Book Review: Emily Climbs
Apr. 7th, 2024 06:43 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerOn and upward with Emily Byrd Starr as she ascends the Alpine path in Emily Climbs, the Alpine path being here of course not a literal mountain but Emily's road to literary success. In this book, Emily is off to Shrewsbury for high school - if she will promise her Aunt Elizabeth to give up writing while she's at school. "I can't promise that," Emily says, with the misery of despair, for she knows that Aunt Elizabeth won't be able to understand that it's not that Emily refuses, but that she simply knows she cannot keep that promise any more than she could promise to stop breathing.
Fortunately Cousin Jimmy intervenes, and Emily has only to promise to give up story-writing. ("Excellent," says her previous teacher Mr. Carpenter, who believes that this will help curb Emily's excesses.) Poems and diary entries remain fair game, and poems, therefore, are what Emily begins to send off to editors - to receive, at first, a steady stream of rejection slips.
Emotionally Emily's growth as a writer is one that any young (or indeed not-so-young) writer can relate to, but there's also a wealth of practical advice for a young writer circa 1925. Type your manuscripts if possible, at any rate only write on one side of the paper, a typed rejection is more personal (and thus more encouraging) than a printed one, etc. Montgomery is offering the budding young writers in her audience a how-to guide.
She is also, as usual, telling a cracking good story. This book has some of the best set-pieces in the whole trilogy, like the blizzard that forces Emily, Ilse, Teddy, and Perry to take shelter in an abandoned house overnight. Emily's eyes catch on Teddy's and she's shaken to her core by the sense that she's falling in love with him... only to forget about it entirely when a chance fancy of Teddy's sets off the idea for a story in Emily's head, and she lies awake all night working out A Seller of Dreams!
And then there's the bit where Emily and Ilse set off round the country to canvass for subscriptions, and get lost, and spend the night beneath the stars in a haystack. They lay awake a long time talking, then Ilse falls asleep, and Emily gazes up at the whole turning dome of the sky and the stars above her... Just beautiful, one of my favorite scenes in the trilogy. Montgomery is so good at capturing that feeling of being overwhelmed by the loveliness of an experience, which can be so hard to explain to anyone else.
Here also Emily's second sight makes another appearance: there's a missing child in the neighborhood, and in her sleep Emily arises and draws a picture of the abandoned house where the child has gotten himself trapped. Emily's appalled by the eeriness of the experience and begs Ilse not to mention it to anyone, which is such a real and human way to react, and would drive me up the wall in a fantasy novel, but it works here, perhaps because Emily's second sight is only one strand among many rather than the main driver of the plot.
(Still fascinated by the fact that L. M. Montgomery just blithely gave the heroine of her realistic novel psychic powers. Does anyone have a read on when an author could no longer get away with this? In the 1930s, Mary Grant Bruce in the Billabong series elaborates an entire theory about how telepathy is kind of like radio, actually.)
And finally, there's the wonderful scene where Emily meets fancy New York editor Miss Royal, who grew up on PEI and is visiting an aunt. Miss Royal brought along her beloved dog, Chu-Chin, whom Emily meets on the drive up to the aunt's house. Chu-Chin bounces into Miss Royal's aunt's house and proceeds to knock everything over while Emily attempts to interview a tight-lipped Miss Royal... only for it to turn out that Miss Royal thinks the dog is Emily's! Amazing. Incredible. Miss Royal begins the next chapter by laughing so hard she nearly falls over, and I always laugh too.
The dog misunderstanding cleared up, Miss Royal offers Emily the chance of a lifetime: come live with Miss Royal in New York City, and Miss Royal will introduce Emily around to her editor friends, and smooth Emily's ascent up the Alpine path! Emily tells herself that she yearns to go, but Aunt Elizabeth will never let her; is appalled when Aunt Elizabeth says she can decide for herself; attempts to convince herself that she's definitely going to take this chance of a lifetime; and then with great relief realizes that she wants to stay at New Moon. Miss Royal, appalled, tells her that she'll never develop as a writer if she stays in this poky little place, but Emily insists that she can study human nature here as well as in New York, and finishes the book once again committing herself to her chosen path: not only a writer, but a Canadian writer, chronicling the life of her own people on Prince Edward Island.
