Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 13

“Beyond lay the sea, shimmering and blue”

I’m quoting Anne of Green Gables again, remembering what my sister Bethie said earlier this year about how she and I quote from Pride and Prejudice so often that it’s almost as if we’re living in the novel. I suppose the same is true of the “Anne” books. “‘Isn’t the sea wonderful?’” Anne asks Marilla. “Down at the base of the cliffs were heaps of surf-worn rocks or little sandy coves inlaid with pebbles as with ocean jewels; beyond lay the sea, shimmering and blue, and over it soared the gulls, their pinions flashing silvery in the sunlight.”

I took these photos on Monday on a walk with my husband and our dog at Second Peninsula Park, near Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia. I thought of Anne as we drove out of the park, too, and I stopped to take a picture of “the bend in the road.”

(I took this photo in Fredericton, PEI, several years ago.)

My family and I moved to a new house at the end of the summer—we’re still in the same beloved neighbourhood in Halifax—and as we unpack boxes and settle in, I’ve continued to think about the line from Anne of Green Gables I quoted last week, about how “One can dream so much better in a room where there are pretty things.” I’m grateful for the treasures we’ve acquired over the years, many of them presents from friends and family. Amidst all the chaos of moving, I’ve enjoyed unpacking and reorganizing our books.

My friend Marianne Ward gave me a beautiful beeswax candle the other day as a housewarming present and I took a picture of it next to some of my favourite books, including an edition of Anne of Green Gables that I recovered in brown paper when I was about ten. (I’m not sure why I left out the “M” in L.M. Montgomery’s name when I wrote it on the spine—that might be as bad as leaving out the “e” at the end of Anne’s name! Maybe even worse, since Montgomery hated being called “Lucy.”)

Anna Ruadh is the first Gaelic translation of Anne of Green Gables, published in 2020 by Bradan Press, and next to that is a copy of Anne of Green Gables: The Original Manuscript, edited by Carolyn Strom Collins—and copy-edited by Marianne. Carolyn and Marianne are currently working on an edition of the manuscript of Montgomery’s The Blue Castle, which, like the “Anne” manuscript, will also be published by Nimbus.

In the spirit of L.M. Montgomery’s scrapbooks, and continuing the “blog post as scrapbook” format that I used here earlier this year, here are a few more things I’d like to share with you this week.

If you’re in or near Halifax, you might be interested in tomorrow’s book launch for my friend Jane Doucet’s novel Lost & Found in Lunenburg, in which recently-widowed Rose Ainsworth takes a chance on a new life in the picturesque town of Lunenburg, Nova Scotia. I read it earlier this month and loved it. If you like novels about changing careers, rescuing animals, or finding romance after heartbreak, and if you like a healthy dose of laughter right alongside that heartbreak, you’ll enjoy this book, and you’ll probably want to go back and read The Pregnant Pause, Jane’s first novel about Rose. Jane writes “happy endings because there are so many sad endings in real life.” She says, “I write books that I’d like to read myself. I put in heavy themes—motherhood indecision, aging and sex, grief and loss—but I wrap them in a warm ‘humour hug.’”

The launch for Lost & Found in Lunenburg is Saturday, October 14th, at 10:30am, at Open Book Coffee, 3660 Strawberry Hill Street, Halifax.

This week I started reading a new biography, Mary Pratt: A Love Affair with Vision, by Anne Koval, and I was delighted to find a reference to L.M. Montgomery in the opening pages. Koval quotes Pratt: “I always keep Agatha Christie and L.M. Montgomery and a few cookbooks within reach. … The straightforward, blunt, and simple observations and instructions found within these unpretentious books smooth the way for me and allow me to go alone into personal observations.” I’m intrigued by the idea that something about the simplicity and clarity of these books inspired Mary Pratt’s own creative work.

Heidi L.M. Jacobs, author of Molly of the Mall, sent me this lovely photo of the first three “Anne” books, spotted on her travels in Portugal:

Last but not least: Sandra Barry sent me some beautiful photos taken by her sister Brenda in the Historic Gardens in Annapolis Royal, Nova Scotia:

Sandra says this is “a little tomato we had never seen before, called, of all things: Amethyst Cream—they were shimmery, no less—hard to capture it, but I think you can sort of see it.”

“One can dream so much better in a room where there are pretty things”

In a conversation with Marilla in Anne of Green Gables, Anne Shirley famously says, “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers.” I like going back to look at the rest of that passage, including Anne’s insistence that the “gorgeous boughs” she’s brought into the house ought to give even Marilla “a thrill—several thrills” and that she’s going to decorate her room with them because “One can dream so much better in a room where there are pretty things. I’m going to put these boughs in the old blue jug and set them on my table.”

This beautiful bouquet was a birthday present from my family. When the birches turn “golden as sunshine” and the maples are “royal crimson,” I’ll bring in some leaves or branches (or perhaps I’ll just take photos.)

Happy October to all of you! I’m looking forward to discussing L.M. Montgomery’s novels The Story Girl and The Golden Road with you in November. In the meantime, if you’re looking for more opportunities to talk about Montgomery, you might be interested in the Anne of Green Gables readalong that Jana of Review from the Stacks is hosting this month.

