Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 37

“Tar and blood and needles of glass”

Ninety-six years ago today, at 9:05 a.m., the French cargo and munitions ship Mont Blanc collided with the Norwegian supply ship Imo in the Narrows leading to Halifax Harbour, and the resulting explosion was the largest man-made explosion in the years before nuclear weapons. The North End of Halifax was flattened, and at least 2,000 people were killed while thousands more were injured.

Carol Bruneau writes vividly about the Halifax Explosion and its aftermath in her novel Glass Voices. Her heroine, Lucy Caines, gives birth to her son in a tent at the base of Citadel Hill on the night after the explosion, “the wind yowling like a cat as she’d laboured.” The hill and the tent village are covered in snow, “but that was as far as whiteness went,” because “the sky had rained tar earlier, what, a morning before? A lifetime? Tar and blood and needles of glass. It’d wept chunks of earth and flaming metal.” Immediately after the explosion Lucy finds herself on the smaller hill of Fort Needham, “arse over teakettle, limbs splayed,” “toes facing uphill, hands and feet the points of a compass rose. Blood drummed her ears as a mushroom grew in the sky, a giant, spreading fungus that crowded out the sun. The spiky grass grazed her cheek: an inch from her eye a bedspring, and something else, unspeakable, purple, with suckers trailing from it like a jellyfish’s. A hand?”

I reviewed Glass Voices for The Diocesan Times when it was published in 2007. The paper’s online archive only goes back a couple of years, but I reproduced the review on my website in 2010 and you can read it here. You can learn more about the Explosion at this CBC website.

There’s a memorial service at the Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower at Fort Needham Park this morning at 8:45, followed by a reception in United Memorial Church, 5375 Kaye Street.

Halifax Explosion Memorial Bell Tower, Fort Needham Park

L.M. Montgomery’s Literary Pilgrimage to Concord, Mass.

Given how many fans of L.M. Montgomery visit “Green Gables” in Cavendish, PEI each year, I find it fascinating to read about Montgomery’s own literary pilgrimage to Concord, Massachusetts, when she was visiting her publisher, L.C. Page in Boston in November of 1910. “Concord is the only place I saw when I was away where I would like to live,” she writes. “It is a most charming spot and I shall never forget the delightful drive we had around it. We saw the ‘Old Manse’ where Hawthorne lived during his honeymoon and where he wrote ‘Mosses from an Old Manse,’ the ‘Wayside’ where he also lived, the ‘Orchard House’ where Louisa Alcott wrote, and Emerson’s house. It gave a strange reality to the books of theirs which I have read to see those places where they once lived and labored.”

Orchard House (thanks to Edie Baxter for the photo)

I wonder how many visitors to “Green Gables” feel that “strange reality” when they tour the house and grounds. Of course, Montgomery herself didn’t “live and labor” in that house, and the nearby house where she wrote Anne of Green Gables no longer exists (although you can visit the site and see the foundation of her grandparents’ house, and with the help of quotations on the plaques there you can try to picture her at the window of her old room upstairs).

L.M. Montgomery’s grandparents’ homestead

It’s interesting to think of Montgomery’s feeling that seeing the places where Hawthorne, Alcott, and Emerson wrote somehow makes their books more “real.” It must be the same feeling that motivates so many readers of the “Anne” books to make the pilgrimage to Prince Edward Island.

I guess they do need some hired help, to paint Green Gables

Montgomery almost felt that Anne herself was real. A couple of months after her trip to Boston and Concord, she writes that “When I am asked if Anne herself is a ‘real person’ I always answer ‘no’ with an odd reluctance and an uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real to me that I feel I am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save in Dreamland” (27 January 1911).

Sunset at Cavendish Beach

On the same day that she visited Concord, Montgomery went to see the “Ware Collection of Glass Flowers” at the Agassiz Museum in Cambridge (now in the Harvard Museum of Natural History). Her comments here on what is real and what isn’t are interesting, too. “I wasn’t feeling very anxious to see them for the sound of ‘glass flowers’ didn’t please me. But I am glad I didn’t miss that wonderful collection. Yes they are indeed wonderful—so wonderful that they don’t seem wonderful at all—they seem to be absolutely real flowers and you have to keep reminding yourself that they are made of glass—of glass—to realize how wonderful they are.”

