Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 3
May 9, 2025
“A sunny Nova Scotia May day”
“The weather was dazzling—a sunny Nova Scotia May day. We walked through the huge iron gates into the Public Gardens and ate our sandwiches and apples beside the duck pond. I kicked off my rubber boots and wiggled my toes in the sun as I watched the swans and the yellow ducklings. The Gardens were immense, full of massive and intricate flowerbeds, winding paths, and strange exotic trees. There were statues, a splashing fountain, an elaborate round bandstand, and a little river with a curved bridge over it. Lovers strolled arm in arm, and children shrieked with laughter as they chased the pigeons.”
– Budge Wilson, “The Leaving”
Last week when I was walking through the Halifax Public Gardens, I was thinking about this passage from Budge Wilson’s brilliant short story “The Leaving,” which paints such a clear and beautiful picture of springtime in the Gardens. The narrator of the story asks her mother why everyone in the Gardens seems so happy. “‘Dunno,’ she said. ‘Weather does things t’ people.’ She looked around. ‘And maybe some of them’s free,’ she added.”
May 2, 2025 would have been Wilson’s 98th birthday. Six years ago, on May 2, 2019, our Project Bookmark Canada Nova Scotia Reading Circle hosted a birthday party for her at Woozles, where several people read passages from her work, including a longer version of this excerpt from “The Leaving,” and Budge herself read one of her poems.
If you’d like to see photos from the party (including one of my daughter presenting Budge Wilson with a bouquet of red tulips), you can find them here.
We’re continuing to work toward a Budge Wilson Bookmark plaque in Halifax, and when the details are confirmed, I’ll be sure to share the news here. If you’re interested, you can read more about Project Bookmark Canada on their website and about our Nova Scotia Reading Circle here. Join our Facebook group for updates.
Speaking of the Halifax Public Gardens, I’m also helping to organize a celebration of Jane Austen’s 250th birthday in the Gardens this summer, and I’ll write more about that event soon, along with details about some other exciting events coming up later this year! Next week, I’ll share some news about a project that’s especially close to my heart….
In the meantime, I’ll leave you with more photos from that dazzling May day in the Gardens.
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
George Elliott Clarke: “Jane Austen is deathless”
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.
May 2, 2025
A Poem Every Morning
Inspired by a recent blog post by my friend Renée Hartleib, I’ve started to read one or two poems first thing in the morning, before I read the news. I used to do this years ago and am grateful to Renée for the reminder of how rewarding this habit can be. I decided to use one of my (many) blank notebooks to record lines of poetry I want to remember.
I chose this one (a birthday present from a friend), which features art by Mi’kmaw artist Alan Syliboy
Renée writes, “My partner and I light a candle each morning and read aloud from Mary Oliver’s book Devotions, a collection of her poetry over her entire lifetime (and one that she curated herself). This simple act returns me to the world of beautiful words and their power, plus Oliver wrote almost exclusively about the sacredness of nature and how it can inspire us to lead lives of more simplicity and grace.”
I like what Oliver says about Queen Anne’s lace in “Passing the Unworked Field”: she writes that “Queen Anne’s lace / is hardly / prized,” yet she asks us to pay attention to the ways in which it “makes all the / loveliness / it can.”
I’ve also recorded phrases and lines from the Good Friday poems my father and I read at St. Paul’s Church a couple of weeks ago, including “thick depriving darknesses” and “images of self-confusednesses” from Fulke Greville’s “In night” and the opening lines of Helen Pinkerton’s “Subjectivity” (published in Taken in Faith):
I measure years by days and days by hours
But in the elastic hour of calculation
I leave immeasurable the instrument.
(If you’d like to watch the video of the service, you can find it here here.)
My friend Shawna Lemay wrote an eloquent tribute to Poetry Month:
May your life become poetry this month in the name of all those whose lives have been lost, whose lives have become harder than they needed to become, who are living with grief, who are afraid and anxious, who are living with unimaginable difficulties.
Even though April has ended, let’s continue to honour poetry in May and every month. I’d be glad to hear your recommendations about favourite poems and poets, if you feel inclined to share them in the comments.
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
George Elliott Clarke: “Jane Austen is deathless”
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.
April 25, 2025
George Elliott Clarke: “Jane Austen is deathless”
“Jane Austen is deathless; I mean, she is as continuously relevant as scripture because she posits—as indelibly as do Platonists and patriarchs—that the sustenance of a civilization depends on how the sexes come to mate and propagate the next generation—via love, lust, and/or lucre.”
