osprey_archer | Book Review: Emily of Deep Valley

Maud Hart Lovelace’s Emily of Deep Valley is one of my favorite Deep Valley books, and it’s also something of an odd duck. Winona and Carney, the other two characters to get their own spinoff books, were both powerful secondary characters in the original series. Emily Webster, by contrast, is never even mentioned in the Betsy-Tacy series proper.

She’s a few years younger than Betsy and her Crowd, a shy, serious high school student who has been raised mostly by her grandfather after her parents died young. Her grandfather, a Civil War veteran, is loving, a little forgetful, not so much old-fashioned as completely unaware of changes in attitudes since his own youth. It doesn’t occur to him that Emily might want to go to college, and Emily, aware that her aging grandfather can no longer look after himself, doesn’t tell him.

But she nonetheless struggles when all her high school friends go off to college, leaving her alone and immured, as she feels, in her little house out past the slough. As the autumn passes, she sinks into a slough of despair, and the rest of the book is about Emily’s decision to fight her way back out. No, she is not going to college, but that doesn’t mean her education is over: she can continue to learn, continue to grow, and although this may not be the life she initially wanted, she can nonetheless build a life that she’s happy to live.

I first read this book not long after I quit grad school, and although there are obvious differences between my life and Emily’s, I had a similar feeling of finding myself stuck in a life that wasn’t what I wanted, with the same feeling that there was nothing I could do to change it, and it was such a relief, a breath of fresh air, to see Emily finding ways that she could change her life.

She takes up piano lessons again; starts taking dance lessons; begins reading a biography of Lincoln with her grandfather; starts up a Browning Club. Little changes lead to bigger changes, invitations to dances, new friends, a romance…

I enjoy Lovelace’s romances, but I think I enjoy even more her failed romances. In this book, Emily has a painful crush on her debate club teammate Don, a brilliant, moody, sulky boy with whom she has long, deep talks about literature on the train to debate tournaments, even though he doesn’t pay much attention to her at school.

Catnip for a bright, sensitive, lonely high school girl, in other words. It’s fascinating to watch Emily’s feelings for him develop over the course of the book. Even at the beginning, she has a clear understanding of his faults, and over time that understanding deepens - and yet at first, this deeper understanding doesn’t undercut her feelings for him at all! If anything, it only intensifies her crush.

It’s only once she has a standard of comparison - men who pay attention to her whenever she’s around, instead of just when they’re on the debate train together - that she begins to feel just how wearing his faults are. True, his moodiness gives him a romantically Byronic air; but how much more romantic is a man who loves you so much that he is always letting you know it.