Sarah Emsley is the author of Jane Austen's Philosophy of the Virtues and a history of St. Paul's in the Grand Parade, the church in Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Jane Austen's niece Cassy was baptized in 1809. She 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 now lives in Halifax with her family. She has hosted several blog series celebrations of Austen's work at www.sarahemsley.com, and she edited a collection of essays on Jane Austen and the North Atlantic for the Jane Austen Society. The Austens is her first novel.