Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 2

Jane Austen, L.M. Montgomery, and the Cavendish Literary Festival

I was thrilled to be invited to speak at the inaugural Cavendish Literary Festival, as I mentioned in a post last week. If you’d like to know more about the Festival and hear when tickets launch, you can sign up for their newsletter here.

I’ll be participating in a panel discussion on Jane Austen and L.M. Montgomery on Friday, September 26th, with Kate Scarth and Laura Robinson, and on Saturday, September 27th, I’ll do a reading from my debut novel The Austens and talk about the connections between Jane Austen and Nova Scotia that inspired me to write the book.

I’m looking forward to speaking alongside Kate, Laura, Donna Jones Alward, Linden MacIntyre, Sheree Fitch, Keir Lowther, Sandra McIntyre, and many others. In addition to author talks, the Festival offers workshops and wellness retreats. More details are available on the Cavendish Literary Festival website. The landscape of Cavendish was a source of tremendous inspiration to Montgomery, and it’s a beautiful setting for this new and exciting Festival.

In Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery describes a September evening in Avonlea, which was based on Cavendish:

… all the gaps and clearings in the woods were brimmed up with ruby sunset light. Here and there the lane was splashed with it, but for the most part it was already quite shadowy beneath the maples, and the spaces under the firs were filled with a clear violet dusk like airy wine. The winds were out in their tops, and there is no sweeter music on earth than that which the wind makes in the fir trees at evening. (Chapter 29)

Come and join us in Cavendish this fall!

I’m going to take a break from writing these posts for the remainder of this month. Happy summer and see you in September.

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

New and Wonderful Books (Solo Camino: An Empowering Guide for Women, by Renée Hartleib; The Secrets of Thorndale Manor, by Syrie James; and The Arrows of Fealty by Jill MacLean)

“Its enchantment has never faded” (L.M. Montgomery Birthplace Museum)

(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

My debut novel, The Austens, will be published by Pottersfield Press on September 15th. Now available for pre-order!

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

New and Wonderful Books

Today I want to recommend three excellent—and very different!—new books by friends of mine: Solo Camino: An Empowering Guide for Women, by Renée Hartleib; The Secrets of Thorndale Manor, by Syrie James; and The Arrows of Fealty by Jill MacLean.

Before I get into the details, I want to add a reminder about the upcoming event “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens: A 250th Birthday Celebration” here in Halifax, Nova Scotia on Sunday, August 17th at 4:30 p.m.

Readers include Janet Brush, Charlene Carr, Sheree Fitch, Darcy Johns, Sheila Johnson Kindred, Hugh Kindred, Stephens Gerard Malone, Jan Parker, Anne Thompson, Carole Thompson, and the Rev’d Canon Dr. Paul Friesen, Rector of St. Paul’s Church. I’m the MC, and Adria Jackson, harpist, will provide music from Austen’s time.

RSVP on our Facebook event page.

Now to the book recommendations!

The first one I want to recommend is Solo Camino: An Empowering Guide for Women, which was published in May. Renée’s new book is beautiful, thoughtful, and inspiring. I read it in one sitting, enthralled by the stunning colour photos and the story of her experience of walking the Camino, dealing with challenges large and small along the way, and adjusting to ordinary life after the journey.

If you don’t already get her fabulous monthly newsletter, I encourage you to subscribe.

I don’t typically read historical mysteries but am delighted to have discovered Syrie’s Audacious Sisterhood of Smoke & Fire series. I admire her heroines, the three Taylor sisters (Diana, Athena, and Selena), and their passion for justice. Book 2, The Secrets of Thorndale Manor, which was published in June, is a powerful and memorable love letter to books and reading as well as a deeply satisfying novel of mystery and romance.

It was an honour to be asked to write an endorsement for Jill MacLean’s new novel, The Arrows of Fealty, which is coming out next month. Here’s what I said:

In this stunning sequel to her equally powerful novel The Arrows of Mercy, Jill MacLean asks us to consider questions about where we pledge our loyalties and why, and whether the efforts of one person can ever make a difference in the fight against injustice and tyranny—issues as pressing in our own time as they were in 14th century England. Her vivid portrait of Haukyn and his experiences of the horrors and resounding effects of war is deeply affecting and thoroughly convincing.

