The Books: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. I: 1889-1910

Daily Book Excerpt: Memoirs:

Next book on the Memoir/Letters/Journals shelf is The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910

I am looking at the publication date of this first volume of L.M. Montgomery’s journal and it says “1985”. Hmm. I only became aware of them in the late 90s. Anyway, they suddenly were available everywhere in the States. If I had been aware of them in 1985 I would have devoured them at the speed of light, and as it was, in the late 90s, I felt that the sudden appearance, over time, of FIVE VOLUMES of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals, was like a gift from the Gods. I couldn’t get my hands on them quickly enough. It almost made me nervous, that these journals were not only now accessible to me … but … what journals! My God! Anyone who was as huge a fan of L.M. Montgomery’s books as I was flipped OUT about these journals. She kept almost a daily journal from when she was a very young girl to when she was an old woman (although depression seemed to curtail her interest in writing at the very end, the fifth volume is sporadic). She wrote 23 books (while she was alive), and posthumous volumes (of short stories and poetry) keep appearing. The woman apparently never stopped writing. I am amazed by not only her output, but her drive to keep creating, even when things got really really bad. Work kept her sane. And alongside all of that are detailed (such detailed) journals, and if you are familiar with all of her books you will recognize the Lucy Maud phrases, her themes, even her descriptions of nature (one of the unique charms of her books) are sometimes lifted wholesale out of her journal and plopped into a novel. These journals are amazing.

Now, I am a Lucy Maud fan from way back. In my daily Book Excerpt thing that I do, the “Lucy Maud Montgomery” section went on FOREVER because of the volume of books she wrote. And for the most part, they are all wonderful. There are a couple of misfires (Ahem, Ahem, Ahem – people still get mad at me for not liking those books), but in general – each book is a slamdunk, and beloved still, by future generations. An incredible body of work.

And her debut was Anne of Green Gables in 1908 (book excerpt here). Not a bad beginning. Lucy Maud Montgomery was one of those rare writers, too, was hailed immediately as a favorite – AND her reputation, if anything, just continues to grow. The books stand up. They have lasting power. In my opinion, it is the Emily series that is Montgomery’s best work … and I know others feel the same way, too, but the Anne books are also amazing. Her gift was in creating characters that were human, flawed, hilarious, smart, mischievous, and completely themselves. Think about Ilse in the Emily books. Wow. What a character. Or Valancy in The Blue Castle (another favorite of mine – excerpts here)). There is Diana Barry in the Anne books, and Leslie Moore in Anne’s House of Dreams, and the list just goes on and on and on and on. WORLDS lived in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s head.

Her short stories too are incredible. It seems there was nothing this woman couldn’t do.

She also had a very practical money-making side, which helped keep her on track. She wanted to be published. Anne was published when Lucy Maud was in her 30s – so she had years of writing before that big break. She wrote ghost stories, mushy romance stories, horror stories, Sunday School-moral stories … she would target specific genre magazines, that paid well, and then would write to order. In the last 15 years, editor Rea Wilmhurst has brought out eight – EIGHT – full volumes of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s short stories, many of them published before the publication of Anne of Green Gables (among them Along the Shore, At the Altar, Against the Odds, Akin to Anne). Another gold mine. Many of the episodes in her short stories would end up being incorporated in her novels (in some cases word for word), and you really get a sense of the writing honing her craft, and narrowing in on what she wanted to write. Like I said: an incredible body of work, incredible for its consistency.

