lucy maud montgomery

Reading Round-Up: March 2023

/ Christine Pennylegion

I don’t know why I wait so long to write these round-up posts. No; sometimes that’s a lie, actually. I know exactly why it’s taken me so long this month, and it mostly boils down to “I’m doing other things and these take more brain than I want to expend right now.” What can I say? April’s been busy. But at any rate, here’s what I read last month:

  • A Wizard’s Dilemma (Diane Duane)
  • A Wizard Alone (Diane Duane)
  • Wizard’s Holiday (Diane Duane)
  • Ducks: Two Years in the Oil Sands (Kate Beaton)
  • Wizards at War (Diane Duane)
  • Uncanny Valley (Anna Wiener)
  • A Wizard of Mars (Diane Duane)
  • The Blue Castle (L. M. Montgomery)
  • Games Wizards Play (Diane Duane)
  • Between You & Me: Confessions of a Comma Queen (Mary Norris)
  • Rattle #79 — Tribute to Irish Poets
  • Millionaire Teacher (2nd ed.) (Andrew Hallam)

These five Diane Duane novels took me to the end of her Young Wizards series (until/unless she writes more of them). I’ve been reading library copies the whole way through, but for some reason my local system doesn’t have Games Wizards Play — which is too old for me to suggest as a recommended title. Since ILL seems to take a thousand years — long enough that, on more than one occasion, I’ve had no memory of having ordered a book when it finally shows up — I just bought my own copy. It was a very satisfying cap on the series; I also particularly enjoyed A Wizard of Mars. I’ll read these again one day, when I’ve forgotten about all of the weird chronology issues.

Also on the fiction end of things, I greatly enjoyed my reread of The Blue Castle, which is probably one of my favourites of all of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novels. I first read it in 2017 as part of my LMM reading project, and I’ll let my post from that time serve to sum it up.

March was another memoir-heavy month. I posted briefly about Anna Wiener’s Uncanny Valley, which was… moderately interesting, but not a standout to me.

Kate Beaton’s Ducks, a memoir of the years she spent working to pay off her student loans in Canada’s oil fields, on the other hand, was engrossing, beautiful, and agonizing. It’s a monster tome of a graphic… memoir (I wanted to day graphic novel, but of course it’s not fiction; it’s told in comics, however we might label that in terms of genre), beautifully written and illustrated. Beaton doesn’t shy away from the complexities of the oil fields: tensions between homegrown Albertans and the economic migrants who come to work there from both inside and outside of Canada, the frigid beauty of the north, the perils of being a woman in work camps where well over 90% of the population is male, the tensions between economic necessities and environmental impacts, the way we sometimes find family when and where we least expect to. Even before I finished Ducks I found myself paging back to read some sections over again. (NB: Sensitive readers should be aware that her narrative deals with multiple sexual assaults.)

Last of the March memoirs, I devoured Mary Norris’s Between You & Me. Norris is a copyeditor for The New Yorker: she’s a style and grammar wizard as may be expected and also, it turns out, hilarious. This one’s great fun, and not just for language nerds. (Bonus: her wonderful Comma Queen video series.)

This quarter’s issue of Rattle featured Irish poets in its latter half — some really lovely poems in the there.

And last but not least, I read Andrew Hallam’s Millionaire Teacher. This is one I constantly see recommended on personal finance-orientrd social media and I wish I had read it when I was eighteen. (Admittedly this would have been quite a trick given that it wasn’t published until 2017.) While I was already broadly familiar with a lot of the concepts he covered, there were some new ideas in there for me, and I found the book extremely informative and digestible without ever being dry. Also I know how to rebalance a portfolio now, so that’s something. Highly recommended.

Reading Round-Up: June 2019

/ Christine Pennylegion / 2 Comments

June was a good month for Canadiana this year, with a full 60% Canadian authorship-rate on my list. Not that I planned it that way — these things tend to happen on their own as I get onto reading jags — but it seems appropriate given that I’m writing this round-up post on Canada Day. (Happy Canada Day.) Here’s the breakdown:

  1. Further Chronicles of Avonlea (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
  2. Against the Odds (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
  3. A Streetcar Named Desire (Tennessee Williams)
  4. Frost & Fire (Roger Zelazny)
  5. I Work at a Public Library (Gina Sheridan)
  6. Boy (Roald Dahl)
  7. The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls (Anissa Gray)
  8. The Story Girl (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
  9. The Blythes are Quoted (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
  10. Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page (Stuart McLean)
  11. Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange (ed. Stuart McLean)
  12. Spirit of Place: Lucy Maud Montgomery and Prince Edward Island (Francis W. P. Bolga, Wayne Barrett, and Anne MacKay)
  13. The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks (Stuart Mclean)
  14. The Invention of Hugo Cabret (Brian Selznick)
  15. The Value of Simple: A Practical Guide to Taking the Complexity Out of Investing (John Robertson)

Lucy Maud Montgomery

… gets her own section this month, with four books by her and one about her. The latter was not, unfortunately, especially interesting. Spirit of Place is a photo book of PEI scenes interspersed with random quotations from LMM’s diaries or letters. I liked most of the pictures — Prince Edward Island certainly lives up to its picturesque reputation — but the quotations seemed chosen at random, the photos didn’t have any discernible order to them, and the whole project seemed rather haphazard. It’s too bad.

The Story Girl is the only novel among the pack, centering around a group of cousins and friends who live in a rural PEI enclave and have adventures etc. The “Story Girl” is really named Sara Stanley, and she has a reputation as a gifted storyteller with an unearthly and charming voice, powerful beyond what her youth would suggest. There is a lot of overblown description of the Story Girl, passages like these:

The Story Girl was barefooted and barearmed, having rolled the sleeves of her pink gingham up to her shoulders. Around her waist was twisted a girdle of the blood-red roses that bloomed in Aunt Olivia’s garden; on her sleek curls she wore a chaplet of them; and her hands were full of them. She paused under the outmost tree, in a golden-green gloom, and laughed at us over a big branch. Her wild, subtle, nameless charm clothed her as with a garment. We always remembered the picture she made there; and in later days when we read Tennyson’s poems at a college desk, we knew exactly how an oread, peering through the green leaves on some haunted knoll of many fountained Ida, must look. (Chapter 18)

The Story Girl leaned that brown head of hers against the fir trunk behind her, and looked up at the apple-green sky through the dark boughs above us. She wore, I remember, a dress of warm crimson, and she had wound around her head a string of waxberries, that looked like a fillet of pearls. Her cheeks were still flushed with the excitement of the evening. In the dim light she was beautiful, with a wild, mystic loveliness, a compelling charm that would not be denied. (Chapter 27)

But when the Story Girl wreathed her nut brown tresses with crimson leaves it seemed, as Peter said, that they grew on her–as if the gold and flame of her spirit had broken out in a coronal, as much a part of her as the pale halo seems a part of the Madonna it encircles. (Chapter 28)

Those were just chosen by paging through at random. There is a lot more of that kind of thing, all terribly saccharine. The Story Girl has a sequel, The Golden Road, but I’m not sure that I’ll bother reading it. I’ve had rather enough of Sara Stanley for a while.

When I checked Further Chronicles of Avonlea out, the librarian laughed at the melodramatic pose on its cover, quipping that it doesn’t really seem very Montgomery-ish. And probably that’s true if you’ve only read Anne of Green Gables, because LMM’s writing on the whole is much darker and more dramatic than her current reputation admits. Anne, after all, was not considered a children’s book when it was first published, and LMM chafed through her life against her growing reputation as someone who wrote for children, not adults. (For further reading see Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings by Mary Henley Rubio.)

Further Chronicles of Avonlea, Against the Odds, an1d The Blythes are Quoted are short story collections, none of which shy away from the dramatic: their narratives deal with poverty, revenge, adultery, illegitimacy, and murder, along with gentler aspects. The Blythes are Quoted is especially interesting in this regard. It is a departure in form from many of her other works, consisting of short stories interspersed by a framing device of poetry by Anne and Walter Blythe, as well as the Blythe family’s spoken and unspoken ruminations on their contents. It is also the last book that Montgomery wrote, delivered to her publisher by an unknown person on the very day she died of suicide via barbiturate overdose. Is The Blythes are Quoted, if not exactly a suicide note, at least a kind of final statement? In some ways it reads as one, as her characters wrestle with the lead-up and aftermath of World War One, particularly (in the latter half of the book) as the dawn of the Second World War called into question all the sacrifices of the First. This was a preoccupation of LMM herself, as well as of her husband, the Rev. Ewen Macdonald, who became convinced late in life that he was predestined to hell for encouraging young men to sign up to fight in WWI. (Seriously: read the Rubio biography.) It’s a dark read, in many ways — but it’s dark in the ways that Montgomery has been all along, if we’ve had the eyes to see it.