The launch for The Arrows of Fealty is on Sunday, September 21st at 3:30 p.m. at the Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia in Halifax. Hope to see you there!

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

“Its enchantment has never faded” (L.M. Montgomery Birthplace Museum)

“It blooms as if it meant it” (quotations from L.M. Montgomery and Jane Austen, with photos from a lavender farm in Prince Edward Island)

My debut novel, The Austens, will be published by Pottersfield Press on September 15th. Now available for pre-order!

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

“Its enchantment has never faded”

L.M. Montgomery wrote in her journal that over the years, the house she was born in became “shabbier than before,” but that “its enchantment has never faded in my eyes. I always look for it with the same eager interest when I turn the corner,” she said (December 31, 1898).

Last week, my family and I visited the L.M. Montgomery Birthplace Museum in New London, Prince Edward Island. I’ve visited several times over the past thirty years and always find it moving to read of Montgomery’s mother’s death from tuberculosis before her first and only child had turned two.

I was glad to see some of my favourite books by and about LMM in the museum shop, including Anne of Green Gables: The Original Manuscript, edited by Carolyn Strom Collins (and proofread by Marianne Ward), the beautiful Tundra editions of Montgomery’s novels featuring cover art by Elly MacKay, Mary Henley Rubio’s excellent biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, and two wonderful novels inspired by Montgomery’s life: After Anne, by Logan Steiner, and Maud, by Melanie J. Fishbane.

Marianne, Logan, and Melanie have all contributed guest posts for my blog:

“L.M. Montgomery and Emily Carr, Worshippers of the Woods,” by Marianne Ward

“People Who Love Our Places,” by Logan Steiner

“Searching for Maud in the ‘Emily’ Series,” by Melanie J. Fishbane

The view from Village Pottery in New London, another of my family’s favourite places in PEI

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

“It blooms as if it meant it” (quotations from L.M. Montgomery and Jane Austen, with photos from a lavender farm in Prince Edward Island)

“And—there was the sea” (quotations from the letters of L.M. Montgomery and photos of beaches in Prince Edward Island)

(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

My debut novel, The Austens, will be published by Pottersfield Press on September 15th. Now available for pre-order!

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

“It blooms as if it meant it”

The title of today’s post comes from Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery: Anne is talking with Marilla, describing the huge cherry tree outside her bedroom window, which is “radiantly lovely—it blooms as if it meant it,” but she’s also admiring “the garden and the orchard and the brook and the woods, the whole big dear world” (Chapter 4).

On a visit to a lavender farm on Prince Edward Island last week (the Island Lavender Distillery), I spotted a single purple lupine, still blooming long after most of the lupines on the Island had gone to seed. Don’t you think it looks as if this last lupine at the lavender farm is “blooming as if it meant it”?

As my mother and I cut sprigs of lavender at the u-pick, I had the words of Mrs. Elton from Jane Austen’s Emma running through my mind. “I shall wear a large bonnet, and bring one of my little baskets hanging on my arm. Here,—probably this basket with pink ribbon. Nothing can be more simple, you see” (Volume 3, Chapter 6).

If only I had thought to bring a pink ribbon! Glad I remembered to bring a large hat. (And my Beethoven t-shirt, with its “Ludwig Lives!” slogan.)

“We are to walk about your gardens,” says Mrs. Elton to Mr. Knightley, “and gather the [lavender] ourselves, and sit under trees…. Every thing as natural and simple as possible.”

I also have a few links to share with you today. I was thrilled to see my debut novel, The Austens, featured on three lists recently:

From 49th Shelf: Most Anticipated: Our 2025 Fall Fiction Preview

(If you, too, are keen to read The Austens, and haven’t already pre-ordered, you can do so here! Thank you to everyone who ordered after I posted about this last week.)

From Halifax Public Libraries: Jane Austen at 250: The Halifax Connection

This post on the Library’s website also features my friend Sheila Johnson Kindred’s book Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen and includes a link to the “Austens in Halifax” walking tour Sheila and I created, along with other books to explore in this 250th anniversary year.

From Book Jotter: Reviews, News, Features, and All Things Books for Passionate Readers: Winding Up the Week #433

If you aren’t yet a subscriber to Book Jotter, sign up here! It’s always a treat to discover new books and essays through Paula Bardell-Hedley’s weekly posts.