Montgomery had what could be seen as a tragedy in her younger years, although the repercussions of it seem to have been deeply buried. Her mother died when Montgomery was only 21 months old, and her father, unable to cope, gave up custody of the child, giving her to her maternal grandparents (who raised her). Her father didn’t even stay in the area (Cavendish, Prince Edward Island). He moved to Saskatchewan when Montgomery was 7 years old, and ended up remarrying, having kids, and starting a whole new life. He promised he would send for her, but he never did. She did go out there on a trip, to visit him, when she was a young girl, and she seemed determined to love him, and forgive him all. But he abandoned her to a very lonely life – her maternal grandparents were tough, strict, and did not express love. (The Emily books, with Aunt Elizabeth, is the closest Lucy Maud Montgomery came to expressing the truth of how rigid her upbringing was). Anything fun was frowned upon, and children were to be seen and not heard, all that. Lucy Maud Montgomery was an imaginative and bright child, and in some ways the enforced isolation of her childhood helped her to live out her fantasies, and live solely in her mind where she would make up stories. A more “fun” upbringing might have lessened the storytelling urge in her. Who knows.

She was very well educated, went to college, she worked for a couple of years as a teacher in various small P.E.I. towns (which ends up being a big part of Anne Shirley’s life, in Anne of the Islandexcerpt here – and Anne of Windy Poplarsexcerpt here), and she also ended up getting a job in a newspaper. She was a working woman. Independent (although, of course, it was the late 1890s, she wasn’t going to go get an apartment by herself – she still lived with her grandparents or boarded with a family during her teaching years). She felt grateful to her grandparents for taking her in, although they never showed her any love, and basically committed herself to staying with them until they died. She would take care of them. This decision (which she stuck to) made her delay marriage for 11 years (although she was also a very independent woman and feared what marriage would do to her work ethic and her ability to write).

She had many suitors (you can’t keep track of them all), and some of them she writes about with a hilarious viciousness that still reverberates. There’s a lot of mean funny stuff in the journals. She obviously felt very private there. (In later years, she spent a lot of time going back and basically re-writing her journals, and typing them out into manuscript form – there was something compulsive about her commitment to this project – but there was probably a lot of editing that happened during the typing phase.) She considered her journals to be raw material, things she could look back to to find inspiration for her next work.

They are busy, chatty, and sometimes wildly sad. She held nothing back. She emerges as a very REAL person (just what you want from a journal of a famous person you love), and completely recognizable as the author of such works as all the Anne books, the Emily books, the short stories, and all of her stand-alone books (The Blue Castle, Magic for Marigold, Jane of Lantern Hill, Tangled Web).

She keeps track of her reading, she keeps track of what she’s working on in her writing. For the most part, she wrote short stories, but suddenly, in 1907, she found herself looking through her writer’s notebooks where she would jot down story ideas, and came across one sentence that said: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. A girl is sent to them by mistake.” That was it, but suddenly, Lucy Maud Montgomery, age 33, 34, was ready to tackle something long. She wrote the whole of Anne of Green Gables over the course of a couple of months, never stopping to rest. The book poured out of her. She sent it to a publisher. They accepted it. It was a smash hit immediately, with people like Mark Twain weighing in on how wonderful it was (Twain saying that Anne was “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice” – not too shabby!!), and went into multiple editions – and not only that but readers everywhere clamored for a sequel. Lucy Maud Montgomery didn’t particularly want to write a sequel, but again, that practical side of her came to the fore, so she wrote Anne of Avonlea to satisfy the fans. She would, over the rest of her life, end up writing six more full “Anne” books (excerpts here), as well as short stories (eventually published posthumously under the title Road to Yesterday) involving Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe. Lucy Maud had, with the freckled feisty crazy orphan Anne Shirley, hit pay dirt.

For the rest of her career, even though she had obligations to her fans (which she took very seriously), she also wrote what she wanted to write, branching out into other series (The Story Girl series – 2 books, the Emily seris – 3 books) as well as writing a couple of books (The Blue Castle and Tangled Web) that were strictly adult-fare.

I won’t jump ahead to talk about her life and what it was like in later years until I get to those volumes in her diaries. The first volume starts when Lucy Maud is about 12 years old (and the journal entries are hilarious and touching), and ends in 1910, as she is on the cusp of marrying the Reverend Ewan McDonald, after a prolonged engagement (as she basically waited for her grandmother to die, if I am remembering correctly).