In today’s post, Jana features a link to her review of my friend Melanie J. Fishbane’s wonderful novel Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery. Jana writes,

“Fishbane’s writing in Maud is beautiful. I have heard it compared to Montgomery’s own (no surprise there), Laura Ingalls Wilder, and other 19th century writers. Fishbane’s thorough research has not only given her the knowledge and ability to write a plausible fictional account of a portion of Montgomery’s life, it also allowed her to tap the styles and particularities of writing descriptive of the era she is writing about. The prose flows easily, reads quickly, and sinks pleasantly into the reader’s mind.”

(“Friday Linkups 23.9 Featuring Maud by Melanie J. Fishbane”)

When Melanie visited Halifax in the summer of 2017, she and I, along with my friend Marianne Ward, visited several L.M. Montgomery-related sites here, including the Old Burying Ground (“Old St. John’s Cemetery” in Anne of the Island) and the Forrest Building at Dalhousie University (“Redmond College”). If you’re interested, you can find the photos from that tour in the introduction to a guest post Melanie wrote for my blog, “Searching for Maud in the ‘Emily’ Series.”

I found it fascinating to reread what Melanie says in her guest post about fourteen-year-old Montgomery burning her diary, then starting a new one and announcing that this time, “I am going to keep this book locked up!!” We’ll never know what was in that first diary, but as Melanie says, writing an historical novel gave her the chance to imagine.

The post also includes photos of Melanie reading at one of my favourite bookstores, Mabel Murple’s; Melanie with the owner of Mable Murple’s, Sheree Fitch; and a photo of Melanie and me with Naomi MacKinnon. Lots of good memories!

Naomi is my co-host for The Story Girl/The Golden Road readalong—and we first met online when we were participating in a different Anne of Green Gables readalong, years ago. We discovered that we both live in Nova Scotia, soon made plans to meet in person, and have been good friends ever since. I hope you’ll join us next month for more conversations about LMM.

“The castled crag of Drachenfels”

We had spectacular weather for our day trip up the Rhine from Bonn to Königswinter and Drachenfels.

(These photos are from my trip to Germany in May, when I spent a couple of days travelling with my sister Bethie and her family, and my brother Tom and his daughter. I shared some photos from my solo trip to Amsterdam last Friday.)

On the hill at the right, you can see the ruined castle Burg Drachenfels; a little further down and to the left of the ruin is a 19th Century neogothic castle, Schloss Drachenburg.

As Byron wrote in Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage,

The castled crag of Drachenfels

Frowns o’er the wide and winding Rhine.

Whose breast of waters broadly swells

Between the banks which bear the vine,

And hills all rich with blossomed trees,

And fields which promise corn and wine,

And scattered cities crowning these,

Whose far white walls along them shine,

Have strewed a scene, which I should see

With double joy wert thou with me!

When I first wrote about reading L.M. Montgomery’s novel Jane of Lantern Hill in early May, I quoted Jane’s father’s plan to take her to visit “castles on the banks of the Rhine,” but at that point on this particular trip to Germany, I hadn’t yet seen any castles. Here are a few photos of Schloss Drachenburg and its gardens:

And a photo of my sister Bethie, my brother Tom, and me:

From the castle, we could see Cologne in the distance. Cologne Cathedral is visible off to the right:

I had taken this photo of the Cathedral a few days earlier, when I was waiting for my train to Amsterdam:

Here are a couple of views of the Rhine and the Siebengebirge from the ruined castle at Drachenfels:

We travelled back to Bonn on the Poseidon. Here’s the view of the 19th and 12th Century castles from the boat as we were leaving:

The following day, we visited Cologne Cathedral (and had lunch—and chocolate—at the Schokoladenmuseum).

The chocolate fountain at the museum:

The Cologne Cathedral window designed by Gerhard Richter:

Here are a few photos from the Bonn Botanic Gardens:

I’ll end with a couple of photos from the beginning of my trip: a sunset in Toronto, just as my flight was taking off, and the view from the plane just before it landed in Frankfurt the next morning. And then one last photo of the view from Drachenfels.

I’m going to take a break from writing blog posts for the next several weeks, to spend more time enjoying summer here in Nova Scotia with my family.

Happy August and September to all of you, and I’ll see you in the fall! I’m looking forward to discussing L.M. Montgomery’s novels The Story Girl and The Golden Road with you in November.

If you liked this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. Thanks for reading!

“In mijn boek” (Photos from a trip to Amsterdam)

I enjoyed three wonderful weeks in Bonn back in May, with a few days in Amsterdam and a couple of day trips to Cologne, and I’ve put together some of my favourite photos to share with you. I’ll start with the Amsterdam trip today, and I’ll save the photos from Germany for next Friday.

First, the spectacular library in the Rijksmuseum. I missed the chance to see the “once-in-a-lifetime” Vermeer exhibition—tickets had been sold out for months, and I didn’t plan my trip until April—but I enjoyed visiting the library and touring the other galleries. Besides, aren’t we always missing “once-in-a-lifetime” opportunities? Every single day is a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity, and I made the most of the days I was fortunate to spend in Amsterdam.

I’m quite fond of the art in the Rijksmuseum garden: grass sculptures by Richard Long, entitled “Life Line” and “From Sky to Earth.”

And I liked the flower market very much.

I took the bicycle and canal photos everyone takes, along with photos of tulips at the Tulip Museum.

I visited Ons’ Lieve Heer op Solder (Our Lord in the Attic), a 17th Century canal house with a Catholic Church hidden on the top floors.

