Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 16

Places I Want to Remember

As the year ends, I can’t help but look back, and I’ve gathered a few of my favourite photos from 2022 to share with you. I’m feeling lucky and grateful that my family and I had the chance to travel again, to New York City and Germany as well as our beloved Prince Edward Island, and some of our favourite places in our home province, Nova Scotia.

Snowdrops and crocuses in my mother’s garden

A spectacular July day at Queensland Beach on the south shore of Nova Scotia

Sunflowers on the north shore of Prince Edward Island

The Shakespeare Garden in Central Park, New York City

The view from the parking lot of a grocery store in Halifax, NS

Commemorative markers on the sidewalk in Endenich, Germany

The house in Bonn, Germany, where Beethoven was born

Cochem, Germany

Reichsburg Cochem

The Mosel River

Cologne Cathedral

Bonn Minster

Beethoven, in the Münsterplatz in Bonn

May the new year bring peace and joy to you and your loved ones.

“The Christmas tree on display in the drawing room window”

I bought a copy of Clare Keegan’s novella Small Things Like These when I was in Bonn earlier this month, without realizing that it was set in the days leading up to Christmas. A good friend had recommended the book when it was first published, and I’m so glad I finally got a copy and read it. Each word is carefully chosen, each scene carefully crafted.

It’s the story of a particular time—Ireland in the 1980s—and a particular person—Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant—but the choices he faces about how to treat other people—family or friends or strangers, nearby or far away—are choices we all face, all the time.

December was a good time to read this beautiful, powerful book. I know it’s one I’ll return to again and again. I also love the cover, and I enjoyed reading this analysis of the detail from Bruegel’s “Winter (Hunters in the Snow, 1565).”

Coffee with my sister at Thalia, a bookstore near the Altes Rathaus in Bonn, where we found Small Things Like These and some other good books:

The scene in which Furlong returns to the house where he grew up is especially memorable. Here’s the first part:

Now, driving up the avenue, the old oaks and lime trees looked stark and tall. Something in Furlong’s heart caught and turned over when the headlights crossed the rooks and the nests they’d built and he saw the house freshly painted, with electric lights burning in all the front rooms, and the Christmas tree on display in the drawing room window, where it never used to be.

A snow-covered field in Bonn, from one of my late afternoon walks last week.

Thank you to everyone who’s responded to the blog posts I’ve written over these past few weeks. And whether you send comments and messages or not, thank you for reading! I’m grateful for the warm welcome and it’s wonderful to be back in touch with all of you again. I’ve missed our conversations.

I’m sending best wishes to you and your families and friends for a peaceful and happy holiday season. I hope you have lots of good books to keep you company, now and in the months ahead. Merry Christmas!

Happy 247th birthday to Jane Austen!

This year, I’m celebrating Jane Austen’s birthday in Bonn, Germany. My sister and I raised a glass in Jane’s honour at the Christmas Market in the Münsterplatz, where we like to go for coffee or a glass of Glühwein “with” Beethoven.

For Beethoven’s 250th birthday in 2020, seven hundred gold and green statues by Ottmar Hörl, all about one metre high, were placed in the Münsterplatz, near the famous 1845 statue (above) by Ernst Julius Hähnel and just a short walk from the house where Beethoven was born. Many of the small statues are now on display in nearby shops.

I can’t help picturing hundreds of small statues of Jane Austen, lined up outside Chawton Cottage or Winchester Cathedral, or perhaps on the site of Steventon Parsonage, where she was born. Maybe in gold and turquoise, in honour of the beautiful ring she owned?

We’ve also celebrated by watching the 1995 adaptation of Persuasion. (It’s so good! We’ve both seen it many times, but had never watched it together.) And, in honour of Marianne Dashwood, I’ve been admiring dead leaves at the Bonn University Botanic Gardens and at Beethoven’s House.

The courtyard at Beethoven’s House:

As I mentioned in last week’s post, I’m looking for a title for the new blog series I’m planning, in honour of Sense and Sensibility. Please send ideas! If I end up choosing the title you suggest, I’ll send you a packet of cards I bought this week at Beethoven’s House.