Everyone else:

End of essay. Here are the other books I tackled in June, in no particular order:

Zelazny’s Frost & Fire is a collection of sci-fi short stories that I enjoyed very much. I have read other Zelazny before — most notably his sprawling ten-volume Chronicles of Amber series — but not, I think, any short stories. These were clever and strange and very entertaining. Man, I should totally reread the Amber books.

If I Work in a Public Library sounds like the title of a blog, that’s because it is. This is a short, amusing blog-to-book publication that takes about six minutes to read.

We were at the library last week at The Invention of Huge Cabret grabbed my attention — I remember my roommate telling me about how obsessed all of her young piano students were with the movie version when it came out in 2011. It’s a very thick book, but most of it is pictures. I think I would have liked the movie better.

A Streetcar Named Desire is one of those cultural touchstones that you probably know some lines from (STELLLLLLLLLLAAAAAAAA) without necessarily knowing that this is where they’re from. Well, now I’ve read it, and now I know. I’m pretty sure I own at least one or two other plays by Tennessee Williams — definitely A Doll’s House, anyway — and perhaps I will read them soon.

The Value of Simple is a guide for Canadian investors, looking at how to set up index-fund investing (and why you would want to, of course). There is a big friendly “don’t panic” at the beginning, à la Douglas Adams, and the entire thing was easy to read and to understand. And look, now we know some stocks. Wheeeeeeee. (NB: Robertson maintains an errata page where he posts updated information as some options have changed since the book’s publication.)

Over the past few years I have enjoyed diving into memoir as a genre, and Roald Dahl’s account of his boyhood did not disappoint. In many respects his childhood was not an easy one; it was interesting, however, to see the genesis of many of the repeated themes that come out in his novels.

And last, but certainly not least, we come to the late, great Stuart McLean. Last month I read a Vinyl Cafe story collection, which gave me a hankering for more. Each of these is a little different: Vinyl Cafe Turns the Page is a collection of Dave and Morley stories, Time Now for the Vinyl Cafe Story Exchange is an anthology of short (true) stories sent in to the Vinyl Cafe radio show by listeners, and The Vinyl Cafe Notebooks is a collection of thematically-grouped personal essays. All of these were wonderful, and I was happy to round out my mental McLean catalogue.

Post-publication edit: I forgot about The Care and Feeding of Ravenously Hungry Girls by Anissa Gray, which first caught my eye in the library simply because it has a beautiful cover. It’s a tightly-woven family drama that reminds me somewhat of Anne Tyler’s novels — except instead of everyone being white Marylanders they are black Michiganites. Michigonians. Michiganis. They live in Michigan. Lots of reckoning with the past and future, emotional revelations, and etc. It was very good, in a fraught sort of way.

Reading Round-Up: May 2019

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

Here’s what I read in May:

  1. I’ve Got Your Number (Sophie Kinsella)
  2. Early Riser (Jasper Fforde)
  3. Surprise the World: The Five Habits of Highly Missional People (Michael Frost)
  4. The End of Education (Neil Postman)
  5. Trust Exercise (Susan Choi)
  6. The Wealthy Barber Returns (Dave Chilton)
  7. Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe (Stuart McLean)
  8. Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister (Gregory Maguire)
  9. Kilmeny of the Orchard (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
  10. The Year of Magical Thinking (Joan Didion)
  11. After Many Days (Lucy Maud Montgomery)
  12. I Owe You One (Sophie Kinsella)
  13. The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work (John M. Gottman and Nan Silver)

The book that has most stuck with me is probably Susan Choi’s Trust Exercise. It is set at a competitive arts high school in the 1980s, following a class of drama students as they form and lose romances, friendships, and alliances under the supervision of their brilliant and demanding drama teacher, Mr. Kingsley. The brilliance of Trust Exercise is in the way it works to reshape our understanding of the truth or falsity of its depicted events. The narrative is divided into three sections. there is a major shift (in perspective, in understanding) about halfway through the novel that asks us to re-evaluate what came before, and yet another in the short third section that in turn reframes the contents of both the first and second sections. I coudn’t stop thinking about it after I finished. I’m still thinking about it.