At the Royal Palace, I was drawn to the huge map on the floor of the Citizens’ Hall, especially the part featuring Atlantic Canada (Acadia and Terra Nova).

After a while, the palace rooms sort of blurred together in my mind, and I could hear the voice of Mrs. Gardiner from Pride and Prejudice: “‘If it were merely a fine house richly furnished,’ said she, ‘I should not care about it myself; but the grounds are delightful.’”

I did like the chandeliers in the Citizens’ Hall:

And this stunning chandelier at the Concertgebouw:

My friend Sheila had recommended the Concertgebouw, and I was able to get tickets to hear a splendid concert by Lenny Kuhr, whose song “De troubadour” was one of the winners of the Eurovision Song Contest in 1969, and whose most recent album was released in 2022. I was thrilled to discover her music, and to meet her afterwards. (It was, I must say, a once-in-a-lifetime experience.)

I especially like her song “In mijn boek” (In my book), which is about love and heartbreak. (“Ooit komt er een dag dan schrijf ik het op”: Someday there will be a day when I’ll write it down.)

By the time I returned to my sister’s house in Bonn, my brother and my niece had arrived from Nova Scotia and our visits overlapped for a couple of days. We visited Königswinter and Drachenfels the first day, and then Cologne on the second, and I’ll share those photos with you next week.

If you liked this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. Thanks for reading!

My Anne of Green Gables Pilgrimage—and Ladies of the Lake

“My love affair with books began at age seven,” says Syrie James in the guest post she wrote for my blog, about her love of L.M. Montgomery’s novels and a new Anne of Green Gables-inspired novel by Cathy Gohlke called Ladies of the Lake.

Syrie is the author of thirteen award-winning novels translated into twenty-one languages, including The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen, The Secret Diaries of Charlotte Brontë, The Missing Manuscript of Jane Austen, Jane Austen’s First Love, and Dracula My Love. A member of the WGA, the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA), and the Historical Novel Society, Syrie has sold numerous screenplays to film and television, had stage plays produced from California to New York City and Montreal, addressed dozens of organizations, universities, and literary conferences, and has performed on stage numerous times as Jane Austen, most notably at Chawton House Library in England. She lives in Los Angeles, where she is writing her next book.

Syrie is a dear friend of mine, and my family and I have fond memories of the time we spent with her and her late husband Bill in Halifax and at the JASNA AGM in Montreal in 2014. I hosted a celebration of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park on my blog that year, and Syrie contributed a guest post “On Turning Down Marriage Proposals.” If you haven’t read her novels yet, you should! I’d recommend starting with The Lost Memoirs of Jane Austen.

Here’s a photo of the two of us at the Montreal Botanical Garden:

Please join me in welcoming Syrie!

The Chinese Garden in the Montreal Botanical Garden

My love affair with books began at age seven. I was living in Paris with my family at the time, and my father (who worked at the Paris headquarters of IBM and was worried that, attending school in France, I might lose my command of English) brought me a box full of the best of children’s literature in English from a London bookstore.

Those books were more precious than diamonds to me. I devoured them all—The World of Pooh and The World of Christopher Robin by A.A. Milne, Charlotte’s Web and Stuart Little by E.B. White, Pippi Longstocking and The Children of Noisy Village by Astrid Lindgren, and more than a dozen other fabulous reads including a nondescript paperback copy of The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett. I own them all still. My hands down favorite was The Secret Garden. I re-read it so many times that I lost count. It instilled in me a fascination for the English countryside, English manor homes … and a desire to become a novelist.

Four years later, having moved back to California, I came upon Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, in my middle school library. I fell in love with the feisty, whip-smart, romantic-minded Anne Shirley, and all her adventures in the lovingly-described Prince Edward Island setting. I identified in so many ways with Anne; she spoke to my heart. I read and started collecting every book by L.M. Montgomery that I could find.

My best friend Kimberly and I were such Anne of Green Gables fans that after we graduated from high school, we made a pilgrimage to Prince Edward Island, taking a summer road trip all the way across the U.S. from California to Eastern Canada. I have such wonderful memories of our magical week in PEI. We marveled at the red, red earth (that Anne celebrated in the novel), picked wild strawberries, splashed along the beaches, and strolled through endless fields of big white daisies. We stayed at a delightful farmhouse B&B near the coast where the owners, with great pride, shared a framed photograph of Queen Elizabeth’s visit in the late 1950s, when their farm was named the prettiest farm in Canada.

Kimberly, dancing down the “driveway” to the PEI farm

Teenage Syrie in Anne of Green Gables-land

We saw the musical Anne of Green Gables on stage in Charlottetown, and were thrilled to visit Green Gables, a farmhouse that belonged to L.M. Montgomery’s cousins and inspired the house in her books. At the time, the house was quietly situated on a remote crossroads in the countryside. Today, it’s part of Green Gables Heritage Place in Prince Edward Island National Park, and features lovely walking trails, farm outbuildings, and a huge visitor center and gift shop—the price of L.M. Montgomery’s fame! I made another pilgrimage there eight years ago with my husband Bill, and it’s a must-see for Anne enthusiasts.

Green Gables

“Anne’s Room” at Green Gables

Syrie and her husband Bill at Green Gables Heritage Place

French River, PEI

I am still in love with Anne Shirley, and all the other wonderful characters and splendid stories that L.M. Montgomery brought to life. When I need a comfort read, I turn to her novels. They are so real, they feed the soul, filled as they are with joy and heartaches, uplifting moments and deep challenges, and all the complexities of the human heart.