Here’s a photo of my sister Bethie, the Poppelsdorfer Schloss, and a ginkgo tree that was planted in the Botanic Gardens around 1870:

Swamp cypress in the Botanic Gardens:

Since I know not everyone shares my passion for dead leaves, I’ll add a few photos of berries, mistletoe, and flowers.

Happy 247th, dear Jane!

Celebrating Sense and Sensibility

I’d love to hear your suggestions about a title for a new blog series celebrating Sense and Sensibility, please. Laurel Ann Nattress proposed “An Invitation to Mansfield Park” for my 2014 series, Nora Bartlett gave me the title “Emma in the Snow” in 2015-16, and in 2018, Adam Q named “Youth and Experience: Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.” Please help save me from titles that are “very dull indeed,” such as the one I chose for “Pride and Prejudice at 200”!

It will be wonderful to celebrate Sense and Sensibility and Jane Austen’s 250th birthday with all of you in 2025, and in the meantime, I’m looking forward to Jane’s 247th birthday next Friday, December 16th. I’m in Germany with my sister Bethie right now, and we’re thinking about celebrating the 247th at the Christmas Market in Bonn.

Earlier this week, there was snow in Bonn, which is rare in early December. It was lovely to see flowers for sale outside even on a snowy day.

Bonn in the snow:

We’ve been to the Christmas Market a couple of times already and we’re planning to go again. Do you have plans for celebrations on (or near) Jane’s 247th birthday?

Preparing to Celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday in 2025

Jane Austen’s 250th birthday is December 16, 2025, and I’m thinking about throwing a party sometime that year. Would you like to celebrate with me?

It’ll probably be similar to the online celebrations I hosted here in honour of the 200th anniversaries of Jane Austen’s novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, Emma, Mansfield Park, and Pride and Prejudice. I started these online celebrations in 2013 and thus had already missed out on the chance to celebrate Sense and Sensibility in 2011.

Many people are making plans to celebrate Jane Austen’s life and works in 2025—a couple of weeks ago, for example, I mentioned the upcoming exhibition at the Morgan Library, guest curated by Austen scholar Juliette Wells—and I’m looking forward to hearing more about the various events, exhibitions, and parties.

Maybe 2025 would be a good time to pay tribute to Sense and Sensibility, Austen’s first published novel. What do you think?

What to Read Next

Thanks so much for all the wonderful book recommendations you sent in response to last week’s post! Creating lists like this and sharing them with other readers is in itself a comfort in an uncertain world. Even though I can’t read them all right away, the books are there, waiting, and that can be a source of joy. And when I do read them, they’ll remind me of the people who recommended them, which enriches the whole experience.

Happy belated Thanksgiving to those of you who were celebrating yesterday. I enjoyed reading this Thanksgiving-themed column by Charles M. Blow, “Thankful for Libraries.” He writes about the first library he ever visited, in elementary school: “I remember thinking as a small child that I was in a cavern of tomes written by people across time and around the globe, that each volume probably contained thousands of ideas, and I wondered how could I get all of those ideas into my mind.” Years later, when he was writing his first book, he worked “in the main branch of New York City’s public library not because I needed to do research—the book was a memoir—but because the space itself seemed most aligned with the task of writing. It was like going to church to pray.”

I too am thankful for libraries. Here’s the Music Library at the Schumann House in Bonn, Germany, which I visited last month. Robert Schumann lived in this house between 1854 and 1856, the last two years of his life.

If you’re wondering what to read next, here are a few ideas:

Naomi recommends Birth Road, by Michelle Wamboldt; We Measure the Earth With Our Bodies, by Tsering Langzom Lama; and Decoding Dot Grey, by Nicola Davison.

Peter recommends The Department of Rare Books and Special Collections, by Eve Jurczyk, and is looking forward to reading the newly published letters of John Le Carré.

Sandra recommends Stalin’s Daughter, by Rosemary Sullivan, and The Genius of Birds, by Jennifer Ackerman.

Somewhere Towards the End, by Diana Athill: Cheryl says, “It’s a wonderful meditation on aging, books, gardening, death, and many other important topics.”