Do glass flowers help us appreciate real flowers even more? Do visits to literary sites make us better, more attentive readers? Maybe. Maybe not. But Montgomery’s belief in what’s real in fiction is apparent in her further comments about her famous heroine Anne Shirley: “She is so real that, although I’ve never met her, I feel quite sure I shall do so someday—perhaps in a stroll through Lover’s Lane in the twilight—or in the moonlit Birch Path—I shall lift my eyes and find her, child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I have always known she was somewhere.” Thus hundreds of thousands of people continue to visit Green Gables every year, many of them in search of “Anne” and that “strange reality.”

L.M. Montgomery was born on this day, November 30, in 1874. Louisa May Alcott was born 181 years ago yesterday, on November 29, 1832.

Quotations are from The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901-1911, ed. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (Oxford University Press, 2013). You can read my review of the book on page 33 of the Fall 2013 edition of Atlantic Books Today.

JASNA Nova Scotia celebrates Jane Austen’s 238th birthday

Would you like to join us for lunch and a toast to Jane Austen in honour of her birthday? We’re celebrating nine days early, on Saturday, December 7th, at 12:30pm at The Cellar Wine Bar & Grill, 5677 Brenton St., Halifax. Christina Simpson will tell us about her experience of this year’s JASNA AGM in Minneapolis, which celebrated 200 years of Pride and Prejudice, and Hugh Kindred will give his annual toast to Jane.

Please let our Regional Coordinator, Anne Thompson, know by December 1st if you’d like to join us, or leave a comment here so I can pass on the information to her. Do come and celebrate with us!

3 or 4 Families in an Italian Village

Remembering a happy childhood can bring sadness, says the narrator of Connie Guzzo-McParland’s debut novel The Girls of Piazza d’Amore, because of the “persistent ache of yearning, like the grief for a lost love.” The novel focuses on three or four families in a village in southern Italy at a moment in the 1950s when many people were leaving for a new life in North America: “‘Here, there is no avvenire’”; “‘We must leave for the sake of the children’”; “‘Four houses and four cats’—that is how we spoke about [the village of Mulirena] after we left.” Looking back, the narrator, Caterina, is certain that “I and the village women I’ve known all carry a history and worlds of stories within us.”

I reviewed the novel for Publishers Weekly, and you can read my review here. I loved Guzzo-McParland’s descriptions of special treats for the village children, “homemade cullarielli, hard doughnut-shaped cookies glazed with white sugar” and tied to the Palm Sunday olive branches with ribbon, or scirubetta on a December day: “A light blanket of snow covered the rooftops. Mother reached over Comare Rosaria’s rooftop from our kitchen window and filled a bowl with snow. She sprinkled sugar and cold coffee over it to make scirubetta for me, Luigi, and my desk-friend, Bettina, who came over every afternoon to do homework with me.”

My favourite character isn’t one of the village girls whose love stories Caterina recounts, but Professore Nucci, her father’s friend, who “wasn’t really a professor; he just liked to be called Professore,” and therefore introduces himself as one. A bachelor living with his two sisters, “He received a small stipend from the village for doing minor secretarial work, but he spent most of the day walking up and down the main street in a pensive mood, his arms behind his back, a baton in one hand. Sometimes he would stop, look up into the air, and move his head as though he were reviewing a musical score.” Not surprisingly, he also likes it when people call him Maestro.

“‘I wouldn’t go to Canada if they paid me in gold,’” he says, but another villager retorts, “‘Don’t worry, professò. They only pay for professors like you in Mulirena. Everywhere else you have to work.’”

The Girls of Piazza d’Amore, by Connie Guzzo-McParland, is published by Linda Leith Publishing, and you can find the author on Facebook. The novel has been shortlisted for the Quebec Writers’ Federation’s Concordia University First Book Award. Congratulations!

Highlights from the Jane Austen Festival in Bath

Two of our local JASNA Nova Scotia members, Lou Harrington and Anita Campbell, travelled to Bath, England in September to attend the Jane Austen Festival. Last Sunday, Lou and Anita entertained members of our Region with stories from their adventures at the Festival, and impressed us with the costumes they created to wear for the famous Promenade. Picture 600 people in Regency costume walking from the Royal Crescent to the Parade Gardens near Bath Abbey—or watch this four-minute video, and you can catch a glimpse of Lou at 1:19, and of Anita at 2:25.

Anita and Lou in their Regency finery

Here are some of the highlights they mentioned: tours of Chawton, Steventon, Winchester, and Stoneleigh Abbey; visits to The Royal Pump Rooms at Leamington Spa, The Holburne Museum, The Herschel Museum of Astronomy, The American Museum in Britain, and the newly restored No. 1 Royal Crescent; tea and breakfast in a private home, Kinwarton; and a book launch for A Carriage Ride in Queen Square: Easy-to-Play Piano Pieces for Jane Austen’s Bath, by Gwen Bevan (great-great-granddaughter of Austen’s niece Fanny Knight). Are you envious? I am!

