Sarah Emsley's Blog, page 22
August 4, 2017
Searching for Maud in the “Emily” Series
It’s a pleasure to introduce Melanie J. Fishbane’s guest post on L.M. Montgomery’s journals and her “Emily” books. Melanie is the author of Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery, which was published by Penguin in April. Publishers Weekly calls it “a delightful debut novel,” and Karen Krossing writes that “Fans of Montgomery’s novels will adore this exploration of her bosom friends, her handsome and teasing suitors, her rigid grandparents, and the challenges she faced in pursuing her dream of becoming an author.”
Melanie has an MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts and an MA in History from Concordia University, and she often lectures on children’s literature and L.M. Montgomery. Her essay “‘My Pen Shall Heal, Not Hurt’: Writing as Therapy in L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted” was published in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911-1942, edited by Rita Bode and Lesley D. Clement (McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2015). She says she’s been obsessed with Montgomery since she first read Anne of Green Gables when she was in Grade Six. She’s a freelance writer and social media consultant, and she teaches English at Humber College. She lives in Toronto with her partner and their cat, Merlin. You can find her on Twitter @MelanieFishbane and on Facebook.
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Photo by Ayelet Tsabari
Last week, Melanie visited Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island to read from Maud, and she and I had a fantastic time touring literary sites in Halifax with my friend Marianne Ward, a freelance editor and a long-time fan of Montgomery’s novels. Here are a few photos from that rainy afternoon, and, at the end of this post, from Melanie’s readings in the Halifax Public Gardens and at Mabel Murple’s Bookshoppe & Dreamery in River John, NS.
First, the Old Burying Ground, fictionalized as “Old St. John’s Cemetery” in Anne of the Island. Anne’s friend Priscilla says, “a few years ago they put up a beautiful monument to the memory of Nova Scotian soldiers who fell in the Crimean War. It is just opposite the entrance gates and there’s ‘scope for imagination’ in it.”
Of course I had to point out Government House, across the street from the Old Burying Ground, because it’s on the “Austens in Halifax” walking tour that Sheila Johnson Kindred and I wrote and posted on my website a few weeks ago:
The house on Church Street where L.M. Montgomery lived when she was working in Halifax at The Daily Echo. Looks as if it’s still for sale. Anyone want to buy it and turn it into a museum?[image error]
The Forrest Building at Dalhousie University, fictionalized as Redmond College in Anne of the Island:
The final stop on our tour was Point Pleasant Park. Montgomery found her walks at Point Pleasant provided consolation when she missed her Prince Edward Island home, and she mentions the park, its shore road, and its pavilions in Anne of the Island. Here’s a photo of Melanie (on the left) and Marianne at Point Pleasant, along with another photo that I took on a different visit to the park last week.[image error]
Melanie and Marianne and I didn’t have time, unfortunately, to visit the building Montgomery worked in when she wrote for The Daily Echo in 1901-02, but Melanie and I did get there this past Monday, after her reading in the Public Gardens.
The building is now the home of The Old Triangle pub, and it’s where we hold meetings for our Project Bookmark Canada Halifax Reading Circle. Marianne is a member of the group and it was her brilliant idea a couple of years ago that we should meet there because of the literary connection with Montgomery.
I was thrilled to hear the announcement last week that the first Bookmark in PEI is for one of L.M. Montgomery’s poems, “The Gable Window,” and that it will be unveiled at her grandparents’ homestead, known as The Site of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Cavendish Home, on June 24, 2018. I think it’s wonderful news, and I’m excited about future Bookmarks across Canada, especially in Nova Scotia and PEI.
(If you’re interested, you can read more about our Reading Circle in this article on the Project Bookmark website: “Reading Circles Link Readers Across Canada.” There are a couple of photos of the homestead in a blog post I wrote a few years ago about “L.M. Mongtomery’s Literary Pilgrimage to Concord, Mass.” And there’s more information about Montgomery-related sites in Halifax on my “L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia” page.)
Here’s Melanie’s guest post:
One of the first images that came to me when I began writing Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery was of Maud throwing her journal into the stove and watching it burn. She was fourteen. Having kept a journal since I was fourteen (and having read it since), I can imagine wanting to burn away certain trivialities. (Don’t worry, I haven’t.)
The journal that L.M. Montgomery burned, however, was one that she had kept since she was nine. While she says in her new journal that she burned it because it had trivial musings about the weather and it was “also very dull,” she also writes that this time, “I am going to keep this book locked up!!” (The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889-1900).
It made me wonder: Why? Why would Montgomery want to keep her new journal locked up with such urgency the idea required not one, but two exclamation points!! (And we all know what Mr. Carpenter—in the “Emily” books—thought of those!!)
I discussed this question with one of my writer friends, who reminded me that some stories are easier to write about in fiction. Even if diaries are supposed to be private in nature, there is a possibility that they will be read. Montgomery scholars Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio have discussed Montgomery’s revisions to her journals, and the special instructions about their publication that she left for her sons to read after she died. So, again I wondered: What was too painful for Montgomery to write about in her journal? Even when she was revising it? Or, had it been there and it was too painful to revisit it?
While I always think it is dangerous to see direct connections between an author’s life and fiction, I do think there are some truths in these connections. And Montgomery encouraged readers to see these links between her life and art, particularly in her autobiography, The Alpine Path. Readers continue to make these links, and they travel from all over the world to visit her fictional worlds in real places.
So, I returned to her fiction, looking for clues about Montgomery’s writing process and the questions she had about writing, trying to answer not just the question about why she might have burned her journal, but the other hidden truths, the things that the journals weren’t saying.
The Emily books became very important in this process because my novel was a portrait of the artist as a young woman. I returned to Emily to see if I could learn more about Montgomery as a teenager. As Alice Munro points out in the afterword she wrote for Emily of New Moon, the novel’s central focus is “the development of a child—and a girl child, at that—into a writer.” Montgomery had said that the Emily novels were more autobiographical than the Anne novels. Writing is essential, as Emily says to Mr. Carpenter at the end of the novel (in italics—good thing it was just dialogue as we know what her teacher thought of those in print), “I have to write—I can’t help it at times—I’ve just got to.” This idea echoes something Montgomery wrote in a letter to G.B. Macmillan about the urge to write and how the only thing she ever wanted to do was write. It was part of the narrative of her experience, of how she wished people to see her—and maybe how she wished to see herself.
Bringing these ideas back to my fictional character based on a real person meant that I had to take all that I learned and allow her voice to tell me who she was and what she wanted. Perhaps it was too painful to write in her journal about it being discovered by one of her family members? Maybe Montgomery felt something sacred had been tarnished, just as Emily felt after her Aunt Elizabeth read the private letters she wrote to her father after his death. While it might be those long-lost journal entries were really about the weather, I had to wonder if there was more in them that Montgomery had burned away when she was fourteen. Perhaps she wrote about her time living at Aunt Emily’s, or what happened with Izzie Robinson, or how long it had been since she had seen her father. We will never know. But writing historical fiction allowed me to consider these questions and delving into the Emily series helped me find those aspects, while (I hope) being true to the character I had created.
Melanie reading in the Halifax Public Gardens:
Photos from last week’s reading at Mabel Murple’s Bookshoppe & Dreamery in River John, Nova Scotia:
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Sheree Fitch introduces Melanie’s reading
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That’s me on the left, with Melanie (and Maud) in the middle, and Naomi MacKinnon (of consumedbyink.ca) on the right
A couple of photos I took on opening day at Mabel Murple’s, in early July:
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[image error]A beautiful display of copies of Melanie’s novel Maud at Mabel Murple’s:
July 28, 2017
A Visit to Green Gables
[image error]I went to Prince Edward Island last weekend and visited Green Gables for the first time in a few years. I’ve been thinking about L.M. Montgomery’s early years as a writer, because I’ve been reading a new collection of her work called After Many Years: Twenty-One “Long-Lost” Stories, edited by Carolyn Strom Collins and Christy Woster. (Montgomery published hundreds of stories and poems—I hadn’t realized just how high the number was—before Anne of Green Gables appeared in 1908.) And I was thinking of those early years because this week, Melanie J. Fishbane, author of Maud: A Novel Inspired by the Life of L.M. Montgomery, is visiting Nova Scotia and PEI. Melanie’s novel focuses on Montgomery as a teenager, dreaming of future success as a writer: “Similar to Jo March in Little Women, Maud imagined herself writing sweeping epics and articles for newspapers, or traveling to the great cities of the world, and making something of herself.”