Still Life, by Sarah Winman: Marianne says it’s “a wonderful work of historical fiction, especially for those who love art and Italy, particularly Florence. It’s an uplifting exploration of love, family, and friendship in all their many guises. And it references E.M. Forster and Room with a View—a happy coincidence!”

I saw Marianne earlier this week and she lent me her copy of Still Life.

The Classic Slave Narratives, edited by Henry Louis Gates, Jr.: Collins says, “All the personal stories were hard; Harriet Jacobs’ story, perhaps the hardest.”

The Splendid and the Vile, by Erik Larson: Gerri says it’s “a non-fiction account of Winston Churchill, his family and various secretaries as well as Lord Beaverbrook for one year during WWI. It is so well written that I had difficulty putting it down. As the title indicates, nothing every minute is gloom and doom even during a war.”

The Shell Seekers and Coming Home, by Rosamunde Pilcher: Cheryl Ann says Coming Home is “a richly detailed historical novel set between 1935 and 1945 in Cornwall, London, and Ceylon” and she highly recommends both novels.

Victoria recommends To Kill a Mockingbird and Go Set a Watchman, by Harper Lee; Moby Dick, by Herman Melville; The Lost Daughter, by Elena Ferrante; The Garden of Monsters, by Lorenza Pieri; The Clash of Civilizations Over an Elevator in Piazza Vittorio, by Amara Lakhous; The Uncommon Reader, by Alan Bennett; Wonderworks, by Angus Fletcher; and Margaret Renkl’s opinion piece in The New York Times called “The Joy of Finding People Who Love the Same Books You Do.” 

Thank you again!

I’m now about halfway through Devoney Looser’s stunning new book, Sister Novelists, which I mentioned in last week’s post, and I’m finding the lives of the Porter sisters and their groundbreaking work in historical fiction fascinating. At one point, when Jane Porter’s work was finding success and Maria’s was not, Maria wrote to her sister that she was considering giving up writing: “I will therefore magnanimously relinquish the Quill and taking up a good darning needle, strive to mend my errors…. If some honest man will marry me, then will I give up the muses; but if not, authorship and old maidism shall go together. Happiness or Fame, that is the alternative.” As Devoney says, “The world wasn’t set up to allow women conventional domestic happiness and unconventional public fame. The sisters knew few women writers who’d succeeded without having been born into money or a title.”

Over the past week, I’ve also been thinking more about books I read earlier this year. I don’t do “best books of the year” lists, but if I did, here’s what I’d put at the top: Animal Person, by Alexander MacLeod, a powerful collection of short stories published in April 2022. Line by line, the whole book is brilliant.

These stories are about family, intimacy, rivalries, secrets, death—about everything, really, and in fact the word everything echoes throughout the book: “The way I see it: everything linked and all of it tied directly into the movement of the planets and our little blue-green orbit around the sun” (from “What exactly do you think you’re looking at?”); “I guess it’s like a movie—maybe everything is like a movie—but this isn’t us just watching a movie” (from “Everything Underneath”); “Where I lived, in a single-story bungalow one over and one down from the Klassens, life was not like this, and everything we did felt like a compromise” (from “The Ninth Concession”); “Can’t you just picture her? Everything’s already set up, and now she’s sitting there watching the clock, waiting for us to arrive.” That last quotation is from “Once Removed,” which was published in The New Yorker in February.

I went looking for a photo of a chandelier and I don’t have anything that resembles the “ugly medium-sized chandelier with brass accents” that features so prominently in “Once Removed,” so instead here’s something entirely different, a spectacular light fixture that I saw in the summer, at the Museum of the City of New York.

I discovered I’ve actually taken quite a few photos of light fixtures recently. Was I inspired to do so after reading “Once Removed”? Maybe. Probably. And/or it could be because I’ve been travelling quite a bit in the last few months, for the first time in years, and I’ve been noticing new and interesting things everywhere I go. It could also be because since the early days of the pandemic, my sister Bethie and I have been talking about looking for light, both real and metaphorical. She’s reminded me that on my next trip to Germany, we’ll need to be prepared to turn down the heat and turn off lights, because of the energy crisis.

Light fixtures in New York City and Cochem, Germany:

Maybe on some future trip, I’ll find an ugly chandelier with brass accents.

