L.m. Montgomery - Tumblr Posts
01.07.22
“It's been my experience that you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will.” —L.M. Montgomery
Happy Canada Day! It’s my first one spent outside the country, but I was there in stomach spirit.
30.07.22
“‘I wonder if it will be—can be—any more beautiful than this,’ murmured Anne, looking around her with the loving, enraptured eyes of those to whom ‘home’ must always be the loveliest spot in the world, no matter what fairer lands may lie under alien stars.” —L.M. Montgomery
Jet lag’s a bitch, but I’m back in the prairies. Now I’ve got a month to spend with family and prepare for law school. Unsolicited advice for future solicitors is welcome.
She had a way of embroidering her life with stars.
L.M. Montgomery, "Old Man Shaw's Girl" (Chronicles of Avonlea)
She had a way of embroidering her life with stars.
L.M. Montgomery, "Old Man Shaw's Girl" (Chronicles of Avonlea)
“November — with uncanny witchery in its changed trees. With murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson behind the westering hills. With dear days when the austere woods were beautiful and gracious in a dignified serenity of folded hands and closed eyes — days full of fine, pale sunshine that sifted through the late, leafless gold of the juniper-trees and glimmered among the grey beeches, lighting up evergreen banks of moss and washing the colonnades of the pines. Days with a high-sprung sky of flawless turquoise. Days when an exquisite melancholy seemed to hang over the landscape and dream about the lake. But days, too, of the wild blackness of great autumn storms, followed by dank, wet, streaming nights when there was witch-laughter in the pines and fitful moans among the mainland trees.”
— L.M. Montgomery, from ‘The Blue Castle’ (via theflowershop)
Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, by L.M. Montgomery
L.M. Montgomery's one of my favorite writers, mostly because the Emily series is so dear to me. But I can recognize that a lot of her output was kind of same-y, and the Pat books (which came out late in her career) kind of solidified my impression that she has one plot she's comfortable working with, and all her novels are just that one plot trying on different hats.
The two books follow little Pat Gardiner, who hates change and loves her dear home Silver Bush more than anything in the world. I prefer Montgomery's stories about children over the stories where they've grown up, because the children tend to be funnier, more optimistic, and more full of promise than they do when they're adults. Since Montgomery's books tend to be a series of sketches or set-pieces strung together chronologically, her adult heroines are hewed-in by the scope of their lives. Their families sigh over their failure to get married; they turn down the advances of scores of tiresome men; they are separated from their dear childhood friends due to work or education; their relatives age and die; their ambitions become a struggle, and it's all generally a huge downer. That was my main problem with Mistress Pat: all Pat wanted to do was live at Silver Bush and have things never change, and so the book contains every meticulous detail of her never really leaving Silver Bush and...being upset when things inevitably change.
I read a review that suggests Mistress Pat is so pessimistic because Montgomery was going through personal stress and depression while caring for her sick husband. It also suggested that her workhorse plot was wearing a pretty fancy new hat: unlike previous heroines, Pat isn't ambitious to write or pursue a career, and she comes from a happy family rather than a broken home. The book deals with sibling rivalry and the problem of incorporating new people into the household after marriage, in a way that seems more frank and less idealized than her other books. And it's not badly written (although personally I'm tired of her nature descriptions; they show up like clockwork every 5 pages in ALL her books, and they practically smother The Blue Castle to death after its snappy and hilarious start). But I still found it to be kind of a slog, especially after the light humor of Pat of Silver Bush.
All that said, this really made me want to go back and read the rest of Montgomery's work in chronological order, to get a better sense of this plot's progression. I've already plowed through Anne of Green Gables, and was pleased it held up in memory as well as it did.
