Includes bibliographical references.

As she approached the age of 70, Ruth Wilson began to have recurring dreams about losing her voice. Unable to dismiss her feelings of unexplainable sadness, she made the radical decision to retreat from her conventional life with her husband to a small sunshine-yellow cottage in the Southern Highlands where she lived alone for the next decade. Ruth had fostered a lifelong love of reading, and from the moment she first encountered 'Pride and Prejudice' in the 1940s she had looked to Jane Austen's heroines as her models for the sort of woman she wanted to become. As Ruth settled into her cottage, she resolved to re-read Austen's six novels and rediscover the heroines who had inspired her; to read between the lines of both the novels and her own life. And as she read, she began to reclaim her voice. This is a beautiful, life-affirming memoir of love, self-acceptance and the curative power of reading.