Along the way, we meet the people who will be the main forces in her life. In 1898, she taught school at a small farming town called Bedeque and she boarded with a family called the Leards. She had a passionate love affair with one of the Leards, a Herman Leard, who was a simple farmer, but who ignited in the independent Lucy Maud a sexual passion that at the very end of her life she still remembered with pain. Her season in Bedeque was marked by this love affair, carried on at night in front of the fire, as the rest of the household lay sleeping, and Lucy Maud seemed tormented by the whole thing. Could she marry this man? Would she ever be satisfied? And would HE be satisfied with her? On some level, she sensed that it could never ever work out… so she eventually broke off the affair.

She never recovered from the loss of Herman Leard. Mentions of him in the journal do end up dissipating over time, but he still comes up – 20, 30 years later. He was the “one that got away” and she did not (to put it mildly) make a good match for herself with Ewan McDonald. The marriage wasn’t only unhappy – it was a shrieking unhappiness of chaos and constant mental illness that shattered her nerves. So of course in looking back on the simple kind farmer who (let’s be honest) made out with her for hours in front of the fire, caressing her, adoring her, she had a lot of regrets. Herman Leard became almost a mythical figure – a man she loved and lost, and nothing would ever be the same again.

And Leard died in 1899. She was back in Cavendish, living with her grandparents, when word came that her former lover had fallen sick and died, and she grieved it as hard as if she had been married to him for 25 years. The Herman Leard entries are wrenching to read. I am so glad that the future Lucy Maud Montgomery, typing out her journals, did not decide to “leave that out”. Because it’s the key to so much of Montgomery’s psyche, and also her work. The theme of unrequited love, love at a distance, love that dares not speak its name, thwarted love, love deferred – all of that shows up in almost every one of her books, and it can be traced to the ache she felt for Herman Leard. He is the key: the simple, uncomplicated, loving man who ignited her senses (she doesn’t SAY they slept together, and I’m not sure they did, although they definitely come close – with Lucy Maud pushing him off her at one point and saying, “No – go back to your room – I’ll go back to mine – this cannot go on …”) – and once she turned her back on him, she never found such happiness again.

Perhaps such happiness can’t survive out in the normal everyday world. Who knows. But I read the Herman Leard sections of her journals, and I ache. I had to leave someone behind too. I survived. But something was definitely lost back there, and it’s foolish to not admit it.

In many ways, Lucy Maud Montgomery decided never to love again (and she kept that promise). She widowed HERSELF when Herman Leard died.

Here is an entry from 1898. The “Herman Leard” year. She moves back to Cavendish, with her grandparents, after a tragic Bridges of Madison County goodbye with Herman, and she spent a couple of months doing battle with wanting to see him, write to him. Her love for him actually impacted her health. Squelching her natural love for him ruined her sleep, her peace of mind. So that’s the context of this next entry.

Excerpt from The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 1: 1889-1910

Saturday, Oct. 8, 1989

The “moon of falling leaves” again! How swiftly it comes around from year to year, each year seeming swifter than the last. There is always something sorrowful in the fall despite its beauty and charm. I suppose it is because it is emblematical of life’s autumn which must also come to us all. But then if we believe – and such a belief, in some shape or form, orthodox or unorthodox, is found in most of us – that after winter comes the spring of another life that ought not to sadden us. Life is a placid, uneventful thing for me just now. I have even learned to laugh again.

“But yet I know where’er I go
That there hath passed away a glory from the earth.”

This has been a “lazy” day for me. I wasn’t in a mood for work and couldn’t even get up energy enough to go on with my new story. I have written a good deal this summer and have gotten into some new periodicals, as well as keeping up with the old. I really think I am improving a great deal. I seem to see more clearly into things somehow. I suppose it would be hard if all I have gone through didn’t bring me some compensation. Sometimes I think it has taught me to see too clearly – I might be happier if my delusions and illusions were left to me. But yet – one would think blindness could never be considered a beatific state, and possibly when I get over the blinking and shrinking of new vision and accustomed to the fierce white light of reality I may feel as comfortable as of yore in my soothing twilight.

