New book by Dr. Kate Scarth to be launched at UPEI on June 26
A new book titled Romantic Suburbs: Imagining Home in Greater London, by Dr. Kate Scarth, chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies and associate professor of Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture (ACLC) at UPEI, will be launched on Friday, June 26, at 4:30 pm in Don and Marion McDougall Hall, Room 243.
Hosted by the Bookmark, the launch is free, and all are welcome.
Drawing on novels by Jane Austen, Charlotte Smith, and their contemporaries, Dr. Scarth 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.
During the event, Scarth will be in conversation with Dr. Sarah Emsley, author of The Austens.
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 Austen was writing Pride and Prejudice and other novels that would eventually make her famous. In The Austens, Emsley explores tensions and rivalries between a great writer and the people closest to them.
In addition to her role as chair of L.M. Montgomery Studies with UPEI’s L.M. Montgomery Institute and in the ACLC program, Scarth is the presenter of the audio course “The Life and Works of L.M. Montgomery,” part of The Great Courses (available on Audible); editor of the online open-access Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies; and co-coordinator of "Your L.M. Montgomery Story," a project that has collected stories from L.M. Montgomery fans in 23 countries, with independent scholar Dr. Trinna S. Frever.
Emsley is also the author of Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues and St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade. She received her PhD from Dalhousie University; held a postdoctoral fellowship at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford; and taught classes on Austen in the writing program at Harvard University. She has hosted several blog series celebrations of Austen’s work, and she edited a collection of essays titled Jane Austen and the North Atlantic for the Jane Austen Society.
