A Certain Slant of Light

The one drawback of reading all of L. M. Montgomery’s books in publication order was that, in my memory, the last book Anne of Ingleside is pretty dire. So I picked it up with an inward moan, but in fact (perhaps this is a case of suitably lowered expectations?) it’s not nearly as bad as I remembered.

What it is, on the whole, is inessential. These feel like the sort of stories that a modern author might share on Patreon, cute little tales about the characters that don’t change your understanding of them or their world in any way, but might satisfy your need just to stay in that world a little while longer.

They’re pleasant enough tales of the hijinks and youthful mishaps of Anne’s children, mostly, enjoyable enough to read and eminently forgettable thereafter. Except the one where six-year-old Walter walks home alone at night because he’s realized he’s been sent away because Mother is sick, and he’s convinced she’ll die before he returns. That one perhaps has a little more heft than the others.

And I did remember the Anne stories that bookend the book, which is probably responsible for my remembered low opinion. The beginning of the book features Anne and Diana spending a lovely day together, which would be delightful except that the narrative keeps insistently reminding us that Diana is FAT. Now, Diana has always been a plump girl, and if the book mentioned it and moved on as the earlier Anne books do that would be one thing, but it comes up again… and again… and again… It comes to seem so mean-spirited. Just let Anne and Diana enjoy their ramble in the woods in peace!

Then at the end of the book, Anne suddenly becomes convinced that Gilbert no longer loves her! Why? No reason. No, literally, there is no reason. She’s just out of sorts with life, that’s all. Eventually she realizes her folly and then she and Gilbert are off to a medical conference in Scotland, HOORAY, but first we have to bushwhack through a few chapters of pointless jealousy.

And, I mean, sure, people do get these notions into their heads sometimes. I can’t argue that it’s unrealistic. But I don’t read L. M. Montgomery for her stone-cold realism! I read her so that the characters and I can saunter together down the White Way of Delight!

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And that concludes the L. M. Montgomery readthrough! Which of course means that it is time for me to tackle some other reading plans.

1. First, I’m going to complete the Jane Austen reread that I started... back in 2022 or so... okay, so it’s been on hiatus a bit, but it is halfway done. Next up is Mansfield Park.

2. Then I intend to get around to the Newbery books of 2024, which I have disgracefully neglected thus far this year.

(2.a. Yes, indeed, I am still working on the Newbery project! It’s whirring slowly away in the background. I have seventeen books left to go in the 1930s, which means that at the current rate I’ll probably finish it... sometime in 2026. Good grief.)

3. Then John Le Carre’s Smiley books! I’m not sure how this will go, to be honest; I may end up deciding that I need long breaks between books, as Le Carre can be so bleak. But I’m looking forward to it all the same. There’s just nothing like a Cold War spy novel, you know?

If I recall correctly, L. M. Montgomery wrote the last two Anne books purely for the money. Authors sometimes do write masterpieces under such conditions (Dickens wrote A Christmas Carol to stave off the threat of bankruptcy), but Montgomery achieved the more usual result of grimly extruding something rather dull. This is where my childhood readthrough of the Anne of Green Gables books ground to a halt, and I can see why.

Really Anne of Windy Poplars bears a resemblance to Chronicles of Avonlea: a collection of more or less unrelated episodes, sewn loosely together by the presence of Anne, most but not all involving matchmaking. (Anne of Windy Poplars also features a story about a pair of terrible twins – Anne can’t escape the curse of twins! – plus an elderly rich lady who takes a gruesome joy in relating all the untimely deaths that have occurred in her family.)

But Chronicles of Avonlea, being forthrightly a short story collection, uses variety in format and point of view that makes each match-making tale feel fresh and different. Anne of Windy Poplars, on the other hand, gets repetitious.

However, I forgive the book everything else for the sake of Katherine Brooke, Anne’s bitterly sarcastic second teacher at Summerside High. Katherine Brooke hates everyone and everything, can scarcely speak without unleashing a sarcastic jibe, and bears a particular spite against Anne, both because Katherine wanted the principle-ship which Anne got, and just in general because Anne seems so disgustingly happy. She is horrible. I love her. I am baffled that Anne wants to befriend her, because after about twenty minutes of Katherine I would want to wring her neck.

But Anne believes that deep, deep (DEEP) down Katherine feels trapped and lonely and wants a friend, and of course she is correct. Eventually she manages to inveigle Katherine into accepting an invitation to spend Christmas at Green Gables, and after an invigorating snowshoe walk Katherine pours out the tale of her lonely, embittered childhood. This festering sore lanced, Katherine begins to heal, and blossoms out extraordinarily while retaining her sarcastic edge.