Next up: you may be surprised to learn that we are not going directly to Emily's Quest, but instead taking a detour to The Blue Castle. Perhaps Montgomery (like Emily when she conceives A Seller of Dreams) was simply so possessed by the idea of Valancy that she just had to put her trilogy aside for a bit to work the story out.
Fortunately Cousin Jimmy intervenes, and Emily has only to promise to give up story-writing. ("Excellent," says her previous teacher Mr. Carpenter, who believes that this will help curb Emily's excesses.) Poems and diary entries remain fair game, and poems, therefore, are what Emily begins to send off to editors - to receive, at first, a steady stream of rejection slips.
Emotionally Emily's growth as a writer is one that any young (or indeed not-so-young) writer can relate to, but there's also a wealth of practical advice for a young writer circa 1925. Type your manuscripts if possible, at any rate only write on one side of the paper, a typed rejection is more personal (and thus more encouraging) than a printed one, etc. Montgomery is offering the budding young writers in her audience a how-to guide.
She is also, as usual, telling a cracking good story. This book has some of the best set-pieces in the whole trilogy, like the blizzard that forces Emily, Ilse, Teddy, and Perry to take shelter in an abandoned house overnight. Emily's eyes catch on Teddy's and she's shaken to her core by the sense that she's falling in love with him... only to forget about it entirely when a chance fancy of Teddy's sets off the idea for a story in Emily's head, and she lies awake all night working out A Seller of Dreams!
And then there's the bit where Emily and Ilse set off round the country to canvass for subscriptions, and get lost, and spend the night beneath the stars in a haystack. They lay awake a long time talking, then Ilse falls asleep, and Emily gazes up at the whole turning dome of the sky and the stars above her... Just beautiful, one of my favorite scenes in the trilogy. Montgomery is so good at capturing that feeling of being overwhelmed by the loveliness of an experience, which can be so hard to explain to anyone else.
Here also Emily's second sight makes another appearance: there's a missing child in the neighborhood, and in her sleep Emily arises and draws a picture of the abandoned house where the child has gotten himself trapped. Emily's appalled by the eeriness of the experience and begs Ilse not to mention it to anyone, which is such a real and human way to react, and would drive me up the wall in a fantasy novel, but it works here, perhaps because Emily's second sight is only one strand among many rather than the main driver of the plot.
(Still fascinated by the fact that L. M. Montgomery just blithely gave the heroine of her realistic novel psychic powers. Does anyone have a read on when an author could no longer get away with this? In the 1930s, Mary Grant Bruce in the Billabong series elaborates an entire theory about how telepathy is kind of like radio, actually.)
And finally, there's the wonderful scene where Emily meets fancy New York editor Miss Royal, who grew up on PEI and is visiting an aunt. Miss Royal brought along her beloved dog, Chu-Chin, whom Emily meets on the drive up to the aunt's house. Chu-Chin bounces into Miss Royal's aunt's house and proceeds to knock everything over while Emily attempts to interview a tight-lipped Miss Royal... only for it to turn out that Miss Royal thinks the dog is Emily's! Amazing. Incredible. Miss Royal begins the next chapter by laughing so hard she nearly falls over, and I always laugh too.
The dog misunderstanding cleared up, Miss Royal offers Emily the chance of a lifetime: come live with Miss Royal in New York City, and Miss Royal will introduce Emily around to her editor friends, and smooth Emily's ascent up the Alpine path! Emily tells herself that she yearns to go, but Aunt Elizabeth will never let her; is appalled when Aunt Elizabeth says she can decide for herself; attempts to convince herself that she's definitely going to take this chance of a lifetime; and then with great relief realizes that she wants to stay at New Moon. Miss Royal, appalled, tells her that she'll never develop as a writer if she stays in this poky little place, but Emily insists that she can study human nature here as well as in New York, and finishes the book once again committing herself to her chosen path: not only a writer, but a Canadian writer, chronicling the life of her own people on Prince Edward Island.