George Elliott Clarke, poet, novelist, opera librettist, playwright, and former Canadian Parliamentary Poet Laureate, wrote a tribute to Jane Austen for “Unexpectedly Austen,” the series I’m co-editing with Liz Philosophos Cooper this year as part of the celebrations of Austen’s 250th birthday.
Clarke writes that “In authoring The Motorcyclist (2016), a novel based on my late father’s diary-recorded amours of 1959, the year of my conception, I soon saw that Austen’s staging of class-conflicted coitus had to drive my story about a Black Haligonian railway worker and wanna-be artist employing his BMW motorcycle, dubbed ‘Elizabeth II,’ to entice various gals into ‘deliciously’ compromising positions.” Read his tribute in full on the JASNA website.
This month’s installment of “Unexpectedly Austen” also includes quotations from Taylor Jenkins Reid, author of Daisy Jones and the Six and other bestselling novels, and award-winning author Azar Nafisi, best known for Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books. Reid says she is “ravenous for any adaptation or retelling” of Pride and Prejudice, while Nafisi says the story of Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy “proves the truth of the poet Ezra Pound’s claim that, ‘Literature is news that remains news.’”
You can find all the tributes and quotations posted to date on the “Unexpectedly Austen” page: from Anna Quindlen and Dwyane Wade (January); Adjoa Andoh and John Mullan (February); and Jeanne Birdsall, Taylor Swift, Ian McEwan, and Margaret Drabble (March).
On a different topic: if you were interested in last week’s post on Poems for Good Friday and would like to watch the video of the Good Friday Service at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, you can find it here.
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax and RMS Titanic
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.
April 16, 2025
Poems for Good Friday
This Friday, April 18th, my father and I will be offering meditations at St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, NS (1749 Argyle St., across from City Hall). The Good Friday service begins at noon, and I’m sure the music will be wonderful. We’ll talk about poems by George Herbert, Fulke Greville, Janet Lewis, T.S. Eliot, and Helen Pinkerton. All are welcome.
St. Paul’s is the oldest existing Anglican place of worship in Canada and the oldest building in Halifax.
Read more about the schedule for Holy Week at St. Paul’s on the church’s website.
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia
I’ll also take this opportunity to say that longtime readers of my blog might remember my father’s contribution to the celebration I hosted in honour of the 200th anniversary of Jane Austen’s Mansfield Park:
“Fanny Price as a Student of Shakespeare,” by John Baxter
An excerpt:
. . . it seems plausible to assume that [Austen] deliberately chose [Henry VIII] because of a fundamental kinship between its heroine and the heroine of Mansfield Park. Both are women who may seem passive or inert from an external point of view, but who in reality are passionately devoted to their own deepest instincts and loyalties and who thus challenge the perspectives of the males in their circle.
At a general level, too, the play recommends itself because of its relentless investigation into the uses and abuses of power. Like Henry VIII, Mansfield Park presents a world in which love is hemmed in by a daunting array of powerful forces.
You can read the rest of the essay here.
And if you happen to be in Halifax on Friday and would like to join us at St. Paul’s at 12pm, we’d be glad 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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax and RMS Titanic
A Glorious Spring Day at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton
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.
April 15, 2025
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax and RMS Titanic
Two parishioners from St. Paul’s Church in Halifax, NS were passengers on RMS Titanic. George Wright, a well-known businessman and philanthropist, perished when the steamship sank in the early hours of April 15, 1912 (113 years ago today). Hilda Slayter was on her way from England to British Columbia to be married, and she survived the disaster. Many years later, she was buried in Halifax, in Camp Hill Cemetery.
The Rev’d Samuel H. Prince, curate at St. Paul’s, held a memorial service at the church on April 21st. “Over the whole of the civilized world,” he said, “there rests the shadow of a great sorrow.” He noted that “Some have been spared,” and he prayed, “Please God, there may be more.”
Leaflet for Memorial Service (courtesy of St. Paul’s Church Archives, Halifax, NS)
In early May, Rev’d Prince sailed on the Montmagny to assist with recovering the bodies of victims. He produced a newspaper on board the ship called The Montmagny Moon, which, among other things, included details of the memorial service he held for George Wright. “Here, at the late Mr. Wright’s ocean tomb as a clergyman of his own dear church St. Paul’s,” Prince said, “I was glad to hold a solemn service to his memory.”
He wrote that “it was with deep feelings of awe and heartache that we went over the waters which so recently had closed above more than a thousand six hundred of our brother mortals. As if conscious of the sadness of the situation, the ship’s bell tolled at intervals on the bridge, rung by the winds.”