On Tuesday, Melanie and I spent a rainy afternoon touring sites in Halifax that Montgomery was familiar with when she lived here in 1895-96 and 1901-02, including the Old Burying Ground, Dalhousie University, and Point Pleasant Park. Melanie will be reading from Maud in the Halifax Public Gardens on Monday, July 31st, at noon. She’ll also be signing books and reading in Summerside, Park Corner, and Charlottetown, PEI today and tomorrow, and then signing books in Halifax on Sunday—full details about her events in the Maritimes are listed on her website. Next Friday, I’ll share with you a guest post Melanie wrote about Montgomery’s diaries and her “Emily” novels, along with some pictures from our tour of LMM-related sites in Halifax.
For now, here are some of the photos I took last weekend in PEI. Despite the huge crowds of people touring Green Gables and walking on the trails, I managed to get a few pictures without any people in them. It’s amusing to look back at these pictures now, as they make the place seem so quiet and peaceful, when in fact it was quite noisy and busy. I can hear my daughter saying, “Quick, quick! Take the picture now! Oh, no!! There’s another person.”
Here are my photos of the Gardens of Hope and the Clyde River, at the PEI Preserve Company in New Glasgow, where it really was quiet. The restaurant and shop were busy, but at that hour in the evening—the best hour for photography, but perhaps also for eating the Preserve Company’s famous raspberry cream cheese pie—there were only about half a dozen people in the garden.
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Sunset at Stanley Bridge:
The kitchen window, “Anne’s room,” the sewing room, the garden, Lovers’ Lane, and the Balsam Hollow Trail at Green Gables Heritage Place, L.M. Montgomery’s Cavendish National Historic Site of Canada:
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“May I call it—let me see—Bonny would do—may I call it Bonny while I’m here? Oh, do let me! … I like things to have handles even if they are only geraniums. It makes them seem more like people. How do you know but that it hurts a geranium’s feelings just to be called a geranium and nothing else? You wouldn’t like to be called nothing but a woman all the time. Yes, I shall call it Bonny.” (Anne of Green Gables, Chapter 4)
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“Anne’s Room”
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July 14, 2017
Austens in Halifax, Nova Scotia: A Walking Tour
Jane Austen died two hundred years ago this month, on July 18, 1817. Readers around the world are commemorating the anniversary with exhibitions, lectures, conferences and other events, and above all—I hope—by reading and rereading her novels.
A few weeks ago, the Jane Austen Society of the UK held a conference in my hometown of Halifax, Nova Scotia, to celebrate the 200th anniversary of Austen’s novels Persuasion and Northanger Abbey, to discuss connections between the Austen family and Halifax, and to honour Jane Austen’s literary achievement in this anniversary year.
Sheila Johnson Kindred and I gave a lecture on the story of Jane Austen’s two naval brothers, Charles and Francis, and the time they spent in Halifax between 1805 and 1811 (Charles) and between 1845 and 1848 (Francis). To complement the lecture, we prepared a walking tour of sites in Halifax that were familiar to Captain Charles Austen and Admiral Sir Francis Austen and their families. I promised to share the walking tour online as well as at the conference, and I’m pleased to say that it’s now available on a new “Austens in Halifax” page on my website. It’s also possible to download and print a PDF of the walking tour.
At the conference, we heard lectures by Cheryl Kinney (“Persuasion: Engineered Injury” and “Jane Austen: Her Doctors and Her Death”), John Mullan (“The Hurry of Northanger Abbey,” “What Matters in Jane Austen?” and “Persuasion and Self-Delusion”), and Peter Sabor (“Jane Austen and Canada: from Anna Lefroy to Joan Austen-Leigh” and “Jane Austen and America: The first fifty years; from 1817 to the late 1860s”). I gave a second lecture on “Anne Elliot’s Ambitions” and Sheila’s second lecture focused on “Fanny Palmer Austen: The Story of a North American Naval Wife.”
Sheila’s biography of Fanny Austen, Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen, will be published this fall by McGill-Queen’s University Press. The book includes the letters Fanny wrote while she was with her husband Charles in Halifax, and it features rarely seen illustrations.
It was a pleasure to visit many of the sites mentioned in the walking tour during the week-long conference, including Citadel Hill, Government House, the Maritime Museum of the Atlantic, St. Paul’s Church, and Admiralty House.
There are many photos on the “Austens in Halifax” page, and in two blog posts I wrote in June, “Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia” and “Reading Jane Austen’s Poems in the Halifax Public Gardens.” I’ll include a few more photos here, all of which I took during the JAS conference.
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, Nova Scotia, where Jane Austen’s niece Cassy was baptized in 1809, and her nephew Charles John Austen, Junior married Sophia Emma Deblois in 1848:
Admiralty House (now the Naval Museum of Halifax), where Admiral Sir Francis Austen and his family lived when he was in Halifax, Nova Scotia as Commander-in-Chief of the North American and West Indies Station, 1845-48. The first photo is the view from the front steps of the house:[image error]
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June 30, 2017
Reading Jane Austen’s Poems in the Halifax Public Gardens
Last Sunday, on a warm summer evening during the Jane Austen Society of the UK conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia, members of the JAS UK and the Jane Austen Society of North America’s Nova Scotia Region read poems by Jane Austen and other members of her family at an event in the beautiful Halifax Public Gardens. The reading was hosted by the Friends of the Public Gardens and organized by Janet Brush. Audience members were encouraged to read as well, from work by Austen or other poets, and they chose poems by such writers as William Blake, John Donne, and Sir Walter Scott. Janet invited me to say a few words about Jane Austen’s poetry at the beginning of the reading, and I decided to post what I said here on my blog as well.
The JAS conference was splendid, and I’m grateful to Patrick Stokes for organizing it and inviting me to give two lectures. I’ll include a few photos from the conference at the end of this blog post, and in July (as promised earlier this month) I’ll write a separate blog post that includes the “Austens in Halifax” walking tour Sheila Johnson Kindred and I prepared to accompany our lecture on “Charles and Francis: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station.”
First, though, here’s what I said about Jane Austen’s poems. This is a slightly longer version of what I said at the poetry reading.
Jane Austen is not usually thought of as a poet. Many of her readers don’t know about her poetry at all—what they know are the “big six” novels, the novels that have made her famous around the world: Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice, Mansfield Park, Emma, Northanger Abbey, and Persuasion, which were published between 1811 and 1817, the year she died.
The 200th anniversary of her death is next month, on July 18th, and there are events planned in England and around the world to commemorate the occasion, including the conference here in Halifax this week. Members of the Jane Austen Society of the UK have come here to talk about Austen’s novels and about the Austen family’s connection with Nova Scotia. Although Jane Austen herself never visited Halifax—never left England, in fact—two of her brothers were in the Royal Navy and they and their families visited a few times.
Jane Austen is probably best known for creating Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy, the heroine and hero of Pride and Prejudice, and that’s partly because the famously “light & bright & sparkling” novel (as she referred to it in a letter to her sister Cassandra on February 4, 1813) has been adapted for film and television several times. But her other works, including her poems, her letters, and the stories and plays she wrote when she was very young, are also well worth our attention, and they give us a richer, fuller picture of her as an artist.
Several of the Austens wrote poetry. There are many poems by Jane’s mother and her older brother James, and there are also riddles and charades composed by other members of the family, including her nieces Fanny Knight and Anna Austen, and her brothers Henry, Charles, and Francis (or Frank).
Charles and Frank are of particular interest to us here in Halifax, because they’re the ones who spent time here when they were posted to the Royal Navy’s North American Station.
Captain Charles Austen was here several times between 1805 and 1811, during Jane Austen’s lifetime, in the years before her two naval novels, Mansfield Park and Persuasion, were published, and she was inspired by his experiences when she created the naval characters in those two novels.
Frank—Admiral Sir Francis Austen—was here many years after her death, when he was Commander-in-Chief of what was by then known as the North American and West Indies Station. He lived in Admiralty House, in the naval yard, which is now the Naval Museum of Halifax.
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We visited Admiralty House on Sunday afternoon, just before the poetry reading in the Gardens.
The Austen family wrote poetry to entertain themselves and their friends, not for publication. Jane Austen once said, when she was encouraged to write a historical romance, “I could no more write a romance than an epic poem” (in a letter written on April 1, 1816). David Selwyn, editor of the Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family (1996), has suggested it is “only in an ironic sense that she saw herself as a poet.”