Anne of Green Gables & Anne of Avonlea, by L.M. Montgomery
These were the first two novels Montgomery published (after writing a billion short stories), so this is like the Original Template for so many of her later books. There's the heroine, who's usually an ethereal, sensitive, imaginative girl who loves nature; there's the love interest, who's usually the model of young manhood and brilliant at his chosen career; there are the relatives or townspeople who Just Don't Understand the whimsical ways of the heroine; and then there are the heroine's acquaintances, who are either Kindred Spirits, Good-Hearted but Dull, or Snobby Bitches. There are some variations (the heroine is always intelligent, but some are sassy while others are more reticent), but that's essentially the framework everything operates within.
I still really LIKE most of the books Montgomery's written, even though seeing the pattern makes me want to poke at it a little. Anne is funny -- the scrapes she gets into are hilarious -- and even though I get tired of the descriptions of nature, they are very evocative and picturesque. Her characters are always going on long walks through forests and flowers and it makes me sad about the suburban wasteland I'm currently surrounded by.
But even while Anne is praised in the narrative for not being like those horrible mean girls who gossip about others, she (and the other "good" characters like Marilla) has a pervading contempt for the French, or the Italians, or other lower-class citizens that work for the white townspeople, and it just goes totally unexamined or addressed. Montgomery has a tendency towards flowery absolutes (people are forever "the sweetest little nymph in all Creation," etc.), so these instances are like unexpected speed bumps in the narrative: it's all glorious and otherworldly and beautiful, and then BAM, it's pretty ugly. But it's no different than Chandler being a real jerk about gay people: you either note it, regret it, and put it aside, or you stop reading.
Kilmeny of the Orchard, by L.M. Montgomery
This was originally published as a serial, and in its completed form it's quite short. The whole thing is pure romantic melodrama: a wealthy, intelligent young man goes to teach in a rural town, and he falls in love with the most beautifullest girl ever EVER in the whole WORLD, Kilmeny. Two problems (SPOILERS): first, Kilmeny is mute, even though she can hear perfectly; second, Kilmeny's mother was crazy and never let her out into the world to see other people, and also she broke all the mirrors in the house and told Kilmeny she was ugly, even though Kilmeny is the most exquisite thing in the entire world EVER. You'd think Kilmeny would have crippling psychological problems, but fortunately once her boyfriend buys her a mirror and shows her how ethereally gorgeous she is, she's fine.
There's an even more alarmingly racist subplot in this one, where Kilmeny's guardians take in an abandoned Italian baby and raise it as their own. He grows up to fall in love with Kilmeny and gets super-upset when this rich handsome white guy shows up and declares he loves her. His "uncouthness" is blamed squarely on his innate Italian-ness overcoming his Christian upbringing, and his guardians regret bringing him up in such a way that he "forgets his place." Ughhh.
So yeah, there wasn't a lot to redeem this one. I guess I can't complain that something written as melodrama is "too melodramatic," but come on, the guy who falls in love with a girl who can't speak just happens to be best friends with a throat doctor. I mean, COME ON, right?
The Story Girl, by L.M. Montgomery
I am downing these books like CANDY, I swear. It helps that it's finals week, so my job has transformed from "take furious notes on respiratory diseases" to "sit quietly in a room proctoring tests."
This book is quite different from the Montgomery Template I've been talking about! For one, it's narrated by a boy (which, okay, doesn't change much, as this boy is also really fond of describing idyllic nature scenes), and it features a wide cast of characters who generally share the stage, even though the Story Girl is the nominal focus. It makes sense that Montgomery (who published a gazillion short stories before selling any novels) would play to her strengths and build a book out of little episodic melodramas woven into a rural coming-of-age tale. There's a sequel, The Golden Road, that picks up where this book leaves off, and both are a paean to the magic of childhood and imaginative power. It's uber-romanticized, but, you know...I'm okay with that.
The characters fill the usual Montgomery categories -- the titular Story Girl is the imaginative, non-conventionally beautiful yet STRIKING heroine; Felicity is the mean, snobby, stuck-up girl; and Cecily is dull, plain, but nice. We also see the first instance of the Redeemed Hired Boy trope, kind of a proto-Perry from the Emily books, who is poor, uneducated, and lacking in social graces, but turns out to be Just As Good as the other children. I'm sure it helps that the hired boy isn't, you know, French or Italian or something, because THAT would be a step too far. I wonder if any later Montgomery books ever address her past bigotry, like Dickens did when he included good Mr. Riah in Our Mutual Friend to make up for Fagin in Oliver Twist.
