Tea at Trianon: L.M. Montgomery's Lesser-Known Works

John Wilson Croker on Marie-Antoinette

"We have followed the history of Marie Antoinette with the greatest diligence and scrupulosity. We have lived in those times. We have talked with some of her friends and some of her enemies; we have read, certainly not all, but hundreds of the libels written against her; and we have, in short, examined her life with– if we may be allowed to say so of ourselves– something of the accuracy of contemporaries, the diligence of inquirers, and the impartiality of historians, all combined; and we feel it our duty to declare, in as a solemn a manner as literature admits of, our well-matured opinion that every reproach against the morals of the queen was a gross calumny– that she was, as we have said, one of the purest of human beings."

~from History of the Guillotine by John Wilson Croker, 1844

Edmund Burke on Marie-Antoinette

"It is now sixteen or seventeen years since I saw the queen of France, then dauphiness, at Versailles; and surely there never lighted on this orb, which she hardly seemed to touch, a more delightful vision. I saw her just above the horizon, decorating and cheering the elevated sphere she had just begun to move in, glittering like a morning star full of life and splendor and joy. Oh, what a revolution....Little did I dream that I should have lived to see such disasters fall upon her, in a nation of gallant men, in a nation of men of honor and of cavaliers! I thought ten thousand swords must have leaped from their scabbards, to avenge even a look which threatened her with insult. But the age of chivalry is gone; that of sophisters, economists, and calculators has succeeded...."

~Edmund Burke, October 1790

Sunday, April 9, 2023

L.M. Montgomery's Lesser-Known Works

The "Emily" Trilogy is actually my favorite anyway. From Smithsonian:

"People were never right in saying I was ‘Anne,’” she told a fellow writer, Ephraim Weber, in a 1921 letter, “but, in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily.” She was referring to Emily of New Moon, a later novel, the first in a series about the difficulty of making it as a young female writer.
I had come to Park Corner to walk in Montgomery’s footsteps and see the world from which she spun stories that blended fantasy and reality. Yet her fiction, synonymous with bright, idyllic settings and bubbly heroines, also had a darker side—and the picturesque beauty of Park Corner felt at odds with the sober vibe of Emily (1923), her bleakest and most serious book.

“You should go to New Moon,” Pamela Campbell said when I confessed my interest in the lesser-known Emily. The house, she said, “is just down the road.”
On February 15, 1922, at her home in Ontario, Canada, Montgomery set her pen down in triumph.

“Today I finished Emily of New Moon, after six months writing,” she announced in her journal. “It is the best book I have ever written—and I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it, and I hated to pen the last line and write finis.”

A century after its 1923 publication, Emily is powerful and disquieting, a view into the author’s sometimes embattled life. The novel and its two sequels tell the story of Emily Starr, a young girl who weathers prejudices and challenges to achieve her dream of becoming a published author.

Emily, like Anne, is an orphan, but there the resemblance ends. Anne finds not only a home, but “kindred spirits” who fall under the spell of her gift for seeing beauty and possibility in the world. In the Anne novels, the emotional complexity of Montgomery’s art lies in the way that adult characters who are hardened in some way—the stern Marilla, Anne’s adoptive mother, or the rigid widow Aunt Josephine Barry—become more compassionate human beings under Anne’s influence. Montgomery’s perceptive insights into such relations became her trademark. (Read more.)