So, you can imagine how delighted I was to receive an advance copy of a new historical fiction novel, Ladies of the Lake by Cathy Gohlke, that is connected in several ways to Anne of Green Gables. It features an orphan girl from Prince Edward Island who loves the recently published novel Anne of Green Gables, dreams of becoming a novelist herself, and begins a correspondence with the real-life L.M. Montgomery! But that’s only a tiny fraction of what the story’s about.

Ladies of the Lake was published by Tyndale House Publishing earlier this week, on July 11, 2023. Here’s the book description:

When she is forced to leave her beloved Prince Edward Island to attend Lakeside Ladies Academy after the death of her parents, the last thing Adelaide Rose MacNeill expects to find is three kindred spirits. The “Ladies of the Lake,” as the four girls call themselves, quickly bond like sisters, vowing that wherever life takes them, they will always be there for each other.

But that is before: Before love and jealousy come between Adelaide and Dorothy, the closest of the friends. Before the dawn of World War I upends their world and casts baseless suspicion onto the German American man they both love. Before a terrible explosion in Halifax Harbor rips the sisterhood irrevocably apart.

Seventeen years later, Rosaline Murray receives an unsuspecting telephone call from Dorothy, now headmistress of Lakeside, inviting her to attend the graduation of a new generation of girls, including Rosaline’s beloved daughter. With that call, Rosaline is drawn into a past she’d determined to put behind her. To memories of a man she once loved . . . of a sisterhood she abandoned . . . and of the day she stopped being Adelaide MacNeill.

I adored this novel. I was hooked from the first chapter. There are so many suspenseful threads and need-to-know questions between the story in the 1930s and the earlier years (1910s – 1917) that I couldn’t put it down.

I loved the ways that L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables were included in the story. The school years when the four girls become close friends were exceptionally well done. The Prince Edward Island and Halifax locations were beautifully described. I’ve been to Halifax twice—once as a teenager, and again many years later with my husband, when I was lucky enough to visit my friend Sarah Emsley in her hometown. This novel evoked such wonderful memories of that trip! It was the first time I had heard of the Halifax explosion, a tragic historical event that is brought to vivid life and is a crucial turning point in the plot of Ladies of the Lake.

Visiting the Halifax Citadel

Canadian flag at the Halifax Citadel

What a page-turning tale! I was gripped by the emotional turmoil of the four women as adults, and holding my breath to see how it would all turn out. Author Cathy Gohlke spun it so well and so craftily that the final twist took me by complete surprise. I wondered how she was going to pull off a happy ending, but she did!

In her afterword, Gohlke writes that she was inspired by “the women characters we’ve loved through literature, women who stood in the gap for one another or helped each other grow—[like] Diana Barry and Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables … such bonds are precious and can prove life-sustaining through hard times.”

This is a brilliant story by an author at the top of her game, full of heartache, joy, pain, laughter, lessons learned, personal growth, and a lovely connection to God—and to Anne of Green Gables. I enjoyed it so much I’m going to read it again. 5 stars!

Syrie’s Website: https://syriejames.com/

Follow Syrie’s blog: https://syriejames.com/blog/

Sign up for Syrie’s newsletter: https://syriejames.com/newsletter/

Find Syrie on Facebook: https://www.facebook.com/syriejames

Syrie’s Facebook Author Page: https://www.facebook.com/AuthorSyrieJames

Follow Syrie on Twitter: https://twitter.com/syriejames

“Heavens, I recognize the place”

I enjoyed revisiting the photos I took at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia the last time I was there, and I hope you’ll enjoy them, too.

I spent a lovely afternoon at the house with my friend Sandra Barry in November of 2015, and I included some of the photos in a blog post a few days later. If you missed Sandra’s poem “Old Rusty Metal Things,” which appeared on my blog back in April, you can find it here.

Sandra will be reading from her work at the Elizabeth Bishop House tomorrow, Saturday, July 8th, along with Margo Wheaton, Rosaria Campbell, and Kayla Geitzler. The address is 8740 Highway #2, Great Village, Nova Scotia. (Event page on Facebook.)

The kitchen at the Elizabeth Bishop House:

Time to plant tears, says the almanac.

The grandmother sings to the marvellous stove

and the child draws another inscrutable house.

(from Elizabeth Bishop’s “Sestina”)

Why didn’t I know enough of something?

Greek drama or astronomy? The books

I’d read were full of blanks…

(from Bishop’s “Crusoe in England”)

“I stared and stared,” Bishop writes in “The Fish,” “until everything / was rainbow, rainbow, rainbow! / And I let the fish go.”

“A scream, the echo of a scream, hangs over that Nova Scotian village. No one hears it; it hangs there forever, a slight stain in those pure blue skies…. Its pitch would be the pitch of my village. Flick the lightning rod on top of the church steeple with your fingernail and you will hear it.”

(from “In the Village”)

Think of the long trip home.

Should we have stayed at home and thought of here?

(from “Questions of Travel”)

Heavens, I recognize the place, I know it!

It’s behind—I can almost remember the farmer’s name.

(from “Poem”)

A few months ago I looked up Bishop’s poem “In the Waiting Room” on my phone, when I was in a hospital waiting room. The person I was waiting for was having emergency surgery—and is now, thankfully, recovering well. But I didn’t know that would be the result during those hours I spent in that room.

