We ♥ L. M. Montgomery Week - Emily of New Moon (a review)

Emily of New Moon was read for Hamlette's We Love L. M. Montgomery Week. ♥

This was my first time reading Montgomery's Emily of New Moon. It's incredible how fast I read it. It was hard to put it down when I had to do other things, like, oh work or sleep or go run errands. It's a very enchanting, melancholy sort of story, and I was completely pulled into it.

Creative souls are hard to come by sometimes and Emily Byrd Starr is, if at all possible, even more creative and imaginative than Anne Shirley. She's a wild thing, born of the fey, on so many levels.

For the unfamiliar, like I was, Emily is orphaned early in the book and, through no other alternative, goes to live with her mother's family. She was raised wild by a father much like herself in personality, and her mother's family despised him. So it's a struggle for her, going to live with an aged aunt who appears to find her troublesome at best and hateful at worst. Aunt Elizabeth Murray is the matriarch of New Moon farm. Aunt Laura is the sweeter, meeker younger sister, and Cousin Jimmy is kind, but also appears to have some sort of interesting mental defect that might make him slightly dangerous. Or at least, there are times when Emily feels slightly fearful of him, although she's not entirely sure why.

I won't go in depth into the darker side of the book here, or the elements that troubled me, but it's impossible to read Emily of New Moon without realizing and appreciating that Montgomery herself must have felt things very, very keenly. I looked a bit into her life, not much, but just a bit, and realized she was much like her heroines in a variety of ways. I had no idea that her use of "the flash" for Emily's brilliant and spiritual inspirations came from her own experiences with it.

The reader experiences a profound grief in regards to Emily. A tender, spiritual soul who desperately wants to just be loved. So to go from loved to unloved, or what felt like unloved to her, was unbearable at times. I just wanted to wrap her up in my arms and hold her as if she were my daughter. I cared that much for her sufferings and her sorrow. But I admire her spunk. I admire her for standing firm where her writing is concerned. And I love how Emily knew from such an early age that she wanted to be a writer and she was going to pursue it. She set herself on a course and never wavered from it in the first book in the trilogy, and I'm assuming, probably never wavered from it in the rest of the series. I'll have to read them to find out, but that won't be a hardship.

Emily truly is a heroine in the best sense of classic literature. She undergoes immense trauma and loss and comes out the other side stronger. She's admirable and plucky. Ultimately, it's Emily's personality and her love of cats and writing that made me love her. She's a very genuine sort of person. She doesn't pretend to be something she isn't and I value that in my friendships and I try to emulate that in my own life, being authentic. No good ever really comes from hiding our personalities. So I admire and respect Emily for her strength of character. She also doesn't necessarily like disobeying Aunt Elizabeth. She would prefer not to, if only Aunt Elizabeth wasn't so unreasonable. But it's her gifting of "the flash" that makes me love her most.

Montgomery's use of epistolary style interspersed with prose entertained me, especially when Emily doesn't quite know the proper spellings. That's just very entertaining and very accurate to any child without a dictionary or spell check.

I would never really want my younger child to read it, I think, but I encourage anyone in their teens and into adulthood to give it a try. In the end, Emily's character, the beauty of New Moon, and how visual the story was in that I could picture everything so clearly, all made Emily of New Moon a magnificent read. I'll put my additional thoughts on the darker elements of the story into my February Reads Wrap-Up post and share the link here for anyone interested. I initially had them in this post and then realized that it wasn't quite the place for them. So we will end with a heartfelt "thank you" to Montgomery for her ingenuity and for her magnificent prose. She was a profound writer.

There are a lot of other fun things going on through tomorrow over at Hamlette's Soliloquy so I encourage you go take a look and have fun participating! And make sure to read the other blog posts that are sure to be delightful!