Can the greatest fiction be medicine for the psyche? Paula Byrne, author of The Real Jane Austen: A Life in Small Things, told the Daily Telegraph this week that Austen's novels were prescribed to shell shock victims of the first world war. The claim was first made in a letter written to the Times Literary Supplement in 1984 by the clergyman Martin Jarrett-Kerr, who said that his former Oxford tutor HFB Brett-Smith had been employed by military hospitals to advise on reading matter for the war-wounded. "For the severely shell shocked he selected Jane Austen."
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