It was Good Friday, a sunny spring afternoon, and the waiting room and hallways were empty. No one sat at the reception desk; no nurse came out to say anything to me. No copies of the National Geographic were waiting for me in that room. A small poster announced a campaign for “Doctors Helping Ukraine.” I studied the reflections of fluorescent lights on the plexiglass walls that divided the chairs from each other. I took photos of reflections and empty chairs. I had brought a book, but I realized what I wanted was Bishop’s poem.

I said to myself: three days

and you’ll be seven years old.

I was saying it to stop

the sensation of falling off

the round, turning world

into cold, blue-black space.

But I felt: you are an I,

you are an Elizabeth,

you are one of them.

Why should you be one, too?

I scarcely dared to look

to see what it was I was.

I read the poem twice, and wondered with Bishop, “Why should I be my aunt, / or me, or anyone?” And then I fell asleep, my head resting against one of the plexiglass walls.

“Reading shaped my dreams”

“Reading shaped my dreams, and more reading helped me make my dreams come true….”

– Ruth Bader Ginsburg

Last week I spent a few days in New York City with my parents and my daughter, celebrating my daughter’s 16th birthday. We had a fabulous time! Some of the highlights: Like Water for Chocolate at the American Ballet Theatre’s Summer Gala at the Metropolitan Opera House, the Georgia O’Keeffe exhibition “To See Takes Time” at the Museum of Modern Art, and an exhibition of treasures from the collections of the New York Public Library. I was happy to see the portrait of Mary Wollstonecraft and six copies of Shakespeare’s First Folio—and especially happy to see the latter with my father, who’s a Shakespeare scholar.

We also enjoyed visiting the Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine, St. Thomas Church Fifth Avenue, St. Patrick’s Old Cathedral, the High Line, and the Columbia University campus, where the above quotation from Ruth Bader Ginsburg is featured at the entrance to the university bookstore.

Three Lives & Co., in Greenwich Village:

The Metropolitan Opera House:

Flamingos at Lincoln Center:

“To see takes time—like to have a friend takes time.” – Georgia O’Keeffe

The New York Public Library:

The Cathedral Church of St. John the Divine:

St. Thomas Church, Fifth Avenue:

Old St. Patrick’s Cathedral:

The High Line at sunset:

My daughter and me at Nami Nori in Greenwich Village:

And here’s a photo she found from the year she turned seven:

(As my friend Lyn said on Facebook, “she sure showed that salad who’s boss!”)

We loved exploring bookstores, including The Strand, Three Lives & Co., and the second location for Books are Magic in Brooklyn (my daughter and I had visited the original location last summer).

Do any of you have recommendations for bookstores—or other favourite places—to explore on a future trip to NYC? As I wrote here last fall, reading is my anchor, and I love what RBG says about how reading has the power to shape our dreams and make them come true.

My parents browsing at Three Lives & Co.:

A bookseller at Three Lives & Co. recommended Taco Mahal, in the West Village, and we went there for lunch on my daughter’s birthday:

Stonewall National Monument garden:

While we walked across the Brooklyn Bridge to visit Books Are Magic, we watched these people climbing the bridge:

The second location of Books Are Magic, on Montague St.:

I bought a copy of Emma Straub’s novel Modern Lovers at Books Are Magic (she and her husband, Michael Fusco-Straub, are co-owners of the store). I had read a library copy a few years ago, and I wrote about the novel here. Straub’s heroine Elizabeth writes a song called “Mistress of Myself,” inspired by a line from Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility: “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself,” thinks Elinor Dashwood.

Excellent Women (Writers): The Significance of Smallness

I adored Molly of the Mall, Heidi L.M. Jacobs’s debut novel, which longtime readers of my blog will know because I’ve written about it at length (in a post that borrows a quotation from the novel’s heroine, Molly, for its title: “Oh, novels! What would I do without you?”). Molly’s experience as the child of graduate students in Edmonton, Alberta, and then as a student in the English Department at the University of Alberta was so close to mine that sometimes I felt as if I were reading about my own life.

My sister Bethie, who’s a decade younger than I am, said that after she read Molly of the Mall she felt as if she knew what my undergraduate experience had been like in the early 1990s (living—I’m quoting from the novel here—“in one of those walk-up apartments off Whyte Avenue with misleadingly elegant names like The Alhambra or The Loch Lomond,” creating mix tapes with literary references, working in an Edmonton mall, going to movies at the Princess Theatre, watching A Room With a View, and so on).

Although Heidi and I were students at the University of Alberta around the same time, somehow we didn’t meet. I was delighted to meet her online after she commented on my blog post about her novel, and of course I couldn’t resist asking if she’d like to write a guest post someday. It’s a great pleasure to introduce her guest post on “Excellent Women (Writers).”

Heidi L.M. Jacobs is a librarian at the University of Windsor, and she has a PhD in 19th Century American Women’s Literature. In addition to her novel, Molly of the Mall: Literary Lass & Purveyor of Fine Footwear, which won the 2020 Stephen Leacock Memorial Medal for Humour, she’s the author of 100 Miles of Baseball (with Dale Jacobs). Her newest book, 1934: The Chatham Coloured All-Stars’ Barrier-Breaking Year, was published earlier this month—congratulations, Heidi!

