Kate Scarth In Conversation with Sarah Emsley

Bookmark is launching Kate Scarth’s book Romantic Suburbs: Imagining Home in Greater London on June 26 at 4:30 pm in Room 243 of the Don and Marion McDougall Hall at UPEI. Kate will be in conversation with Sarah Emsley, author of The Austens. This event is free, and all are welcome.

 Drawing on novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and their contemporaries, Romantic Suburbs argues that in an era before public health and urban planning policies, Romantic-period women took matters into their own hands. Women novelists of this period imagined a new suburban world where women, their families, and communities could thrive. Romanticism and women’s fiction helped shape the story of suburban development—a phenomenon that continues to influence twenty-first-century life globally.

 The Austens brings to life the story of Jane Austen’s friendship with her sister-in-law Fanny Austen, who lived in Bermuda and Nova Scotia with her naval captain husband during the years when Jane was writing Pride and Prejudice and other novels that would eventually make her famous. The Austens explores tensions and rivalries between a great writer and the people closest to them.

 Kate Scarth is the chair of L.M Montgomery Studies with UPEI’s L.M. Montgomery Institute and an Associate Professor in the Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture (ACLC) program at UPEI. 

 Sarah Emsley received her PhD from Dalhousie University, held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, taught classes on Austen in the Writing Program at Harvard University, and lives in Halifax, NS.