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Feelings of depression and of being psychically poisoned are not the only problems faced by suggestible and impressionable readers.
When reading the previously mentioned biographical material, I have often felt exasperated by the subjects’ negativity, melodramatic outbursts and self-indulgent behaviour, lack of common sense and blindness to the cause of some of their problems.
Some writers’ chronic money troubles for example could often have been avoided. As for the messy relationships, why did they get involved with such awful people in the first place? Why did they never learn from experience? Why couldn’t they see that they were their own worst enemies!
Reading other books just for their uplifting effect is not enough here: something more is needed. So what are the best solutions?
Stella Gibbons’s solution
Stella Gibbons became so exasperated by the doomy and dismal books of Mary Webb and similar writers that she wrote Cold Comfort Farm both as a parody of rural melodramas and a remedy for the plight of the characters.
She transmuted tragedies into comedies and showed how common sense, determination, good advice and a positive approach could be used to produce solutions for the problems of many miserable and apparently doomed people, transform unsatisfactory lives and bring order out of chaos.
Re-writing the scenarios to give them a positive outcome as Stella Gibbons did is a good way to break the spell; it can even be a form of white magic.
Something like this happens in Sheri S. Tepper’s Marianne Trilogy, when an ally who is a white magician replaces a series of sinister gifts sent to Marianne by a black witch with similar but wholesome gifts to reverse the evil effects.
I started an article about Terry Pratchett’s witch Tiffany Aching by saying what a great relief it was for me to turn to his books after reading a lot of depressing biographical material.
This introduced one of the problems that reading certain books can cause together with a good solution.
While other articles cover the sometimes devastating effects of putting ideas and experiences into the context of other people’s lives and looking at the total picture, this one is about being badly affected emotionally or even psychically rather than mentally.
Reading about the lives of writers such as August Strindberg, Stella Benson, Mary Webb, Ouida, Jean Rhys and Antonia White, who have all been featured or at least mentioned on here, can have a very bad effect on impressionable people.
Some people are very good at getting inside books, sharing the writers’ viewpoints and living the lives and stories. This can be a two-edged sword: when reading certain books, such people are in danger of getting sucked in, overwhelmed, trapped and poisoned by psychic contagion.
Some of the harmful effects come from picking up the writers’ inner states from the material: general negativity and feelings of misery, agony, abandonment, depression, desolation, disconnection, doom and despair can be infectious.
Counterweights and antidotes
By far the best solution is to read very different books, ones that have on the whole a very positive effect. They can be inspiring, educational and informational or just entertaining.
Children’s and young adults’ books are often ideal; old friends, comfort reading and new books by a favourite author are all good too.
