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- Herausgeber: Booksell-Verlag
- Kategorie: Für Kinder und Jugendliche
- Sprache: Englisch
In "Emily's Quest," Lucy Maud Montgomery masterfully continues the journey of her beloved protagonist, Emily Byrd Starr, as she navigates the realms of ambition, love, and self-discovery. Written in Montgomery's signature lyrical prose, the novel blends elements of natural beauty and intricate emotional landscapes, drawing readers into a rich tapestry of early 20th-century Canadian life. In this concluding volume of the Emily series, the tension between artistic aspiration and societal expectation is poignantly explored, culminating in a profound exploration of identity and belonging that resonates deeply within the literary context of women's literature and coming-of-age narratives. Lucy Maud Montgomery, a pioneer of Canadian literature, was deeply influenced by her own experiences growing up on Prince Edward Island, where she often found herself at odds with traditional social roles. Her love of storytelling and her keen perception of the complexities of human relationships informed her creation of Emily, a character who embodies the struggle between creativity and conformity. Montgomery's own journey as a female writer in a male-dominated literary world parallels Emily's quest for self-actualization, making this work both personal and universal. Readers who seek beautifully crafted narratives that delve into the intricacies of the human spirit will find "Emily's Quest" an unforgettable journey. Through its exploration of themes such as love, ambition, and artistic integrity, Montgomery's poignant finale not only entertains but also encourages readers to reflect on their own quests for identity and purpose. This novel is a must-read for anyone captivated by the power of literature to illuminate the depths of the human experience. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2021
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Emily's Quest
Table of Contents
Introduction
A young woman on Prince Edward Island tests the strength of her imagination against the stubborn realities of talent, expectation, and time, forging a writer’s voice that must stand on its own.
Emily’s Quest endures as a classic because it captures, with quiet courage and luminous restraint, the making of an artist within everyday life. As the culminating volume of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Emily trilogy, it refines the psychological depth and artistic seriousness introduced earlier, offering a portrait of vocation rarely granted to young female protagonists in early twentieth-century fiction. Its influence persists in conversations about the coming-of-age novel and the Künstlerroman for younger readers, where the rhythms of apprenticeship, self-doubt, and perseverance continue to guide storytellers exploring the origins of creative identity and the cost of staying true to it.
Written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery and first published in 1927, Emily’s Quest is set primarily on Prince Edward Island and follows Emily Byrd Starr as she advances from gifted adolescent to committed young writer. It is the third book in the sequence that began with Emily of New Moon. Without disclosing later turns, the novel concerns the shaping of a literary life, the discipline of craft, and the negotiation of community ties. Montgomery situates Emily’s ambitions within a closely observed rural world, composing a narrative about belonging and independence that complements the broader arc of her career.
Montgomery’s focus here is not solely on success or recognition but on the inner weather of a calling. The novel traces how observation becomes art, how memory and place inform style, and how conscience steadies a writer through rejection and praise alike. Rather than celebrating talent as effortless, it emphasizes apprenticeship, habit, and humility, all framed by the textures of island seasons and domestic rituals. In this way, Emily’s Quest functions as a meditation on the ethics of imagination: what we owe to the people who shaped us, what we owe to ourselves, and how those debts can be honored without compromise.
Formally, the book fuses intimate interiority with the outward charm for which Montgomery is renowned. Landscapes are rendered as more than scenery; they are catalysts for insight, reminding readers that sensibility is sharpened by attention to detail. Dialogue feels rooted in community idiom, while descriptions carry a lyrical economy that rewards slow reading. The pacing reflects the uneven tempo of growth: long stretches of craft punctuated by brief awakenings. Through this blend of lyric description and grounded social observation, Montgomery achieves a balance between romance and realism that invites readers to recognize both the dream and the discipline of artistic work.
At its heart, Emily’s Quest examines ambition and integrity under the pressures of family loyalty and social expectation. It considers how a young woman negotiates authority in a culture that prizes modesty, and how devotion to work can coexist with tenderness, friendship, and responsibility. The novel attends to class and place without didacticism, illuminating the subtle hierarchies of a small community. It also portrays solitude as both risk and necessity, suggesting that isolation can become either a refuge or a hindrance depending on how it is held. These tensions create a humane, resilient vision of selfhood anchored in character rather than circumstance.