She did not write epic poetry, and she did not, as far as we know, seek to publish her poems. Yet I’m inclined to agree with the argument the Canadian literary critic George Whalley proposes in an essay called “Jane Austen: Poet” (published in Jane Austen’s Achievement [1976], edited by Juliet McMaster). Whalley says she is a poet not primarily because she wrote verses—though she did, and they are clever and entertaining, as you’ll hear in a moment when we read some of them.
Instead, Whalley invokes the Greek root of the word “poet,” poiein, which means “make, do, fashion, or perform,” and he suggests Jane Austen is a poet because she is a “maker” in words, a maker of tragedies as well as of comedies. She is an artist, a creator, a maker with a poetic vision, in her novels, which are her greatest achievement.
(I say more about Whalley and the idea of Jane Austen as a poet in my essay “The Tragic Action of Mansfield Park,” which was published in Approaches to Teaching Austen’s Mansfield Park [2014], edited by Marcia McClintock Folsom and John Wiltshire. An earlier version of that essay appeared in Persuasions On-Line.)
At Sunday’s reading, I chose to focus on three of her poems: “My dearest Frank,” “In measured verse,” and “Winchester Races.” I’ll quote a few lines from them here.
The first poem is a letter Jane Austen wrote to congratulate her brother Frank on the birth of his first son in the summer of 1809. She and her sister Cassandra and their mother had recently settled in a cottage in the village of Chawton, in Hampshire. Frank’s wife and daughter were in nearby Alton, and Frank himself was away on a voyage to China when his son was born. Charles Austen and his family were in Bermuda in 1809, and he brought his wife Fanny and their first baby, Cassy, to Nova Scotia for the first time that fall. (Cassy was baptized at St. Paul’s Church in Halifax on October 6, 1809.) In the last lines of the poem, Jane imagines that perhaps Charles and his family will return to England and settle in the Great House at Chawton, which belonged to her older brother Edward:
You’ll find us very snug next year;
Perhaps with Charles & Fanny near—
For now it often does delight us
To fancy them just over-right us.
I love the fact that North America features so prominently in the second poem I read, “In measured verse,” which Jane Austen wrote for her niece Anna: there are references to “Ontario’s lake,” “Niagara’s Fall,” and “transatlantic groves.” While Jane Austen herself didn’t visit North America, she travelled vast distances in her imagination. She said of Anna that “Her wit descends on foes and friends / Like famed Niagara’s Fall.”
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I couldn’t resist including this photo I took last summer when my family and I visited Niagara Falls.
The last poem I read was the last one Jane Austen wrote before she died in July of 1817. She died in Winchester, England, at the age of forty-one, and her beloved sister Cassandra was with her in her final days and hours. Even though she was very ill and must have known she was dying, she chose to write a comic poem. It begins,
When Winchester races first took their beginning
It is said the good people forgot their old Saint
Not applying at all for the leave of St Swithin
And that William of Wykham’s approval was faint.
She wrote it on July 15, St. Swithun’s Day, and she died three days later.
Christy Ann Conlin was the next reader. She read Jane Austen’s “Ode to Pity,” along with a brief excerpt from her novel The Memento. The novel is set in Nova Scotia, at a grand estate called “Petal’s End,” and the descriptions of the estate and garden, “Evermore,” were inspired by Christy Ann’s visits to Uniacke House, Prescott House, and the Halifax Public Gardens, as she discussed in a piece she wrote for my blog last September. The young heroine, Fancy, reminds me of Jane Austen’s Catherine Morland, who thinks with delight of all the gothic horrors that might await her at Northanger Abbey. The crucial difference here, in The Memento, is that Fancy hasn’t simply imagined the stories that haunt the Parker family and their servants at Petal’s End, and Christy Ann’s novel turns out to have even more in common with the ghost stories of Edith Wharton than it does with Austen’s novels.
Janet Brush read Jane Austen’s “Oh! Mr Best, you’re very bad,” we listened to readings from Blake, Donne, Scott, and others, as I mentioned above, and several JAS and JASNA members read from other poems by Jane Austen and her family. Christopher Smith from the JAS amazed and delighted the audience with a dramatic recitation, in French, of two fables by La Fontaine. It was an informal and fun reading, and by the end we were passing around a copy of David Selwyn’s edition of the Collected Poems and Verse of the Austen Family, taking turns choosing what to read next.
Many thanks to everyone who participated, and to Janet and the Friends of the Public Gardens for choosing Jane Austen’s poetry as the theme of the June reading, timed to coincide with the JAS conference. There are more readings planned for July 21st, August 18th, September 23rd, and October 21st, all from 6 to 8pm at the bandstand, to continue the celebrations of the 150th anniversary of the Public Gardens.
Here are some of the photos I took at the Jane Austen Society, UK conference in Halifax, “Transatlantic Perspectives on Jane Austen: 200 Years of Persuasion,” 20-27 June 2017. We toured Uniacke House on Friday:
We visited Luckett Vineyards and Grand Pré National Historic Site on Saturday:
[image error][image error][image error][image error][image error]The farewell dinner was held at the Halifax Citadel:
[image error][image error][image error][image error] And here’s one last photo of the Halifax Public Gardens:
June 9, 2017
Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia
Later this month, Sheila Johnson Kindred and I are giving a joint lecture for the Jane Austen Society, UK conference in Halifax, Nova Scotia on “Charles and Francis Austen: Jane Austen’s Sailor Brothers on the Royal Navy’s North American Station,” so I’ve put together a collection of photos of Austen-related sites in Bermuda and Nova Scotia. Jane’s younger brother, Captain Charles Austen, served on the North American Station between 1805 and 1811, and one of her older brothers, Vice Admiral Sir Francis Austen, was Commander-in-Chief between 1845 and 1848, long after Jane’s death in 1817.
Sheila and I are writing a walking tour that highlights places the Austen brothers and their families saw or visited during their time in Halifax, and I’ll post more details about that next month. In the meantime, I want to share some of the photos with you. I took all the photos of places in Halifax and my sister-in-law Laura Baxter took the photos of places in Bermuda.
Sheila recently completed a biography of Charles Austen’s Bermuda born wife Fanny Palmer Austen. Her book Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen will be published in October by McGill-Queen’s University Press.
Sheila and I have collaborated on many Austen-related projects over the years (including an essay called “Among the Proto-Janeites: Reading Mansfield Park for Consolation in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1815,” which was published in Persuasions On-Line after we presented it at the 2014 JASNA AGM in Montreal), and I am thrilled to announce the news about her book. I know it will be essential reading for anyone interested in Jane Austen, as Sheila traces through Fanny’s life story the relationship she built with Jane and the influence she may have had on Jane Austen’s fiction, especially the creation of the female naval characters in Persuasion.
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Belcher’s Marsh Park in Halifax, NS. A photo from our co-authored paper “Among the Proto-Janeites.” This land was part of the Birch Cove estate that Sir John and Lady Sherbrooke leased from Halifax merchant Andrew Belcher in 1811.
I’ll include details about Sheila’s articles on the Austens at the end of this blog post, for anyone who wants to consult back issues of Persuasions while we wait for October to read Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister. Congratulations on your book, Sheila! I’m looking forward to conversations about the Austens in Bermuda and Nova Scotia at the conference, and I can’t wait to see the book in print.
First, a few photos from St. Georges, Bermuda, where Fanny Palmer was born, and where she and Charles Austen were married in St. Peter’s Church in 1807:
Photos of Halifax, Nova Scotia:
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The Halifax Town Clock on Citadel Hill, given to the city by Edward, Duke of Kent
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The Dockyard Clock, now located on the Halifax waterfront
St. Paul’s Church, Halifax, where Charles and Fanny Austen’s daughter Cassy was baptized in 1809:
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Government House, Halifax, where Charles and Fanny Austen danced at a ball in 1810
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Admiralty House, where Francis Austen and his family stayed when they were in Halifax in the 1840s
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Looking across to McNabs Island, in the Halifax Harbour, from Point Pleasant Park
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Georges Island, Halifax Harbour
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Georges Island, and McNabs Island in the distance
For further reading
There’s more information about the Austen family’s Nova Scotia connection in Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, a collection of essays I edited for the Jane Austen Society, UK after the 2005 conference here in Halifax. The book includes the lectures Peter W. Graham, Brian Southam, Sheila Johnson Kindred, and I presented at the conference.
