Hello and happy October to all of you! Like L.M. Montgomery’s heroine Anne Shirley, I’m “glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” Like Jane Austen’s Marianne Dashwood, I’ll be admiring dead leaves pretty much every time I go out for a walk.

Last week, I visited Herring Cove Provincial Park, one of my favourite places in Nova Scotia, and I want to share this beautiful view with you.

I hope you enjoyed the “Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility.” As I mentioned last time, Kate Scarth has written a fun guest post about “Marianne Dashwood and Anne Shirley, #KindredSpirits,” which I’ll share here on October 30th, the anniversary of the date Sense and Sensibility was published. Maybe by then I’ll have some good photos of maple branches (in honour of Anne) and dead leaves (in honour of Marianne).

And then in November, we’ll be celebrating the 150th anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth, with a series of guest posts from Gisèle Baxter, Mary Beth Cavert, Kerry Clare, Lesley Clement, Susannah Fullerton, Trinna Frever, Sue Lange, Audrey Loiselle, Naomi MacKinnon, Hughena Matheson, Nili Olay, Liz Rosenberg, Logan Steiner, and Marianne Ward.

On September 15th, I had the pleasure of signing copies of my book St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade—written for the church’s 250th anniversary in 1999 and published by Formac—at a celebration of the 275th anniversary. My father took this photo of me with the Rev’d Canon Dr. Paul Friesen, Rector of St. Paul’s, and Alison Kitt-Grainger, co-author of St. Paul’s at 275:

My daughter took this photo of me outside St. Paul’s:

I was thrilled to receive an invitation to speak about the history of St. Paul’s in the Evenings @ Government House fall season (November 5th). It’s been fun to sort through images for the slideshow that will accompany my talk.

Later this month, I’ll be speaking at the Jane Austen Society of North America AGM in Cleveland, Ohio. My talk is called “‘She placed her bonnet on his head & ran away’: Stealing Sources and Avoiding Consequences in Jane Austen’s Fiction.” Following the AGM, the essay will be published in Persuasions/Persuasions On-Line. I haven’t been to a JASNA AGM for several years and I’m looking forward to seeing some of you there!

Sandra Barry, who wrote a lovely guest post in August about rereading Sense and Sensibility, sent me the Collins’ Clear-Type Press edition of the novel that she discovered at Endless Shores, a bookstore in Bridgetown, Nova Scotia. I was surprised and delighted to find the book in my mailbox a few days after her post was published. She enclosed with it a beautiful hardanger work bookmark made by her sister Brenda Barry. (I wasn’t familiar with the term hardanger and Sandra explained that it’s a Norwegian open work needle art.)

A few things I’d like to recommend:

I enjoyed reading about the Bookshop Band and their new album, “Emerge, Return” in this article by Elisabeth Egan in the New York Times: “How Far Will a Reader Go to Hear Songs Inspired by Books?” I first heard the Bookshop Band in 2019, when they were invited to perform in Halifax to celebrate the 30th anniversary of Bookmark, one of my favourite bookstores.

The band—Beth Porter and Ben Please—writes and performs songs inspired by books. Sounds wonderful, doesn’t it? Here’s the link to “Red & Black,” a song inspired by Alistair MacLeod’s award-winning and bestselling novel No Great Mischief, recorded at Bookmark’s Charlottetown, PEI shop in 2019.

Shawna Lemay has started a Poetry Club on her fabulous blog, Transactions with Beauty. She recently wrote about my friend Margo Wheaton’s The Unlit Path Behind the House and Rags of Night in Our Mouths and I love what she says about Margo’s poetry: “It’s not flashy but it’s quiet and true and imagine having that to refer to in this world of ours which is often too loud and fake and garish and without integrity or even an understanding of what that looks like” (“Poetry Club: Wheaton, Tait, Parker”).

When I visited Poets’ Corner in Westminster Abbey several years ago, I remember wondering why the memorial to Charlotte, Emily, and Anne Brontë spelled their last name “Bronte.” I was glad to read that .

In a recent issue of her newsletter, Noted, Jillian Hess wrote a celebration of “notes that are not aesthetically pleasing,” in which she quotes Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s description of one of his notebooks as a “Fly Catcher: or Day-Book for impounding Stray Thoughts” and George Eliot’s description of the notebook she kept while writing Middlemarch as a “Quarry.” Do any of you keep notebooks? I’ve done so for many years—maybe I’ll write about them here sometime.

I’ll leave you with a few recent photos: evening light on the Halifax Commons, a bicycle and marigolds at a café in Herring Cove, and asters in an empty lot in my neighbourhood.

Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:

A Calendar for Sense and Sensibility, by Ellen Moody

From the forthcoming book Living with Jane Austen, by Janet Todd

Read more about my books, including St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, and Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, here.

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Copyright Sarah Emsley 2024 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.