A couple of weeks ago, I went to hear Deanna Ryan-Meister, President of the Titanic Society of Atlantic Canada, speak at the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic. She gave a fascinating talk about three White Star Line ships, including Titanic, and their connections with Halifax.
I was surprised and pleased to see that she included my book St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade in the collection of books she had on display. The book has a section on the church’s connections with Titanic. I wrote this history of St. Paul’s more than a quarter of a century ago, and it’s been wonderful to see the book receiving new attention now that the church is celebrating its 275th anniversary.
(If you’re interested, you can buy the book from the church or from Woozles, Bookmark, or Block Shop Books.)
Left to right: Deanna Ryan-Meister, Sarah Emsley, Bob Chaulk, and Lynette Richards
It was a pleasure to meet Lynette Richards, author of Call Me Bill, a graphic novel about the wreck of the SS Atlantic, and Bob Chaulk, author of Atlantic’s Last Stop: Courage, Folly, and Lies in the White Star Line’s Worst Disaster Before Titanic and The Dangerous Harbour: Revealing the Unknown Ships and Wrecks of the Halifax Explosion.
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
A Glorious Spring Day at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton
Anne Shirley and “Old St. John’s Graveyard”
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.
April 4, 2025
A Glorious Spring Day at Jane Austen’s House in Chawton
It was a delight to visit Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire, on the first day of spring.
Jane Austen’s House Museum
My daughter and I took the train from London to Alton and enjoyed walking from the Alton station to Chawton. Daffodils! Primroses! Hyacinths! Sunshine! A visit with cousins we hadn’t seen in years! And the pleasure of touring Jane Austen’s House. I took tons of pictures, and I’ll share a few of the best ones with you here.
Tea at Cassandra’s Cup, across the street from the House. My cousins gave me an early edition of Catherine Parr Traill’s book The Backwoods of Canada.
“But now you love a hyacinth. So much the better. You have gained a new source of enjoyment, and it is well to have as many holds upon happiness as possible.”
– Henry Tilney to Catherine Morland in Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (Volume 2, Chapter 7)
Thanks so much for visiting Chawton with me!
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
Anne Shirley and “Old St. John’s Graveyard”
Jeanne Birdsall on Jane Austen’s Novels: “my lodestones”
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.
April 2, 2025
Anne Shirley and “Old St. John’s Graveyard”
Every time I pass the Old Burying Ground on Barrington Street in Halifax, which was fictionalized as Old St. John’s Graveyard in L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of the Island, I picture Anne Shirley sitting on one of the gravestones.
“I don’t know that a graveyard is a very good place to go to get cheered up,” Anne says, “but it seems the only get-at-able place where there are trees, and trees I must have. I’ll sit on one of those old slabs and shut my eyes and imagine I’m in the Avonlea woods.”
On the north shore of PEI
As Linda Lefler commented on one of my blog posts last month, “I love knowing where the friendly ghosts are.” She, too, thinks of Montgomery and Anne when she’s passing through this part of Halifax.
The Old Burying Ground is a National Historic Site of Canada, and it receives thousands of visitors every year. If you’re interested, you can read more about it on their website, in my book St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, and in a blog post I wrote several years ago: “Anne of Green Gables and the Old Burying Ground, Halifax.” More than 12,000 people were buried there between 1749, the year Halifax was founded, and 1844, when the graveyard closed to burials.
Welsford-Parker Monument, Old Burying Ground
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
Jeanne Birdsall on Jane Austen’s Novels: “my lodestones”
The Appeal of Writing by Hand in a Notebook
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.
March 31, 2025
Jeanne Birdsall on Jane Austen’s Novels: “my lodestones”
I’m a longtime fan of Jeanne Birdsall’s award-winning Penderwicks series, as is my daughter, and I was thrilled when Birdsall accepted the invitation to write a reflection for “Unexpectedly Austen,” the series Liz Philosophos Cooper and I are co-editing for the Jane Austen Society of North America throughout this 250th anniversary year.
Birdsall says she reads “good books . . . over and over, hoping they’ll improve my work. Of these, Jane Austen’s are among my favourites, my lodestones. I don’t try to emulate her—that would be foolish and arrogant—but do slip her in when I can. In my saga of a family named Penderwick, one character reads Sense and Sensibility while another (named Jane) writes a play called Sisters and Sacrifice, a possible alternate title for Austen’s book, though I didn’t figure that out until it had settled into my manuscript.”
The March installment of “Unexpectedly Austen” also includes comments from Taylor Swift, Ian McEwan, and Margaret Drabble. Swift says Ang Lee’s adaptation of Sense and Sensibility inspired her when she was creating her album Evermore, while McEwan names Northanger Abbey as an influence on his novel Atonement and Drabble says of her own novels that they are all “a dialogue with Jane Austen.” Read their comments and Birdsall’s reflections in full on the JASNA website.
