Please join my friend Naomi and me to read L.M. Montgomery’s Kilmeny of the Orchard in May. I thought I’d send out the invitation now to make sure anyone who wants to join us has time to read or reread the novel. Feel free to join the conversations in the comments on Naomi’s blog or mine, and if you write your own post about Kilmeny, please let us know. I’m also planning to have a look at Montgomery’s story “Una of the Garden,” which she transformed into Kilmeny of the Orchard. Here’s how Montgomery describes Eric Marshall’s discovery of the orchard (in the novel): The charm of the place too ..read more

I’m delighted to announce “A Summer Party for Sense and Sensibility” and “‘A world of wonderful beauty’: L.M. Montgomery at 150,” two exciting projects I’m planning for later this year. Contributors to the Sense and Sensibility blog series include: Finola Austin, Elaine Bander, Deb Barnum, Sandra Barry, Cheryl Bell, Matthew Berry, Diana Birchall, L. Bao Bui, Kathy Cawsey, Carol Chernega, Lori Mulligan Davis, Lizzie Dunford, Susan Allen Ford, Paul Gordon, Heidi L.M. Jacobs, Natalie Jenner, Hazel Jones, George Justice, Theresa Kenney, Deborah Knuth Klenck, Emily Midorikawa, Laurel Ann Nattress ..read more

I’m reading Shawna Lemay’s beautiful and thought-provoking new book Apples on a Windowsill, a collection of essays on still life, memory, art, and marriage, and I’m fascinated by what she says about how a still life can both stop time and serve as a moment of suspense: “The question hovers: what happens next? And it gives us an interval to dream new possibilities.” Shawna talks about wanting to “escape into a favourite movie where I know that the ending is a happy one,” such as “Bridget Jones’s Diary or an adaptation of Pride and Prejudice or Persuasion.” In life, she says, “we have no idea if ..read more

Happy 248th birthday to Jane Austen! Last summer’s roses in the Historic Gardens at Annapolis Royal, photographed by Brenda Barry To celebrate, I thought I’d write about an Austen-inspired novel I read recently. Polly Shulman’s novel Enthusiasm is a delightful YA romance inspired by Jane Austen’s Pride and Prejudice, but also by less well-known elements of Jane Austen’s life and work, including a novel written by her niece Anna that was originally entitled “Enthusiasm” and later renamed “Which is the Heroine?” In a letter to Anna, Jane said, “I like the name ‘Which is the Heroine’ very well ..read more

Uzma Jalaluddin’s novel Much Ado About Nada was inspired by Jane Austen’s Persuasion as well as (more obviously) by Shakespeare’s Much Ado About Nothing. I enjoyed reading scenes set on the University of Toronto campus and in the fictional Golden Crescent neighbourhood of Scarborough, Ontario, and watching the complicated relationship between Nada Syed and Baz Haq unfold. In chapters set in the present, they meet at Deen&Dunya, “a massive Muslim convention held in downtown Toronto” that’s “like Comic-Con, except with hijabs, jilbabs, beards, and kufi skullcaps rather than intricate fan-cre ..read more

“I’m that person who finds the purchase of a sponge-cake to be delightful.” I’m quoting Shawna Lemay, whose novel Everything Affects Everyone I wrote about last Friday. I enjoyed the novel so much that I’ve been reading more of her work, including some of her poems, and a splendid essay I remembered from a few years ago, called “The Sponge-Cake Model of Friendship.” “You know how interesting the purchase of a sponge-cake is to me,” Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on June 17, 1808. Shawna says, “I find it diverting to know what my friends had for breakfast, where they hope to holiday ..read more

L.M. Montgomery was born 149 years ago today, on November 30, 1874, in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island. My favourite quotation about birthdays in her novels appears in Anne of Green Gables: just after Anne has met Diana Barry for the first time, and the two of them have sworn to be faithful friends “as long as the sun and moon shall endure,” Anne tells Marilla all about their meeting and her happiness, and one of the things that delights her about her new friendship is that “Diana’s birthday is in February and mine is in March. Don’t you think that is a very strange coincidence ..read more

Of all the stories told by Sara Stanley in The Story Girl, the one I remembered most vividly from my first reading of the novel is “The Blue Chest of Rachel Ward” (Chapter 12), the sad story of Sara’s grandmother’s cousin Rachel and the day that was supposed to be her wedding day. Sara tells Bev and the other children about how Rachel, an orphan from Montreal, came to spend a winter with relatives in Prince Edward Island, fell in love with handsome Will Montague—“an awful flirt,” according to Felicity—and got engaged. Over the winter she “made all her wedding things with her own hands,” but wh ..read more

Let’s read Jane of Lantern Hill! Thanks to everyone who commented—here, on social media, in letters and emails, and in person—in response to last week’s post about Reading L.M. Montgomery Together. Based on the responses we received, Naomi and I have decided to read Jane of Lantern Hill this spring, and we hope you’ll join the conversation. We’re planning to write about the novel in May. (And maybe we’ll turn to Kilmeny and/or Pat later on. We also took note of the votes for Rilla and Emily. Thank you for your enthusiastic response to all these books!) If you’re interested, you might like to ..read more

“… feeling all the happy privilege of country liberty, of wandering from place to place in free and luxurious solitude, she resolved to spend almost every hour of every day while she remained with the Palmers, in the indulgence of such solitary rambles.” I went in search of a Jane Austen quotation to accompany this stereoscopic card captioned “Solitude, Fairmount Park, Philadelphia,” which I found in an antiques shop in Mahone Bay, Nova Scotia last Sunday, and I settled on this passage from Sense and Sensibility (Volume 3, Chapter 7). (I don’t own a stereoscope, but I liked the image and boug ..read more