But despite the kind of "stock type" feeling of the young characters (most of them can be summed up in one word: "crybaby," "fat," "argumentative," etc.), they all play together and fight and get into trouble in interesting and funny ways. It made me nostalgic for that enforced closeness you sometimes had in childhood friendships, where even if you didn't like the people you hung out with, they were still important fixtures in the narrative of your life. Of course, the romanticization means I'm thinking of all those old petty dislikes as "cute," rather "aggravating."
The Golden Road, by L.M. Montgomery
This is essentially The Story Girl Rides Again!, only with fewer stories and more adorable excerpts from a newspaper that the young cast decides to publish. It's surprising how Montgomery seems to veer from one extreme to the other: on the one hand, a hilarious sarcasm and satirical take on mundane life; on the other, a romantic, religious earnestness that aims for transcendence but sometimes dips into sentimentality. I greatly prefer the humor; in one scene, the local "witch woman" decides to come to church with the young cast, and to their mortification she gets gets bored halfway through the sermon and leaves, announcing that the townspeople are hypocritical jerks and it would be better if they "go into the woods and commit suicide." Witches telling people to kill themselves -- this is what I want out of young adult literature.
I'm in the middle of reading Anne of the Island, and Gilbert Blythe has just asked Anne to marry him, and Anne has essentially said "Oh Lord no, what a terrible idea, why did you ask me that, you've ruined EVERYTHING." Gilbert gets all emo sadface and goes away, and Anne is upset that by proposing, he has threatened their dear comradeship. This is the same thing Pat did to Jingle in Mistress Pat, and I'm still bewildered by what motivates it. It's not because Anne wants to be a career woman, because she's never expressed a concrete interest in a particular career. Maybe she just doesn't like the idea of marriage? But she doesn't really say "I don't want to get married," she just says "Oh I could never feel that way about you, we are just friends." But she's jealous of any girls who show an interest in him anyway. So is she just in denial? Why are so many of Montgomery's heroines in denial about who they really love? They're always so intelligent and sure of themselves, but in this one arena they are total dolts.
Maybe it's some sort of weird pridefulness, where they think love is a strange and foreign thing they want no part of. Or maybe it's just a useful plot device. If Anne accepted the proposal right away, she and Gilbert would have no reason to be unhappy for another 150 pages.
Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery
So it turns out Anne initially rejects Gilbert's proposal because she doesn't recognize what love actually feels like. She meets the man she has always fantasized about -- rich, dark, handsome, poetical -- and when he proposes she's like "Oh wait, I think I've built a false construct of 'love' out of things I read in sentimental books. Real love is actually what I felt for Gilbert earlier. Whoops!"
Of course, because it's the early 1900s, she can't just go to Gilbert and be like "Hey, it turns out I love you, can we still get married?" She has to suffer and think she lost him, and he has to get tragically ill and almost die, and THEN they can get married. But that stuff only lasts for twenty pages, so it's fine.
The rest of the book is about Anne going to college to get a degree, and living with three other girls in a quaint house. A new character named Philippa is introduced, and while I initially thought I'd hate her, she turned out to be all right. I'm surprised by how much Marilla and Green Gables are side-lined in these later books; since I only read the first two as a kid, the Anne mythos to me was all about Green Gables and Marilla and Diana, and not these random college friends named "Stella" and "Priscilla" with interchangeable personalities.
Also, along with not being a fan of lower-class French or Italian people, Montgomery is not a fan of fat people, either. I think every book thus far has had a disparaging comment about fat people, in contrast to the slender (and bewitchingly gray-eyed!) Anne. In this last book, Anne meets a fat ugly woman who married a poor man who loved her, rather than a rich man who didn't. Anne is frankly stunned by the notion that fat ugly people might have romance in their lives, which, I don't know, betrays a certain stuntedness to her much-vaunted imagination.