One more piece of news: I’m thrilled to have been invited to speak at the inaugural Cavendish Literary Festival, September 26th to 28th—more on that soon, once details have been finalized. I’m always glad to have a reason to make the trip to PEI and visit places L.M. Montgomery knew and loved. Maybe some of you would like to come to the Island for this Festival? If you’re interested, you can sign up for the Cavendish Literary Festival Newsletter to find out when tickets launch.

I’ll be back on Friday with photos from my visit to the L.M. Montgomery Birthplace Museum.

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

“And—there was the sea” (quotations from the letters of L.M. Montgomery and photos of beaches in Prince Edward Island)

My novel The Austens is now available for pre-order!

(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

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

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

“And—there was the sea”

L.M. Montgomery wrote about her love of the sea in letters to her friend G.B. MacMillan: “And—there was the sea,” she says in a letter of September 13, 1913. “I was not prepared for the flood of emotion which swept over me when I saw it. I was stirred to the very depths of my being—tears filled my eyes—I trembled! For a moment it seemed passionately to me that I could never leave it again.”

Lakeside Beach, Prince Edward Island, on a windy day

My family and I spent a few days in Prince Edward Island earlier this week, walking along beaches on the North and Eastern Shores and visiting bookstores in Charlottetown. (We also visited L.M. Montgomery’s Birthplace Museum—more about that in a future post.) In a second-hand bookstore, I found a copy of Spirit of Place: Lucy Maud Montgomery and Prince Edward Island, a collection of quotations from Montgomery’s writing edited by Francis W.P. Bolger with photography by Wayne Barrett and Anne MacKay, a book my grandmother had given me for my twelfth birthday. After we came home, I took my own copy off the shelf and started rereading it. The book includes several quotations from Montgomery’s letters to MacMillan. I read it many times when I was younger, and the beautiful quotations and photos continue to inspire me.

Lakeside Beach on a rainy evening

Panmure Island Provincial Park

Lakeside Beach at sunset

In a letter to MacMillan written on May 21, 1909, Montgomery speaks of her childhood wish to know what lay beyond the New London Cape: she says she felt sure it was “a very realm of enchantment … the land of lost sunsets.”

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

Subscribe

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

My novel The Austens is now available for pre-order!

Shawna Lemay’s tribute to Jane Austen: on learning to “view the world at a comedic distance”

(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

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

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

My novel The Austens is now available for pre-order!

I’m delighted to share the news that my debut novel, The Austens, is available for pre-order. The book will be published by Pottersfield Press on September 15th.

If you’d like a signed copy, you can order from Bookmark, one of my favourite independent bookstores! (They ship internationally.)

You can also pre-order from Indigo, McNally Robinson, Woozles, Block Shop Books, LaHave River Books, Audreys Books, and many other sources. I’ll add more pre-order links on The Austens page of my website as they become available.

It’s a pleasure to share the beautiful cover with you:

The cover features a detail from an early nineteenth-century watercolour of Government House, Halifax, by J.E. Woolford (reproduced courtesy of the Nova Scotia Museum). I love that the image also includes a glimpse of Halifax harbour, just down the hill from this elegant Georgian mansion where one of the heroines of my novel, Fanny Austen, dances with her naval captain husband, Captain Charles Austen.

I’ve received wonderful endorsements for The Austens from several writers I admire, including Karen Joy Fowler, Devoney Looser, and Janet Todd, and I am tremendously grateful for their kind words.

“Deeply researched and lovingly imagined.” – Karen Joy Fowler, author of The Jane Austen Book Club

“Emsley breathes wondrous new life into those magical years when Jane was blossoming into one of the world’s greatest novelists, while Fanny’s life unfurled with marriage, children, and travel.”
– Devoney Looser, author of Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive, and Untamed Jane

“In this powerful reimagining of the stories of Fanny Palmer and Jane Austen, Sarah Emsley creates a rich and poignant context for the six novels – a context that lets us see what Austen reveals of women’s lives – and how much she omits.” – Janet Todd, author of Living with Jane Austen and Jane Austen and Shelley in the Garden

My aunt was the first person to pre-order my first novel—in fact, she ordered it decades before I dreamt of writing this novel about Jane Austen and her family. When I was in high school, I used to invite friends and family to sign their names on the ceiling of my bedroom (thanks, Mom and Dad, for letting me do that…), and here’s what my aunt wrote:

If you’d like to help more readers discover The Austens (or any other book you want to support!), here are some suggestions:

Buy a copy for yourself and/or as a gift! Pre-ordering is especially helpful as it gives the publisher an idea of the level of interest in the book. (Here’s the link to pre-order a signed copy from Bookmark.)

