The Books: At the Altar: ‘The Dissipation of Miss Posonby’ (L.M. Montgomery)

Children’s/YA bookshelf:

At the Altar – ‘The Dissipation of Miss Posonby’ – by L.M. Montgomery

I love when she has these old-fashioned Victorian titles. ‘The Dissipation of Miss Posonby’. Wonderful.

Miss Posonby is one of Lucy Maud delightful old-maid characters. She’s prim, tidy, proper – and completely trapped by her circumstances (her father is a tyrant) … Eventually, this story is about how Miss Posonby hears that an old beau of hers has returned to town – after 20 years being away – and someone is throwing a party for him … and she wants to go, but her father refuses and, I believe, locks Miss Posonby in her room. What eventually happens is the two young girls next door (19, 18 years old) get all invested in Miss Posonby’s old romance – she says she doesn’t have a dress to go to the party anyway … she says all of this out of her bedroom window, where she is locked in … and the girls live across the way. Eventually, they lend her one of their dresses – and climb it up to her in the old oak tree outside her window. Miss Posonby, once she puts on the pretty dress, is revealed to be a beautiful ripe woman in her 40s, not the silly old maid who lives like Emily Dickinson in her tower-room. She goes to the party, is reunited with her old beau, and is happy! In her utter dissipation.

Here is the opening of the story. I love the tone Lucy Maud takes. It’s comedic.

Excerpt from At the Altar – ‘The Dissipation of Miss Posonby’ – by L.M. Montgomery

Miss Posonby sat and sewed at her window for hours at a time, but she never looked our way, partly, I suppose, from habit induced by modesty, since the former occupants of our room had been two gay young bachelors, whose names Jerry and I found cut all over our window-panes with a diamond.

Jerry and I sat a great deal at ours, laughing and talking, but Miss Posonby never lifted her head or eyes. Jerry couldn’t stand it long; she declared it got on her nerves; besides, she felt sorry to see a fellow creature wasting so many precious moments of a fleeting lifetime at patchwork. So one afternoon she hailed Miss Posonby with a cheerful “hello”, and Miss Posonby actually looked over and said “good afternoon,” as prim as an eighteen-hundred-and-forty fashion plate.

Then Jerry, whose name is Geraldine only in the family Bible, talked to her about the weather. Jerry can talk interestingly about anything. In five minutes she had performed a miracle – she had made Miss Posonby laugh. In five minutes more she was leaning half out of the window showing Miss Posonby a new, white, fluffy, frivolous, chiffony waist of hers, and Miss Posonby was leaning halfway out of hers looking at it eagerly. At the end of a quarter of an hour they were exchanging confidences about their favourite books. Jerry was a confirmed Kiplingomaniac, but Miss Posonby adored Laura Jean Libbey. She said sorrowfully she supposed she ought not to read novels at all since her father disapproved. We found out later on that Mr. Posonby’s way of expressing disapproval was to burn any he got hold of, and storm at his daughter about them like the confirmed old crank he was. Poor Miss Posonby had to keep her Laura Jeans locked up in her trunk, and it wasn’t often she got a new one.

Friom that day dated our friendship with Miss Posonby, a curious friendship, only carried on from window to window. We never saw Miss Posonby anywhere else; we asked her to come over but she said her father didn’t allow her to visit anybody. Miss Posonby was one of those meek women who are ruled by whomsoever happens to be nearest them, and woe be unto them if that nearest happen to be a tyrant. Her meekness fairly infuriated Jerry.

But we liked Miss Posonby and we pitied her. She confided to us that she was very lonely, and that she wrote poetry. We never asked to see the poetry, although I think she would have liked to show it. But, as Jerry says, there are limits.

We told Miss Posonby all about our dances and picnics and beaus and pretty dresses; she was never tired of hearing of them; we smuggled her library novels – Jerry got our cook to buy them – and boxes of chocolates, from our window to hers; we sat there on moonlit nights and communed with her while other girls down the street were enteretaining callers on their verandahs; we did everything we could for her except to call her Alicia, although she beggued us to do so. But it never came easily to our tongues; we thought she must have been born and christened Miss Posonby; “Alicia” was something her mother could only have dreamed about her.

We thought we knew all about Miss Posonby’s past; but even pale, drab, china-blue women can have their secrets and keep them. It was a full half year before we discovered Miss Posonby’s.