The book’s classic stature also stems from its position within Canadian literary history, where it extends Montgomery’s exploration of island life into a distinctly modern inquiry about authorship. By centering a young female artist and taking her apprenticeship seriously, the Emily trilogy broadened the possibilities of youth literature beyond moral instruction or episodic adventure. Later portrayals of creative adolescence often echo its attentiveness to process and the ethical dimensions of ambition. While the Anne books first secured Montgomery’s international fame, Emily’s Quest has increasingly been appreciated for its inward gaze and for enlarging the scope of what a coming-of-age narrative could encompass.
Place functions here as a living partner in the act of creation. Fields, shorelines, kitchens, and schoolrooms shape sensibility as surely as mentors and books. The house at New Moon, with its rhythms of work and seasons of quiet, fosters the patience required for long efforts, while the island’s distances remind us that every path chosen leaves another untaken. Montgomery’s landscape is neither sentimental nor harsh; it is exact. In this exactness, readers sense how environment and memory converge to form a writer’s palette, and how returning to familiar ground can inspire new perspective rather than mere repetition.
Part of the book’s lasting appeal lies in its accessibility across ages. Young readers find a companion in Emily’s sturdy resolve and frank self-scrutiny; adult readers recognize the novel’s clear-eyed view of compromise, opportunity, and the long labor of becoming. The story has remained widely available in print and digital formats, drawing ongoing engagement from general audiences, book clubs, and classrooms. Its language and setting feel specific yet welcoming, inviting re-reading for subtleties of craft. That continued circulation, paired with critical attention to Montgomery’s artistry, helps secure its place as a durable work of twentieth-century fiction.
The premise is straightforward and compelling: Emily stands at the threshold of adulthood determined to live by the pen. She faces the practicalities of earning trust, finding time, and meeting standards set by editors, elders, and her own conscience. As opportunities and tests arise, her vision clarifies. The narrative explores how to accept guidance without surrendering voice, and how to measure success when approval can be uneven or delayed. Without revealing developments, it is enough to say that the novel maps the contours of vocation with honesty, allowing its heroine to struggle and learn in credible, resonant ways.
Montgomery’s prose operates with a restrained musicality, attentive to cadence and image without ornament for its own sake. Humor lightens exacting moments, while gentle irony exposes pretension and shallow judgment. Secondary characters carry their own motives and histories, enriching the social fabric against which Emily measures herself. Scenes of work are given as much weight as scenes of feeling, underscoring that creativity is not a mood but a practice. Throughout, the narrative avoids easy absolutes. It suggests that growth is iterative, that failure can clarify intention, and that the truest victories are often quiet and private.
Emily’s Quest remains relevant because it treats aspiration as a moral as well as an artistic problem, honoring the reader’s intelligence and experience. Its themes of perseverance, authenticity, community, and the search for a sustaining home speak across decades. In an age that often prizes speed and spectacle, the novel champions patience, depth, and the slow accumulation of skill. It celebrates imagination without denying reality, and it invites us to consider what kind of life permits meaningful work. For contemporary audiences, this balance offers both solace and challenge, ensuring the book’s lasting power and grace.
Synopsis
Emily's Quest, the final novel in L.M. Montgomery's Emily trilogy, follows Emily Byrd Starr as she remains at New Moon on Prince Edward Island after school, determined to become a writer. Under Aunt Elizabeth's strict order and Aunt Laura's gentle care, Emily balances farm duties with late-night pages in her garret. The small community of Blair Water provides material and constraints, sharpening her observations. Childhood friends have grown into distinct paths, yet their shared history still binds them. From the outset, Emily frames her life as a deliberate apprenticeship, committed to discipline, modest means, and the steady cultivation of voice rather than quick applause.
She begins with small steps: sending poems and sketches to newspapers, enduring form rejections, and celebrating modest acceptances that help pay household bills. Her journals remain a private workshop where she tests images, titles, and plots. Advice from editors and older acquaintances introduces practical matters of contracts, deadlines, and revisions. Emily decides that a novel, not short pieces alone, will embody her ambition, and she quietly gathers scenes from local life to shape a longer work. Throughout, she measures progress by pages written and lessons learned, accepting that skill develops slowly, even as neighbors expect immediate results or caution against dreams.