Articles by Sheila Johnson Kindred:
“Charles Austen: Prize Chaser and Prize Taker on the North American Station 1805-1808” in Persuasions 26 (2004): 188-94.
“Charles Austen’s Capture of the French Privateer La Jeune Estelle.” Jane Austen Society Annual Report (2006): 50-53.
“Two Brothers, One City: Charles and Francis Austen in Halifax, Canada” in Jane Austen and the North Atlantic, ed. Sarah Emsley. Chawton, Hampshire: Jane Austen Society, 2006. 9-21.
“Jane Austen’s Naval Brother Charles on the North American Station” in the Royal Nova Scotia Historical Society Journal 10 (2007): 25-46.
“The Influence of Naval Captain Charles Austen’s North American Experiences on Persuasion and Mansfield Park” in Persuasions 31 (2009): 115-29.
Coming this fall! Sheila Johnson Kindred’s book about Jane Austen’s sister-in-law Fanny Palmer Austen:
Jane Austen’s Transatlantic Sister: The Life and Letters of Fanny Palmer Austen. Montreal, Quebec: McGill-Queen’s University Press, forthcoming October 2017.
June 2, 2017
First Impressions: Jane Austen’s radical female friendship
Congratulations to Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney, whose book A Secret Sisterhood: The hidden friendships of Austen, Brontë, Eliot and Woolf was published yesterday by Aurum Press. Emily and Emma wrote a guest post on “The Challenge of Friendship” for “Emma in the Snow,” the blog series I hosted last year for the 200th anniversary of Austen’s Emma, and it’s my pleasure today to share with you their guest post on the friendship between Jane Austen and Anne Sharpe.
On their blog, Something Rhymed, Emily and Emma write about friendships between women writers (including Nora Lefurgey and L.M. Montgomery, Emily Dickinson and Helen Hunt Jackson, and Elizabeth Bishop and Marianne Moore, to name a few), and they often feature guest interviews and blog posts by contemporary women writers. I asked if they’d write about their own friendship as part of this guest post on Austen and Sharpe, and here’s what they had to say:
The two of us met right at the beginning of our writing journeys, during a time when we were still secretive about our fledgling work. In fact, it took us a year before we admitted to each other that we were writing in our spare time. Since then we have helped each other with the many uphill struggles and shared every moment of celebration. This got us to wondering whether our favourite writers of the past had enjoyed the same kind of support. Lots of male duos came to mind: William Wordsworth and Samuel Taylor Coleridge, Lord Byron and Percy Bysshe Shelley, Ernest Hemingway and F. Scott Fitzgerald. But we struggled to come up with many examples of female literary friendship because women who write are often cast as solitary eccentrics or isolated geniuses: Jane Austen cooped away in her country cottage, Charlotte Brontë roaming the moors with only her sisters for company, George Eliot too aloof to need the advice of another woman who wrote, and Virginia Woolf protecting her space at the top. Our own friendship taught us to question these portrayals, and so we set out to discover whether behind each of these great women was another great woman.
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Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney
I’ve been following Something Rhymed for a long time, and I’m looking forward to reading A Secret Sisterhood.
Here’s the press release for the book :
Male literary friendships are the stuff of legend; think Byron and Shelley, Fitzgerald and Hemingway. But the world’s best-loved female authors are usually portrayed as isolated eccentrics. Emily Midorikawa and Emma Claire Sweeney seek to dispel this myth with a wealth of hidden yet startling collaborations.
A Secret Sisterhood looks at Jane Austen’s bond with a family servant, the amateur playwright Anne Sharp; how Charlotte Brontë was inspired by the daring feminist Mary Taylor; the transatlantic relationship between George Eliot and the author of Uncle Tom’s Cabin, Harriet Beecher Stowe; and the underlying erotic charge that lit the friendship of Virginia Woolf and Katherine Mansfield – a pair too often dismissed as bitter foes.
Through letters and diaries which have never been published before, this fascinating book resurrects these hitherto forgotten stories of female friendships that were sometimes illicit, scandalous and volatile; sometimes supportive, radical or inspiring; but always, until now, tantalisingly consigned to the shadows.
A Secret Sisterhood evolved from the authors’ own friendship. Their blog, Something Rhymed, charts female literary bonds and has been covered in the media and promoted by Margaret Atwood, Sheila Hancock and Kate Mosse, showing that the literary sisterhood is still alive today.
Emma Claire Sweeney has lectured at City University, New York University in London, the Open University and the University of Cambridge. Her work has won Arts Council, Royal Literary Fund and Escalator Awards, and has been shortlisted for several others, including the Asham, Wasafiri and Fish. She writes for newspapers and magazines such as the Guardian, the Independent on Sunday, The Times, and Mslexia. Her debut novel Owl Song at Dawn was published by Legend Press in July 2016. The novel has been shortlisted for the BookHugger Book of the Year Award, and Emma has been named an Amazon Rising Star and a Hive Rising Writer.
Emily Midorikawa lectures at City University and at New York University’s London campus. She has taught at the University of Cambridge and the Open University, as well as writing for the Daily Telegraph, the Independent on Sunday, The Times, Aesthetica and Mslexia. Her memoir ‘The Memory Album’ appeared in Tangled Roots, an Arts Council-sponsored collection that celebrates the stories of mixed-race families. Emily is the winner of the Lucy Cavendish Fiction Prize 2015, and was longlisted for the Mslexia Novel Competition. She was a runner-up in the SI Leeds Literary Prize, judged by Margaret Busby, and the Yeovil Literary Prize, judged by Tracy Chevalier.
And here’s Emma and Emily’s guest post on Austen and Sharpe:
The day we first met occupies an important place in both our memories. It was back in the summer of 2001 and we were among a group of British graduates at a training weekend, preparing for our new posts as English teachers in rural Japan. While Emily remembers feeling an instant connection, Emma couldn’t tell whether we’d come to dislike each other or end up the best of friends.
We feel so grateful that our younger selves took the path that led to friendship, even though we didn’t fully understand what drew us close. Back then, we scarcely admitted our dreams of authorship even to ourselves, but we now look back on this first meeting as the point of departure on a journey that would take us, sixteen years on, to the publication of our first co-written book.
In A Secret Sisterhood we explore the literary friendships of celebrated female writers – relationships that have been consigned to the shadows while the bonds between male writers have hogged the limelight.
We discovered that Charlotte Brontë met her writer friend, the straight-talking Mary Taylor, at a Yorkshire boarding school; George Eliot first encountered Harriet Beecher Stowe by reading the American author’s bestselling works; and Virginia Woolf was introduced to fellow modernist Katherine Mansfield in the Oxfordshire home of a well-known literary hostess. But we struggled to work out when Jane Austen first met the woman who would become her staunch literary ally.
The received wisdom is that Jane met Anne Sharpe, the governess who penned plays in between teaching lessons, during the summer of 1805. They forged their unlikely friendship, so the story goes, inside the walls of Godmersham Park, the abode of Jane’s wealthy brother and Anne’s employer.
But a governess friend named ‘Miss Sharpe’ first crops up in Jane’s correspondence in the spring of that year (21–3 April 1805). Surprisingly, an annotation tucked away at the back of the authoritative edition of Jane Austen’s letters insists that this Miss Sharpe could not possibly be the same woman who taught Jane’s niece – a Miss Sharpe who would feature in Jane’s next surviving letter (24 August 1805), and whose name would litter the rest of Jane’s missives.
The first governess friend of the name “Miss Sharpe” cannot be Anne Sharpe, apparently, because she and Jane could not yet have met. There’s no evidence that Jane had paid a visit to her Kentish relatives during the fifteen months of Anne’s employment. And Anne must have been holed away in Godmersham throughout that time.
But this, in fact, was not the case. The metal-clasped diaries and wax-sealed letters of Jane’s niece Fanny reveal that, during the spring of 1805, her teacher was away from home. These unpublished manuscripts show that Anne’s month-long absence coincides with a time when Jane was moving house.
This was a period ridden with trepidation for the Austen women. The death of Reverend Austen had not only robbed them of an affectionate husband and father, they’d also lost a major source of income. Unable to continue to afford their tenancy of Green Park Buildings, Mrs. Austen and her two daughters removed themselves to poky rented rooms in a busy part of town.
Since Fanny waved off her governess during the week commencing 18 March and Anne didn’t return for almost a month, it seems possible that Edward sent her to assist the Austen women with their move, and that Jane and Anne grew fond of each other far from the watchful eyes of the owners of Godmersham.