This latter part of summer has been busy and – in spots – pleasant. Of Ed, I have seen nothing and heard little. He came home to Belmont in the spring. I was in dread that he would visit his friends here and that I’d meet him somewhere. He stayed away, I suppose, as long as he decently could, and when he finally did come on a flying visit, I had been warned in time and was far enough away, suddenly finding it convenient to pay a long promised visit to Bideford. He was gone before I came back.

I spent my Bideford week with Edith England. I had a nice time and enjoyed it all very much, although there was a sorrowful side to it, too. If any person wants to see clearly just how much she is changed – whether for better or worse – let her revisit after some lapse of time any place where she has once lived. She will meet hr former self at every turn, with every familiar face, in every old recollection. She will see, in sharp contrast to the present, her old ideals, views, hopes, beliefs, as she would never see them in any other way. Such at least was my experience. I seemed to be outside of life, looking with cool, dispassionate eyes as might a disembodied spirit, on my old self, the Maud Montgomery who used to teach in Bideford school, and who, in some curious manner, seemed to be still living there. And I saw, as I had not before seen, the difference – in ideals and illusions, in estimate of people and things, in capacity for enjoyment and suffering. I saw how much I had gained in some respects, how much I had lost – irretrievably lost – in others. I had at times a curious sense of imposing on the good Bideford people who were so kind to me – because they thought they were welcoming the Maud Montgomery they had known of old, whereas I was not she at all, but a new creature altogether, who bears her name and inhabits her body but is only an impostor after all. The former Maud was so different – she was a happy, light-hearted girl with any amount of ideals and illusions and a comfortable belief in the stability of “things temporal”. She had some strong ambitions and aspirations but her main object was to “have a good time” and she had a knack of succeeding with it. She believed in herself and other people, had a good conscience and a whole heart, and did not trouble herself greatly over the perplexities of life. But the girl of to-day – how different from all that is she! She has no illusions and few ideals; life is flat, stale, and unprofitable, viewed from her old standpoint and full of snares and pitfalls as viewed from her new. She has a “past” and its shadow falls ever across her path. She has looked below the surface and seen strange things. She could no more live that Bideford year over as she lived it then than she could gather up her old illusions and clothe herself in them as in a garment outgrown. And would she if she could? Do you know, that is a question I often ask myself – “If I could would I go back to my old self?” – and I can never answer it. I can never dare to say either “no” or “yes”. The fruit of the tree of knowledge may leave a bitter taste in the eater’s mouth, but there is something in its flavor that can never be forgotten or counterfeited.

At the end of my Bideford week I went to Bedeque!

Don’t you wonder how I dared do it? I wondered not a little myself. But Helen had made me promise to go and I could hardly refuse or put it off any longer. Besides, I had another reason which I did not proclaim from the housetops.

In the months that had gone by since I left Bedeque I had had a hard fight and, though often worsted, it would have been hard indeed if I had not gained some poor victory in the end. I had really succeeded in a measure in stifling my infatuation for Herman Leard – strangled it into unconsciousness. Was it really dead? That was what I wanted to know. That was why I went to Bedeque. If when I met him it could be without a tremor or a heartbeat then I would gladly realize that I was free from the thralldom of that tyrannical passion.

Helen met me at the boat in the evening and we walked up to the house. Herman was building a load of hay in the field by the road and came over to speak to me. The very moment I put my hand in his and looked into his eyes there surged over me the sickening conviction that I loved him as madly as ever. At that moment all the passion I had hoped was dead started with one agonizing throb into trebly convulsive life.

I went into the house as one in a dream. They had company that evening and, as of old, I was forced to mask my pain under smiles and vivacity. It was only when I got away to bed that I could find relief in a passionate fit of tears. When it was over the reactive calm enabled me to look the situation in the face with some degree of firmness. And I made the resolution that I would avoid Herman in every possible way during my visit.