The Tale of Katherine Brooke looms so large in my memory of the book that I was surprised to find it really only takes center stage for a couple of chapters. Katherine Brooke, the world’s most aggravating coworker, is a C-plot for the first half of the book, bursts into prominence for those Christmas at Green Gables chapters, and fades away into the background as Anne gets back to matchmaking again.

I’ve got a bit of a backlog of Montgomery reviews, which I’ll be posting over the next few days, because they’ve piled up rather while I was pondering what to write about Pat of Silver Bush.

This is one of my favorite Montgomery novels, which is, I understand, a minority view. But I see a lot of myself in Pat, in her hatred of change, her desire to remain a child forever (I once read a book which asserted “All children want to grow up,” and I’ve never felt so alienated), her lamentations that it really is a pity that people have to grow up and get married and move away.

I don’t, admittedly, share her intense domesticity: her love of washing dishes, her enthusiasm for spring cleaning the house from top to bottom, her general desire to make her childhood home Silver Bush her life’s work. But it is fascinating to me that this domesticity actually makes Pat feel alienated from most of the girls she knows. As she sighs to Judy (a servant at Silver Bush, but really Pat’s foster-mother in all but name), “I don’t seem to be like other girls, Judy. They all want to go to college and have a career. I don’t… I just want to stay at Silver Bush and help you and mother.”

The 1930s seems rather early for all the other girls to be wanting college and a career, and yet here’s Pat already sighing over it. (Of course, part of this is that there was a backlash against this sort of thing in the 1950s, and the memory of the later decade tends to efface the earlier one nowadays.)

But if Pat isn’t like the other, modern girls, she’s not the traditional girl her elders might desire, either. She doesn’t want to get married and have what society would regard as a home of her own. Nor will she ever fulfill the average readers’ desire that she stop crying over every tree that gets cut down and find some greater ambition than washing the dishes till they shine.

Pat knows exactly who she is and what she wants, and what she wants is to stay in her own home, her childhood home, and love it and take care of it and ensure that here in this one place nothing ever changes. She cannot and will not change to please anyone else, and I admire the pigheadedness even as I recognize that in trying to stop change, Pat might as well be trying to stop the sun.

The best and the worst that can be said of L. M. Montgomery’s Magic for Marigold is that it is fine. It’s a very readable book, but never anything more than that.

Marigold is an only child, who lives in the homestead of Cloud of Spruce with Old Grandmother, Young Grandmother, and her widowed mother. No children live nearby, and so Marigold plays with her imaginary friend Sylvia, and it will perhaps tell you all that you need to know about the book that although we hear a lot about Sylvia, we never actually get to play with Sylvia and Marigold.

Instead, Marigold makes a succession of temporary friends. The runaway princess Varvara, who escaped from a nearby hotel and just wants to have fun for a day. Her cousin Gwennie, whom Marigold started off hating because an aunt always extolled Gwennie’s goodness to the skies – until Marigold discovers that Gwennie hates her because said aunt has always told Gwennie that Marigold is the good one. A succession of girls that Marigold meets on visits to various aunts and cousins. A couple of boys.

This book evidently started out as a collection of magazine stories, which explains a lot about it. Each story is interesting enough in itself, but they never add up to anything – just separate beads strung together on the connecting thread of Marigold’s imaginary friend Sylvia, who of course vanishes in the last chapter.

I considered, briefly, leaving The Blue Castle out of my L. M. Montgomery readthrough, since I reread it so recently when I was on Prince Edward Island. “But why,” I asked, “would I deny myself the pleasure of rereading it once again?”

So reread it I did, and as ever it remains a delight. Twenty-nine-year-old Valancy Stirling lives the grim gray life of a spinster, cowed by her mother and trampled by her clan—until she is diagnosed with a fatal heart condition. Then she realizes that she’s going to die without having ever really lived, she casts off conventional restraints. She says exactly what she thinks! She refuses to take Redfern’s Purple Pills, which her aggravated relations push on her, as they are convinced she’s going mad! She takes a job as a hired girl in local handyman Roaring Abel’s house, so she can look after his daughter Cissie, who is dying of consumption.

The Stirling clan nearly expires at this development. A member of their connection—going into service? Working for a drunk, looking after his dying daughter, who had a baby out of wedlock a few years ago? The horror. But Valancy is having the time of her life. At last she’s really useful to someone; at last she has a friend, the first friend that she has ever had in her life.