Photo by Lou Harrington

Anita made her linen/cotton dress using a pattern drawn from a museum original dating from around 1800 (from Past Patterns), and her blue linen spencer from a Regency Wardrobe pattern from La Mode Bagatelle. She even made the Dorset buttons herself, using instructions she found online. And—incredibly (to me, at any rate)—she made the bonnet from scratch, using a Lynn McMasters pattern for an early nineteenth-century seaside bonnet. Joleen Gordon from the Nova Scotia Basketry Guild gave her the straw plait, and it took her all summer to sew the straw on by hand. Anita says that while she has no formal training in costume or sewing, she’s always had a personal interest in costume research and she loves historic clothing.

Detail of Anita’s amazing bonnet. Aren’t you tempted, like Austen’s Beautifull Cassandra, to place it on your gentle head and run off to seek your Fortune, or at least some ice cream and adventures?

Lou has a diploma in Costume Studies from Dalhousie University (and a Pharmacy degree, too, which she says feeds her bank account while the Costume Studies diploma feeds her soul). She writes:

My dress on Sunday was a cotton muslin day dress, about mid-Regency. Sleeves and hem trimmed with broiderie anglaise. The spencer is a la militaire, and was fashioned from a modern blazer that I cut off. Brass buttons from my mother’s button jar. The hat came from a charity shop. I imagine someone wore it once to a wedding and then got rid of it. With some careful cutting and stitching, it became a bonnet. A bag of muslin over the crown and some ribbon completed the look. No one but a costume girl would really notice, but the shape is a bit more Gaskell than Austen so I may pull it apart to rework it someday. Just as Lydia might!

This year was Lou’s fifth trip to the Festival. She’s attended every year since her first visit in 2009.

Now, it’s a little-known fact that after my M.A., I too considered Costume Studies at Dalhousie. You might not guess this, given that I don’t have a Regency dress and that the only Regency accessory I’ve ever made is a reticule — copied from one Lou made, and it took me a year to make it. But way back in 1996, the Costume Studies program recreated a beautiful eighteenth-century wedding at St. Paul’s Church in Halifax, and I found the costumes inspiring. Instead of going into Costume Studies, however, I wrote a book about St. Paul’s, and then decided on a Ph.D. in English so I could spend a lot of time reading Jane Austen and writing about her. So here I am, still writing, and not sewing. But I certainly appreciate the work that goes into recreations of historical costumes. (And if I had ever learnt, I should have been a great proficient, I’m sure.)

I’ve been to Bath and several other Jane Austen-related sites in England, but I’ve never been to the Jane Austen Festival. Have any of you been? If you have, what were your favourite events, talks, or tours? Lou and Anita and JASNA NS members: what would you add to my very short summary of the Festival? With nine days of Austen-inspired entertainments, it’s hard to keep track of everything!

L.M. Montgomery at Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts

My recent trip to one of my favourite places in Boston, the Museum of Fine Arts, reminded me of L.M. Montgomery’s (brief) description of her first experience of the Museum during a trip to Boston to meet her publisher, L.C. Page, in November 1910: “Mrs. Page, the Marcones and I spent the day in the new Museum of Fine Arts. It was a wonderful day—but it should have been a week instead of a day. I had no time to study anything—I could only look and pass on.” I expect many people feel this way about the MFA, or indeed any great art museum—I certainly did a few years ago when I had only an hour and a half to see the brand new Art of the Americas wing at the MFA before leaving for Halifax.

The Art of the Americas wing (the photo is reminiscent of my banner photo, isn’t it? You can tell that I like bare branches against water and/or sky. I visited again this past August, but I took the photo when I was there in March.)

“And there was so much to look at—I wanted to stand for an hour before everything and absorb it,” Montgomery continues. “The collection of Japanese pottery was marvelous—the amber room was a delight beyond words; the Egyptian department was wonderful and the Greek Statues were—Greek statues. And as for the paintings—but I cannot write about them. I had seen engravings of most of them but to see the pictures themselves was a revelation.”