Heidi says, “I’m never sure when a photo of me wearing a seafoam green ball gown at a Scottish dance formal is professionally appropriate but this seems like the perfect (only?) opportunity!”

Over the past three very strange years, I’ve become irretrievably hooked on a particular kind of book by mid-20th-century women who I’ve come to call Excellent Women (Writers). It’s not only that writers such as Barbara Pym, Elizabeth Taylor, Maeve Brennan, Mary Lavin (1912-1996) are excellent—it’s that Pym’s 1952 novel, Excellent Women, made me notice something about the books that resonated with me. What Pym’s novel made me notice was smallness. While smallness is often conflated with insignificance, in the writings of these Excellent Women, smallness is actually what is significant.

In July of 2022, I re-read Excellent Women for the first time in over thirty years. At the time, I was also trying to process the impact of the previous two years’ social distancing, isolation, working from home, and existing for the most part within 50 kilometers of my house. I had come to see the merits of making one’s world smaller and finding meaning in smallness.

The copy of Excellent Women I re-read was the one I purchased in the spring of 1990 for a course I had signed up for in the 1990-91 academic year with Dr. Nora Stovel at the University of Alberta. My copy of Excellent Women—pictured here with its ghastly 1980s cover—has a notation on the final page that says when I read it first in May 1990, I found it “ho hum.” When I re-read it in January 1991, I found it so “much more enjoyable” that it merited three exclamation points. As you can see, when I re-read this book in July of 2022, I “loved it” enough to underscore “loved” twice and use an exclamation point.

As I look at my copy today, I notice that in 1991 and in 2022, I made note of these lines of Pym’s: “I wondered that she should waste so much energy fighting over a little matter like wearing hats in chapel, but then I told myself that, after all, life was like that for most of us—the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies, the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction.”  I think what I loved so much about Excellent Women this time around—thirty-two years after I’d thought it was “ho hum”—was that I was old enough to see the “smallness” of life, the “useless longings” in new ways as well as the importance of the non-dramatic.

Pym’s novel deals with these smallnesses thematically but her prose is brilliant because she makes the small do a lot of work. For example, after Mildred Lathbury indulgently purchases a “Hawaiian Fire”-coloured lipstick at a department store and ventures to the ladies room, she describes the scene as

“a sobering sight indeed and one to put us all in mind of the futility of material things and of our own mortality. All flesh is grass… I thought, watching the women working at their faces with savage concentration, opening their mouths wide, biting and licking their lips, stabbing at their noses and chins with powder puffs. . . Later I went into the restaurant to have tea, where the women, with an occasional man looking strangely out of place, seemed braced up, their faces newly done, their spirits revived by tea. Many had the satisfaction of having done a good day’s shopping when they got home. I had only my Hawaiian Fire and something not very interesting for supper.”

These small details, small actions bring the power of Pym’s prose to the surface.

Once I started thinking about these poignant and moving smallnesses in Pym, I saw them again in many of the books I was reading and loving by mid-century writers. The writings by Irish short story writer and essayist Maeve Brennan (1917-1993) have a sort of explosive economy of word, phrase, and emotion. Take for example, this single sentence from Brennan’s essay called “I wish for a little street music”: “The father stared admiringly up at his son, hearing every word, and you could see that what he longed for was to have the chance, just once again, to pitch his child up and walk a few steps with him in his arms” (The Long-winded Lady). Again, a tiny moment but it captures something immensely powerful.

I also came to see what was funny in many of these books was the smallness of the jokes. You could almost miss them but when you see them, they’re like a shared joke with a good friend. Like Rachel Ferguson’s (1892–1957) quirky The Brontës Went to Woolworths (1940): “I thought perhaps she might be one of those sort of writers—like Thomas Hardy— who sounded as if they ought to be dead before they really were” (125).  Or this passage from Nancy Mitford’s (1904-1973) The Pursuit of Love (1945): “The Ratletts considered that Tony was a first-class bore. He had a habit of choosing a subject, and then droning around and round it like an inaccurate bomb aimer round his target, ever unable to hit.” I think we’ve all read writers like Ferguson and met a more than a few Tonys.

But there are writers like Elizabeth Taylor (1912-1975) whose poignancy comes from the depth she forges within a deceptively small scope. This first paragraph of the quiet yet gutting Mrs Palfrey at the Claremont (1971) captures what is so evocative about Taylor’s prose: “Mrs Palfrey first came to the Claremont Hotel on a Sunday afternoon in January. Rain had closed in over London, and her taxi sloshed along the almost deserted Cromwell Road, past one cavernous porch after another, the driver going slowly  and poking his head out into the wet, for the hotel was not known to him. This discovery, that he did not know, had a little disconcerted Mrs Palfrey, for she did not know it either, and began to wonder what she was coming to. She tried to banish terror from her heart. She was alarmed at the threat of her own depression.” Nothing huge happens in this novel but yet, when you’re done, it feels like you’ve experienced something enormous. It is huge in its smallness.

To return to Barbara Pym: life is “like that for most of us.” It’s the small things that matter not the huge things—“the small unpleasantnesses rather than the great tragedies.” When I think about that passage from Excellent Women that I underlined twice—thirty some years apart— I wonder if, perhaps in 1991 my young self saw the lines about “the little useless longings rather than the great renunciations and dramatic love affairs of history or fiction” as foreshadowing or words of caution. I do know that in 2022, Pym gave me a quiet articulation of something deeply and wordlessly resonant.