This first taste of friendship prepares Valancy for her next great step. After Cissie dies, Valancy asks Barney Snaith to marry her.

Barney Snaith is a local reprobate, agreed by all to be some sort of criminal, not because he’s ever been caught breaking the law but because he lives all alone on an island up somewhere in the Mistawis, and what could that mean except a criminal past? He’s got a bitter, cynical sense of humor and a kind heart, as witness his generosity to Cissie in the years of her illness and to Valancy, too, once she arrives to care for Cissie; and so Valancy explains to him that she’s got a year to live, and she’d like to really live it, so could he marry her please?

Valancy therefore enters the marriage under the impression that Barney is acting more or less out of altruism, which in different hands could be a recipe for angst, but in fact Valancy is blissfully happy. The last third of the book is an idyll: Valancy and Barney sitting before the roaring fire in Barney’s island cabin, wandering the woods and steams of the Mistawis, sleeping under the stars on beds of bracken, sharing flights of fancy about the loveliness of nature and just as contentedly sharing peaceful silences.

On my previous entry, I noted that Montgomery paused between the second and third books of the Emily trilogy to write The Blue Castle. sovay suggested that Barney Snaith is as it were an off-shoot of Dean Priest, Emily’s most compelling and least suitable suitor. He’s a thousand times more interesting than Teddy Kent, a fascinating conversationalist, a world traveler whose friendship with Emily immensely expands her horizons, an encouraging friend – right up until he realizes just how passionately committed Emily is to her writing, at which point he grows jealous and belittling toward her talent.

sovay’s theory, and I think there’s something to it although it would be hard to prove, is that Montgomery needed to write a book where the Dean character is the right choice, before wrapping up the Emily books where his flaws means he is emphatically not. Like Dean, Barney Snaith is a world-traveler with a bitter, cynical sense of humor, a delightful conversationalist who yet knows how to be silent, a man whose friendship with the heroine immeasurably enlarges her world—but he lacks that fatal jealousy that eventually makes Dean start to try to hem Emily in rather than help her open out.

Admittedly, Valancy has no artistic inclinations to speak of, so we don’t actually get to see what Barney would do if he came to see her Art as an unconquerable rival. But one has the impression that he just wouldn’t ever see it that way; if Valancy became a keen watercolorist, Barney would be able to share her affections with her paintbox. Perhaps he’d even be glad that Valancy has her own art to pursue while he works on his books.

(Barney Snaith is secretly Valancy’s favorite nature writer, John Foster, a coincidence that becomes funnier every time I read this book, especially since Barney scoffs at John Foster so. After Barney goes off on a reverie about dandelions, Valancy teases him, “That sounds John Foster-ish,” and Barney replies, “What have I done to deserve a slam like that?”)

And then of course it turns out that Valancy isn’t actually dying of heart disease, and she leaves Barney because she’s so appalled that he might think she lured him into marriage under false pretenses—except of course by now Barney has fallen in love with her! Valancy is not convinced by his protestations of the same, nor by the fact that he bought her a fifteen thousand dollar pearl necklace for Christmas (did I mention that he’s secretly the millionaire heir to the fortune from Redfern’s Purple Pills?). But then Barney gets mad because he thinks Valancy’s rejecting him because she’s snobbish that his family made their fortune in patent medicines, and that fetches her! HAPPY END.

There are certain books where one just feels that the author was having a fantastic time from beginning to end, and this is one of them. Simply glorious wish fulfillment from top to bottom, with just enough bite to keep it from melting away like cotton cotton.

Emily Byrd Starr! Although I have (for the most part) enjoyed my wander through L. M. Montgomery's bibliography, a little part of me has been waiting impatiently to get to Emily of New Moon, and I have at last arrived.

Emily of New Moon is L. M. Montgomery's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Girl. Emily is a proud, sensitive child, stubborn and intense and impelled by a passionate need to write her strange fancies. Until the age of eleven, she lives in near-seclusion with her dreamy consumptive father.

But after he dies, she goes to live with her long-dead mother's much-older sisters - plus Cousin Jimmy, who is considered not all there, in part because he composes poetry. Doesn't write it down, mind, just keeps it in his head, and recites it in the fall when he is boiling the pigs' potatoes, turning them round and round in a vast cauldron under the stars.

This is perhaps Montgomery's most gothic novel, or rather her most gothic trilogy. There is a vein of darkness under the bright and sparkling surface of her books (and sometimes not too far under the surface), and I think that contrast is part of the reason why they have endured when so many other books have faded. This is the book where it breaks closest to the surface.