Tell friends in person or online. Write a short—or long!—review. Posting reviews on Goodreads and Amazon (among other places) can be very helpful. Adding the novel to your “Want to Read” list on Goodreads can also help more readers discover it.

Request the book from your local library! If they don’t have a copy, suggest that they consider purchasing it.

I’ll share more details about upcoming events and readings soon, including the Halifax launch for The Austens. If you know of a bookstore or group that might like to invite me to speak (in person or at an online event), please get in touch.

I took this photo of Government House a few weeks ago at the Lieutenant Governor’s Garden Party

Thanks so much to all of you, dear readers, for the conversations we’ve had here over the years about Jane Austen and her life and works. I appreciate your interest in my writing and photos, and I’m excited to share this novel with you!

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

Shawna Lemay’s tribute to Jane Austen: on learning to “view the world at a comedic distance”

A Bookmark Plaque in Halifax, NS for Budge Wilson’s Story “The Leaving” (details about the Budge Wilson Bookmark and the fundraiser our Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark launched recently)

(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

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.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

Shawna Lemay’s tribute to Jane Austen: on learning to “view the world at a comedic distance”

“The most important thing I go on learning from Jane Austen is to view the world at a comedic distance,” writer and photographer Shawna Lemay says in the tribute she composed for “Unexpectedly Austen,” the series I’m co-editing with Liz Philosophos Cooper for the Jane Austen Society of North America (JASNA) to celebrate the 250th anniversary of Austen’s birth. “I read Jane Austen,” Shawna says, “because she’s funny and she’s sharp and she’s tender. I read her for her layers of understanding and for the way she sees.”

Today marks the 208th anniversary of Austen’s death on July 18, 1817. This is perhaps a moment to pause in the midst of this year’s 250th birthday celebrations and reflect on the sad anniversary of her death at age forty-one. We will of course never know what she might have written if she had lived longer. But we have her six famous novels, along with her letters and shorter works that weren’t published during her lifetime. What a gift she gave to generations of readers, who continue to find new layers in her work, new perspectives that may help us understand both the lives of her characters and the world we live in now.

“Where shall I begin? Which of all my important nothings shall I tell you first?”

– Jane Austen to Cassandra Austen, June 17, 1808

Later in this letter to her sister, Jane Austen writes, “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me.” Inspired by Austen’s words, Shawna Lemay wrote about “The Sponge-Cake Model of Friendship” for All Lit Up, back in 2018. In this essay, she talks about how the Austen sisters shared details about “important nothings,” and she suggests that “it’s the writing of sponge-cakes to each other that comforts, that makes each feel less alone.” (I recommended this essay here a couple of years ago and talked about the “sponge-cake” letters my sister and I have exchanged over the years.)

Photo by Shawna Lemay

In the tribute she wrote for “Unexpectedly Austen,” Shawna says she learns “from Jane Austen to delight in details, in sponge-cake, if you will. I learn about the juiciness of one’s important nothings, about living a life deeply interested in others.”

Read Shawna’s tribute in full on the JASNA website.

You might also like to read her recent post “Where Shall I Begin? Living with Jane Austen,” in which she highlights Adjoa Andoh’s contribution to “Unexpectedly Austen.” Andoh, well known as Lady Danbury from Bridgerton, says, “I have yet to see a stage or film version of one of Austen’s novels that successfully communicates the wit, humour and acerbic voice of the narrator who is Austen. Without that voice, all the stories are reduced to something much less interesting.”

Shawna writes, “as much as I have enjoyed the film adaptations, each time I watch one, I’m always drawn back to the texts. That is where the genius resides, at the level of the sentence, the paragraph. If you’ve only watched the movies, you only know a small sliver of Jane Austen’s staggering accomplishments. Every re-reading will reward you with a new and deeper understanding of humanity, of her genius. If you truly wish to understand the meaning of ‘wit,’ it is there in Austen’s works.”