Note on the photos: As a kitten my cat Gracie loved to nibble the corners off paperbacks—mostly fiction. She doesn’t eat many books but still loves to read. Check out #graciereads (# not @) on Instagram.

“A grey cloak and an umbrella”

Today’s guest post is on Bleak House, by Charles Dickens. My high school friend Maggie Arnold has contributed several wonderful guest posts for my blog over the years, most recently on Jane Austen’s Persuasion, and I was very happy that she agreed to write a guest post for this new series in which I ask friends to recommend some of their all-time favourite books, and/or books they’ve read recently.

The Rev. Dr. Maggie Arnold is the Rector of St. Stephen’s Episcopal Church in Cohasset, Massachusetts. She lives with her husband Christopher, and her children Rose and Clara, as well as their dog and cat. Maggie studied printmaking and bookbinding before going on to seminary and doctoral work in the religion of the Early Modern Period. Her book, The Magdalene in the Reformation, was published by Harvard University Press in 2018. She is currently working on a history of the Boston Episcopal Charitable Society, the second oldest charity in the United States.

I took this photo of Maggie’s book next to a gorgeous print she created when she was in art school and gave to my husband and me as a wedding present.

Maggie and I met on the first day of grade eleven in Halifax, and have been friends ever since. For six years, when we were both living in the Boston area, we were able to see each other relatively often, and in the years since my family and I moved back to Canada, we’ve been grateful for many visits in both Nova Scotia and Massachusetts. Back in 1991, Maggie designed a sweatshirt featuring images of the members of our (very small—there were fourteen of us!) graduating class. Now that I’ve shared a recent photo of her with you, I thought I’d also add the sketches she drew of the two of us when we were seventeen. My daughter is currently a student at the same school, and I keep threatening to embarrass her by wearing this old and beloved sweatshirt to an event—maybe next year’s gala fundraiser??

Please join me in welcoming Maggie!

I was so excited when Sarah asked me if I would consider writing a post for this series! I have used books therapeutically for years. A favorite author’s voice can be a way to turn my mind along better channels, if I have gotten into a muddy rut of self-pity or confusion. Jane Austen, for example, always gives me a sense of perspective: humour and also the goal of a life well spent, measuring one’s words and offering the best of one’s self to the relationships that mean most: our family and dear friends, the community around us. C.S. Lewis helps guide me back to the basics of Christianity, a no-nonsense approach to being on a journey with and toward God, staying humble and avoiding the pitfalls of trendy ideas.

One of my most beloved authors is Charles Dickens, whose compassionate vision seems to comprehend every story, every kind of life—urban and rural, male and female, rich and poor, generously busy and sadly constricted. His wide-ranging narratives encourage a curiosity about the human experience which I find deeply faithful. The worst sin, for Dickens, is indifference, and he does the work of combating that temptation for us; who could be indifferent to portraits drawn with such a knowing eye?

Sometimes I go to a cherished book seeking renewal for mind and spirit, but often what I need is more mundane, inspiration for the repetitive tasks of daily life as they add up over time. Dickens’ Bleak House contains multitudes, but at its edges is one small family and their home. We see them only briefly, introduced in the chapter “More Old Soldiers Than One,” but their effect on me is always so invigorating, like a breath of sea air. Mr. and Mrs. Bagnet were soldiers of empire, and are only recently settled in England after a career abroad. The names of their daughters, Quebec and Malta, testify to their birthplaces in far-flung outposts during the course of Matthew Bagnet’s military career (their son, “young Woolwich” indicates their retirement to London).

Despite Matthew’s service, it is Mrs. Bagnet who takes the commanding role in the family, and we see her strong but gentle husband deferring to her opinion on every question, as he admits, “It’s my old girl that advises. She has the head.” She herself is a marvel in nineteenth-century literature (or any literature, really), a middle-aged woman who is admirably resourceful, crisply efficient, cheerful and loving, devoted to the care of her family and yet neither officious nor resentful. Her presence in the book provides an antidote to the character of Mrs. Jellyby, also a fixture of British imperial culture. Where Mrs. Jellyby’s charitable projects for African orphans cause her to neglect her own children and household to the point of endangering her family and guests, Mrs. Bagnet capably sets her sights on what is near and dear. As a result, her home is a place of welcome refuge for the troubled Mr. George, her husband’s friend and fellow officer.

Her appearance speaks of the outdoors, “freckled by the sun and wind,” and her only ornament is her wedding ring, betokening her commitment to her marriage and its offspring. She looks after their finances and feeds her family a nutritious, frugal diet, as Mr. George recalls, “I never saw her, except upon a baggage-wagon, when she wasn’t washing greens!” Their home is simply furnished “and contains nothing superfluous, and has not a visible speck of dust or dirt in it.” The cleanliness and order, according to her “exact system,” are the manifestations of her good sense and thoughtful provision for her family. Her daughters are learning to read and to sew, accruing wisdom both intellectual and practical, Woolwich plays a patriotic fife, and they all help their mother with the domestic chores. Elsewhere we learn more of her history, and how she has been able to make a home anywhere she has traveled, which she has done independently, “with nothing but a grey cloak and an umbrella.”

