Buyers will receive via email a collection of readings recorded by former Mother Seton English and Creative Writing teacher Sister Patricia Maura (now Pat Bradshaw Brown). 

"There is within me (and with sadness I have watched it in others) a knot of cruelty borne by the stream of love, much as our blood sometimes bears the seed of our destruction, and at times I was mean to Doodle."

Those of us who used Scott Foresman's Outlooks through Literature in our ninth grade English class may recognize these words as the poignant musings of the narrator in James Hurst's short story "The Scarlet Ibis."  Some of the earliest graduates of Mother Seton had the enormous good fortune to have Sister Patricia Maura (now Pat Bradshaw Brown) as their English teacher in their freshman and sophomore years.  We can still recapture the thrill of meeting Shakespeare for the first time:

What's in a name?  that which we call a rose
By any other name would smell as sweet;

Or the stirring conclusion to our first Dickens novel:

It is a far, far better thing I do than I have ever done;
It is a far, far better rest that I go to than I have ever known.

It is Sister Patricia Maura's voice we hear when we remember these lines.  She was a superb teacher, one whom many of us modeled ourselves after as we began our own teaching careers in later years.

At our suggestion, Pat graciously agreed to record some of the bits of literature she introduced us to in those impressionable years, and we are thrilled to present here her recording of excerpts from the following pieces:

• "The Scarlet Ibis" by James Hurst


• "The Ballad of Moll Magee" by William Butler Yeats


• "The Highwayman" by Alfred Noyes


• "The Cask of Amontillado" by Edgar Allan Poe


• "The Raven" by Edgar Allan Poe


• Excerpt from act III, scene ii of Julius Caesar by William Shakespeare


• "Stopping by Woods on a Snowy Evening" by Robert Frost

Pat entered the Sisters of Charity in 1956 and graduated from the College of St. Elizabeth in 1962.  She taught at Mother Seton from 1964 to 1968, after teaching English at Holy Trinity in Westfield and St. Cecilia Grammar School in Kearny.  She taught public high school until she moved to West Virginia.  She later moved to Florida, where she has worked as a day-to-day substitute teacher for over 24 years.  She now enjoys reading to her grandchildren and she says that the four years she taught at Mother Seton were the most enjoyable of her teaching career.

If you had Sister Patricia Maura for English, you will want a copy of this treasure for yourself.

The recordings in this collection have been enhanced by sound engineer George Petit, who is well-known for his work with musicians like Boz Scaggs.