If so, this would not have been the first time that Anne had been told to cancel lessons and fit herself around the family’s other plans. She was regularly instructed to work outside the schoolroom: sent to drop off the boys at their boarding schools at the beginning of term and pick them up at its close, and called on at times to chaperone her employer’s guests on their journeys too.
To have been a fly on the wall when Jane and Anne first met, to watch as their relationship transformed from that of employer and employee to a deep bond between two women who wrote.
Both were enduring difficult times during the spring of 1805. Anne suffered persistent headaches and eye problems that must have hampered her attempts at devising plays, and Jane – still unpublished at this stage – had not been able to concentrate on her new novel during the months since her father died.
It’s tempting to imagine that the pair’s shared love of literature sustained them through such difficult times and that their first flicker of friendship brightened each other’s lives.
In the years to come, these women would find all sorts of ways to support each other’s endeavours – Anne offered Jane astute critiques of her novels and Jane acted in one of Anne’s household plays – but, on this occasion, the pair could no sooner have become acquainted than they would have been forced to part ways. Anne had to return to her post at Godmersham and Jane had to endure her shrunken circumstances in Bath.
Jane did see some opportunities in her newfound impoverishment. It offered the perfect excuse to invite her childhood friend Martha Lloyd to join the new household – a plan Jane and her sister had plotted behind the backs of their relatives. Martha’s meagre finances could supplement the Austen women’s funds and her skills as an amateur cook and apothecary would come as welcome indeed. But, more than anything, it was her friendship they held dear.
Friendship was also at the heart of another of Jane’s schemes. That first mention in the surviving letters of a governess called “Miss Sharpe” gives the impression that Jane had been looking for teaching work in Bath on the woman’s behalf. If this governess friend was indeed the Anne Sharpe who taught Jane’s niece, such an endeavour would surely have involved Jane going behind her brother’s back.
This version of events exposes the myth of Jane as a conservative maiden aunt, devoted above all else to kith and kin. Here was a much more rebellious woman, someone prepared to flout social conventions by treating a family servant as an equal; someone ready to show disloyalty to her brother by prioritising the needs of a female friend.
Quotations are from the Oxford edition of Jane Austen’s Letters, edited by Deirdre Le Faye (4th edition, 2011) and details included in this post are drawn from the unpublished letters and diaries of Fanny Knight housed at the Kent History and Library Centre.
May 26, 2017
An Invitation to Read The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery
I’m planning to reread L.M. Montgomery’s 1926 novel The Blue Castle this fall. Would anyone like to join me? When my friend Naomi (Consumed By Ink) and I reached the end of Montgomery’s “Emily” series last month, we started talking about what to read next, and we’ve decided on this novel, partly because Montgomery started writing it just after she finished Emily Climbs and before she began to work on Emily’s Quest. We also decided to announce it now, instead of waiting until fall, so anyone who’s interested will have plenty of time to get a copy of the book and start reading.
I’m intrigued by Mary Henley Rubio’s suggestion that “Tucking The Blue Castle in before the third Emily book, Montgomery blows off the steam that had been gathering as she faced the unhappy prospect of marrying off Emily. The Blue Castle becomes part of the Emily series…” (“Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own,’” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre).
Naomi and I are planning to write blog posts about The Blue Castle sometime in November. Please join us by commenting, talking about the novel on Twitter—hashtag #ReadingValancy (inspired by #ReadingEmily, which Naomi chose for the Emily Readalong)—and/or by writing a blog post of your own. If you write a blog post, we hope you’ll share the link in the comments on Naomi’s blog or mine, or both, so we can keep track.
I suggested November because of this passage from The Blue Castle:
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 a 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. What cared they? Old Tom had built his roof well, and his chimney drew.
“Warm fire—books—comfort—safety from storm—our cats on the rug. Moonlight,” said Barney, “would you be any happier now if you had a million dollars?”
It isn’t likely that I’ll have photos of the Muskoka landscape in the fall to include in my blog post on The Blue Castle, as I don’t have plans in the coming months to visit Bala, Ontario (the town that inspired the fictional “Deerwood” in the novel). I don’t have cats, either, so there will be no cat photos for this readalong, at least on my blog. However, today I can share with you some photos of PEI in the spring, because I spent some time on the Island last weekend. And, like many Montgomery fans, I have a couple of small china dogs, Gog and Magog, so a photo of them on the mantel is the best I can offer as a substitute for cat photos. When I was in Charlottetown, I bought a copy of L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys, a collection of essays on Montgomery and Ontario, which I’ve been meaning to read ever since it came out two years ago. I’m especially interested in the essays on The Blue Castle, by Laura M. Robinson, E. Holly Pike, and Linda Rodenburg.
If you’d like to read The Blue Castle with Naomi and me, please let us know by commenting on this blog post.
If you’re interested in Montgomery’s life, particularly her ambitions as a very young writer, you might like to read what Naomi wrote earlier this week about Melanie J. Fishbane’s new novel, Maud.
Here are the three posts I wrote for the Emily Readalong earlier this year, in case you missed them:
“I am important to myself”: Emily of New Moon
“I have to write”: Emily Climbs
“She knew that a hard struggle was before her”: Emily’s Quest
My other posts on L.M. Montgomery are included here: “L.M. Montgomery in Nova Scotia.”
And, finally, here are the photos I took in PEI on the Victoria Day weekend.
Charlottetown:
Confederation Trail, St. Peter’s:
Prince Edward Island National Park, Greenwich:
Confederation Bridge:
(I’m always drawn to the simplicity of bridge, sea, and sky, and I’ve taken several versions of this photo over the years. There’s one in last year’s blog post “Spring in Rainbow Valley” and another in 2015’s “Birthday ‘Coincidences’ in Emma and Anne of Green Gables.’”)
May 5, 2017
Why Did Jane Austen Abandon The Watsons?
It’s a pleasure to introduce this guest post by Kathleen A. Flynn on Jane Austen’s unfinished novel The Watsons. Kathleen’s debut novel, The Jane Austen Project, which Syrie James calls “clever, captivating, and original,” was published earlier this week. I loved the book and I agree with Paula Byrne that it’s “Brilliantly written and a must-read for any Jane Austen fan!”
Thank you to Harper Collins for sending me an ARC, which I read last month on a weekend trip to Prince Edward Island. Regular readers of this blog will know I often read books by or about L.M. Montgomery when I visit PEI. This time, I enjoyed reading one of my old favourites, Emily’s Quest, and discovering a new favourite in The Jane Austen Project. Over the past few months, during my rereading of the “Emily” novels, I’ve been thinking a great deal about the pressure Montgomery felt when she was writing the second and third novels in that series, pressure to provide her readers with the courtship plot they expected.
It was a delight to find the heroine of The Jane Austen Project, Rachel Katzman, addressing this topic in relation to Jane Austen’s life and work: “Many people find it strange, even tragic, that the author of such emotionally satisfying love stories apparently never found love herself, but I don’t,” Rachel thinks, just after she meets Jane Austen.
In Rachel’s opinion, Austen “was a genius: burning with the desire to create undying works of art, not a cozy home for a husband and children.” She “wrote the world she knew, and what she felt would appeal to readers. The marriage plot is interesting mostly for how it illuminates the hearts of her characters, what they learn about themselves on the way to the altar. She concerns herself with bigger questions: how to distinguish good people from plausible fakes; what a moral life demands of us; the problem of how to be an intelligent woman in a world that had no real use for them.” I underlined many other passages I thought were excellent, and I’m tempted to quote at length, but I’ll stop there and urge you to get a copy of this fabulous novel so you can read it yourself. (First, though, I hope you’ll read Kathleen’s guest post, below.)
Kathleen is a copy editor at The New York Times, and a life member of the Jane Austen Society of North America. She lives in Brooklyn. I’ve been following her on Twitter for a long time and I enjoy reading her blog. (You can also find her on Facebook.) I’m very happy that she’s celebrating her publication week by sharing some of her thoughts on Jane Austen’s writing process. Congratulations on the publication of The Jane Austen Project, Kathleen!