Since I'm reading her books chronologically, I'm moving on to Anne's House of Dreams, even though Anne of Windy Poplars is technically the book that covers the next years of Anne's life. I figure I'll read Anne's story as Montgomery initially mapped it out, and then go back and see if she tried to retcon anything when she wrote books to fill in the gaps.
Anne's House of Dreams, by L.M. Montgomery
Partway through this book I had to accept that Montgomery didn't plan on looking back towards Avonlea and continuing any of the stories there. At one point Marilla, Mrs. Rachel, and the twins come to Anne's house for Christmas, and I was so excited to hear from them, even though I kind of hated the twins in earlier books. But beyond a brief mention of them arriving, the entire chapter is dedicated to an (admittedly funny) conversation between some new characters, and then Christmas is over and the Green Gables folk head home. I was so disappointed!
But I was able to accept that the book is less about Anne and more about her new role among a colorful cast of neighbors. There's the jovial sea captain, the man-hating old maid (who was awesome), and the gorgeous young woman who is doomed to unhappiness and tragedy because of Terrible Circumstances. I kind of think Montgomery was more interested in them than she was in Anne. Anne and Gilbert prance happily around as newlyweds, and truth be told they seem kind of neutered. They fight once in the book, and that's interesting, but the rest of the time Gilbert exists with little personality in the background. Anne goes through childbirth twice, which offers some depth and pathos, and there's also a hilarious point where she vows not to speak in baby-talk to her child, and then can't help herself and goes all out with the baby talk. The little funny moments feel far more modern than the high-romance of the nature descriptions, and I definitely prefer the books that have a greater proportion of humor and a smaller proportion of description and Tennyson references.
I also think that Anne, as a character, comes off better when her flights of fancy are tempered by a sensible character. The whole book is just Anne and all the people who like Anne being fanciful together, but after Anne's second child is born, Marilla visits and acts like her normal sarcastic self. Anne's dialogue seemed so charmingly Anne when it was all being said in response to Marilla's sarcasm, where in isolation Anne often feels grating and over-the-top. I guess I just miss Marilla. More Marilla! More Marilla!
Rainbow Valley, by L.M. Montgomery
This is barely an "Anne" book; it's barely even an "Anne's children" book, because most of the focus is on a different set of children whose father is the local minister. It's basically a big jumble of every plot Montgomery has written so far: there's a poor adopted orphan (like Anne), a spirited girl who gets into trouble but means well (like Anne), a bunch of imaginative children who get into delightful scrapes (like the kids in The Story Girl), and a man who is in love with a beautiful kind woman but they can't marry because of Reasons (like every book Montgomery's ever written, practically). Anne surfaces briefly to admire flowers and laugh at how badly the behaved the children are, which is...annoying. But I've always liked Montgomery best when she's writing about kids, so I enjoyed most of this.
I did notice that I'm getting Stockholm syndrome when it comes to the nature descriptions, though. I've begrudgingly started to admire how she can vary the descriptions enough that they don't feel repetitive, even though fully 30% of each book is "this is what a sunset looks like."
I'm working on a prologue-y bit for the book I'm writing (Hallways is the name of it) and I'm writing EXACTLY like L.M. Montgomery. Apparently reading eight books by the same author in one month does something to your brain. I haven't mentioned any flowers, forests, or sunsets, though, and I haven't compared any female characters to dryads or nymphs, and NO ONE has been described as "bewitching" or "slender." But I have been describing time travel energy as "blooms on a map," so the shame is still there.