You may not believe that I kept this resolution – but I did, although what it cost me cannot be expressed. The house was full of visitors most of the time and this made it easier. Then Helen and I were much away visiting and while we were home I kept out of Herman’s way markedly. Oh, I was merry and unconcerned enough, but I cried myself to sleep every night I was there. On the last evening we were all out in the yard in the twilight. Herman came along, said he was going for the cows, that there was a very pretty lane on the way and “wouldn’t I come and see it”. I took one step forward – I wanted to go more than I have ever wanted anything in the world. Then I stopped. Something – I don’t know what – held me back. It would be madness to go and undo the work of months – lose what I had so hardly gained. I said, “I’m afraid it is going to rain,” and turned back. It was the wisest thing I ever did in my life – and the hardest.

I wonder what would have happened if I had gone. I shall never know – and to the end of my life I shall go on wondering.

I was so thankful that my visit was at an end. It seemed to me that if I had had to stay one day longer I would have died or gone crazy. I think Herman was angry because I had not gone with him for that walk – at anyrate, he disappeared Saturday morning and did not even come to say good-bye to me. And so it ends – yes, ends. For I will never go back to Bedeque and I expect and hope that I will never see Herman Leard again. I feel that no love can ever again be to me what mine for him was – that never again will I meet any man who will have the power to stir my heart and soul to their profoundest depths as did Herman Leard. And, all in all, I think it is best so for I believe that such love is hardly ever the forerunner of happiness – it is a “challenge to fate” and she punishes it surely and severely. I have had my love dream and it is dead – or murdered – and I have buried it very deeply – and now what I have to do is to forget it as utterly as may be.

When I had once left Bedeque I lapsed back into my state of mind before going – a sort of pangless resignation to my lot. I came home – I worked and studied and thought hard – and now I am at peace. I feel no active pain. Sometimes – for instance when I am writing like this – I feel a stab of the old agony and a suddenly realization of all I have missed comes to me sickeningly. Then I close my eyes and pray to die. But it passes and I am calm once more. I am not unhappy now – at least not with a positive unhappiness. There is a certain negative unhappiness in my life – the unhappiness not of present pain but of absent joy. But I think there are really very few really happy people in the world – I can count on my ten fingers all I know whom I believe are really perfectly happy – and I cannot expect to be more favored than the majority. And, after all, I frankly admit that my suffering was no more than my just punishment – although I don’t know that a sense of having merited one’s pain alleviates it any – rather aggravates it, I should say.

But I must stop turning myself inside out in this uncanny fashion. For after all, words, even the most felicitous, say either too much or too little. I have much to be thankful for – thankful that I did not wreck my life altogether in that mad passion of last winter. I came perilously near to it. Oh, thank God, it is all over!!!

I came home by way of Park Corner and Clara came down with me for a week. We had quite a gay time with picnics, drives, etc.

Cavendish is looking very beautiful now, with bloomy mists purpling over its dark spruce hills and all the splendor of crimson and gold among its maples and birches. Cavendish is really the prettiest country place I’ve ever been in. It is a long, narrow settlement, bordering on and following the outline of the north shore, whose wonderful waters, ever changing in hue and sheen, now silvery gray, now shimmering blue, now darkly azure, now misty with moonrise or purple with sunset, can be seen from any and every point ….

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19 Responses to The Books: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. I: 1889-1910

  1. Desirae says:

    OUCH. Seriously, just… ouch. Lucy Maude (that’s how I think of her now, thanks to you) is basically Miss Lavendar, but without the chance for reconciliation.

    I am so excited for you to be posting from these! I didn’t even know they existed until I started reading you.

  2. sheila says:

    Miss Lavendar!!!!! Painful!

    Yes, it is so amazing how she incorporated all of these crazy feelings into very specific character studies – and her belief in the “happy ending” for her books was mainly a wish-fulfillment, because her dreams hadn’t been fulfilled. She was determined that HER characters would find love – even if they had to wait for years. You can see how powerful that was for her … Ugh.

