(Edmonton) Juliet McMaster seized the chance to share a great literary passion of hers with elementary students Thursday: Jane Austen's juvenilia.
The U of A professor emerita of English is a world-renowned Jane Austen scholar and has also written on Charles Dickens, William Makepeace Thackeray and Anthony Trollope. More recently she is the author of Woman Behind the Painter, about the English painter James Clarke Hook.
But it was a fanciful children's tale, The Beautiful Cassandra, written by Austen when she was a child herself that McMaster read to about 30 kids at Windsor Park Elementary School to celebrate Read-In Week, shown in this video. The kids were fascinated by the illustrations to the Juvenilia Press edition, perhaps because they were penned by McMaster herself.
Earlier this week children at the school heard from Tololwa Mollel, Thomas Trofimuk and Anna Marie Sewell. Closing the week on Friday is a reading by Mark Haroun, Gemini-nominated screenwriter for CBC's Heartland.