When Montgomery visited, the MFA had just moved from its original location in Copley Square, where it had been since its founding in 1876, to its current location on Huntington Avenue. The Beaux Arts building was designed by Guy Lowell and opened in November 1909. The Fenway entrance, and the giant baby heads by Antonio Lopez Garcia, were far in the future. One can only imagine what Montgomery would have thought of the sculptures that now greet visitors to the MFA.

“Day and Night,” by Antonio Lopez Garcia (thanks to Elizabeth Baxter for these photos)

Quotations are from The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901-1911, ed. Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston (Oxford University Press, 2013). You can read my review of the book on page 33 of the Fall 2013 edition of Atlantic Books Today.

Longbourn – a review

“The very shoe-roses were got by proxy.” This line from Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice sparked Jo Baker’s fascinating exploration of the servants’ world at Longbourn, in a novel that highlights the inequalities and injustices of a system in which some young ladies are born to sew, read, talk, and dance, while others are born to scrub mud and blood from their mistresses’ clothes and underclothes, to cook and clean, and to brave miserable weather for the trivial errand of fetching decorative shoe-roses. Longbourn is not about Mr. and Mrs. Bennet and their five daughters, although the family and their friends and acquaintances do appear in the background, in the way that servants appear in Austen’s novel.

A spirited maid named Sarah and the mysterious new footman at Longbourn, James, are the heroine and hero of this story, while Elizabeth Bennet appears only briefly and Mr. Darcy is hardly mentioned at all. The other servants are Mrs. Hill, the housekeeper; her husband, the butler; and Polly, another maid. Let me say right away that Baker’s Elizabeth is very different from Austen’s. Gentle Jane, wicked Wickham, and silly Kitty, Lydia, and Mrs. Bennet, for example, are all recognizable here, but in Longbourn, Elizabeth is generally thoughtless and even unkind. It’s she who says, with a “sorrowful glance” at the rain outside, that those shoe-roses will have to be got by proxy, meaning by Sarah. Utterly self-absorbed, she shows no interest in her maid beyond a vague and misguided assumption that Sarah will be keen to visit London and see more of the world. Austen’s Elizabeth is sharp, quick to judge, and slow to understand herself, but she is unkind only to those who have slighted her, such as Mr. Darcy or Miss Bingley – and we aren’t given any reason in Longbourn to believe Sarah has offended her.

There are a couple of ways of reading this new version of Elizabeth, depending on the degree to which you see fidelity to the original novel as essential in an adaptation. In Baker’s defense, she isn’t continuing Austen’s story, she’s creating a new story, and her Sarah and James are certainly capable of holding the reader’s attention and sympathy themselves, whether her Elizabeth does or not. (P.D. James’s Death Comes to Pemberley, on the other hand, also features an Elizabeth Bennet who lacks the wit and energy of Austen’s heroine, but while James’s Darcy and Wickham get all the attention in her sequel to Pride and Prejudice, neither one of them sparkles very much either, so there’s little compensation.)

Sarah and James win our sympathy not only because they have difficult, unpleasant jobs – like scouring pans and scrubbing filthy petticoats or emptying sloshing chamberpots – but because of their tenacity and courage as they struggle to make a good life for themselves. They don’t give up, even when it seems fate is against them – and it almost always seems that fate is against them. I won’t give away too many details of what happens to them, but James, for example, holds fast to his belief that truth will win out: “he would not be punished for something he had not done.” And if Baker’s Elizabeth has lost her confidence and her kindness, Sarah has gained both. She speaks up fearlessly to James, sparring with him in the way Austen’s Elizabeth challenges Darcy, and she offers protection to Polly when Wickham gets too close.

It’s clever to foreground the servants’ lives, but Longbourn isn’t the story of just any early nineteenth century servants, and the debt the novel owes to Pride and Prejudice means we’re invited, even obliged, to read one in light of the other. I don’t mean that slavish imitation is required, but it shouldn’t be necessary to make readers dislike the Bennets and others of their class in order to increase our sympathy for their servants. Isn’t it possible to sympathize with both the maid who scrubs the petticoats and the woman who employs her?

Longbourn’s focus on the perceived plight of the minor characters extends not only to the servants, but also to Mr. Collins and Mary Bennet. All of them, according to this interpretation, have been wronged by the Bennets, chiefly Elizabeth. Baker’s determination to rehabilitate the characters Elizabeth criticizes leads to a brief section in which she gives us Mary Bennet’s point of view, which is jarring because it’s the one place we leave the minds of the servants. Mary has allowed herself to dream of marriage to Mr. Collins, “of the new importance that it would bring to her,” imagining that “on becoming Mr. Collins’s bride, she would have also become the means of her family’s salvation, and no longer just the plain, awkward, overlooked middle child.” This passage, along with passages that present Mr. Collins as well-meaning and misunderstood, suggests that Longbourn isn’t just “The Servants’ Story,” as the novel’s subtitle has it, but the story of the characters who in Pride and Prejudice are denied the sympathy of either Elizabeth or the narrator or both of them. I was almost surprised to find that Baker didn’t include a defense of Miss Bingley.