The story at the centre of Animal Person, “The Entertainer,” looks at a piano recital from the perspective of a young piano student named Darcy who is absolutely certain his performance will be a disaster, his teacher, Roxy, and the husband of a woman, Gladys Ferguson, whose ability to communicate through words has slipped away, though her memory for music has remained. From Darcy’s feeling that “sometimes it feels like the music itself, the actual sheets, are making fun of me,” to Roxy’s sympathetic understanding of Darcy’s lonely predicament—“It’s just better, so much better, when you are not up there, up here, alone”— to the last words spoken by Gladys Ferguson’s husband, this story broke my heart.

The first story in the collection, “Lagomorph,” is about ordinary chaos in the life of one family and their extraordinarily long-lived pet rabbit, Gunther, and it’s been a favourite of mine since it was first published in Granta in 2017. I like the way the kids in the family work out “a pretty funny matador routine” with Gunther, shaking a dish towel and shouting “Toro! Toro! Toro!” I like the way “the minivan was always running in the driveway, its rolling side door gaping for the quickest possible turnaround, like an army helicopter.” I like the eldest daughter’s response to the news that her parents are separating: “We just want you to be happy,” she tells them, and the narrator (her father) says “the line stuck in my ear because I’d always thought it was the kind of thing parents were supposed to tell their kids, not the other way around.” At the end, the narrator sees himself reflected “at the red centre” of Gunther’s eye, and he can almost see his family’s shared history “held inside the mind of the oldest rabbit that has ever lived.”

“Lagomorph” won an O. Henry Prize in 2019. In 2020, it was published as a hand-crafted letterpress book by Gaspereau Press, and this edition was named the winner of the 2021 Nova Scotia Masterworks Arts Award. You can read the story on the Granta website, but of course I encourage you to get a copy of Animal Person so you can read all the stories in this splendid collection.

Do you make “top books of the year” lists? Do you have a favourite book published in 2022?

I’ll close with a photo I took last Saturday, in an attempt to capture the late afternoon light. This is the view from Point Pleasant Park in Halifax, looking out toward McNabs Island (on the left) and York Redoubt (on the right).

Reading is My Anchor

Hello, long-lost friends! I’ve missed the conversations we’ve had over the years, here in this corner of the internet. It’s been a while since I last wrote a blog post, and my goodness, the world has changed a lot since then. My love of reading has stayed steadfast, and I’d be very interested to hear your recommendations. What have you been reading in recent weeks—or years? What books do you turn to in times of uncertainty?

Here are a few highlights from among the books I’ve read recently.

Central Park

One of the books I enjoyed most in the summer, during a weekend trip to New York City with my daughter, was Colson Whitehead’s The Colossus of New York: A City in Thirteen Parts. I had read the brilliant first essay, “The Way We Live Now: 11-11-01; Lost and Found,” several times, and the ending always moves me to tears: “The twin towers still stand because we saw them, moved in and out of their long shadows, were lucky enough to know them for a time. They are a part of the city we carry around….”

But I hadn’t yet read the whole book, and now, long after I finished reading it, lines from the last essay are still echoing in my mind: “When you talk about this trip, and you will, because it was quite a journey and you witnessed many things, there were ups and downs, sudden reversals of fortune and last-minute escapes, it was really something, you will see your friends nod in recognition. They will say, That reminds me of, and they will say, I know exactly what you mean.”

At the very end, Whitehead talks about flying out of New York and the way “the city explodes into view with all its miles and spires and inscrutable hustle,” and the feeling that even as “you try to comprehend this sight you realize that you were never really there at all.”

My daughter and I visited several bookstores (no surprise there), including Books Are Magic in Brooklyn, which we both loved. We’re already planning our next trip.

In mid-October, Juliette Wells, Professor of Literary Studies in the Department of Visual, Literary, and Material Culture at Goucher College in Baltimore, Maryland, came to visit Nova Scotia as one of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Traveling Lecturers. She spoke in the English Department at Dalhousie University and at the Halifax Central Library. In preparation for her visit, I re-read her book Reading Austen in America, a persuasive account of the way readers on this side of the Atlantic contributed to the international fame of a novelist who is often thought of as quintessentially English.

