"Bibliotherapy/' wrote W. B. McDaniel in 1956, "is unquestionably a war baby. It is a hospital library baby of World War l."1 Oxford don H. F. Brett-Smith gave that war baby a national identity, a British one, when he reportedly ministered with books during the First World War, helping to create one of bibliotherapy's most pervasive origin stories. The source of this often-cited account appears to be a 1984 letter to the Times Literary Supplement ("The Mission of English Literature") by the teacher and essayist Martin Jarrett-Kerr. Brett-Smith had been Jarrett-Kerr's tutor at Oxford. According to the story laid out in the TLS, having been declared unfit for military service in the war, Brett-Smith was employed instead by hospitals to advise on suitable reading materials for wounded men.2 In the course of this work, Brett-Smith compiled a so-called "fever chart" of therapeutic books that could be safely distributed to shell-shocked soldiers, at the apex of which lay the novels of Jane Austen.
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