Chronicles of Avonlea, by L.M. Montgomery
Shamefully I read this book out of chronological order -- it was published between The Story Girl and The Golden Road. It's a collection of short stories that take place in Avonlea, although that just means the characters sometimes mention the existence of "Anne Shirley" in some inconsequential way. The stories themselves tend to be more humorous than sentimental (always my preference), and there are several characters and plots that Montgomery will repurpose in later books (the man-hating feminist of Anne's House of Dreams is clearly based on a character in this book, and she's just as hilarious here as she will be later). If there's anything to complain about, it's the idea that marriage is the cure-all to any problem -- three-fourths of the stories here are about people who didn't marry for Some Reason, and claim they don't care a bit about marriage, until the story ends and it turns out they really do.
This makes me wish Montgomery had the freedom to write honestly about her own hard experiences with with marriage, rather than portray these picturesque relationships that end up feeling a little flat. I should look into reading her journals once I'm done with the novels.
Rilla of Ingleside, by L.M. Montgomery
I've taken a break from reading Montgomery's collected works because this felt like a good place to pause. Technically, this is the last book in the Anne series, although Montgomery went on to write more books covering the years of Anne's life we didn't see. Like Rainbow Valley, this book has little to do with Anne specifically. Rilla is the ostensible heroine, but for much of the book Rilla's coming-of-age feels like an afterthought. Writing from the perspective of a young girl is kind of Montgomery's calling card, but here it feels almost mechanical. Rilla is unlike Anne (and unlike all FIVE of her siblings) in that she's not ambitious; while everyone else is teaching and going to college, she's thinking about how much fun it will be to go to parties and wear pretty clothes and have a bunch of boyfriends. Unfortunately for her, World War I shows up and changes everything.
All of Montgomery's books are describing actual places in rural Canada, but the nature descriptions are always so rarefied that I forget these stories are taking place during the course of ordinary history. When WWI begins, it's dismaying, like the earlier books have retroactively become this Eden that we're falling away from. And it's almost funny to say that, because this book is barely different from the others: we're still in Canada with all the women who can't go to war, and there are funny stories to tell, and breathless descriptions of nature in bloom, and every time something bad happens Montgomery pulls her punches and warns you well in advance. There's the obligatory love story, too, although this one is probably the least convincing of all the love stories so far (worse than Kilmeny, and that's saying something).
But while reading this, I finally identified what it is that makes me like some bits of Montgomery's books versus others. I whine endlessly about her nature descriptions (although guess who's spending a lot more time gazing dreamily at flowers these days?), but what I'm really reacting to is her tendency to summarize. Vast swaths of plot go by in this sort of middle-distance manner of recollection, when what I really enjoy is the close-up, moment-to-moment writing of her "action" scenes. I think this is why I enjoy her more when she's writing about children: children are active, and she tends to show their interactions in detailed sequences, rather than at a remove. When Montgomery's adults interact in a close-up scene, it's almost always for the purposes of gossipy conversation, often between characters I don't care about. Most of the moment-to-moment writing in Rilla of Ingleside is about the war, and while it's very interesting (from an academic perspective) to read a book that focuses almost exclusively on women's reactions to and analyses of the war, it makes for rather dry storytelling.
This probably explains the feeling of "remoteness" I get from her books -- they tell more than they show. I don't know if it's proper of me to fault her for that, since her style has tended that way from the beginning. But it explains why I miss Marilla and Mrs. Lynde and even Dora and Davy so much: the flavor of their personalities came through in close-up scenes in the earlier books, while few of the characters in later books (Anne and Gilbert included!) come across as strongly or vibrantly. Rainbow Valley was successful to me because it told a lot of little up-close stories about the Meredith children, but it was at the expense of the Anne and Gilbert's children, who were pretty much non-entities.
Next up chronologically is Emily of New Moon, which I've always adored, and I'm a little nervous that all this analysis is going to sour me on it. But we'll see. I write all these critical things about her books and wish they were different in various ways, but I still really enjoy reading them. I've been trying to read some other books I picked out on a whim from the library, and they're so tedious that it makes me yearn for a good sunset-description.
the older I get the more I'm like wow Anne Shirley was right. I am so glad to live in a world with Octobers. Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. Dear old world you are very lovely and I am glad to be alive in you.