My favourite chapter is the one on Christian, Countess of Dalhousie, one of Austen’s early readers, whose husband founded Dalhousie University. To give just one example of Lady Dalhousie’s engagement with Austen’s novels: in a diary entry in 1818, she recorded that she read Persuasion while on board ship, sailing from Halifax to Mahone Bay.

Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia, at twilight. In the bottom photo, you can just make out the spires of the famous three churches.

Juliette writes that though the hero of the novel, Captain Frederick Wentworth, “was a naval officer, not an army man like Lord Dalhousie, Austen’s positive portrayal of the British military post-Waterloo would certainly have resonated with the countess.” Lady Dalhousie might also have appreciated Austen’s portrait of the intrepid Mrs. Croft, who has joined her husband the Admiral on his naval journeys back and forth across the Atlantic and to the East Indies, and who claims that “Women may be as comfortable on board, as in the best house in England.” Mrs. Croft also protests, famously, that “We none of us expect to be in smooth water all our days” (Persuasion, Volume 1, Chapter 8). Lady Dalhousie had a similar spirit of adventure: “In the most daring act recorded of her,” Juliette says, “she was the first person, male or female, to walk the length of a just-finished suspension bridge between Ottawa and Hull, over the Rideau Canal,” in 1827.

Juliette’s new book, A New Jane Austen: How Americans Brought Us the World’s Greatest Novelist, will be published next year by Bloomsbury, and I’m keen to read it. In the lecture she gave at Dalhousie, she spoke about early Austen scholars, including Oscar Fay Adams, Austen’s first critical biographer and critical editor. She shared this lovely image of him alongside a photo of Cecil Vyse, as played by Daniel Day-Lewis in the 1985 adaptation of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View. A perfect match, right?

As 2025 approaches, Juliette is serving as guest curator for a special exhibition at The Morgan Library that will mark the 250th anniversary of Jane Austen’s birth. (Another great reason to plan a trip to New York….)

I love the film adaptation of A Room with a View and had just watched it earlier in October with my sister and brother-in-law when I was visiting them in Bonn, Germany. My sister does a particularly good imitation of Mr. Beebe’s response to the “Miss Honeychurch. Piano. Beethoven.” scene: “If Miss Honeychurch ever takes to live as she plays it will be very exciting, both for us and for her.”

I borrowed my sister’s copy of Beethoven: His Life and Music, by Jeremy Siepmann, after she and I had visited the house in Bonn where Beethoven was born, and I liked it so much that I ordered my own copy after I got home. Maybe I’ll write more about Beethoven and Bonn in a future blog post; for now I’ll just quote Siepmann: “Among the many things which make Beethoven’s music unique is its extraordinary capacity to inspire courage. … In some ultimately mysterious way, he makes us feel, through his example, that we can confront reality without fear.”

(I accidentally left my glasses case on the plane when I flew from Halifax to Frankfurt, and was happy to find a case featuring Joseph Karl Stieler’s portrait of Beethoven in the gift shop at Beethoven’s House.)

Not long after Juliette’s visit, I attended two other fabulous and memorable literary events in Halifax. The first was the launch of Renée Hartleib’s book Writing Your Way: A 40-Day Path of Self-Discovery.

Renée invites readers to make time for quiet reflection and writing, promising that even just a few minutes a day of listening to “the inner, truest version of you” can be enough to change our lives. While reading Writing Your Way, I was often reminded of one of my favourite quotations from Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park, in which the heroine, Fanny Price, says “We have all a better guide in ourselves, if we would attend to it, than any other person can be.” Renée suggests that writing can help us find our way to a “better guide” within—she says “Some might call it your soul, your spirit, or your essence”—whether we’re seeking answers about creating art, making changes in our lives, working to make the world a better place, or all of the above.

The second event, Booktoberfest, was organized by the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia and held in our beloved Halifax Central Library. Forty-four authors participated in a celebration of books they had released during the first two years of the pandemic, when in-person events were, for the most part, cancelled. Several authors read from their work, and all were available to sign copies of their books.

