Jane Austen’s Guide to Alzheimer’s

This is a perfect reading of "Emma": the frequency with which people complain about the character as a spoiled brat has always baffled me. She is patience incarnate. Her father's frustrating hypochondria has its 21st-century complement in the form of an aged parent who needs to be taken to multiple appointments with medical specialists--only to reject their prescriptions in favor of whatever latest nonsense they have just seen in "Prevention" magazine. I'm amazed that Emma has a tongue left, so often has she had to bite it. The reading of the attack on Miss Bates as a proxy for the Mr. Woodhouse Emma can't criticize in ingenious, too!

Heartfelt and beautifully written.
Dovetails nicely with Robert Waxler's book "The Risk of Reading - How Literature Helps Us to Understand Ourselves and the World."
Thank you, Ms. Adams

A very beautiful ideal. For those within reach of its attainment, an encouragement and affirmation. May they live happily ever after.

This is indeed a wonderful essay. I have been about to revisit Emma and her surrounding and delightful cast of neighbors, friends and detractors and now I have an additional reason to dive in. Ms. Adams reaffirms the reason for great literature. It helps us understand the people and world and to be more empathetic to everyone's human condition.

Ms Adams' essay is lovely and full of grace. As is "Emma," of course. Thus, it may seem heretical--even ridiculous--to suggest that she might have benefitted from substituting a Bertie Wooster story for yet another re-reading of Austen's most didactic novel. P. G. Wodehouse's works are not just diversions; they not only amuse, they also contain useful advice on dealing with one's family.

Wonderful, moving essay on the timeliness -- and timelessness -- of one of the greatest English-language novels we have.
I never considered this interpretation until now -- how brilliant Ms. Adams is!
Another New Year's resolution: re-read "Emma" bearing this view in mind.

Thank you for this completely brilliant essay. How, in this age of Alzheimer's, readers and writers have managed to miss this stunning interpretation until Ms. Adams revealed it seems almost incomprehensible. I'll take this thinking with me for comfort when I make my regular trip west to visit my aged parents--one with AD--and mull it further when writing about my late husband, who died of early-onset AD. I look forward to Carol Adams's book.

Interesting, but I see Emma and her father as using each other--she for an excuse to avoid intimacy, which she was afraid of, and he to keep her from leaving the nest. Perhaps there is some dementia mixed in, but mostly he is just selfish and needy, and she's more comfortable with him, and with tampering in others' affairs, than with a real adult relationship--at least until Knightly breaks through her wall.

Thank you for this! I appreciate not only the new perspective on Emma Woodhouse, but especially the perspective on Mr. Woodhouse. I have no idea how many times I've read this novel, but I'm going to start it once again tonight, inspired by this piece. I know it will feel both beautifully familiar and also new at the same time because of Carol J. Adam's compassionate insights.

This is certainly an interesting perspective that also contains a great deal of wisdom.

It should be shared and discussed in the Alzheimer's community.

Bob DeMarco, Founder
Alzheimer's Reading Room

http://www.alzheimersreadingroom.com/

For all faults, Emma is a devoted, loving caretaker for her father. I've often heard Mr. Woodhouse described as a selfish, foolish man, but Ms. Adams' interpretation of him as having cognitive impairments, or possibly dementia, makes a great deal of sense. Emma, and Mr. Woodhouse's family and friends (except for John Knightley, perhaps) protect him and respect him as the courteous, generous gentleman he was once and still is within. Thank you for this new insight.

Carol Adams is amazing. How many have missed this? Her original thinking in "The Sexual Politics of Meat" is one of the most formative books of my earlier life. How good to read this, how sad the circumstances that produced it.

I think this beautifully written column confirms the adage that what we get out of reading literature depends on what we bring to it. Clearly, Ms. Adams infused her interpretation of this great novel with the sensitivity and the understanding she had derived from caring for her mother. Now, the rest of us benefit from a new way of seeing Emma and her father.

Books on the ways of reading Jane Austen are encouraging to an English professor like me. This writer's volume should be a good counterpart to William Deresiewicz's A Jane Austen Education. The one thing I would add for the readers is to not forget to read Austen herself. I waited until my late 40s to begin. I don't regret waiting; rather, I am glad I began. Mansfield Park and Lady Susan left to go.

Emma is a novel I've read innumerable times and yet I never picked up on this insight into the protagonist's situation in life -- even though my own father died of dementia. He became so profoundly unwell that we had to move him into a home, which relieved me of day-in, day-out or day-long caretaking of him. Had I been his constant companion, while reading one of my favorite books, perhaps I might have picked up on this as well. Now that I've read your piece, I'll never read Emma the same way again. Thank you for enlightening me by illuminating her! I wish you your freedom, with the comfort or knowing that you do and have done all you can for you mother. Best wishes to you both.

Thanks for this: priceless.

This is a beautiful essay.

Thank you for this persuasive interpretation of Emma's situation. It makes a good deal of sense out of what was somewhat puzzling to me about her. She has to live partly in fantasy because her real life is so constrained, not only physically but mentally, by her care and concern for her father.