As her peers move outward, Emily’s world simultaneously widens and contracts. Teddy Kent pursues advanced art training away from Blair Water, sending intermittent news that keeps their long attachment unresolved. Perry Miller, ambitious and practical, advances through legal studies and politics. Ilse Burnley follows her own dramatic inclinations with urban training, returning in flashes that disrupt and enliven the circle. Dean Priest, an older family friend, reenters with intellectual companionship and candid opinions about art and life. These relationships, variously supportive and complicating, test Emily’s priorities, asking how loyalty to place, vocation, and affection can coexist without sacrificing integrity.
Emily completes an early novel and subjects it to outside judgment, inviting praise or correction. She receives a decisive critique from a trusted voice that forces a reckoning with her methods and aims. The assessment is severe enough to halt her momentum, and she temporarily withdraws from ambitious plans, focusing on duties at New Moon and smaller literary tasks. This pause strains confidences with friends who interpret her silence in different ways. Yet it also clarifies the kind of work she hopes to write—fiction drawn from truth rather than ornament—setting up the slow, careful rebuilding of confidence and craft.
Life at New Moon continues with seasons of planting, harvest, and village gatherings, and the practical nearness of family keeps Emily grounded. Social invitations and rumors bring her into situations where expectations about marriage, residence, and propriety are openly stated. A sudden personal crisis—combining physical danger and emotional strain—interrupts her routine and compels a period of convalescence. During recovery she appraises what matters, noting how easily a future can be altered by accident or misreading. The episode refocuses her resolve to pursue meaningful work while remaining attentive to the needs of those who rely on her steadiness and care.
Gradually, Emily returns to her desk with renewed clarity. She chooses subjects closer to her experience, writing scenes that confront jealousy, pride, sacrifice, and the quiet urgencies of domestic life. Her prose tightens; her sense of structure improves. She sends revised work to publishers with patience and a plan, and professional correspondence shifts from dismissal to interest. Mentors and critics continue to speak, but their voices no longer define her choices. The project that takes shape is more mature and less ornamental than before, reflecting a hard-won understanding of character and consequence without surrendering the island’s beauty and mystery.
Meanwhile, the personal fabric tightens. Offers of marriage and promises from the past come due, presenting Emily with choices about love, independence, and the claims of art. Misunderstandings among the four friends complicate their long-standing loyalties, and outside pressures—family hopes, career timetables, social expectations—intensify decision points. A long-hidden piece of information surfaces in the wider community, altering one friend’s understanding of her history and setting off changes that ripple through the group. Emily weighs whether commitment must limit creativity or whether both can be sustained with honesty, and she tries to let action, rather than sentiment, determine direction.
The later chapters bring convergences. After years of drafting and revision, Emily reaches a professional milestone that validates her steady discipline, though it arrives without spectacle. The community responds with a mixture of pride and practical questions about what success will mean for New Moon. Friendships undergo candid conversations and quiet reconciliations, and previously uncertain bonds clarify into settled paths. The resolutions align with character rather than convenience, suggesting that endurance and truthfulness yield durable results. Without grand gestures, private choices reshape the horizon, and the trilogy’s central threads—work, place, affection—are gathered into a coherent, forward-looking conclusion.
Overall, Emily’s Quest presents the culmination of a young writer’s apprenticeship, emphasizing patience, self-knowledge, and fidelity to one’s art. It traces how vocation is tested by ordinary obligations and by the charms and costs of attachment. The novel underscores that achievement often consists of quiet persistences rather than sudden triumphs, and that clarity emerges from honesty more than from praise. By following Emily through discouragement, recovery, and choice, the book affirms the possibility of uniting creative work with a life anchored in community. The trilogy closes by honoring growth that feels earned, with horizons open to further, unrecorded days.
Historical Context
Emily’s Quest unfolds primarily in rural Prince Edward Island, Canada—especially the fictional community of Blair Water and the Murray family farm, New Moon—during the late Victorian and early Edwardian decades. The implied chronology spans roughly the 1890s into the early 1910s, a period when the Island’s rail line connected villages to Charlottetown, steamers linked the province to the mainland, and the postal system knit local lives to metropolitan centers. The landscape of red-soil farms, coves, and spruce woods shapes daily rhythms, while kin-based settlements and church-centered routines structure social life. The setting’s insularity and its outward ties to larger Canadian and American markets create the novel’s tension between rootedness and ambition.
The community Emily inhabits is marked by a strong Scottish-Presbyterian heritage, deference to family reputation, and an ethic of thrift and respectability common to small Maritime settlements at the turn of the century. Education through local academies and Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown offered advancement, but guardians and clergy exercised strong moral oversight. Technologies such as the railway, telegraph, and a maturing postal service shortened distances without erasing the Island’s conservative social codes. This time-and-place matrix—an agricultural province negotiating modernity—frames Emily’s bid to become a professional writer while negotiating courtship expectations, editorial authority, and the obligations of kin and place.