Our July installment of “Unexpectedly Austen” also includes quotations from writer and comedian Andrew Hunter Murray and novelist and academic Julie Schumacher.

Murray says Pride and Prejudice gets better with each rereading: “Just when you think you’ve got everything out of it, you find more jokes, more wisdom, more understanding. It’s stunning. Plus, everyone fancies Lizzie.”

After being described as the “Funniest Woman in America,” Schumacher wrote an essay called “What if You Win a Comedy Award But Don’t Think You’re Funny?: “My idea of funny is Jane Austen,” she writes, “especially Pride and Prejudice. ‘Read a lot of Jane Austen,’ I want to say, when someone asks, ‘and maybe then you’ll be funny.’”

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

A Bookmark Plaque in Halifax, NS for Budge Wilson’s Story “The Leaving” (details about the Budge Wilson Bookmark and the fundraiser our Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark launched recently)

“Jane Austen had pinned me to the wall” (A “scrapbook” post with a quotation from Robert Gottlieb’s memoir Avid Reader, links to recent articles, and photos of flowers and Halifax harbour)

(P.S. If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

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.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

A Bookmark Plaque in Halifax, NS for Budge Wilson’s Story “The Leaving”

Project Bookmark Canada recently announced that a Bookmark plaque will be unveiled in Halifax for Budge Wilson’s short story “The Leaving.” I’m the organizer of the Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark Canada, and I’m thrilled that we can share this exciting news at last. We’ve launched a fundraiser to help ensure we can make this happen, and we’d be tremendously grateful for your support. Every donation, large or small, will help! Donate using this link on the Project Bookmark website.

The Budge Wilson Bookmark will be the third Bookmark for Nova Scotia and the first on Project Bookmark Canada’s Literary Trail to be installed on a university campus.

Our Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark has been working hard on this project for a long time, to honour the brilliant work of the late Budge Wilson. Budge published her first book at age fifty-six, and then—inspiring late bloomers everywhere—thirty-three books after that before she died in 2021.

She wrote short stories (including the ones that appeared in her 1990 collection The Leaving, which won the Canadian Library Association Young Adult Book Award and the American Library Association Best Book for Young Adults), picture books (including the beloved story A Fiddle for Angus), novels (including a prequel to L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, entitled Before Green Gables), and poetry (she was in her late eighties when she published her first book of poetry, After Swissair, which honoured those affected by the tragic crash of Swissair Flight 111).

Alexander MacLeod, professor of English at Saint Mary’s University and a member of our Reading Circle, considers Budge Wilson “one of the most important artists in the history of Atlantic Canada.”

I took this photo of Budge Wilson at a bookstore signing for After Swissair

Back in 2019, our Reading Circle hosted “Budge’s Birthday Bash” at Woozles bookstore to celebrate Budge’s 92nd birthday and to share the passages from fiction and poetry that we had recommended to Project Bookmark Canada for consideration for a Bookmark. It was a wonderful and memorable evening, and we were all delighted when Budge told us it was her “best birthday ever.”

Budge Wilson at the Birthday Bash (photo by Andrew B. Conrad)

Not long after that, we had to put the Budge Bookmark project on hold for a while because of the pandemic. (And someday, we could tell the story of other obstacles that stood in the way…) But the Reading Circle, the Wilson family, and other supporters of the Budge Bookmark were determined to honour Budge’s writing.

We look forward to celebrating the unveiling of a Bookmark plaque for a passage from “The Leaving” in the not-too-distant future (date to be confirmed—I’ll share it here when we know for sure). A huge thank you to Dalhousie University, especially Jennifer Andrews, Dean of Arts and Social Sciences, for making it possible to install the Budge Wilson Bookmark on the Dal campus near Shirreff Hall, the residence Budge lived in as a student in the 1940s.

In “The Leaving,” a twelve-year-old girl from rural Nova Scotia visits Halifax and Dalhousie with her mother and catches a glimpse of the wider world and a future that could be hers. It is a powerful narrative of a quiet act of rebellion and emancipation. The narrator, looking back on this trip to the city with her mother, says that

she took me out to Dalhousie University, and we walked among the granite buildings and beside the playing fields. “If yer as smart as the teacher claims,” she said, “maybe you’ll come here some day t’learn.” I thought this highly unlikely. If we couldn’t afford running water, how could we afford such a thing as that? I said so.

