Well read: Literature is being used as part of revolutionary therapy to transform people's lives
By Brian Viner on The Independent
Saturday, 14 August 2010

Betty's divorce came through on the day of her golden wedding anniversary. She had lived overseas for 50 years, married to a domineering Frenchman who earlier in their marriage had fathered a child with another woman. When finally she called time on the troubled relationship, she decided to return to her native Liverpool, yet her self-confidence was completely shot. Betty is 79.

Sue lost both her husband and her father within 12 months. She, too, found herself bereft of confidence, and couldn't bring herself to leave the house. She became introverted, introspective, and stopped reading anything, even newspapers.

Margaret suffered from depression. Her sister's health was poor and her son, too, had been ill. A devout Catholic, she found solace in prayer, but still suffered from panic attacks and needed anti-depressants.
Pip, aged 58, and once the regional sales manager for the Liverpool Daily Post and Echo, has suffered nine strokes, all stress-related. He no longer works.

Louise has Asperger's syndrome. She has difficulty following conversations, but is fed up of being "treated like an idiot".

Noelene rarely left the sanctuary of her home. Her mother said to her, "What you need is some friends to hang out with". Noelene replied, "Well, do me a favour, go and find me some. And when you find them, I'll hang out with them."

Noelene has friends now. Louise relates better than ever to other people. Pip's health has improved. Margaret and Sue are cheerful, outgoing and chatty, while Betty positively radiates charisma. And they all owe their transformation to a Friday-morning reading group at a community centre in Birkenhead, led by Kate McDonnell, a serene, softly-spoken, middle-aged Oxford graduate who suffers badly from rheumatoid arthritis.

McDonnell works for Get Into Reading, an initiative started nine years ago by Jane Davis, an English lecturer at Liverpool University. This is principally a story of inspirational women, none more so than Davis, whose original motivation was to introduce great literature to people who would never otherwise encounter it. That is still one of the principles of Get Into Reading, and the charity to which it gave birth, The Reader Organisation. Yet along the way, the goalposts shifted. Davis has effectively turned William Shakespeare and Charles Dickens, George Eliot and Emily Brontë, Alfred Tennyson and WB Yeats, into therapists.
Her own background is key to the whole remarkable enterprise. Davis left school in Liverpool at 16, with two O-Levels. By 19, she was a mother, living in squats. Yet she had always read to keep herself company. Part of her childhood had been spent living above a pub, surrounded by drunk adults, so she would escape to the local library to immerse herself in what she now describes as "another universe, where your parents look after you, and you have a pony".
In her early twenties, Davis re-entered the world of education. It wasn't quite the same scenario as that imagined by her fellow-Liverpudlian, playwright Willy Russell, who called his literature-hungry heroine Rita, but it wasn't that different. She became a mature student at Liverpool University and left with a first-class degree. Then she became an English teacher. For Davis, reading had never been an intellectual exercise, and nor was teaching. Studying Paradise Lost, her priority had been to find "any useful information that will help me to stay alive", and she applied the same philosophy to teaching, using books to nudge students towards a better understanding of their own lives.
The full piece at The Independent.