The Island’s long Land Question shaped property, class, and stability. Prior to Confederation, much of Prince Edward Island was held by absentee proprietors, prompting decades of tenant agitation, notably the Tenant League in the 1860s. Joining Canada in 1873 helped resolve the crisis. The Land Purchase Act of 1875 enabled the government to buy proprietary estates and sell them to occupants, fostering owner-operated farms. This settlement entrenched families like the fictional Murrays as secure landholders with deep local status. The novel mirrors this post-1875 order: New Moon’s security, pride of lineage, and the moral weight attached to “good land” reflect the sociopolitical triumph of resident proprietorship over landlordism.
The construction of the Prince Edward Island Railway (begun 1871, substantially completed by 1875) integrated rural settlements into a broader circulation of goods, newspapers, and mail. By the 1890s, passenger services connected Blair Water–type villages to Charlottetown, Summerside, and ferry points, shrinking travel time for business and education. The line later became part of Canadian Government Railways and then Canadian National (1918), symbolizing federal integration. In the book’s world, trains enable trips to city offices, literary contacts, and departures for careers elsewhere. The railway’s cadence—timetables, shipments, postbags—quietly underwrites Emily’s capacity to submit manuscripts and maintain ties beyond the Island.
Outmigration defined Maritime life between 1891 and 1911. Prince Edward Island’s population fell from approximately 109,000 (1891) to about 94,000 (1911), with many leaving for the “Boston States,” Montreal, or the developing West. Charlottetown still served as a hub, but limited industrialization meant ambitious youths pursued opportunities elsewhere. The novel reflects this demographic tide: talented friends depart for law, art, or stage careers, making the Island a place of nurture and loss. The bittersweet pull between home and away, central to Emily’s choices, mirrors the period’s economic geography, in which cultural and professional capital accumulated in mainland cities while the Island supplied educated emigrants.
Temperance activism culminated provincially with prohibition in 1901, after decades of moral suasion by church groups and women’s organizations and following the 1898 federal plebiscite on prohibition, which, though nationally inconclusive, emboldened local reformers. Prince Edward Island’s Prohibition Act (1901–1948) banned the sale of alcohol, enforced by constables and courts, and spawned smuggling, court cases, and persistent debates about liberty and community welfare. The movement’s broader cultural authority—sermons, pledge-signings, and temperance lectures—shaped public respectability. Emily’s social world, with its acute concern for reputation and self-control, registers this ethos. Chaperoned gatherings, suspicion of bohemian habits, and the premium on “upright” living reflect a community calibrated by temperance ideals, even when individuals pursue more adventurous, cosmopolitan callings.
Educational expansion for women in the Maritimes directly informed the horizons of Montgomery’s characters. Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, founded in 1860, and teacher training through the Island’s Normal School opened paths for literate young women by the late nineteenth century. By the 1890s, female teachers staffed many rural classrooms, and advanced students sought credentials that allowed entry into journalism, secretarial work, or further study off-Island. In the novel, academy exercises, elocution, and school publications cultivate ambition and skill. Emily’s disciplined apprenticeship as a writer—drafts, feedback, and persistence—emerges from this educational milieu, where instruction in composition, rhetoric, and moral character intertwined.
Women’s legal capacity and civic status changed incrementally in the decades encompassing Emily’s story. The Prince Edward Island Married Women’s Property Act (1884) recognized married women’s rights to hold property and earnings, a precondition for treating literary income as a woman’s own. Yet political rights lagged: Canadian women obtained the federal vote in 1918, and Island women secured the provincial franchise in 1922. Local Councils of Women, founded nationally in the 1890s with branches in Maritime towns, advanced reforms in education, sanitation, and moral regulation. Emily’s quest for economic independence, negotiations with male editors, and resistance to marrying for security embody this transitional order—legally more capacious than mid-Victorian norms, but socially policed by kin, clergy, and custom. Her choices dramatize the “New Woman” debate in practical terms: the right to vocation, income, and self-definition before, and within, marriage.