I came home from Booktoberfest with two new treasures (I could easily have bought many more), including Lauren Soloy’s picture book Etty Darwin and the Four Pebble Problem. I love the imagined conversation between Etty and her famous scientist father about science and the imagination, during their walks on The Sandwalk, the “thinking path” he created near their house.

I also bought Stephens Gerard Malone’s new novel The History of Rain, about a veteran of the Great War who finds consolation in work as a landscape gardener, and I had a chance to chat with Stephens about our shared love of historical fiction.

“I say give the earth your rage, young man, and she’ll give you flowers.”

At the moment, I’m switching back and forth between reading The History of Rain and a new biography by Devoney Looser called Sister Novelists: The Trailblazing Porter Sisters, Who Paved the Way for Austen and the Brontës.

Thanks for reading to the end of this long post, and please do send book recommendations!

I’ll end with a photo of the anchor at the entrance to HMCS Stadacona in Halifax, along with a photo of nearby Admiralty House (now the Naval Museum of Halifax). Jane Austen’s brother Francis lived in Admiralty House when he was in Halifax in the summers of 1845, 1846, and 1847 as Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indies Station.

Down to the Sea

“… the next thing to be done was unquestionably to walk directly down to the sea.”

– Jane Austen’s Persuasion (1818), Volume 1, Chapter 11

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I’m rereading Persuasion and I thought I’d share a few photos I took when I walked down to the sea the other day. This is not Lyme Regis (obviously), but Herring Cove Provincial Park, in Nova Scotia.

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I’ve missed taking pictures and writing for this blog. At the moment, I don’t have any plans to host big celebrations like the blog series I hosted last year in honour of the 200th anniversary of Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, but it’s nice to be back.

What are you all reading these days? I’m always looking for new recommendations, even though I always have a long list of books I want to read. After Persuasion, I’m planning to start Amy Jones’s new novel, Every Little Piece of Me. My friend Naomi wrote about the novel on her blog last week: “I loved this book,” she says. “With humour and insight, Amy Jones goes deeper and darker with Every Little Piece of Me, exploring the dark side of media and social media, women’s issues, loss and grief, and the power of human connection.”

I like that the novel opens with a family on the verge of moving from New York to Nova Scotia to open a bed and breakfast. Here’s the response of one of the daughters to the announcement about the move:

“Dad. Papa. We know where Nova Scotia is.” She did, vaguely, insofar as she knew that it wasn’t New York, or L.A., or even New Hampshire—was it actually, possibly, could it be, in Canada?

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Other recent additions to my list include Washington Black, by Esi Edugyan (which my friend Marianne just started reading), and The Ghost Road, by Charis Cotter (recommended by my daughter). Further suggestions welcome!

Elinor and Marianne

I loved finding Jane Austen’s Elinor Dashwood in Emma Straub’s novel Modern Lovers, just as I loved finding Marianne Dashwood in Jeanne Birdsall’s The Penderwicks on Gardam Street (in which Jane Penderwick says “the mystifying Marianne who hated flannel will long linger in my memory”).

Straub’s heroine Elizabeth writes a song called “Mistress of Myself”:

Everyone else at Oberlin was all hot and bothered about Foucault and Barthes, but she was far more interested in Jane Austen. She was reading Sense and Sensibility for pleasure, and that’s where she saw it—on one of the very last pages, when Elinor Dashwood was trying to prepare herself for a visit from Edward Ferrars, with whom she was deeply in love but who she believed had forsaken her. “I will be calm; I will be mistress of myself,” Elinor thought.

Elizabeth understood it completely: the desire to be in control, the need to speak the words aloud. No one in Saint Paul, Minnesota had ever been truly her own mistress. … Elizabeth swiveled the chair around so that it was facing the window, and opened up her notebook. The song was finished fifteen minutes later….

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Sense and Sensibility also makes an appearance in Gail Honeyman’s novel Eleanor Oliphant is Completely Fine:

It’s another one of my favorites: top five, certainly. I love the story of Elinor and Marianne. It all ends happily, which is highly unrealistic, but, I must admit, narratively satisfying, and I understand why Ms. Austen adhered to the convention. Interestingly, despite my wide-ranging literary tastes, I haven’t come across many heroines called Eleanor, in any of the variant spellings. Perhaps that’s why the name was chosen for me.