Longbourn is a moving love story that could almost stand on its own, as Baker gives us powerful new characters whose courage in the face of adversity makes for compelling reading. And its premise is intriguing: the novel offers a new way of looking at Austen’s world, reminding us in vivid and disturbing detail of the way elegant Regency lifestyles depended heavily on the labour of servants. Yet ultimately, Longbourn’s distortion of the very characters, especially the heroine, whose story inspired this one, means that it disappoints. The servants’ story would be more successful if the novel didn’t oversimplify tensions between the classes by demanding that readers learn to dislike, or even despise, Elizabeth Bennet.

For further reading:

Sarah Seltzer discusses Longbourn in “How to make a Jane Austen reboot that’s actually good,” Salon, November 11, 2013: “Often, though, Baker’s effort at ‘rewriting’ the characters to show their privilege feels didactic – we get it, they’re enabling the gears of oppression.”

Margaret C. Sullivan’s review of Longbourn at Austenblog, November 3, 2013: “We struggled through this book, constantly pulled out of it by this determination to dunk Austen’s work in a literary mud puddle. It seems to us a subversion of Pride and Prejudice, not a celebration of it.”

Syrie James’s review of Longbourn at Austenprose, October 16, 2013: “Jo Baker’s engrossing novel … takes Jane Austen’s famous work, turns it upside down, and shakes out a fully realized and utterly convincing tale of life and romance among the servants.”

“Pride, Prejudice, and Drudgery,” Diane Johnson’s review of Longbourn in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, October 11, 2013: “a work that’s both original and charming, even gripping, in its own right.”

How Much Did Edith Wharton Revise The Custom of the Country?

Tenth and last in a series celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.

“I have just received duplicate galleys of the last two chapters, & these are still so fresh in my mind that I have revised them & hurried them off to Scribner by this post, with a line to say that they are to be used for the book if not too late.” On August 29, 1913, Edith Wharton was writing to her secretary, Anna Bahlmann about preparing the text of The Custom of the Country for publication that fall. The novel had been serialized in Scribner’s Magazine in monthly installments, beginning in January, and the first edition of the novel was to be published in October.

As I discovered when my sister Elizabeth Baxter and I compared the serialized version of the novel with the first edition, word by word, while Wharton made some changes to the last three chapters of the novel, in Book Five, she didn’t make as many there as she had in the Books One and Two. She made some revisions in Books Three and Four, but none at all in Chapters 37 through 43 of Book Five.

She appears to have debated whether or not to revise the chapters towards the end at all: a letter to Anna Bahlmann from August 26th says she “will try to revise the remaining chapters of the ‘Custom’ (for the book)” as “I feel less tired.” Had she been too tired to revise the earlier chapters in Book Five?

One interesting change is that in the last paragraph of the novel, the magazine text says of Undine Spragg that “There was something she could never get,” whereas the first edition text says “She had learned that there was something she could never get.”  The revision suggests that for all her blindnesses, Undine is capable of learning something. Her divorce and remarriage in the last chapter take place in Sioux Falls, in the magazine text, but in Reno in the first edition. Sioux Falls, South Dakota, was where she went for her divorce from Ralph Marvell.

In Chapter 44 in the first edition, Mrs. Jim Driscoll and Bertha Shallum “received [Undine] with a touch of constraint; but it vanished when they remarked the cordiality of Moffatt’s greeting.” The magazine text refers to “the long-established intimacy of Moffatt’s greeting.” Undine knows how long she and Moffatt have been intimate, but the other women would see only that his manner is cordial, without knowing exactly why.

Some of the revisions soften the language somewhat: in Chapter 44, Moffatt’s “great gaudy sitting-room” in the Nouveau Luxe in the magazine text becomes simply a “big bright sitting-room.” In Chapter 45, Undine’s response to Moffatt’s request that she go home to America with him is quite different: in the first edition of the novel, she “picture[s] the consequences of what he exacted.” In the magazine text, on the other hand, she “picture[s] the consequences of the monstrous renunciation he exacted.” Here’s the next paragraph from the magazine text:

“You don’t know—you don’t understand—” she kept repeating; but she knew it was part of his terrible power that he didn’t: that his very ignorance of the coil of conventions she was trapped in turned their impenetrable net into a cobweb. It was hopeless to try to make him feel the value of what he was asking her to give up.”