“They’s ways,” she said.

We’re grateful to all those who have made donations to help make this Bookmark happen—even before our Reading Circle had launched a fundraiser. It says a great deal about Budge that fans of her work started to send money even before any of the details were confirmed.

We do still need to raise funds to cover a few additional costs. Our hope, now, is that even more of you will want to donate to the Budge Bookmark. Please join us in celebrating the work of the brilliant and beloved Budge Wilson!

To donate, visit the Project Bookmark Canada website.

You can specify that the donation be toward the Budge Wilson Bookmark, or a general donation for the continued work of Project Bookmark Canada. If you wish to donate by cheque, please contact Hughena Matheson (president at projectbookmarkcanada dot ca) for the appropriate mailing address.

You’re welcome to join our Facebook group for the Nova Scotia Reading Circle.

Read more about our Nova Scotia Reading Circle in this 2017 piece on the Project Bookmark Canada website. (Includes a photo of members of our group holding copies of books by Budge Wilson.)

See photos from Reading Circle member Naomi MacKinnon’s visits to Bookmarks for works by Terry Griggs (Owen Sound, ON), Ken Babstock (Toronto, ON), Elizabeth Hay (Ottawa, ON), Dennis Lee (Toronto, ON), Merilyn Simonds (Kingston, ON), and L.M. Montgomery (Cavendish, PEI) here (scroll down to the bottom of the post).

See Naomi’s photos of the first Bookmark in Nova Scotia, for Alistair MacLeod’s novel No Great Mischief, here (scroll down past PEI photos to “Part 2, Cape Breton”).

My daughter took this photo of me next to the Milton Acorn Bookmark in Toronto a couple of years ago:

And she took these photos of me with Hughena Matheson, President of Project Bookmark Canada, at the Ken Babstock and Jean Little Bookmarks, also in Toronto:

I’m looking forward to the day when we can take photos of the Budge Wilson Bookmark here in Halifax!

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

“Jane Austen had pinned me to the wall” (A “scrapbook” post with a quotation from Robert Gottlieb’s memoir Avid Reader, links to recent articles, and photos of flowers and Halifax harbour)

Save the date for a celebration of Jane Austen in the Public Gardens, August 17th

(If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!)

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.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

“Jane Austen had pinned me to the wall”

I’ve been reading Robert Gottlieb’s memoir Avid Reader (2016), which I turned to after I enjoyed watching Turn Every Page: The Adventures of Robert Caro and Robert Gottlieb, a fascinating 2022 documentary about Caro’s political biographies and his half century of working with Gottlieb as his editor. I was intrigued to find a reference to Jane Austen at the end of the first chapter of Avid Reader.

Gottlieb calls his first reading of Austen’s Emma his crucial literary experience of his pre-college years. He says, “When Emma behaves rudely to poor, harmless, talkative Miss Bates in the famous scene of the picnic on Box Hill, I was suffused with mortification: I had been forced to look at my own acts of carelessness and unkindness. Jane Austen had pinned me to the wall. It was the first time I really made the connection between what I was reading and my inner self.”

It’s a vivid metaphor: Jane Austen pinning her young reader to the wall, forcing him to think about his own life, his own actions. Gottlieb says, “It was in the novel, beginning with Emma, that I would discover some kind of moral compass.”

Here are a few other things I’ve been saving to share with you. It’s been a while since I put together a “scrapbook” post, inspired by the scrapbooks created by L.M. Montgomery. I’ll start with some recent photos of flowers:

I enjoyed reading Sarah Lyall’s review of the new exhibition at the Morgan Library & Museum in New York City, “A Lively Mind: Jane Austen at 250,” co-curated by Juliette Wells and Dale Stinchcomb. Lyall writes that “Providing a vigorous counterargument to the image of Austen as a retiring spinster who wrote as a kind of amusing pastime, the show uses letters, manuscripts and more to trace the trajectory of her career and illustrate how seriously she took her vocation.”

I was glad to see this Open Letter From Writers to Publishers about AI, published on LitHub last week, asking publishers “to stand with us. To make a pledge that they will never release books that were created by machines.”

AI is an enormously powerful tool, here to stay, with the capacity for real societal benefits—but the replacement of art and artists isn’t one of them. … To add insult to injury, use of AI has devastating environmental effects, using great amounts of energy and potable water. … We call on publishers to take a public stand for their authors against the theft of our art and the debased AI work that profits from that theft.