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In The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, Jane Penderwick seems to have an even stronger passion for dead leaves than Marianne Dashwood does, as she not only admires them, but buries herself beneath them:

Abandoning herself to the relief of tears, she pushed the leaves this way, then that way, then another, trying to build a big enough pile to crawl under. She was crying too hard to manage even that, though, so finally she simply lay down and pulled a few leaves over her face, and cried and cried until there were no more tears, but still she lay there, thinking that maybe she would stay forever, moldering along with the worms and the leaves, and at least she would help the lawn grow.

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From Sense and Sensibility:

“Dear, dear Norland,” said Elinor, “probably looks much as it always does at this time of the year. The woods and walks thickly covered with dead leaves.”

“Oh,” cried Marianne, “with what transporting sensation have I formerly seen them fall! How have I delighted, as I walked, to see them driven in showers about me by the wind! What feelings have they, the season, the air altogether inspired! Now there is no one to regard them. They are seen only as a nuisance, swept hastily off, and driven as much as possible from the sight.”

“It is not every one,” said Elinor, “who has your passion for dead leaves.”

“No; my feelings are not often shared, not often understood. But sometimes they are.”

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I decided to share these quotations today because it’s the 207th anniversary of the publication of Sense and Sensibility. I’ll leave you with a few more photos of dead leaves, and then I’m going to take a break from blogging and social media for a while to focus on other writing projects—see you sometime in 2019!

These photos below are from a walk I took with a dear friend—whose name, coincidentally, is Marianne—in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, last week.[image error]

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“Quiet Observation” in Persuasion

“We have much to learn from the patient practice of quiet observation in Jane Austen’s Persuasion,” writes Natasha Duquette. I’m sharing her guest post on the novel today in honour of the first day of the Jane Austen Society of North America AGM, which is entitled “Persuasion: 200 Years of Constancy and Hope.”

Natasha Duquette is Professor and Chair of English at Tyndale University College. She’s the author of Veiled Intent: Dissenting Women’s Aesthetic Approach to Biblical Interpretation (2016) and the co-editor, with Elisabeth Lenckos, of Jane Austen and the Arts: Elegance, Propriety, Harmony (2013). Her current project is a 30-Day Journey with Jane Austen, which she describes as “a small volume consisting of curated passages from Austen’s work accompanied by brief reflections” (forthcoming from Fortress Press in 2019). She serves on the Board of Directors for JASNA and she’s a member of the churches subcommittee, which oversees JASNA support of parishes in the UK, such as St. Nicholas in Chawton and Winchester Cathedral. She lives in Toronto, Canada, with a pug, a papillon, and her husband Fred.

Four years ago, when I hosted a blog series in honour of Mansfield Park, Natasha wrote about “Fanny Price’s Prayers,” and it’s a pleasure to welcome her back with this guest post on Anne Elliot and “quiet observation.”

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Slowing down, quieting one’s mind, and becoming more conscious of one’s physical senses and surroundings can yield unexpected dividends, spiritually and creatively. As a novelist, Jane Austen was a careful observer of both human character and natural landscapes. She must have been a masterful practitioner of silent attentiveness. In her novel Persuasion Austen deploys the phrase “quiet observation” (Volume 1, Chapter 5) to define this posture. The heroine of Persuasion, Anne Elliot, exemplifies this intellectual faculty, in contrast to her sister Mary’s in-laws, Mr. and Mrs. Musgrove, who are “unobservant and incurious” (Volume 1, Chapter 6). Anne, on the other hand, has the wonder, curiosity, and receptivity of a writer or a scientist. The narrator explicitly emphasizes her “attention for the scientific” while she is listening to music at a concert, for example (Volume 2, Chapter 8). Anne is at times painfully aware of “her silent, pensive self” (Volume 2, Chapter 1). This self-awareness is a gift, however. In our modern world of virtual realities, alluring distractions, and at times frantic busyness, we have much to learn from the patient practice of quiet observation in Jane Austen’s Persuasion.