Turn-of-the-century print culture linked Island writers to Toronto, Montreal, Boston, and New York. Canada’s 1898 domestic letter-rate reduction and improved postal logistics eased small-packet circulation, while rail conveyed manuscripts and proofs quickly. Periodicals such as Saturday Night (founded 1887), the Canadian Magazine (1893), and, later, Maclean’s (originating in 1905) exemplify markets that courted national readers, as American magazines dominated at newsstands. Editors favored specific lengths, themes, and moral tones, and cross-border copyright complexities before 1921 shaped reprint practices. The novel’s steady cadence of rejection slips, revisions, and modest checks mirrors this ecosystem, where persistence and networking—more than locality—determined entry.
Tuberculosis, then called consumption, was a leading cause of death around 1900, with Canadian mortality on the order of 150 per 100,000 annually. Sanatoria emerged as public health responses: Muskoka’s opened in 1897, Nova Scotia followed in 1904, and an Island sanatorium began in 1916, reflecting regional needs. Montgomery’s trilogy begins with Emily orphaned by TB, and in Emily’s Quest the fear of wasting illness lingers in family memory and community caution. References to nervous exhaustion, convalescence, and the fragility of artistic temperaments fit a period when abundant rest, fresh air, and moral hygiene were prescribed together, binding health to virtue in popular discourse.
Religious life shaped law and custom. Presbyterian and Methodist congregations set village calendars through Sabbath observance, mission drives, and temperance campaigns. The federal Lord’s Day Act (1906) formalized restrictions on Sunday commerce and recreation, reinforcing habits already common in rural PEI. Clergy and elders mediated reputations, and household piety conferred status. The novel’s emphasis on self-discipline, guarded courtship, and the watchful gaze of neighbors reflects this religiously inflected public sphere. Even as characters gravitate toward art, theatre, or metropolitan careers, the Island’s moral economy—sermons, prayer meetings, and church socials—remains the template against which choices are measured and judged.
Professional pathways were changing in law and public service. The Law Society of Prince Edward Island (established in the 1870s) regulated admission, while Dalhousie Law School in Halifax (founded 1883) offered systematic instruction that many Maritime aspirants still supplemented through articling. This hybrid regime allowed talented men of modest means to rise by examination and apprenticeship. In Emily’s circle, the trajectory from rural schoolhouse to clerkship, courtroom, and political aspiration tracks contemporary mobility. The prestige of legal success—and the oratorical skills it required—complements the novel’s investment in rhetoric, debate, and publication as means of self-making within a small but ambitious society.
Charlottetown embodied the Island’s modern face. By the 1890s it boasted expanding newspapers, improved wharf facilities, electric lighting, and early telephone exchanges, while the hinterland remained only partially electrified for decades. The city hosted theatres, debating societies, and publishers’ offices that connected local talent to wider circuits. For Emily and her cohort, occasional stays in town meant access to editors, pressrooms, libraries, and audiences—gateways to cultural capital otherwise scarce in the countryside. The contrast between urban bustle and New Moon’s routines dramatizes the period’s uneven modernization, where a short rail journey could transport a young writer from parochial scrutiny into a cosmopolitan milieu.
Economic restructuring in the late nineteenth century left the Island agriculturally focused and cautious. Wooden shipbuilding, which had peaked in the 1860s, declined sharply by the 1880s as steel steamships prevailed, narrowing local industrial options. Mixed farming—especially potatoes, oats, and dairy—dominated, with seasonal labor and small surpluses. The National Policy’s protective tariffs fostered central Canadian industry more than Maritime manufacturing, intensifying peripherality. In the novel, frugality, careful bookkeeping, and the moral authority of landownership reflect this economy. Artistic careers appear risky against the stability of fields and livestock, sharpening choices about vocation, marriage, and migration that drive Emily’s story.
Fine-arts training and exhibition networks drew Islanders to mainland centers. The Art Association of Montreal (founded 1860; art school established in the 1880s) and the National Gallery of Canada (1880) signaled professional avenues for painters, supplemented by travel to Boston, New York, or Paris. Patronage, juried shows, and critics’ columns made reputations—and demanded urban presence. The novel’s artist figure’s departures to study and exhibit, and the allure of studio life, mirror these institutions’ centripetal pull. Emily’s romantic and vocational entanglement with art is thus keyed to a real infrastructure of schools, salons, and markets that lay far from New Moon’s fields yet beckoned determined talent.