Next up: you may be surprised to learn that we are not going directly to Emily's Quest, but instead taking a detour to The Blue Castle. Perhaps Montgomery (like Emily when she conceives A Seller of Dreams) was simply so possessed by the idea of Valancy that she just had to put her trilogy aside for a bit to work the story out.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-08 06:51 pm (UTC)although the later Billabong books are perhaps a bridge between the two, with Norah and company talking about tuning into psychic radio waves?
The use of technical language for paranormal experiences is surprisingly old! I've seen it in fiction as far back as Kipling's "Wireless" (1902). I think there are just a lot of different concepts of extrasensory whatever blurring and blending in this era. Its science fiction and horror are the same way. Emily's second sight feels deliberately folkloric to me.
Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat (1976) rests its romantic premise on a straight-up soulbond, the suspense part of the novel deriving from the fact that although the heroine has an intimate mental map of the man with whom she has been telepathically linked since childhood, she has no physical idea of what he actually looks like.
are you thinking that Montgomery needed to write a version where the heroine could get together with the Snaith/Priest character, where it would be the right and dream-fulfilling choice for her?
Yes: the attractive world-traveled outsider-dreamer with the tawny hair, the whimsical, sensitive mouth, the touch of cynicism, and the bitter laugh as real romantic hero, not bona fide terrible idea; I have not been able to find any literature on it, which is nuts, but the characterization seems far too close for coincidence, especially since Montgomery doesn't otherwise seem to use this model of dude as a recurring type. The age gap is not a factor with Barney and neither is disability, but his reputation is worse than Dean's. They are of course majorly differentiated by the fact that Barney can support Valancy for who she is while Dean falls down so hard on that front that after more than thirty years I'm still disappointed in him, but visually, it really struck me that even with all the similar descriptions, Barney's eyes are Emily-violet. Dean's are Priest-green.
(Totally and fortunately absent from Valancy's relationship with Barney is also the thing where Emily's relationship with Dean is consistently vectored through her dead father—by both of them—which is so weird that I can't even tell if the books notice it. As probably discussed the last time it came around on your journal, Emily Climbs sincerely doesn't work for me as a novel, which means I have spent a lot of time since childhood thinking about it.)
no subject
Date: 2024-04-09 01:07 pm (UTC)Mary Stewart's Touch Not the Cat has a different dynamic, since it's definitely written and marketed as a fantasy novel. In Emily or Billabong, the books are framed as completely realistic fiction, but the heroine just occasionally has a flash of clairvoyance that happens to save someone's life.
I will keep the Barney-Dean parallels in mind as I read The Blue Castle! May perhaps expand on the theme when I make my Blue Castle post.
Are you thinking of Emily's Quest perhaps as the novel that doesn't work for you? There's actually very little Dean in Emily Climbs - he's mostly abroad while Emily's in high school in Shrewsbury. But in the third book (Emily's Quest) he's going to come sweeping back in to crush her dreams by telling her that her book A Seller of Dreams is no good, and nearly marrying her during her resultant depression, and then admitting the book was good after she's thrown him over etc. etc.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-09 03:26 pm (UTC)How so? I'm willing to believe it is now marketed as a paranormal romance, but the original jacket copy does not treat it differently from her other novels of romantic suspense—a heroine, a mystery, an ambiguous hero—except for explaining that what used to be called the second sight is now recognized as telepathy, which could be realist in the '70's. It's on the Gothic end of her novels of romantic suspense, but it's not like Thornyhold (1988) which has explicit witchcraft and feels to me as though it falls between her Arthurian novels and her romances, or her children's novels which are fantasies. [edit] Doylistically, it makes sense to me that she wrote Touch Not the Cat in among her Merlin novels, but it's otherwise a return to form.
Are you thinking of Emily's Quest perhaps as the novel that doesn't work for you?
Yes; that was just mistyping as I tried to rebuild my comment.
no subject
Date: 2024-04-09 07:34 pm (UTC)I know there was a lot of interest in ESP, clairvoyance, etc. etc. in the 1970s, but I'd need to see some pretty strong evidence of mainstream belief that some people can speak to each other telepathically as if they were talking on the phone to accept that this was seen as a realistic romantic suspense novel rather than romantic suspense novel with a fun supernatural twist.