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Kathleen Flynn (photo by Bryan Thomas)
Here’s the description of the novel:
London, 1815: Two travelers—Rachel Katzman and Liam Finucane—arrive in a field in rural England, disheveled and weighed down with hidden money. Turned away at a nearby inn, they are forced to travel by coach all night to London. They are not what they seem, but rather colleagues who have come back in time from a technologically advanced future, posing as wealthy West Indies planters—a doctor and his spinster sister. While Rachel and Liam aren’t the first team from the future to “go back,” their mission is by far the most audacious: meet, befriend, and steal from Jane Austen herself.
Carefully selected and rigorously trained by The Royal Institute for Special Topics in Physics, disaster-relief doctor Rachel and actor-turned-scholar Liam have little in common besides the extraordinary circumstances they find themselves in. Circumstances that call for Rachel to stifle her independent nature and let Liam take the lead as they infiltrate Austen’s circle via her favorite brother, Henry.
But diagnosing Jane’s fatal illness and obtaining an unpublished novel hinted at in her letters pose enough of a challenge without the continuous convolutions of living a lie. While her friendship with Jane deepens and her relationship with Liam grows complicated, Rachel fights to reconcile the woman she is with the proper lady nineteenth-century society expects her to be. As their portal to the future prepares to close, Rachel and Liam struggle with their directive to leave history intact and exactly as they found it . . . however heartbreaking that may prove.
And here’s Kathleen’s guest post on The Watsons:
It often seems like writing was easy for Jane Austen. There is the crazy brio of her juvenilia; early versions of three of her novels by her mid-20s; the subtle, complicated Emma completed in just one year. Seeing her letters in an exhibit at the Morgan Library a few years ago, I was amazed by the quicksilver flow of her thoughts, the perfection of her handwriting.
But things did not always go so well, as we see with The Watsons.
This incomplete novel, dating from her years in Bath (1801-1805) shares elements with the completed ones: keen insight into gradations of status, an interest in gossip, a scene set at a dance, a family heavy on sisters, a young woman seemingly destined to find a husband before the story closes. We are introduced, using dialogue more than exposition, to not just “three or four families in a country village,” but to an entire social world.
We learn that Emma Watson, raised by her loving aunt and uncle in comfort and the expectation of a tidy fortune, has been cast off after the uncle died and the aunt remarried unwisely. She’s returned to a family she barely knows and with scant means to support her, with manners that strike her older sister Elizabeth, who is kind but crass, as too “refined” for her setting.
It’s a bit gloomy, but there is also a lot of Austen’s comedy here as she explores her characters’ blind spots and snobbery. The opening does not seem so much bleaker than that of Sense and Sensibility. It’s a fascinating start, with so much going on, and so much promise. Whenever I read it, I am saddened by its incompleteness, and tormented by two questions. Why did she stop at around 18,000 words? And why did she keep the manuscript around anyway?
Did she feel there was a flaw in her plot? We know at least that Austen knew where the story was going, for family lore holds that she’d told Cassandra what would happen.
James Heldman, in an article in Persuasions in 1986, argued that the narrative approach in The Watsons is different – that there is less distance between the heroine and the narrator than usual, and it lacks the usual “narrative voice of Jane Austen telling us the story, informing us, guiding us, shaping our responses, standing between us and her characters as we together watch them live their lives.” He goes on to theorize that Emma Watson’s sense of displacement in her new home may be read as a dramatic rendering of the author’s own sense of unease in Bath.
Conventional wisdom is that Jane Austen was unhappy there. Her letters offer little guidance, unless absence is itself a clue. None survive between 27 May 1801 – after a flurry of them at the beginning of that year to Cassandra about minutiae of settling into their new home – and 14 September 1804. The 27 May letter, which anticipates that the sisters will soon be together again, concludes with this unintentionally poignant comment: “Unless anything particular occurs, I shall not write again.”
Perhaps something about how she lived there made fiction hard. Could she have lacked privacy, a suitable spot to work, or the ability to command her time enough to establish a routine? It seems ridiculous that someone so brilliant could be discouraged, yet something was holding her back. We must remember too, she was not yet a published author, even if the sale in 1803 of Susan (later Northanger Abbey) made her think she would be soon. Perhaps her writing did not seem sufficiently important to her family, or even to herself.
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Kathleen’s photo of a street in Bath. She remarks that “it’s a little claustrophobic and maybe it captures how Jane Austen might have felt living there.”
Or perhaps, contrary to the widely held view, she was enjoying Bath. Maybe instead of writing she was busy socializing, observing people and their quirks, storing up memories that would later be repurposed into fiction. I would prefer to believe this – it’s painful to imagine Jane Austen being miserable.
But as she neared 30, late in her time in Bath, we can guess she was at least sad, if not deeply depressed. She endured two punishing losses in quick order: the death of her friend Madame Lefroy, and that of her father, which was not only a personal blow but also a practical one, leaving her mother, her sister and herself in a precarious financial state and for several years without a settled home.
In The Watsons, Emma Watson’s father, a retired clergyman, is in poor health. Family tradition holds that Jane told Cassandra that he would die in the course of the story, forcing Emma to move in with her annoying brother.
Maybe creating a kind, dying, retired-clergyman father and then having her own kind, retired-clergyman father die was a little too much reality for Jane Austen. Many writers of fiction have at one time or another had the eerie sense of their own life starting to mirror what they’ve been writing about. It isn’t that they can see into the future or that by writing things they cause them to happen, though it can feel this way. It’s more that themes and preoccupations work their way to the surface, as possible future events are rehearsed in the imagination. Writing can be an escape from the limits of one’s own personal circumstances, but at the same time is tangled in them, however indirectly this may show up in the stories that emerge.
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Kathleen’s photo of Chawton Cottage, where “maybe there is more of a mood of openness and freedom.”
The move to Chawton in 1809 began an amazingly fertile period in Austen’s writing life – impressive by any measure, but especially in contrast with the years that preceded it, lending support to the theory that it was something about her way of life that had been the problem. She revised three of her existing novels, wrote three new ones, and started a fourth before being forced by illness to abandon it in early 1817. But she seems to have left The Watsons alone.
Did she think she might ever pick it up again and rework it? Or did she keep it around as reference source, to mine for ideas and phrases? Could it have come to seem too old-fashioned? Too dark? Though death is a plot device in Austen’s novels, like that of Mr. Dashwood in Sense and Sensibility, or Mrs. Churchill in Emma, it is never of characters we’ve come to know and care about. Maybe she realized killing Mr. Watson was a step she wasn’t prepared to take, that this was not the sort of writer she wanted to be. (“Let other pens dwell on guilt and misery,” Mansfield Park, Volume 3, Chapter 17.) Seen that way, it is maybe not so much a false start as a learning experience, not a waste of time but a way station on her road to greatness.
Still, how I wish she had finished it.
Do you have a theory about why Jane Austen abandoned The Watsons? Add a comment below.
April 21, 2017
“She knew that a hard struggle was before her”: Emily’s Quest
At the beginning of L.M. Montgomery’s Emily’s Quest (1927), Emily Starr has “very clear-cut ideas of what she was going to make of herself.” Committed to living in and writing about Prince Edward Island instead of New York, she is “filled with youth’s joy in mere existence” and determined to succeed as a writer. She anticipates that a “hard struggle” lies ahead: there will be neighbours and relatives who’ll judge the way she spends her time, rejection letters from publishers, days when she’ll feel unable to reach the standards she’s set for her work (Chapter 1).
For all her talents at a kind of “second sight” (Chapter 11), however, she can’t predict the full extent of the challenges. And even though the book begins with her spirited resistance to rewriting her stories to please magazine publishers—“After this I’m just going to write what I want to,” she declares in her diary (Chapter 2)—she still has to endure criticism from Dean Priest, a long period during which she doesn’t write at all, and many days and months of feeling she can hardly muster the courage to live through tomorrow, let alone the years ahead. Dean speaks of her writing as an amusement, a “little hobby,” saying, “I’d hate to have you dream of being a Brontë or an Austen—and wake to find you’d wasted your youth on a dream” (Chapter 4). And then she gives up on writing altogether.
It’s hard to listen to Emily of New Moon, who used to say things like, “I am important to myself” and “I have to write,” dismissing her writing: “Oh, I’m done with that. I seem to have no interest in it since my illness. I saw—then—how little it really mattered—how many more important things there were—” (Chapter 8).