And here’s what the paragraph looks like in the first edition, after Wharton’s revisions:

“You don’t know—you don’t understand—” she kept repeating; but she knew that his ignorance was part of his terrible power, and that it was hopeless to try to make him feel the value of what he was asking her to give up.

He still has a “terrible power,” but there’s no “coil of conventions,” “impenetrable net,” or “cobweb,” and she isn’t “trapped.” The barriers to serial divorce and serial marriage are not as strong in the revised version of the novel.

If you’re interested in the revisions Wharton made earlier in the novel, especially in Books One and Two, you can read more about them in the “Note on the Text” in my edition of The Custom of the Country.

Thanks for celebrating the 100th anniversary of this fabulous novel with me this year! Cheers to Edith Wharton—and to Undine Spragg—and here’s to their next century.

For further reading:

The Custom of the Country, by Edith Wharton, edited by Sarah Emsley (Peterborough, ON: Broadview, 2008).

My Dear Governess: The Letters of Edith Wharton to Anna Bahlmann, edited by Irene Goldman-Price (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 2012).

My other posts on The Custom of the Country:

Part One: How I Discovered The Custom of the Country

Part Three: “I’ll never try anything again till I try New York”

Part Four: Undine Spragg as the Empress Josephine

Part Five: Marriage, Divorce, and “diversified elements of misery”

Part Six: “Diamonds are a Girl’s Best Friend”

Part Seven: “Trading Up”: Wharton’s Influence on Candace Bushnell and Julian Fellowes—Undine as a film star?

Part Eight: What Edith Wharton Tells Us About The Way We Live Now

Part Nine: Edith Wharton’s Portrait of a Lady—Mr. Popple’s portraits and Undine’s powers

That moment when you’re revising obsessively and it feels like “an attack of scrupulosis”…: On revising The Custom of the Country

Happy 100th Anniversary to Edith Wharton’s The Custom of the Country! The first installment of the novel was published in Scribner’s Magazine in January 1913.

Writing with “dogged obstinacy”: In the summer of 1911, Edith Wharton was “digging away” at her “Big Novel,” The Custom of the Country, wondering if “dogged obstinacy” could “replace freedom & inspiration.”

“The books were too valuable to be taken down”: On Undine Spragg’s treatment of her son Paul in the last chapter of The Custom of the Country, and Paul’s experience of nightmarish library in which the books can never be read, and no one ever writes.

French Fact and American Fiction: Wharton’s use of place names in The Custom of the Country.

Plan for JASNA 2014 and hear about the 2013 Jane Austen Festival

The next JASNA Nova Scotia meeting is at 2pm this Sunday, November 10th at Anne Thompson’s house. We’ll talk about our plans for next year’s AGM in Montréal, and hear from Lou Harrington and Anita Campbell about their experience at the Jane Austen Festival in Bath this past September. Both Anita and Lou are very accomplished seamstresses — as you can tell from their Regency costumes in the photos below — as well as devoted readers of Austen’s novels, and from what I’ve heard so far, it sounds as if they had a wonderful time in Bath.

Please join us for tea, and please tell Anne if you’re able to be there (or let me know in the comments below, and I can give you directions if needed).

Anita and Lou and friends at the Jane Austen Festival

Anita and the Pulteney Bridge

What’s the best way to introduce kids to Jane Austen?

I want to hear your ideas! I’ve put together a list of Jane Austen-related books for children that includes the Cozy Classics and BabyLit board books, the Real Reads abridged versions of Austen’s novels, and Juliet McMaster’s wonderful illustrated edition of Austen’s story “The Beautifull Cassandra.” This list is a work-in-progress and I hope you’ll help me add to it, with suggestions for books I may have overlooked and film adaptations that are appropriate for watching with young children, along with any other ideas you have for introducing kids to the works of Jane Austen.

I haven’t listed any of the movies yet, though off the top of my head I think the 1995 Pride and Prejudice belongs on the list, while the 1999 Mansfield Park does not. What do you think? I’d cut the first scene from the 2007 Sense and Sensibility for obvious reasons, but I’m trying to remember if the rest of it would be okay to watch with children.

Please add your comments and suggestions either here or on my “Jane Austen for Kids” page. Thank you!