Biography Offers New Glimpses Of Jane Austen

From NPR:

"WERTHEIMER: You told me something that I had never heard before in this book, that Jane Austen had big fans in the trenches in the First World War - a sense of Austen and other literature of her period as a moment of escape.

Ms. HARMAN: Thats right. The 18th century novelists and writers were very popular in the trenches in the Great War. And yes, Austen was used in the fever chart that the War Office drew up to treat shell-shocked soldiers. She was put top of that chart, in terms of how therapeutic her works could be in a dire situation where a man was grievously wounded and needed to be read to. Austen's novels were thought to be the most comforting."

The interview's not all that interesting, though Harman's a good biographer, by all accounts, and this book is probably a fine work, but I like this anecdote, an anecdote I've heard before but which still dazzles me.