In Memoriam: Remembering Patrick J. McGraw and Deborah Knuth Klenck

(The following is JASP board member Susan Allen Ford's tribute for Patrick J. McGraw and Deborah Knuth Klenck at JASP 2025 on Thursday, June 19, 2025.)

JASP lost two of its best friends this spring.  Patrick McGraw died on April 9; Deborah Knuth Klenck died on April 10.  Both died from the complications of cancer.

We remember Pat first, perhaps, for his propensity to pun.  It was hard to get through even a short conversation with him without the need either to laugh or to raise your eyebrows—or to do both.  But he could also be serious.  He was generous, thoughtful, and kind.  During the years of my husband’s illness and my own, he frequently checked with me to see how I was doing.  Pat loved learning, and he was a teacher.  He taught English and Latin at St. George’s Independent School in Memphis.  Jane Austen, of course, was his great love.  Before his illness, when he was still able to travel, he was a fixture at JASP.  He could be found everywhere—the bar, the meeting spaces, the dance floor—talking and laughing and brightening the world around him.  A couple of years ago, when his illness had been diagnosed and he was unable to attend JASP, he generously donated his registration fee to celebrate the way JASP brings people together.  Throughout his illness he continued to act as JASNA’s Regional Coordinator for the Central Missouri Region, organizing and making a substantial donation for their 250th-year programming and even helping extend that programming to another part of the state. A couple of years ago, JASP established the Patrick McGraw Teacher Scholarship in his name.

Deborah Knuth Klenck was professor emerita of English at Colgate University, where she taught authors from Milton to Dickens.  Inger lured her down here in the early days of JASP, and Debbie became a popular speaker and discussion leader.  To some degree (as might be true of many of us), Debbie’s life revolved around Jane Austen.  Growing up, Debbie read and reread Pride and Prejudice almost obsessively in her little bedroom in Queens.  Whenever in England, she brought her daughter, Jane (named for her favorite author), and her son, Edward, to Winchester Cathedral and to Chawton.  Her son Ted Scheinman celebrated his mother's Austenian life and JASP in Camp Austen (2018).  

Debbie was totally present always, full of feeling—ready to laugh or to cry in sympathy.  Though sometimes Debbie would be sitting here at JASP finishing a gown or headpiece for the ball, she was always fully engaged with everyone and everything around her.  And she had a wicked sense of humor.  Inger reminded me that at the Jane Austen and Shakespeare JASP, Debbie devised a game for which we wrote epitaphs for characters.  Hers were mordant and hilarious.

Recently, I reread a 2013 essay Debbie wrote for Persuasions on her fifty years of reading Pride and Prejudice, in which she expressed her fear that she might become Lady Catherine but vowed, for the rest of her life, to “strive to remain a rational creature speaking truth from the heart in the mode of both Elizabeth and Darcy.”  She kept that promise.

Both Pat and Debbie approached the end with courage.  Pat told me that he was not afraid of dying: “I have always known,” he said, “where shanty Irishmen like me go when they die!” I like to imagine Pat and Debbie, both people of faith, meeting in a celestial version of JASP.  Remember how Jane described her aging?  “By the bye,” she tells Cassandra, “as I must leave off being young, I find many Douceurs in being a sort of Chaperon for I am put on a Sofa near the Fire & can drink as much wine as I like.” Let’s imagine Pat, Debbie, and Jane, then, on a heavenly sofa, drinking wine, and laughing.  And let’s make sure—especially this weekend—to remember and celebrate them. 

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To learn more about the inaugural Patrick McGraw Teacher Scholarship and to donate, click here.