Through Emily’s determination to write for pay while resisting expedient matches, the book critiques a social order that prized female respectability over intellectual vocation. It exposes the economic fragility of women’s ambitions under patriarchal gatekeeping—guardians who police courtship, editors who demand “safe” themes, and neighbors who conflate conformity with virtue. By dramatizing the costs of a misalliance in a jurisdiction where separation carried stigma and where gossip could end careers, the novel spotlights how informal sanctions substituted for formal power, channeling women toward domesticated futures even as education and postal modernity suggested wider horizons.
The narrative also probes class and regional inequities. Secure landholding families wield social capital that poorer households must painstakingly earn through schooling or law, while the Island’s peripheral economy pushes the gifted to leave. Temperance and Sabbath regimes, though reformist, generate moral surveillance that constrains artistic experiment and theatrical careers. In mapping these pressures onto choices about migration, publication, and marriage, the novel implicitly criticizes national development patterns that privileged central Canadian cities and entrenched Maritime outflow. Emily’s vocation becomes a counter-argument: a claim for cultural production from the margins that challenges the period’s hierarchies of class, region, and gender.
Author Biography
Lucy Maud Montgomery was a Canadian novelist and short story writer whose work helped shape early twentieth-century children’s and young adult literature. Born on Prince Edward Island in the late nineteenth century, she is best known for Anne of Green Gables, a novel that brought a rural Atlantic Canadian setting to a global readership. Her fiction combined humor, lyrical description, and close attention to the inner lives of girls and women, offering narratives of growth, vocation, and belonging. Beyond a single iconic character, Montgomery built a varied body of work that has remained continuously in print, translated widely, and adapted for stage and screen across generations.
Montgomery’s formative years on Prince Edward Island gave her a deep attachment to its landscapes, communities, and seasons, which became the imaginative core of much of her writing. She trained as a teacher at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and later studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax. These experiences broadened her intellectual horizons while honing the discipline she brought to daily writing. Early reading in British and Scottish poetry, the Victorian novel, and religious and folk traditions informed her style. The island’s oral storytelling culture and its Presbyterian milieu shaped her sensibility, even as she pursued an increasingly professional literary life.
Before her first novel, Montgomery established herself in the magazine market in Canada and the United States, publishing poems and stories that refined her voice and themes. She worked as a teacher and in newspaper offices, gaining practical editorial experience and a sense of the periodical world’s demands. Persistent and businesslike, she kept detailed notebooks of ideas and revisions, habits that underpinned her productivity. Her practice of transforming earlier sketches into later stories or chapters showed a craftsman’s economy. The discipline of writing for diverse audiences—domestic tales, romances, and humorous pieces—prepared her to orchestrate longer narratives with comic verve and emotional depth.
Anne of Green Gables appeared in 1908 and met immediate popular success, leading to a long sequence of Anne books that followed the heroine and her community over time. Montgomery’s portrayal of imaginative childhood, female education, and small-town life resonated across North America and beyond. The early acclaim brought new pressures, including the navigation of contracts and the realities of international publishing, which she handled with notable professionalism. Sequels such as Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne’s House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley, Rilla of Ingleside, and Anne of Ingleside extended the fictional world while experimenting with tone, from comic domesticity to the sobering wartime home front.
Montgomery did not confine herself to Anne’s story. The Emily trilogy—Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest—explored the making of a writer, tracing ambition, mentorship, and the costs of artistic vocation. She also wrote The Blue Castle, an adult novel that examines autonomy and desire, and A Tangled Web, a multigenerational comedy-drama. Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat return to questions of home and change, while The Story Girl and The Golden Road celebrate narrative itself. Short story collections, including Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, and the poetry volume The Watchman and Other Poems, display her range across forms and moods.
Themes central to Montgomery’s oeuvre include the sustaining power of imagination, the ethics of community, and the tension between personal aspiration and social conformity. Her depictions of girls’ education and women’s work reflect contemporary debates about gender roles, presented with sympathy and wit rather than polemic. A committed churchgoer and later a minister’s wife after her marriage, she drew on religious and rural cultures without idealizing them. Notably, Rilla of Ingleside offered one of the earliest Canadian novels to portray the First World War from the home front, integrating national history with family life and showing how global events penetrate even seemingly remote communities.
In the 1910s and 1920s Montgomery relocated to Ontario, balancing writing with congregational and domestic responsibilities and continuing to publish into the late 1930s. She died in the early 1940s. Posthumously published journals have deepened understanding of her methods, reading, and literary ambitions. Her legacy endures in scholarship, tourism centered on Prince Edward Island, and an extensive adaptation history that includes film, television, stage musicals, and international retellings. Read today, her books are valued for their craftsmanship, humor, and psychologically attentive portraits of youth and community. They continue to offer insight into Canadian cultural history while appealing to readers around the world.