The other novel that especially stood out to me from May’s reading is Jasper Fforde’s Early Riser. Jasper Fforde writes weird, fascinating novels set in alternate-universe earths. Early Riser is set on an earth — in Wales, to be precise — where humans hibernate through the winter, humanity is facing a global cooling crisis, and under-population is a constant threat. Also there are viral dreams that may or may not be becoming real. And zombies. It’s all completely bonkers and you should read it.

I also made some progress on the resumption of my Lucy Maud Montgomery reading project. Kilmeny of the Orchard had its own post here. After Many Days is a collection of rediscovered short stories, collated and edited by Rea Wilmshurst. There are a few of these collections now, all arranged thematically. The stories in After Many Days all had to do with the resolution of things long put on hold: long-lost lovers finally reuniting, family reconciliations, chances for a long-anticipated revenge, someone returning in the nick of time and un-mortgaging the family farm, and so on and so forth — happy endings all round, of course. I enjoyed them.

Besides After Many Days, I read one other collection of short stories: Christmas at the Vinyl Cafe. The Vinyl Cafe was a long-running CBC radio show, hosted by the late Stuart McLean. It featured music and essays, but the heart of the show was its stories, especially the “Dave and Morley” stories about a middle-aged Toronto couple and their family, friends, and neighbours. I grew up listening to The Vinyl Cafe on Sunday afternoons, and I either own or have read most of the story collections. (It may or may not be possible to listen to some of them on youtube, possibly including my personal favourite, Polly Anderson’s Christmas Party. Shhhh.)

Gregory Maguire’s Confessions of an Ugly Stepsister was a fairly enjoyable read, setting the Cinderella story in Haarlem (Netherlands) during the Tulip mania years. The title doesn’t match the tone especially well.

Last, but not least, on the fiction list for May: two novels by Sophie Kinsella. In I’ve Got Your Number, Poppy Wyatt loses her engagement ring — a heirloom! — and her cell phone in a hotel fire-drill mishap; luckily, she finds a cell phone someone left in the trash and can leave its number with the hotel in case her ring turns up. But the cell phone belongs to someone — the ex-assistant of Sam Roxton, high-powered businessman, who wants his company phone back. This one was genuinely funny, and very of-the-moment with a lot of text messages breaking up the narrative. In I Owe You One, “Fixie” Farr saves a stranger’s laptop from water damage at a coffee shop, setting off a chain of I-owe-yous between her and Seb, the laptop’s owner, while she tries to juggle running her family’s shop and the reappearance of Ryan, and old crush, in her life. It was definitely not as strong as I’ve Got Your Number.

I’ve already forgotten what the Five Habits of Highly Missional People are. Um… eating together is one. Honestly, I’m drawing a complete blank. I suppose I could always read it again since it’s a teeny, tiny, seriously short book.

Neil Postman’s The End of Education was a helpful read for me as I think about the kids’ educational choices. If education is a means to an end, Postman asks, then what precisely is that end? And, if we have determined what the end of education is, how does the means of education — here he is chiefly considering the public school system, but the question applies more broadly — serve that end? Or does it serve it at all? And if the means don’t serve the end, what must change?

I tried to read Joan Didion’s The Year of Magical Thinking some years ago, and couldn’t get past the first few pages; the book begins with the account of her husband’s sudden death, and I don’t know what it was — it was just too sad for me, at least then, and I couldn’t go on. But I went on this time. It’s a sensitively written and beautiful little book, but yes, sad, especially at its end, where it concludes on rather a hopeless note.

My husband and I both read The Wealthy Barber Returns last month, mostly on the recommendation of r/personalfinancecanada. It’s a funny, easy read, and gave us a lot of good discussion points now that we’re finally done with school and paying for school, and thinking about things like investments and retirement and university costs for the children and all that good stuff. It’s a good overview, I think, and we may go back to it in the future.

Finally, the Gottman book. A few years ago I read a profile of John Gottman’s work in The Atlantic that was making the social media rounds: The Secret to Love is Just Kindness. It stuck with me, and The Seven Principles for Making Marriage Work is a great introduction to his research — which includes longitudinal studies on thousands of couples over multiple decades — and, I think, very practical and wise. If you’re married this one is probably a must-read.