Some of this is sheer aesthetic: this is a book with a lot of night scenes, Emily running with the Wind Woman in the gloaming, her first glimpse of the shadowy New Moon kitchen, the candles that are the only light allowed at tradition-bound New Moon. But it's also there in the scene where Emily's relatives draw lots to see who has to take her, because none of them want her - except Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy, who don't count, because Aunt Elizabeth is boss at New Moon and everyone knows it. In Aunt Elizabeth's none too subtle domestic tyranny; in the fact that Cousin Jimmy is not all there because years before, when they were children, Aunt Elizabeth pushed him down the well.

It's there in the story of Ilse Burnley, too, Emily's best friend, similarly imaginative but imbued with a fearful temper: fire to Emily's ice. Although Ilse is not at all a pattern young lady, she's allowed to play with Emily because everyone knows that the reason she's like that is that her father neglects her disgracefully. Ilse's father can't be bothered with her, because when she was a baby, her mother ran away with another man.

Or so, at least, everyone thinks. When Emily learns the story, she's tormented by the idea that Ilse's mother could have abandoned her baby. Desperately ill with a fever, she has a vision: Ilse's mother fell down an old well! In her delirium, she insists that the well be searched, and to calm her Aunt Elizabeth promises to have it done - whereupon the searchers find Mrs. Burnley's skeleton.

Emily's second sight will be a running theme in these books, and it fascinates me because these are otherwise perfectly realistic novels. I grew more interested still when littlerhymes and I read Mary Grant Bruce's Billabong books (published between 1910 and 1943; almost exactly contemporary to L. M. Montgomery's own career), another set of realistic novels in which the heroine (Norah) sometimes saves the day with her second sight. Now it's clear in both cases that this ability is a little uncanny, and does push at the bounds of realism - but not so much that it actually breaks them and pushes the books into another genre, which I think it would do today.

Another thing that I find striking, in terms of cultural shifts, is that Ilse is such a spitfire. In college I did my thesis project about American girls' literature between 1890 and 1915 (Emily is of course a bit later, but still close enough for government work), and a lot of the secondary literature makes a big to-do about how so many of these books are anti-feministly focused on teaching girls to rein in their tempers, but I've always found it more striking just how much temper these characters are allowed to display in the first place, and how generally sympathetic the books are toward their characters' fury. We love Anne Shirley not despite but because she breaks a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head. Ilse Burnley is lovable in part because she jumps up and down shrieking that Emily is a "proud, stuck-up, conceited, top-lofty biped."

This is the late nineteenth- and early twentieth-century ideal: a temper that flares up hot and dies away to nothing. This is not the ideal today, when you are either supposed to have no temper at all (which is how we are actually supposed to act most of the time) or to be enraged exclusively by injustice (an internet ideal which would probably still get you 500 years of detention if you acted on it at school by breaking a slate over Gilbert Blythe's head).

To be honest, I'm not sure that these critics have really, actually thought through what they are saying. Do they truly in their heart of hearts think that the world would be a better place if Anne Shirley never learned to control her temper, and at age thirty-one was still breaking slates over Gilbert Blythe's head? Is it bad that Amy March learns her lesson after burning Jo's book, and never again vents her rage by burning other people's prized possessions? It's all very well to wax starry-eyed about "women's rage," but at the end of the day I suspect that anyone who claims to be unequivocally in favor must also believe, at the bottom of their heart, that the poor little dears can't do any lasting damage in their anger.

This is not a mistake L. M. Montgomery ever makes. She knows very well what damage was wrought when Aunt Elizabeth in a fit of temper pushed Cousin Jimmy down the well.

I am sorry to inform you that Further Chronicles of Avonlea was not worth the wait. Like Chronicles of Avonlea, it’s a collection of short stories, and also like Chronicles of Avonlea, they’re pretty clearly mostly stories that weren’t originally written to have an Avonlea connection.

In Chronicles of Avonlea, however, Montgomery gave it a good college try to tie the stories into the Anne of Green Gables series, with frequent cameos by Anne and friends. In Further Chronicles of Avonlea, she seems to have given up trying. There’s one story told by Anne Shirley (in first person POV, which is discombobulating; she really doesn’t feel Anne-like to me), plus a couple of brief mentions of her, but otherwise the Avonlea connection is often extremely tenuous.