I wrote about the second novel in the Penderwicks series here on my blog back in 2012, when my family and I were listening to the audiobook in the car, and again in 2018, after a walk with my friend Marianne. Both posts include several photos of autumn leaves because of Marianne Dashwood’s “passion for dead leaves.”
In The Penderwicks on Gardam Street, the widowed Mr. Penderwick claims to be going on dates with a mysterious woman named Marianne who “likes taking walks” and “doesn’t like flannel.” His daughter Jane finds a copy of Sense and Sensibility in his study.
Instead of adding more pictures of autumn leaves to this post, I’ll share with you some recent photos of snowdrops and crocuses (with last year’s dead leaves), taken in my neighbourhood. I’m glad spring has arrived in Nova Scotia.
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
The Appeal of Writing by Hand in a Notebook
Government House and 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.
March 28, 2025
The Appeal of Writing by Hand in a Notebook
On a recent trip to the library, I picked up The Notebook: A History of Thinking on Paper, by Roland Allen, and I’m looking forward to reading it. I enjoyed my friend Rohan Maitzen’s review. Allen’s main point, she says, “is that this everyday item, which we now take for granted in its multiplicity of forms and uses, really was revolutionary, changing not just the way we make notes but the way we think.”
Allen writes that a notebook “challenges us to create, to explore, to record, to analyse, to think. It lets us draw, compose, organize and remember—even to care for the sick. With it, we can come to know ourselves better, appreciate the good, put the bad in perspective, and live fuller lives.”
The simplicity of the notebook is part of what makes it “endlessly appealing,” Rohan says in her review, “even in this electronic era.” When I’m writing by hand, I often take notes on scraps of paper instead of in a notebook, but all the same, I find it hard to resist a beautiful blank notebook and have filled many of them over the years.
I was tempted to buy all three of these lovely blank books (above) at Jane Austen’s House Museum in Chawton, Hampshire, when I was there last Thursday. I chose only one, pictured at the beginning of this post, which features a reproduction of a wallpaper pattern used in an upstairs bedroom in the House.
I just got home after a wonderful week in England, and I’ll share some of my photos from the trip once I’ve had a chance to sort through them. For now, here are some Chawton daffodils for 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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
Government House and St. Paul’s Church, Halifax
“The year to appreciate Austen” (John Mullan’s guide on where to start with Jane Austen)
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.
March 21, 2025
Government House and St. Paul’s Church, Halifax
Last week I had the privilege and pleasure of giving a talk at Government House in Halifax, NS on the history of St. Paul’s Church, which is located in the heart of the city in the Grand Parade, opposite City Hall.
As I mentioned here last fall, I spoke about St. Paul’s in the Evenings @ Government House series on November 5, 2024. I was delighted to return for an encore presentation on March 11, 2025. It’s wonderful to know that there is a great deal of interest in this topic. At a time when we’re watching the City of Halifax changing rapidly, with older houses and buildings torn down to make way for new developments, exploring the history of St. Paul’s Church and protecting this beautiful, historic place seem more important than ever.
St. Paul’s is currently celebrating its 275th anniversary. The celebrations began last fall, to mark the anniversary of the founding of the parish in 1749, and they’ve continued into 2025, the anniversary of the opening of the church building in 1750.
My talk explored connections between St. Paul’s and Halifax, including the founding of the city, relief efforts after the sinking of RMS Titanic in 1912 and the Halifax Explosion in 1917, and close ties with Government House, the Royal Family, and former Governors and Lieutenant Governors. I also looked at the links between St. Paul’s and Jane Austen’s family: her niece Cassy Austen was baptized there in 1809 and her nephew Charles John Austen, Jr. was married there in 1848.
I’ll write more about the rich and complex history of St. Paul’s in a future post; for now, I’ll share with you some of the photos from this wonderful and memorable evening at Government House. I’m grateful to His Honour, the Honourable Mike Savage, and Her Honour, Ms. Darlene (Killen) Savage, for inviting me to speak and for giving my parents and me a warm welcome. Thanks also to Melissa Goertzen for organizing the event and to Michael Creagen for the photos.
Government House, Halifax, Nova Scotia
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.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
“The year to appreciate Austen” (John Mullan’s guide on where to start with Jane Austen)
“Sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship” (The bend in the road at Point Pleasant Park, Green Gables fabric, “Lucy. Maud.,” and the Anne of Green Gables manuscript)
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.
