The JASNA 2025 AGM in Baltimore

An invitation to the unveiling of the...

The JASNA 2025 AGM in Baltimore

First, a couple of notes about upcoming events:

[image error][image error] The book launch for my novel The Austens is on Tuesday! [image error][image error]

October 21st. Halifax, Nova Scotia. The Regency Ballroom in the Lord Nelson Hotel. Doors open at 6:30 p.m. See you there! (Facebook event page: Book Launch for The Austens.)

And before that, on Saturday, October 18th, please join the Nova Scotia Reading Circle for Project Bookmark Canada to celebrate the unveiling of the Budge Wilson Bookmark on the Dalhousie University campus. The ceremony begins at 3:00 p.m. on the path to the east of Shirreff Hall and will be followed by a reception in the Dal Student Union Building at 3:30. (Facebook event page: Budge Wilson Bookmark unveiling.)

I’ve been working on both the novel and the Budge Wilson Bookmark for many (many!) years and am delighted to be celebrating these two events so close together. The timing for these celebrations is a happy coincidence. (And then, yes, soon after that, I will probably need to catch up on my sleep.)

Okay, now on to the 2025 Jane Austen Society of North America AGM! What a fabulous celebration we had last weekend in Baltimore. Thank you to the Maryland Region and all the organizers and volunteers. It was such a pleasure to connect with old friends, some of whom I’ve known for more than twenty-five years, and to meet new friends and celebrate Jane Austen’s 250th birthday. (Next year’s JASNA AGM in Tucson, Arizona, will focus on Austen’s Bath novels, Northanger Abbey and Persuasion.) It was a delight to visit with friends I’ve known online for a long time but met in person for the first time at the AGM, including my dear friend Emily Midorikawa. The weekend was busy, and I don’t have many photos, but here are a few.

The view from my hotel room

I’m about halfway through and am loving Devoney Looser’s new book, Wild for Austen: A Rebellious, Subversive and Untamed Jane

With Emily Midorikawa, co-author (with Emma Claire Sweeney) of A Secret Sisterhood: The Literary Friendships of Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë, George Eliot, and Virginia Woolf

Participating in the book signing on the last day of the AGM was fun, and I loved chatting with readers and seeing so many of my books on display at Jane Austen Books.

Stacks of copies of The Austens, Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, and The Custom of the Country

(Mine are off to the left)

You can order my new novel The Austens from them, of course, as I’ve mentioned here before, and they also have Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade (the church in Halifax, Nova Scotia where Jane’s niece Cassy Austen was baptized in 1809), Jane Austen and the North Atlantic (which I edited for the Jane Austen Society), and my critical edition of Edith Wharton’s 1913 novel The Custom of the Country. They accept international orders.

Liz Philosophos Cooper, Brad Abernethy, Sarah Emsley

With Liz Philosophos Cooper, my co-editor for “Unexpectedly Austen,” and Brad Abernethy, a new member of JASNA Nova Scotia (whom I met for the first time in Baltimore)

One of the many highlights was hearing Susannah Harker interviewed by Gabrielle Malcolm about her experience of playing Jane Bennet in the 1995 adaptation of Pride and Prejudice. I also enjoyed listening to fellow L.M. Montgomery fan Nili Olay talk about Montgomery’s novels in relation to Austen’s. I had fun wearing my Regency gown at the ball on Saturday evening—the first time I’ve worn period dress for an AGM ball since I became a member of JASNA in 1998. This 250th birthday year seemed like the right time for a Regency ball gown. I loved watching Sarah Rose Kearns’s beautiful adaptation of Persuasion at the Chesapeake Shakespeare Company and enjoyed chatting with Rose afterwards.

Deborah Barnum, Sarah Emsley, Syrie James

With Deborah Barnum (of Jane Austen in Vermont) and Syrie James (whose most recent novel is Danger at Darkmoor Park) at the Regency ball

With Sarah Rose Kearns

And I gave a talk on “Books as Children” and signed many, many copies of The Austens. Sharing the book with JASNA friends over the weekend was a wonderful experience.

With friends old and new after my talk

Oh, and I brought home some lovely trinkets, treasures, and jewellery from Puddings & Biscakes and Alison Woo Designs, along with my own creation from an AGM workshop—a hand-stamped neckerchief. And an Austen at 250 tea towel, a gift to all AGM attendees from a fellow JASNA member.

Austen at 250 tea towel, Mansfield Park bracelet, key chain, program for Persuasion, magnet, stickers, white and blue neckerchief

On a different topic, I’d like to share with you a couple of pieces I read this week and found both moving and inspiring.

First, from Austen scholar and JASNA member Alicia Kerfoot, whom I met in person for the first time at the ball on Saturday, an essay entitled “Reframing the Pregnancy Story: On Literature, Stitching, and Lost Narratives.” As young readers, Alicia and I were both (like many others) inspired to become writers after we discovered L.M. Montgomery’s books. In this essay, Alicia writes,

“I think that in Anne’s House of Dreams, Montgomery aligned Anne’s lost infant with the lost voices of woman writers. That her first child is a girl who dies at birth, and her second is a healthy boy of ‘ten pounds’ seems to parallel the way that Anne hands over the writing of the ‘great Canadian novel’ to Owen Ford, a male journalist from Toronto.”

And from Shawna Lemay, whose work I have quoted here many times over the years, a post entitled “Fall is for Poetry.” Shawna wasn’t at the AGM, but she too has been celebrating Jane Austen’s 250th birthday this year, and she wrote a wonderful tribute for “Unexpectedly Austen.”

This week on her blog, Transactions with Beauty, Shawna writes that “April may be poetry month, but fall is the season for walking down the street reading a book of poetry, sitting on a park bench, doing same. And let’s not forget the classic sitting under a tree and watching the leaves fall and memorizing a poem. I suppose in reality these things don’t happen quite so often any more, but they could!” She says, “I recently saw someone walking down a street reading a paperback, and it delighted me beyond delight. It was not a performance, and no one was trailing them filming them walking down the street with an iPhone.”

Like Anne Shirley in Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, I am glad we “live in a world where there are Octobers.” And I agree with Shawna that “October is a good time to read a poem, write a poem, go to a library. Read anything. You know. Walk down your street reading a book. :)”

Beautiful trees near Shirreff Hall on the Dalhousie campus (I took this photo on Wednesday when I went to visit the spot where the Budge Wilson Bookmark was about to be installed)

I’ll end with a picture I took at Bookmark in Halifax yesterday. It’s wonderful to see The Austens in such good company. With all those Austen-related books on display, I sort of felt as if I were still at the JASNA AGM, even though I’m back home in Nova Scotia.