“A glorious October, all red and gold”
I’m quoting from Anne of Green Gables again, from Chapter 24, “Miss Stacy and Her Pupils Get Up a Concert.” Anne delights in the changing leaves, the “mellow mornings,” and the friend she’s found in her new teacher, Miss Stacy, “a bright, sympathetic young woman with the happy gift of winning and holding the affections of her pupils and bringing out the best that was in them mentally and morally.”
Isn’t it wonderful when students get to study with teachers like this? I think of my own favourite teachers and I feel grateful for all I’ve learned from them. I feel as attached to the “h” at the end of my name as Anne is to her “e,” and I know what Anne means when she says that hearing Miss Stacy pronounce her name, she feels “instinctively that she’s spelling it with an E.” Not everyone pays attention to such details and it’s a real gift when someone does.
I quote from Anne of Green Gables so often that sometimes I feel as if I live in the novel, in the way that my sister Bethie and I talk about “living in Pride and Prejudice.”
I’m excited about celebrating L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday with you, beginning next week. On Wednesday, October 30th, the anniversary of the date Jane Austen’s Sense and Sensibility was published, we’ll hear from Kate Scarth on “Marianne Dashwood and Anne Shirley, #KindredSpirits.” My new blog series “‘A world of wonderful beauty’: L.M. Montgomery at 150” will run from through to November 30th.
Sometime after that, I’ll put together a blog post about the fabulous Jane Austen Society of North America AGM that I attended last weekend. Right now, I’m still travelling—visiting Bethie in Mississippi—and so I thought I’d share with you some photos from a glorious October walk at Lake Banook in Dartmouth, Nova Scotia, before I left home.
Here are the links to the last two posts, in case you missed them:
Peggy’s Cove and the Public Gardens
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.
If you enjoyed this post, I hope you’ll consider recommending it to a friend, and if you aren’t yet a subscriber, please sign up to receive future posts.
Copyright Sarah Emsley 2024 ~ All rights reserved. No AI training: material on http://www.sarahemsley.com may not be used to “train” generative AI technologies.
