Welcome to my website, where you’ll find my children’s story “The Jane Austen Playgroup,” along with details about my books and other publications, including Jane Austen’s Philosophy of the Virtues, Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, St. Paul’s in the Grand Parade, and a critical edition of Edith Wharton’s novel The Custom of the Country.
I write primarily about Jane Austen’s life and works, women writers who were influenced by Austen, and Canadian – especially Nova Scotian – history.
I was born on the prairies, in Edmonton, Alberta, and grew up by the sea in Halifax, Nova Scotia. I received my PhD in English literature from Dalhousie University in Halifax, where I wrote my dissertation
on ethics in Jane Austen’s novels. Following postdoctoral work on Edith Wharton and the novel of manners at the Rothermere American Institute, University of Oxford, I taught classes on Jane Austen in the Writing Program at Harvard University in Cambridge, Massachusetts. In 2008, I returned home to Halifax to focus on writing, and I’m currently working on a novel.
Above: my photo of Lake Martha, Mount Uniacke, Nova Scotia
Some of my favourite links:
Jane Austen Society of North America
The Writers’ Federation of Nova Scotia (and my page on their website)
The Writers’ Union of Canada (and my page on their website)