She’s engaged to the wrong man, and as Elizabeth Waterston says in Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery, “The artist as a young person seems to have disappeared from the story, just as, long ago, in Anne of Green Gables, the story of Anne’s literary ambitions veered away into the traditional path of a courtship tale.” Cecily Devereux writes that “without home and children, as Janet Royal makes clear to Emily, and as Anne comes to see early in her story, success for women is seen to be a hollow thing” (“Writing with a ‘Definite Purpose’: L.M. Montgomery, Nellie McClung and the Politics of Imperial Motherhood in Fiction for Children,” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two: A Critical Heritage, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre).
After Emily breaks the engagement, she returns to her writing: “Suddenly—the flash came—again—after these long months of absence…. And all at once I knew I could write” (Chapter 12)—and yet the courtship plot has not disappeared. In one chapter, she’s quoting Elizabeth Barrett Browning and praying, “Oh, God, as long as I live give me ‘leave to work.’ … Leave and courage” (Chapter 12). And then in the very next one, she’s ready to set aside that work for domestic happiness: “Who cared for laurel, after all? Orange blossoms would make a sweeter coronet” (Chapter 13).
Mary Rubio says that “It was painful for Montgomery to make her feisty little alter-ego into a creature of bland domesticity,” and it was “little wonder” that she found it hard to complete the last “Emily” book. Rubio notes that “On June 30, 1926, she wrote grimly: ‘I began work—again—on Emily III. I wonder if I shall ever get that book done!’ On October 13, 1926, she breathed a sigh of relief: ‘Yesterday morning I actually finished writing Emily’s Quest. Of course I have to revise it yet but it is such a relief to feel it off my mind at last. I’ve never had such a time writing a book. Thank heaven it is the last of the Emily series’” (“Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery’s ‘Room of Her Own,’” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume Two).
I was interested to learn that after she completed Emily Climbs, Montgomery postponed writing the inevitable sequel and instead began to write The Blue Castle. “This was unprecedented,” Rubio says in her biography of Montgomery, “having two novels going at the same time.” It sounds as if she was very reluctant to commit to an ending for Emily’s story and write it down. Emily’s marriage, Rubio writes, “was the foregone conclusion, demanded by the genre and the era” (Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings).
I read Jane Urquhart’s L.M. Montgomery (from the Extraordinary Canadians series) last month and I was intrigued by a question posed by a friend of hers: “my friend insists that Montgomery was holding back, that had she given herself permission to do so she could have written adult fiction as compelling as that of Charlotte Brontë or George Eliot—both of whom, Montgomery confesses in her diaries, she ‘may have dreamed of rivaling’ in her ‘salad days’—or of her American contemporaries Edith Wharton or Willa Cather. But how would such cerebral and possibly sexual drama be received in the conservative Protestant society Montgomery lived in and wrote about?”
What would the “Emily” series have been like, I wonder, if Montgomery had followed the very advice Emily gives herself at the beginning of Emily’s Quest, “to write what I want to”—if she hadn’t written the ending her readers expected?
This blog post is the third and last in a series for the Emily Readalong (#ReadingEmily) hosted by Naomi of Consumed by Ink (for more about the readalong and links to what others have written for their blogs, see her posts “Emily Readalong: Emily of New Moon,” “Emily Readalong: Emily Climbs,” and “Emily Readalong: Emily’s Quest”). My first two posts in the series: “‘I am important to myself’: Emily of New Moon” and “‘I have to write’: Emily Climbs.”
I spent the Easter weekend in Prince Edward Island, and I have a few photos to share with you.
New London on Saturday evening:
New Glasgow on Sunday afternoon:
Cavendish Cemetery, “Resting Place of L.M. Montgomery”:
L.M. Montgomery’s grave:
Graves of L.M. Montgomery’s mother, Clara Woolner MacNeill, and grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Woolner MacNeill:
L.M. Montgomery’s Birthplace, New London (the museum opens for the season in May):
Oceanview Lookoff, Cavendish, Prince Edward Island National Park:
It was grey and foggy most of the time we were there, perfect weather for reading at the cottage where we were staying, or in a café. I was #ReadingEmily, of course, plus Kathleen A. Flynn’s fabulous new novel The Jane Austen Project, and listening to Pride and Prejudice and then Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables while driving. I’m looking forward to visiting PEI again later in the spring or maybe in the summer. The weather on the weekend reminded me of a line from Anne of Green Gables about “the beautiful capricious, reluctant Canadian spring” (Chapter 20). Like Montgomery, Budge Wilson often describes what spring is like in the Maritimes. In her story “Be-ers and Doers,” the narrator talks about the South Shore of Nova Scotia: “all those granite rocks and fogs and screeching gulls, the slow, labouring springs, and the quick, grudging summers. And then the winters—greyer than doom, and endless.”
[image error]In the comments section of Naomi’s post on Emily’s Quest, she and I have been been talking about ideas for a future LMM readalong. In the fall, maybe, or next winter? Who wants to join us, and what would you like to read? We’re talking about The Blue Castle, Jane of Lantern Hill, Pat of Silver Bush, or The Story Girl and The Golden Road, and the list goes on and on….
Naomi says, “Let’s just assume we’ll eventually get to them all!” I’d like to choose one or two to read over the summer. When I was in Charlottetown on Monday, I bought “Una of the Garden,” the story Montgomery published in The Housekeeper magazine and later transformed into a novel, Kilmeny of the Orchard, so I’m tempted to start there, but I’d be interested to hear what others are thinking.
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The illustration on the cover of Jane Urquhart’s book on L.M. Montgomery makes me think of something Jane Austen wrote to her sister Cassandra on the subject of decorating a hat. She says in her letter, “I cannot help thinking that it is more natural to have flowers grow out of the head than fruit. What think you on that subject?” (11 June 1799)
March 17, 2017
“I have to write”: Emily Climbs
In L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Climbs (1925), one of the novels Emily Starr reads is The Children of the Abbey (1796), by Regina Maria Roche, which is also mentioned in Jane Austen’s Emma, when Harriet Smith tells Emma that Mr. Martin is going to read it because she’s recommended it. Emily laughs while she’s reading the novel, because “The heroine fainted in every chapter and cried quarts if anyone looked at her.” It’s the only novel Emily’s Aunt Ruth owns—and Aunt Ruth is shocked that Emily finds it funny, as she thinks it “a very sad volume” (Chapter 16).
There are no tears mentioned on the first page of The Children of the Abbey, but there’s one—a single “tear of unutterable joy”—on the second page, and it’s quickly followed by a description of the heroine, Amanda, “smiling through her tears.” In the second chapter, “a trickling tear stole down [Lady Malvina’s] lovely cheek, which, tinged as it was with the flush of agitation, looked now like a half-blown rose moistened with the dews of early morning.” And there are many more. For example: “her tears began to flow for the disastrous fate of her parents” (Chapter 45); “Tears at length relieved her painful oppression, she raised her languid head, she looked around, and wept with increasing violence at beholding what might be termed mementos of former happiness” (Chapter 55); “She wept, and sighed to think, that the happiness he had prayed for he could not behold” (Chapter 58). I can picture Emily laughing, and Aunt Ruth sighing, or perhaps allowing a single tear to trickle down her cheek.
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This rose (which I photographed in Charlottetown, PEI when I went to Leonhards café last December for coffee and a slice of their famous vanilla roll) is quite lovely, I think, but unfortunately it is not “moistened with the dews of early morning.”
Like Helen Glew, who says in her blog post about rereading Emily of New Moon as an adult that she was “struck by the literary nature of the book,” I’ve been paying more attention to literary allusions in the “Emily” novels this time around than I did the first time I read them, when I was ten. Helen highlights references to The Pilgrim’s Progress, Jane Eyre, and The Mill on the Floss. I can hear echoes of Mansfield Park as well, especially in the scene in Emily of New Moon in which Emily is given a room of her own and thinks, “I wonder if Aunt Elizabeth will ever let me have a little fire here” (Chapter 27), and in Emily Climbs when Aunt Ruth tells Emily that “Plays are wicked” (Chapter 10).
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Another photo from my December trip to PEI. This is near Victoria-by-the-Sea.
In Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery (2008), Elizabeth Waterston suggests that in Emily Climbs, “The constant literary allusions emphasize Emily’s similarity to her creator in tastes and influences. Emily’s journal, like Montgomery’s, mentions Scott’s poems, Viking sagas, Emerson’s essays, Tennyson, Irving’s Tales of the Alhambra (1832), George Macdonald’s At the Back of the North Wind (1871), Byron, Macaulay, Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), Mrs. Browning, Mrs. Hemans, the historical works of Francis Parkman, and Bliss Carman’s poetry.” (Thanks to “Buried in Print” for recommending Magic Island in a comment on my Emily of New Moon blog post last month.) I also enjoyed reading Waterston’s analysis of images of entrapment in the novel, of the names Montgomery chose for her characters, and of Emily’s response to both obstacles and opportunities as she pursues her dream of becoming a successful writer.