Authors, editors, and other publishing professionals are invited to add their signatures. I’ve signed.

I like what Shawna Lemay says in this recent post about the value of browsing in a bookstore. “Browsing the shelf, seeing others browse, picking up and hefting books, reading passages, talking about books.” She quotes Jason Guriel saying “For my part, I’ve always needed the works of art that matter to me to be near me.”

Shawna quotes Guriel quoting Christian Wiman on Seamus Heaney: “if a person has a single poem in his head, one that he returns to and through which, even in small ways, he understands his life better, this constitutes a devotion to the art.” Guriel says that to steep yourself in a poem in this way is “to approach the state of prayer.”

Devotion to a novel can have similar effects, I think. Reading Emma, for example, to help us understand both our own lives and the lives of others.

Shawna says, “Now is the time to ask ourselves what we love. I love books. I aways have. I love reading them, and holding them, and I love the hope and the dreams and the stories they contain.”

I’ll end today’s post with a couple of photos of Halifax harbour. First, a view of Halifax on the right, with Dartmouth on the left, (tiny) Georges Island in the centre, and McNabs Island in the distance. I took that one on a ferry ride in the spring. The second is a view of Georges Island (in the foreground) from Halifax, taken a couple of weeks ago.

If you’re interested in the celebration of “Jane Austen in the Public Gardens” in Halifax on August 17th, rsvp on our Facebook event page. All are welcome!

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

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

Save the date for a celebration of Jane Austen in the Public Gardens, August 17th

“She changed my life”: Andrew Davies pays tribute to Jane Austen (includes three tributes for “Unexpectedly Austen,” from Paul Gordon and Gay Mohrbacher as well as Davies)

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.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.

Save the date for a celebration of Jane Austen in the Public Gardens, August 17th

Please join the Friends of the Halifax Public Gardens and members of the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Nova Scotia Region for an afternoon of readings from Jane Austen’s work, including passages from Pride and Prejudice and other novels.

Jane Austen in the Public Gardens
A 250th Birthday Celebration

Sunday, August 17th, 4:30 p.m.
Halifax Public Gardens

We’ll meet near the bandstand. In the photo above, you may be able to see the rows of benches for the audience, between the café (on the far left) and the bandstand (in the centre).

RSVP on the Facebook event page for Jane Austen in the Public Gardens.

I’m excited to be the MC for this event. Readers include Janet Brush, Charlene Carr, Sheree Fitch, Darcy Johns, Sheila Johnson Kindred, Hugh Kindred, Stephens Gerard Malone, Jan Parker, Anne Thompson, Carole Thompson, and the Rev’d Canon Dr. Paul Friesen, Rector of St. Paul’s Church. Adria Jackson, harpist, will provide music from Austen’s time.

His Honour, the Honourable Mike Savage, Lieutenant Governor of Nova Scotia and Patron of the Friends of the Public Gardens, has sent a message on the occasion of the 250th birthday of Jane Austen, “one of the most celebrated and enduring literary figures of all time”:

Jane Austen’s legacy lives on not only in the pages of her novels but also through her family’s unique connection to Nova Scotia. Her brothers, Charles John Austen and Francis Austen, served as Captain of the North Atlantic Station in Halifax and Commander-in-Chief, respectively, during the early 19th century. Her niece, Cassy Austen, was baptized at St. Paul’s Church in 1809, and her nephew was married there forty years later. It is intriguing to consider how Jane Austen’s letters and conversations with her brother Charles may have influenced her work—particularly characters and scenes in the novel Persuasion.

His Honour writes that “As we celebrate Jane Austen’s life and literary achievements, we recognize the enduring power of literature to transcend time and place. Her novels remain as relevant as ever, offering insight into human nature, social customs, and the strength of character.”

Here’s hoping for a lovely sunny afternoon on August 17th. If it rains, we’ll reschedule for a later date.

If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend. If you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up.

Subscribe

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

“She changed my life”: Andrew Davies pays tribute to Jane Austen (includes three tributes for “Unexpectedly Austen,” from Paul Gordon and Gay Mohrbacher as well as Davies)

Celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th Birthday at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax

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.

Copyright Sarah Emsley 2025 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.