Emily's Quest
Chapter I
I
"No more cambric-tea[1]" had Emily Byrd Starr written in her diary when she came home to New Moon from Shrewsbury, with high school days behind her and immortality before her.
Which was a symbol. When Aunt Elizabeth Murray permitted Emily to drink real tea--as a matter of course and not as an occasional concession--she thereby tacitly consented to let Emily grow up. Emily had been considered grownup by other people for some time, especially by Cousin Andrew Murray and Friend Perry Miller, each of whom had asked her to marry him and been disdainfully refused for his pains. When Aunt Elizabeth found this out she knew it was no use to go on making Emily drink cambric-tea. Though, even then, Emily had no real hope that she would ever be permitted to wear silk stockings. A silk petticoat might be tolerated, being a hidden thing, in spite of its seductive rustle, but silk stockings were immoral.
So Emily, of whom it was whispered somewhat mysteriously by people who knew her to people who didn't know her, "she writes," was accepted as one of the ladies of New Moon, where nothing had ever changed since her coming there seven years before and where the carved ornament on the sideboard still cast the same queer shadow of an Ethiopian silhouette on exactly the same place on the wall where she had noticed it delightedly on her first evening there. An old house that had lived its life long ago and so was very quiet and wise and a little mysterious. Also a little austere, but very kind. Some of the Blair Water and Shrewsbury people thought it was a dull place and outlook for a young girl and said she had been very foolish to refuse Miss Royal's offer of "a position on a magazine" in New York. Throwing away such a good chance to make something of herself! But Emily, who had very clear-cut ideas of what she was going to make of herself, did not think life would be dull at New Moon or that she had lost her chance of Alpine climbing because she had elected to stay there.
She belonged by right divine to the Ancient and Noble Order of Story-tellers. Born thousands of years earlier she would have sat in the circle around the fires of the tribe and enchanted her listeners. Born in the foremost files of time she must reach her audience through many artificial mediums.
But the materials of story weaving are the same in all ages and all places. Births, deaths, marriages, scandals--these are the only really interesting things in the world. So she settled down very determinedly and happily to her pursuit of fame and fortune--and of something that was neither. For writing, to Emily Byrd Starr, was not primarily a matter of worldly lucre or laurel crown. It was something she had to do. A thing--an idea--whether of beauty or ugliness, tortured her until it was "written out." Humorous and dramatic by instinct, the comedy and tragedy of life enthralled her and demanded expression through her pen. A world of lost but immortal dreams, lying just beyond the drop-curtain of the real, called to her for embodiment and interpretation--called with a voice she could not--dared not--disobey.
She was filled with youth's joy in mere existence. Life was for ever luring and beckoning her onward. She knew that a hard struggle was before her; she knew that she must constantly offend Blair Water neighbours who would want her to write obituaries for them and who, if she used an unfamiliar word would say contemptuously that she was "talking big;" she knew there would be rejection slips galore; she knew there would be days when she would feel despairingly that she could not write and that it was of no use to try; days when the editorial phrase, "not necessarily a reflection on its merits," would get on her nerves to such an extent that she would feel like imitating Marie Bashkirtseff and hurling the taunting, ticking, remorseless sitting-room clock out of the window; days when everything she had done or tried to do would slump--become mediocre and despicable; days when she would be tempted to bitter disbelief in her fundamental conviction that there was as much truth in the poetry of life as in the prose; days when the echo of that "random word" of the gods, for which she so avidly listened, would only seem to taunt her with its suggestions of unattainable perfection and loveliness beyond the reach of mortal ear or pen.
She knew that Aunt Elizabeth tolerated but never approved her mania for scribbling. In her last two years in Shrewsbury High School Emily, to Aunt Elizabeth's almost incredulous amazement, had actually earned some money by her verses and stories. Hence the toleration. But no Murray had ever done such a thing before. And there was always that sense, which Dame Elizabeth Murray did not like, of being shut out of something. Aunt Elizabeth really resented the fact that Emily had another world, apart from the world of New Moon and Blair Water, a kingdom starry and illimitable, into which she could enter at will and into which not even the most determined and suspicious of aunts could follow her. I really think that if Emily's eyes had not so often seemed to be looking at something dreamy and lovely and secretive Aunt Elizabeth might have had more sympathy with her ambitions. None of us, not even self-sufficing Murrays of New Moon, like to be barred out.