When I read this series for the first time, I’m pretty sure I focused more on Emily as a writer than on Emily as a reader. I was inspired by her determination to create a literary career for herself, to keep writing despite “brutal rejection slips and the awfulness of faint praise” (Chapter 22). Like Montgomery herself, Emily adopts the metaphor of climbing the “Alpine Path” when she thinks about her literary ambitions: “she would climb it, no matter what the obstacles in the way—no matter whether there was any one to help her or not” (Chapter 5). (Montgomery’s autobiography was published as “The Story of My Career” in 1917 and later as The Alpine Path. The phrase “the Alpine Path” comes from a poem by Ellen Rodman Church and Augusta De Bubna called “The Fringed Gentian,” which Montgomery pasted into one of her scrapbooks; an image of the scrapbook page is included in a virtual exhibition curated by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly.)
Even when Emily feels she doesn’t have time, she keeps writing: “I haven’t a moment of time for writing anything. … But I have to write. So I get up in the morning as soon as it is daylight, dress, and put on a coat—for the mornings are cold now—sit down and scribble for a priceless hour. … That hour in the grey morning is the most delightful one in the day for me” (Chapter 7).
Reading about Emily’s persistence in writing stories and sending them to publishers made me want to do the same thing, and when I was ten, the year I read these novels, I wrote two stories that were strongly influenced by Emily’s own history and by what she was writing.
The first story, “Alone,” opens with ten-year-old Katie being told by her uncle’s housekeeper that her beloved Uncle Mac has died. I just noticed now, rereading the story, that she cries in Chapter 1, but then at the funeral, in Chapter 2, “not once did she let a tear fall.” She doesn’t faint, either. Katie is sent to live with her Great-Aunt Lucy, who dies the very next night, and then she’s sent to an orphanage, where she makes friends with a girl named Alice and the two of them plan to run away. Eventually, they find a home with a kind woman who adopts both of them—and then, “as most stories usually do, this one ends. And they all lived happily ever after!” Anne of Green Gables is obviously another influence.
I’m pleased, and a little embarrassed, to say that this story was included in a collection published by the Halifax City Regional Library. I guess that must have been my first published story. And I haven’t published any fiction, yet, as an adult, though I’ve spent the past several years working on a novel. (I mentioned my novel at the end of a blog post I wrote last fall.) I’ve been working on a new round of revisions and I’m much happier with the manuscript now. As soon as I have anything else to report, I’ll be sure to share the news here.
I suppose I could show you a photo of the manuscript, or maybe of my laptop and coffee cup, or something like that, but instead I’ll show you a photo I took the other day when I was on my way to a café in Herring Cove to work on the novel. I liked the colours of the sea and sky so much that I’ve made this the banner photo for the blog.
Anyway—back to the second Emily-inspired story I wrote when I was ten. It’s called “A Night in the Old Garden.” I knew the plot of “Alone” owed a great deal to Emily of New Moon, but I had forgotten that there was also a connection between Emily Climbs and the second story. In this case, it’s just the title. Emily’s poem is called Night in the Garden, and I don’t think the flowers come to life, as they do in my story. Here’s how my story begins: “There was a strange feeling about the moors as I walked slowly towards the old garden that night. … I started to draw the old garden, but the flowers kept making horrible, twisted faces at me….”
I showed “Alone” and “A Night in the Old Garden” to my grandmother, who shared them with a friend of hers, Lois Valli, who drew several sketches to illustrate each story. And then my grandmother traced and stitched the outlines of some of the sketches onto a quilt she was making for me. I still have the quilt, of course, and I’ll always treasure it, as it reminds me not only that my grandmother believed in my writing, but also that her own creative work has been a source of inspiration for me all my life. She loved painting, drawing, quilting, and writing letters and poetry. And she loved reading.
I wish I’d kept track of the books I’ve read over the years, beginning either when I was ten and discovered the “Emily” series or sometime soon after that. I know I’ve often mentioned books in diary entries, but I do wish I had a more complete list of what I read and when. Vicki Ziegler wrote recently about the notebook in which she’s recorded the books she’s read over the past thirty-four years, and I felt quite envious when I read her blog post (“What I Read in 2016”). I also felt a shock of recognition, because the notebook she uses looks very much like the one a friend gave me sometime in the 1980s.
Seeing Vicki’s photo prompted me to search for my notebook. I didn’t know for sure whether I still had it, or, if I did, where I would have put it, but I was fairly certain that I hadn’t written on very many of its pages. It didn’t take too long to find it—it wasn’t in the same box as my two stories, but it turned up in a box nearby—and I discovered that at some point in the past, I tore out and discarded several pages. I don’t think I burned them; I’m sure I would remember if I had done something that dramatic, or if what I had written was so scandalous that it merited that fate. Thus, while I don’t know what was written on those pages, I have a new opportunity to begin a record of the books I’m reading. (Plus, my notebook looks kind of like Vicki’s, which I think is awesome.)
Naturally, I’ve started with Emily of New Moon and Emily Climbs. For about four years now, I’ve kept track of at least some of the books I’ve been reading—the ones I want to be sure to remember—on Goodreads. (Please do come and find me there! I’m always interested in hearing recommendations.) So I’ll consult that online list when I record in my “new” notebook the titles of other books I’ve read this winter, including Ann Patchett’s Commonwealth, Lisa Moore’s Flannery, Emma Donoghue’s The Wonder, and Juliet McMaster’s Jane Austen, Young Author—all of which I recommend highly.
I’ve also had the privilege to read Melanie J. Fishbane’s wonderful novel Maud, which focuses on L.M. Montgomery as a teenager, during the years when she was, like Emily, beginning to work seriously on her writing. (Maud will be published by Penguin Random House on April 25th.)
I love the way Montgomery shows how important Emily Starr’s reading is to her career as a writer, and I’m now curious to find out what she reads in Emily’s Quest. And, of course, to find out what she writes.
This blog post is the second in a series for the Emily Readalong (#ReadingEmily) hosted by Naomi of Consumed by Ink. Here’s Naomi’s blog post “Emily Readalong: Emily of New Moon,” which includes links to what other bloggers have written about the novel. And, in case you haven’t seen it yet, here’s my first post for the series: “‘I am important to myself’: Emily of New Moon.” I’m planning to write about Emily’s Quest in April.
A few more of the passages I underlined in Emily Climbs:
Emily’s diary “seemed to her like a personal friend and a safe confidant for certain matters which burned for expression and yet were too combustible to be trusted to the ears of any living being.” (Chapter 1)
“I have made up my mind that I will never marry,” Emily tells her diary. “I shall be wedded to my art.” (Chapter 1) (Mary Henley Rubio says in Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings that when Montgomery was writing Emily Climbs, “She felt little interest in it. Her readers would demand that Emily grow up, marry, and live happily ever after. Maud had been in a state of heady excitement when she wrote both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon, but it was only her personal discipline that got her through the sequels, where her feisty heroines had to be tamed.”)
“Nothing ever seems as big or as terrible—oh, nor as beautiful and grand either, alas!—when it is written out, as it does when you are thinking or feeling about it. It seems to shrink directly you put it into words. … Oh, if only I could put things into words as I see them! … but it seems to me there is something beyond words—any words—all words—something that always escapes you when you try to grasp it—and yet leaves something in your hand which you wouldn’t have had if you hadn’t reached for it.” (Chapter 1)
A comment from the narrator: “I have never pretended, nor ever will pretend, that Emily was a proper child. Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.” (Chapter 1)
“I am not anybody’s ‘property,’ not even in fun. And I never will be.” (Chapter 2)
“Well, it all comes down to this, there’s no use trying to live in other people’s opinions. The only thing to do is live in your own. After all, I believe in myself.” (Chapter 4)
“Keats is too full of beauty. When I read his poetry … I always feel a sort of despair! What is the use of trying to do what has been done, once and for all?” (Chapter 19)
On whether to stay in Prince Edward Island, or leave home to pursue a literary career: “as for material—people live here just the same as anywhere else—suffer and enjoy and aspire just as they do in New York.” (Chapter 24)