This wouldn’t matter so much if the stories were stronger, but unfortunately on the whole I found them pretty weak: forgettable, or memorable for the wrong reasons, like the story about the man whose sweetheart married his best friend… and they have a daughter together… and when the daughter is ten, the best friend dies, so the man decides to take charge of the daughter’s education…

“Don’t marry your sweetheart’s daughter,” I begged.

Reader, he marries her.

This is the price of doing a complete read-through of an author’s works. Some of them are less well known for very good reason, as it turns out. Ah well. Onward and upward! Up next is Rilla of Ingleside.

Although it would be foolish to pick a favorite Anne of Green Gables book, I must admit that I have a soft spot in my heart for Anne’s House of Dreams. Montgomery writes wonderfully vivid characters, and this book in particular is full of delightful weirdos. I love Captain Jim, the lighthouse keeper who tells wonderful yarns of his adventurous life, and Miss Cornelia, Anne’s vociferous neighbor who hates men and Methodists.

And most of all I love Leslie Moore, Anne’s beautiful neighbor with the “splendid, resentful eyes.” On their wedding night, as Gilbert drives Anne to her new home by the sea, Anne notices a girl driving geese in the sunset. “Who is that beautiful girl?” Anne gasps, but her newly minted husband can’t answer: he saw no one, as he has eyes only for Anne.

So it is only a few weeks later that Anne learns Leslie’s story from Miss Cornelia. At sixteen, Leslie was forced by economic circumstances to marry the villainous Dick Moore, who soon after went off to sea, got into a brawl, and came back suffering from brain damage, including total amnesia. For the past dozen years, she’s looked after him, and she’ll probably grind the rest of her life away in poverty, looking after a man she never loved in the first place.

The rage and the pride of Leslie! Her lonely heart yearns toward Anne, but she’s held back by resentment, for Anne has everything Leslie ever wanted: a college education, a loving husband, and soon enough a baby on the way. “So you are to have that too,” she chokes out, and strides away in such a fury of resentment that there is nothing to do but stride along beside the crashing sea until the sound of the waves pounds it away.

Anne is hurt, of course, but unswayed in her determination that Leslie will be her friend, someday. And, since friendship is Anne’s superpower, her steadfast love and affection eventually coax Leslie out of her shell. ( spoilers )

I also love the sense of place in this book. Anne’s house of dreams is a seaside home on a spit of land that ends in Captain Jim’s lighthouse, and the book is chock full of evocative shore walks, ships leaving the harbor, Captain Jim's sea stories: Lost Margaret drifting out to sea, asleep in her coracle... In some books I think Montgomery relies too heavily on stories-within-a-story, but here the stories enrich the sea-laden atmosphere like a sprinkle of salt over clam chowder. You can almost hear the lap of the waves as you read.

The Golden Road is the sequel to The Story Girl, and I remembered vaguely that I had liked it more than the first book, although as with the first book I had forgotten most of what actually happens in it. However, one sequence more or less burned itself into my mind: ( The tale of the Awkward Man )

…I finished this book just a few days ago, and I have yet again forgotten most of the parts that are not about the Awkward Man. Oh, and also our young heroes decide they’ll make their own magazine! That’s always fun.

On PEI, I picked up a couple of facts about The Story Girl. First, the blue chest in the book - Rachel Ward’s wedding chest, locked and abandoned after she was jilted at the altar - is a real chest, which resides in the Anne of Green Gables Museum, which is still owned by Montgomery’s wider family connection. Second, this was L. M. Montgomery’s favorite of her own books.

The second fact rather flabbergasted me, as I’ve read this book before and was not greatly impressed. This time around, I enjoyed it more, because I knew what to expect and could therefore enjoy what it has to offer rather than hankering over what it has not: that is to say, any kind of plot or forward motion.

Except for the Story Girl herself, a vivid tale-spinning wood nymph of a girl (always appearing with scarlet leaves or berries crowning her nut-brown hair), the characters are fairly forgettable, as are many of their adventures - although there is an excellent sequence where they become convinced that tomorrow is Judgment Day, and spend twenty-four hours in fear and trembling. But our ostensible main characters are not the point; they are merely a string on which to hang, like beads, the Story Girl’s stories, a mixture of mythology and fairy tale and Prince Edward Island lore.

I found the book much more enjoyable when I went into it knowing that it was a few dozen short stories dressed up in a trenchcoat to look like a novel. Still a little puzzled as to why it was L. M. Montgomery’s favorite, but who can understand the mysterious ways of authors! Maybe it was just the most fun to write.