    Totally OUCH.

  3. tracey says:

    Sheila — I need to get these journals for myself.

    Mainly to see if she ever mentions Horton Foote.

  4. sheila says:

    Ha! I’m sure Horton Foote is somehow relevant to this early 20th century Canadian woman. I’m sure there’s a connection!

  5. tracey says:

    Yes, I’m sure he spoke to her across the space-time continuum or something.

  6. sheila says:

    Desirae – apparently there is now a comprehensive biography out of LMM (written by one of the editors of her journals) – I do want to read it, especially what went on in those last years when she was barely writing in her journal (but of course still churning out books). It was hard for me to even get through that last volume, because she seemed so destroyed, so distraught, that I felt like I was invading her privacy.

    So I do look forward to hearing someone analyze what exactly it was that went so wrong for her (emotionally) in those last years. The approach of WWII didn’t help – I know she found the prospect of another war shattering.

  7. Rachel says:

    I love all your posts about L.M. Montgomery–it’s pretty hard to find any serious discussion of her. And thanks for mentioning The Tangled Web, one of my favorite Montgomery books and one that’s kind of a forgotten cousin.

    You can feel that sense of isolation, even desperation, all throughout the Emily books (even with the happy ending) and in the characterization of Leslie Moore.

  8. Desirae says:

    I find her belief in happy endings kind of fascinating, both from a biographical and a lit crit point of view. In Anne of the Island (I think) Anne says “only a genius should write an unhappy ending” to one of her friends, and I take that as writing advice. Not that only a genius should attempt it, but that if something is to have an unhappy ending it must be the right ending; the reader should look at it and think that it HAD to end that way. They have to be earned. Of course, I guess this is true for any kind of ending.

    This could not be less related, but would you mind if I sent you an e-mail about Geek Love? I’ve finished it lately and I’m dying to talk about it.

  9. sheila says:

    Rachel – I was looking through some of my LMM posts this morning as I was putting together this post, and I suddenly got this huge urge to read Tangled Web again. I love that book so much. Aunt Becky and her jug!! And that masterpiece of an opening scene around Becky’s death bed where all the characters are introduced. Lucy Maud at her very finest.

    I’ve always felt that the Emily books are her best – or maybe it’s just that they are the most personal. In my opinion, it is her Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man. You get the sense that Emily’s work will always be her first love … and Lucy Maud seems to really try to get to the heart of that isolation, and also that ambition. I love Emily.

    And yes, I agree that Leslie Moore is one of her most unforgettable characters.

    I love talking about this stuff with people who have read more than just the Anne book!!

  10. sheila says:

    Desirae – Oh please, girl, shoot me an email! I may not have time to respond until the weekend, but would love to hear your thoughts. I still have only read that book once. It was too painful to even look at for years. Incredible work of art.

    And I agree: her belief in happy endings could not be shaken – she would prefer to write about things as they SHOULD be rather than as they ARE. But in books like the Emily books – and, even, I suppose in Anne – with the torment Anne and Gilbert put each other through through the first three books – the happiness must be earned. People escape sorrow by the skin of their teeth. And I don’t know, but I get the sense that the pain and sorrow that Emily went through – with Jarback Priest, and burning her book, and the scissor in her foot – will mark her forever, no matter how happy she eventually will be with Teddy. Emily paid – dearly – for her dream deferred.

  11. Rachel says:

    Oh God, that scene where Emily burns her book. It brings me right back to Little Women and Amy burning Jo’s manuscript. Even though I’m something of a minority Amy fan, I remember thinking when I first read it that falling through the ice and nearly drowning was an incredibly insufficient punishment for destroying someone’s art. I guess I still do.

  12. sheila says:

    What Amy did was unforgivable. I know she felt sorry, boo-hoo, but I still get mad when I think about her doing that.

