I wasn't entirely sure how much I'd enjoy 'Emily of New Moon' - beloved children's authors don't always stand up to adult reading. 'The Blue Castle' was fun but specifically billed as an adult book whereas 'Emily' sounded more like something meant for children, I added it to my Christmas wish list anyway and was more than happy when mum obliged with a copy. Initially it seemed my worst fears would be realised - Emily is an annoyingly winsome child living with her adoring father in a dream of poor-but-happy domestic bliss, fortunately for the reader though he's in the final stages of consumption and soon dies leaving Emily orphaned, penniless, and in the hands of her mother's estranged family. They make her draw lots to see who will take her on which is how she ends up at New Moon farm with aunts Elizabeth and Laura and Cousin Jimmy.
When the book opens Emily is around 11 years old and the first half is mostly taken up with how she settles into her new life, makes friends, and survives all the pitfalls of childhood. Emily isn't a precisely beautiful child but she has a great deal of charm and personality as well as a burning desire to write and the imagination to go along with that. Her school teacher and aunt Elizabeth might find her exasperating but most the other people who come into contact with her are instantly and deeply charmed. I managed to be charmed too - Montgomery is good at showing the injustices that can make up a child's life - the callous way her fate is decided, run ins with her horrible teacher, the minefield that adolescent friendships are made up of - are all done brilliantly.
The second half of the book deals with more complex and increasingly adult issues. One thing I didn't much enjoy from the first half is the way that Montgomery has Emily narrate through a series of letters to her dead father complete with spelling mistakes, these slowly disappear which is a relief. In there place are a number of relationships; there is Ilse, a tempestuous and neglected child with whom Emily has a stormy friendship with just an occasionally competitive edge to it, Perry the houseboy with ability and ambitions who falls in love with Emily almost at first sight, and Teddy Kent who seems to be the boy that Emily prefers. Teddy's mother is the curious thing here, she's obsessive in her love for her son going as far as poisoning his cats when she feels he's become to fond of them. There is also Dean Priest, a sort of cousin in his 30's who rescues Emily after she's fallen down a cliff and is so enchanted with her that he decides to wait for her to grow up.
For a modern reader Dean is quite unsettling in a way I don't think Montgomery intended. He too, it seems, falls in love with something in Emily at first sight but she's only 12 at this point and it turns out that he was a friend of her fathers. They develop a friendship of their own which is all quite proper except for the lurking suspicion that Dean is waiting for something more and this is how the book ends. Emily is 13, she's leaving childhood behind, there's a consensus that she has some talent as a writer with the possibility of a career ahead of her, and there are all the makings of a few love triangles and tragedies ahead. I have ordered the rest of the trilogy so guess I'll find out what happens next soon enough.
You will enjoy the rest of the Emily series, I'm sure (reminds me, I have to delve back into those).
ReplyDeleteI'm not sure if you're interested in or have other LM Montgomery series, but being presumptuous, I'm looking at the bookshelf to the right of me now:
Kilmeny of the Orchard
The Story Girl and The Golden Road
Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat
Magic for Marigold
and a few collections of short stories: At the Altar, Akin to Anne, After Many Days, Along the Shore.
Thank you for giving me the impetus to revisit the bookshelf I sit next to nearly every day!
Lynda
I've just started 'Emily Climbs' and am enjoying it very much, so yes, I think there will be more Montgomery in my reading this year. Thank you for the recommendations :)
DeleteWas very interested to read about these. I too loved Anne, knew that Montgomery had written more, but haven't read any of the non-Anne books. Thanks!
ReplyDeleteI would say worth investigating. I'm not falling in love as I did at 10 with Anne of Green Gables but the Emily books are very enjoyable so far and just what I find I'm in the mood for.
DeleteJust coming to remark vacuously on what a pretty cover design that is. I must have read Emily, because we had copies at home and I remember the beginning, as she's walking round being introduced to the horrible relatives, but not a lot more, although Ilse and Teddy ring a bill. Was I defeated by the letters? Upset by the cats' deaths? I should have another look...
ReplyDeleteLovely cover and I think the rest of the series is even prettier. I'm 60 pages into the second book and enjoying it more as Emily gets older, and now I try and remember details of the Anne books I find I can't despite having read them times. Reading a little bit about Montgomery is proving interesting as well - I knew absolutely nothing about her before but she sounds quite interesting.
DeleteIt is fun to rediscover books previously read - and to enjoy them on a new level. I'm glad the recommendations may prove handy.
ReplyDeleteLM Montgomery did actually have two journal volumes (from memory) published....and I'm just about to head back to the university where I found them around fifteen years ago! They were brilliant and quite extensive, albeit a bit sad - I had the feeling that her life was a bit more Emily than Anne.
Lynda
Emily has a slightly autobiographical feel to her in places, maybe along with some wish fulfilment. It's also making me wish I knew more about Canadian literature generally. The journals sound fascinating so I'll keep an eye out for them.
DeleteI read Emily many moons (aha!) ago, and cannot remember a thing - have added to my re-read list. I've just read (for I think the first time) Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (Kate Douglas Wiggins), which is very Montgomery-like, and here too we have the older man who meets the young child and decides to wait and just pops in fairy (hmmm...) godfather-like at Xmas with expensive gifts. There are all sorts of weird bits, esp. when the two joke that he might not like her when she's a 'lady'. Eek.
ReplyDeleteIt's uncomfortable isn't it. It makes me realise what a taboo subject the relationships between older men and very young women have become especially in the last 30 years. In older mills and boon (the sort my grannie used to read and share with me when I was in my teens) I guess the men were generally in their 30's to the girls late teens or very early twenties and the Georgette Heyer's I devoured when I was 14 generally had heroines who were under 20 also falling in love with men in their 30's. At 14 that seemed reasonable enough but it's not something I care to dwell on overmuch now. Rumer Godden's 'The Greengage Summer' does something similar as well - if I remember correctly she bases that book on something that actually happened to her own family but scales back the ages of the children a couple of years. The end result made me feel that the girls were too young to be so sexually aware but again I suspect that has as much to do with shifting attitudes as anything else. I'm on the second book now and Dean and Emily's relationship plays a bigger part. There's nothing physically inappropriate but it still reads uncomfortably and I'm not exactly sure why. It's possible that Montgomery wants it to in some ways but I'm also reasonably confidant that she doesn't see him as a pervert or predator.
DeleteI wonder if the mental vs. physical childlikeness of the girls contributes to this uneasiness too - The Greengage Summer is interesting in that sense because the narrator-girl is mentally naive about the questionable events going on around her but decides she is now a 'woman' physically because she has her first period; but as we see (and certainly know!), there's a good deal more to maturity than a bit of blood. We never see the messy physicality of the girls of LMM (unless they're dying of TB and even then it's fairly neat), so they retain a constant 'too young-ness'. The one that freaks me out most is Jean Webster's Daddy-Long-Legs with its seduction by letter. Talk about creepy pre-Internet grooming.
DeleteI found some Wilkie Collins that freaked me out last year but altogether it makes me wonder how much I impose contemporary taboos onto older fiction and how much the writer intends to disturb the reader. I've flicked through Emily's Quest enough to gather that Montgomery is building up to something...
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