When I began thinking about this piece, I took my Penguin edition of Persuasion with me on a trip to Ward’s Island, off the Northern shoreline of Lake Ontario, just a short ferry ride away from downtown Toronto. I was trying to detach from the incessant press of urban competitiveness in order to create space to receive Austen’s words. As I was reading her most naval narrative alongside open water, I glanced up from the page and beheld a nineteenth-century schooner (or close replica of one) sailing along.

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Both photos © Natasha Duquette

At first, I could not believe my eyes, but there it was, the perfect visual accompaniment to the text of Austen’s novel. After a few moments, the sound of cannon fire boomed in the distance from the schooner. With the scents and tastes of a swim in Lake Ontario fresh in my memory, feet cradled in the warm sand, eyes delighted by the sailing ship, and ears awakened via the sound of cannon, I was grateful I had taken some time for quiet observation.

In Austen’s novel Persuasion, Anne Elliot carefully contemplates both natural landscapes and human beings. At the turning point of the novel, she is in Lyme, with “its sweet retired bay, backed by dark cliffs, where fragments of low rock among the sands make it the happiest spot for watching the flow of the tide, for sitting in unwearied contemplation” (Volume 1, Chapter 11). When Anne visits the seaside with Henrietta Musgrove, the two young women “gloried in the sea; sympathized in the delight of the fresh-feeling breeze—and were silent” (Volume 1, Chapter 12). Paradoxically, this contemplative locale is where Anne Elliot breaks from her silent stasis by springing into action, when Henrietta’s sister Louisa Musgrove takes a near fatal fall. In this emergency, it is the men who are frozen and fainting in fear while Anne shouts out decisive and quickly obeyed commands. Austen shows us how Anne’s quiet observation leads to clear judgment, and her steady contemplation undergirds confident action.

This is the case in Anne’s contemplation of human nature as well. Early on in the narrative, we find Anne “contemplated” the Musgrove sisters “as some of the happiest creatures of her acquaintance” (Volume 1, Chapter 5). In her initial period of quietly observing Captain Wentworth, after their eight-year separation, she contemplates evidence of his still “warm and amiable heart” with a mix of pleasure and pain (Volume 1, Chapter 10). She later attentively observes the grieving Captain Benwick’s psychological state and prescribes textual remedies for his healing. Anne’s impoverished friend Mrs. Smith likewise receives her undivided attention. Interestingly, women of keen perception surround the vulnerable Mrs. Smith, as her nurse Rooke is also “a shrewd, intelligent, sensible woman” with “a fund of good sense and observation” (Volume 2, Chapter 5). The collectively quiet yet shrewd study of Mr. Elliot’s character by a small team of women—Anne, Mrs. Smith, and nurse Rooke—leads to the exposure of his true character. Detectives are also people of quiet observation.

The novel’s moments of astute perception build one upon another until they reach a crescendo with Anne’s sighting of Captain Wentworth in Bath. The narrator powerfully but simply states: “the very first time Anne walked out, she saw him” (Volume 2, Chapter 7). Then, four paragraphs later, an amplified statement of the same fact occurs: “Anne, as she sat near the window, descried, most decidedly and distinctly, Captain Wentworth” (Volume 2, Chapter 7). The alliterative “d”s of this sentence create a staccato effect conveying Anne’s intense emotion. She is a woman whose “feelings for the tender” accompany her powers of empirical observation (Volume 2, Chapter 8). She sees the reality of Captain Wentworth’s being clearly as she looks through the transparent glass of a shop window. In her chapter written for the essay collection Jane Austen and the Arts (2013), Melora Vandersluis notes how Austen contrasts the vanity of those fixated on reflective glass mirrors, like Sir Walter Elliot, with the truth perceived by those who look through the glass of a window. Anne’s descrying of Wentworth’s distinct form is a perfect example of the latter.

There are dangers in underestimating and underusing the powers of quiet observation. By neglecting to regularly exercise this mental and spiritual capacity, we may miss the daily wonders of our external environments, the subtle signs of unethical characters impinging on us, or the lived realities of someone we love. Though you are most likely reading this blog post on an electronic device, consider turning it off for even just a few minutes. Following Anne Elliot’s example, take some time to contemplate the actual creatures or places close to you at this moment.

Quotations are from the Penguin edition of Persuasion, edited and with an introduction by Gillian Beer (1998).