  13. sheila says:

    And speaking of unforgivable: it was Dean Priest who made Emily doubt her book – and Emily so thought he was smarter than she was, etc., that she was destroyed by his words – and he KNEW that she would be destroyed and that was why he did it. Only ostensibly to clear the way for her to love him and him alone.

    That guy skeeves me out. He’s a great character – a truly creepy haunted man – but you get (because Lucy Maud is so brilliant) why Emily would be drawn to him.

    But that act … and how he finally admitted that it was because he was jealous of the book …

    I still shiver. Artists will always encounter jealousy – especially from those who claim to love them. Lucy Maud nails it.

  14. Rachel says:

    Yes to this. Amy’s action is unforgivable, but it’s still the action of a bratty little kid. Dean is an intelligent adult who isn’t working towards the destruction of the art itself, but something much worse: the destruction of the artist. Dean must know, since he knows Emily so well, that by tearing apart her belief in her writing, he is tearing apart her belief in herself. For someone like Emily, her writing is so tied to who she is, that there’s really no distinction between the artist and the person. It’s definitely shudder-worthy.

    I think Montgomery understood jealousy really, really well. The Emily books are riddled with it: Dean’s jealousy about Emily, Teddy’s mother’s jealousy over her husband and son, Ilse’s jealousy, her father’s belief that his wife abandoned him. And, since I mentioned Leslie Moore a few posts back, I will add that there’s one detail in her story that I love. The part where she admits to Anne that she was so jealous of Anne’s happy life that she wanted to break her china dogs. Her impossibly cute china dogs. It makes you laugh because it’s so true. Jealousy is comical when you can look outside of it, but when you can’t, even the small, stupid annoyances get poisoned.

    Clearly I need to go find some L.M. Montgomery message boards to get all this analysis out of my system.

  15. sheila says:

    Rachel – well, consider this your very own Lucy Maud message board. :)

    Point taken about Amy being a bratty child. Dean Priest is far more malevolent – and it’s even more creepy because he clocked her as someone to conquer when she was only 11 years old and he saved her life. Member that creepy moment when he looks at her contemplatively and says, “Hm. I think I’ll wait for you.”

    There would always have been something unconquerable in Emily – and Dean Priest could not deal with that, and yet instead of leaving Emily alone and moving on – he made it his business to destroy her – and then CLAIM her. Messed UP.

    Good point about the jealousy – the jealousy that twists people’s souls. Oh and Leslie with the dogs – I forgot about that part. It’s tragic, but yes, so understandable. And Anne is so good-hearted she couldn’t understand why her offers of friendship were being rebuffed. I love it when Captain Jim says to Anne at one point – “Yes, you had an unhappy childhood but that is just the normal unhappiness of a neglected child. Leslie had tragedy in her childhood – and so her grief and sadness is beyond the pale – she CAN’T let you in.”

    I was always a little bit sorry when Leslie sort of exited the action after Anne’s House of Dreams (although her kids are important in Rilla of Ingleside and the other later books). I always thought she would make an interesting heroine of her OWN book.

  16. eugenia says:

    Oh my God, I NEED TO GET MY HANDS ON LM’S JOURNALS.

  17. Maya says:

    Oh my I only discovered this site 2 days ago having been in love in LMM’s books since childchood. I read them all in polish first and it was such a treat to be able to read them in english after a couple of years!

    Anyway never knew about the journals and now they are not to easy to get. Can anybody tell me WHY I mean WHY really she thought she had to break up with Herman?

    • sheila says:

      Maya – LMM was a bit of a snob. She couldn’t see herself married to an uneducated farmer. She never expressly said she regretted her choice in leaving him behind – but, damn, 25 years later, she was still mentioning him in her journal. It’s heartbreaking!

  18. Bhadra says:

    Thank you so much for this series! I love L M Montgomery’s novels. Especially the Emily series–I think they are deeper and better written than the others. I’m trying to get hold of the later 4 journals.

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