Personal Statement
Josie Billington specialises in Victorian literature and in research on reading and health. Her publications include Faithful Realism (2002), George Eliot’s Middlemarch (2008), This is Living Art: Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare (2012), and editions of Elizabeth Gaskell’s Wives and Daughters (2006), Margaret Oliphant's Novellas (2013) and The Ladies Lindores (2016), Elizabeth Barrett Browning's poetry (2014) and George Eliot's Scenes of Clerical Life (2015).
She has published extensively on the power of literary reading to influence mental health including research projects on reading in relation to chronic pain, self-harm, reading with children and families, and the psychodynamics of reading groups, with colleagues in Medicine and Psychology, and with national charity, The Reader. Her publications in this field include Is Literature Healthy? (2016), and an edited interdisciplinary volume, Reading and Mental Health (2019).