II
Those of you who have already followed Emily through her years of New Moon and Shrewsbury* must have a tolerable notion what she looked like. For those of you to whom she comes as a stranger let me draw a portrait of her as she seemed to the outward eye at the enchanted portal of seventeen, walking where the golden chrysanthemums lighted up an old autumnal, maritime garden. A place of peace, that garden of New Moon. An enchanted pleasaunce, full of rich, sensuous colours and wonderful spiritual shadows. Scents of pine and rose were in it; boom of bees, threnody of wind, murmurs of the blue Atlantic gulf; and always the soft sighing of the firs in Lofty John Sullivan[2]'s "bush" to the north of it. Emily loved every flower and shadow and sound in it, every beautiful old tree in and around it, especially her own intimate, beloved trees--a cluster of wild cherries in the south-west corner, Three Princesses of Lombardy, a certain maiden-like wild plum on the brook path, the big spruce in the centre of the garden, a silver maple and a pine farther on, an aspen in another corner always coquetting with gay little winds, and a whole row of stately white birches in Lofty John's bush.
* See Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs.
Emily was always glad that she lived where there were many trees--old ancestral trees, planted and tended by hands long dead, bound up with everything of joy and sorrow that visited the lives in their shadows.
A slender, virginal young thing. Hair like black silk. Purplish-grey eyes, with violet shadows under them that always seemed darker and more alluring after Emily had sat up to some unholy and un-Elizabethan hour completing a story or working out the skeleton of a plot; scarlet lips with a Murray-like crease at the corners; ears with Puckish, slightly pointed tips. Perhaps it was the crease and the ears that made certain people think her something of a puss. An exquisite line of chin and neck; a smile with a trick in it; such a slow-blossoming thing with a sudden radiance of fulfilment. And ankles that scandalous old Aunt Nancy Priest of Priest Pond commended. Faint stains of rose in her rounded cheeks that sometimes suddenly deepened to crimson. Very little could bring that transforming flush--a wind off the sea, a sudden glimpse of blue upland, a flame-red poppy, white sails going out of the harbour in the magic of morning, gulf-waters silver under the moon, a Wedgwood-blue columbine in the old orchard. Or a certain whistle in Lofty John's bush.
With all this--pretty? I cannot tell you. Emily was never mentioned when Blair Water beauties were being tabulated. But no one who looked upon her face ever forgot it. No one, meeting Emily the second time ever had to say "Er--your face seems familiar but--" Generations of lovely women were behind her. They had all given her something of personality. She had the grace of running water. Something, too, of its sparkle and limpidity. A thought swayed her like a strong wind. An emotion shook her as a tempest shakes a rose. She was one of those vital creatures of whom, when they do die, we say it seems impossible that they can be dead. Against the background of her practical, sensible clan she shone like a diamond flame. Many people liked her, many disliked her. No one was ever wholly indifferent to her.
Once, when Emily had been very small, living with her father down in the little old house at Maywood, where he had died, she had started out to seek the rainbow's end. Over long wet fields and hills she ran, hopeful, expectant. But as she ran the wonderful arch was faded--was dim--was gone. Emily was alone in an alien valley, not too sure in which direction lay home. For a moment her lips quivered, her eyes filled. Then she lifted her face and smiled gallantly at the empty sky.
"There will be other rainbows," she said.
Emily was a chaser of rainbows.[1q]
III
Life at New Moon had changed. She must adjust herself to it. A certain loneliness must be reckoned with. Ilse Burnley, the madcap pal of seven faithful years, had gone to the School of Literature and Expression in Montreal. The two girls parted with the tears and vows of girlhood. Never to meet on quite the same ground again. For, disguise the fact as we will, when friends, even the closest--perhaps the more because of that very closeness--meet again after a separation there is always a chill, lesser or greater, of change. Neither finds the other quite the same. This is natural and inevitable. Human nature is ever growing or retrogressing--never stationary. But still, with all our philosophy, who of us can repress a little feeling of bewildered disappointment when we realize that our friend is not and never can be just the same as before--even though the change may be by way of improvement? Emily, with the strange intuition which supplied the place of experience, felt this as Ilse did not, and felt that in a sense she was bidding good-bye for ever to the Ilse of New Moon days and Shrewsbury years.