Possessed of a sterling integrity that has stood the test of time, Mrs. Bagnet is untarnished by the world’s corruption, growing older with her husband as they raise their children, yet remaining along with him, in Dicken’s judgment, “simple and unaccustomed children themselves” in the ways of greed and deceit. To gain experience while staying young at heart—that continues to be my hope for each day, as I try to care for my own family, making a home and facing life’s challenges.

Mr. George and Matthew Bagnet together offer her the ultimate praise: George remarks that she looks as fresh as a rose, and as sound as an apple. “The old girl,” says Mr. Bagnet in reply, “is a thoroughly fine woman. Consequently, she is like a thoroughly fine day. Gets finer as she gets on. I never saw her equal.”

Here are the other guest posts Maggie has written for my blog over the years:

“What Women Most Desire: Anne Elliot’s Self-discovery” (for my blog series “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion”)

“Emma Woodhouse as a Spiritual Director” (for my blog series “Emma in the Snow”)

“‘Born again’: Valancy’s Journey from False Religion to True Faith” (in L.M. Montgomery’s novel The Blue Castle)

“Discerning a Vocation in Mansfield Park—But Whose?” (for my blog series “An Invitation to Mansfield Park”)

Previous posts in this series featuring book recommendations:

“Reading Close to Home,” by Naomi MacKinnon

“What is Said and What is Not Said,” by Jill MacLean

“Words that Heal,” by Renée Hartleib

An Invitation to Read The Story Girl and The Golden Road

Let’s read L.M. Montgomery’s novel The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road, together this fall. My friend Naomi and I enjoyed discussing Jane of Lantern Hill with you last month, and we’ve decided to read The Story Girl next, in November. I hope you’ll join us!

I haven’t read these books since I was about ten or eleven, and for the most part I’m excited to revisit them, though I admit to a small amount of apprehension. As I mentioned when I wrote about rereading Jane of Lantern Hill, I found some aspects of the book disappointing. Even so, I’m glad I read it again.

I’m going to borrow my daughter’s copies of the beautiful Tundra editions of these novels, featuring cover art by Elly MacKay.

I also have the copy of The Golden Road that I read in the early 1980s, but for some reason I don’t have a copy of The Story Girl, which surprised me because in those years I was building an L.M. Montgomery collection.

Probably I’ve written here before about how on Saturday mornings after he picked my sister Edie and me up from our ballet classes, my father used to take us to a bookstore on the Halifax waterfront called A Pair of Trindles, which carried books by Canadian authors only. I saved my allowance to buy one Montgomery novel at a time, often the McClelland & Stewart “Canadian Favourites” editions.

I’m announcing the readalong now so that everyone who’s interested will have lots of time to get ahold of copies of these books and start reading. The hashtag (for both novels) will be #ReadingStoryGirl. Please join the conversations on Naomi’s blog, Consumed by Ink, and mine, and/or on social media and your own blog, if you like.

I love the first sentence of The Story Girl:

“I do like a road, because you can be always wondering what is at the end of it.”

Already the Story Girl sounds like Anne Shirley, who tells Marilla near the end of Anne of Green Gables that she’s optimistic about her future, which used to “stretch out before me like a straight road”:

Now there is a bend in it. I don’t know what lies around the bend, but I’m going to believe that the best does. It has a fascination of its own, that bend, Marilla. I wonder how the road beyond it goes—what there is of green glory and soft, checkered light and shadows—what new landscapes—what new beauties—what curves and hills and valleys further on.

The bend in the road in Fredericton, PEI

On a completely different topic, I also want to tell you about a literary event that’s coming up in early July. My friends Sandra Barry and Margo Wheaton will be reading from their poetry at the Elizabeth Bishop House in Great Village, Nova Scotia on Saturday, July 8th, in the afternoon. Regular readers of my blog will probably remember Sandra’s poem “Old Rusty Metal Things,” which I shared here in April. If you’re in the area, I hope you’ll consider making the trip to the EB House for what I’m sure will be a wonderful event. (I’m not sure of the precise time yet, but if you’re interested, please comment on this post and I’ll get back to you with more details.)

The Elizabeth Bishop House, Great Village, NS

Here are some photos Sandra sent me recently, taken by her sister Brenda Barry. The first, in Sandra’s words, is “a sweet song sparrow singing to the sun. I love hearing them sing—this one was singing and singing and singing—clearly out of pure, sheer joy.”

Tree Swallow

Redstart

Hummingbird

And some iris photos, also by Brenda:

If you missed any of the Jane of Lantern Hill posts and would like to catch up, you can read more here:

From me:

“Back in Bonn with Bethie, #ReadingLanternHill”

“The Idyllic Island (#ReadingLanternHill)”

From Kathy Cawsey:

“She is my daughter … no outsider shall ever come between us again” #ReadingLanternHill

From Naomi MacKinnon:

“Announcing a Readalong of Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery: #ReadingLanternHill”

#ReadingLanternHill: My Thoughts on Jane of Lantern Hill, Anthropomorphism, and Squishmallows

From Rebecca Foster:

“Jane of Lantern Hill by L.M. Montgomery (1937) #ReadingLanternHill”

From Bill at The Australian Legend:

LM Montgomery

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. Please help spread the word about our readalong for The Story Girl and The Golden Road!

I’m always interested to read your comments and messages. If you’d like to subscribe and receive future posts by email, you can sign up on my website, www.sarahemsley.com. Thanks very much for reading.