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!
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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.