Phew! I think half the “writing” time for these posts is spent doing things like googling character names I can no longer remember… I need to start making notes as I go.

Kilmeny of the Orchard

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

What a delight it was to me to realise that when you move to an author’s home country, you can find more of their books — and so here begins a mini-resumption of my Lucy Maud Montgomery reading project (the first six posts of which are linked here). Over the summer of 2017 I read as many of Montgomery’s books as I could easily get my hands on — which ended up being nineteen of them — as well as a biography. Now I have just finished LMM number twenty, Kilmeny of the Orchard.

It is a sweet love story, unusual in the Montgomery canon in that its protagonist is a man rather than a girl or a woman — actually, of the twenty, it is the only one set up this way (although I believe a few of her short stories take a male point of view). Eric Gordon is a fresh university graduate intent on joining his father in the family business — but not before he spends a few weeks on Prince Edward Island, substitute teaching in place of a friend who is taken ill. Wandering down through an abandoned orchard one night, he is suddenly arrested by the sound of beautiful music being played on the violin. The player is the beautiful Kilmeny Gordon — a young woman with a sad family history and a puzzling case of muteness.

Naturally Eric and Kilmeny’s love grows and triumphs in the end — it’s hardly giving anything away to say so! I will leave you to discover how on your own, if you are so inclined. The reader will want to pay attention to the theme of emotional pain and how it transforms one’s character and relationships, for better or for worse. I was particularly struck by this short passage near the end of the novel:

As he crossed the pasture field before the spruce wood he came upon Neil Gordon, building a longer fence. Neil did not look up as Eric passed, but sullenly went on driving poles. Before this Eric had pitied Neil; now he was conscious of feeling sympathy with him. Had Neil suffered as he was suffering? Eric had entered into a new fellowship whereof the passport was pain. (p. 235)

It seems to me that, fundamentally, we have two options when confronted with pain and sorrow: to turn inward upon ourselves in self-pity, as Neil does, or to allow it to turn us outward towards others in compassion, as Eric is here able to do. Kilmeny of the Orchard is, in part, concerned with the question of what we are to do with our pain — and how those choices affect those around us, innocent and guilty alike.

I also learned a little bit more about PEI history, because I had to look up a reference to the “harvest excursion train”. In the earlier half of the twentieth century, trains would take Maritimers west each year to work the grain harvests in the prairie provinces, as well as for other industries like logging and school-teaching. You can read more about the harvest excursion in this CBC piece.

Kilmeny of the Orchard was a lovely read, and quick — despite the high page count on the quotation above, there is not that much to it (my copy had largeish print and extraordinarily wide margins). It was a nice way to pick up my LMM project again. Twenty books down… five more to go!

Valancy, Jane, Marigold, and Pat

/ Christine Pennylegion / 1 Comment

My Lucy Maud Montgomery reading project has continued into the fall, and I am close to the end of it, with only one book left to go (out of all the LMM novels & short story collections available to me though my local public library system). One of the most interesting parts of this endeavour, to me, is encountering LMM’s lesser-known heroines, and seeing how they compare and contrast with her most famous protagonist, Anne Shirley (later Blythe). I briefly touched on Emily Starr and her trilogy in my reading round-up post for August; here are four more I have encountered this month.

Valancy Stirling, of The Blue Castle, has shot straight to the top of my list of favourite Montgomery heroines, and the book she comes from may also be my favourite so far. We first meet Valancy as a single 29-year-old (a hopeless old maid, to be sure) who lives with her overbearing mother and horrible elderly cousin. Valancy is completely browbeaten, not just by those two women, but by the entirety of her large and close-knit clan. When she receives news that she has less than a year to live due to a heart condition, however, Valancy decides to start living life on her terms. She begins to say exactly what she’s thinking to her family, and leaves the family home (!) to go into service (!!) as companion to an old schoolmate of hers, a Fallen Woman (!!!) who lives with her perpetually drunk father (!!!!) and is dying of consumption. As her family schemes to get her back home, believing her to have quite literally taken leave of her senses, Valancy finds herself and, of course, love — as is surely required to cap off the book in a satisfying manner.

The Blue Castle is a romantic comedy of the finest degree, and I would compare it favourably with novels by Jane Austen. Since it is a romantic comedy I don’t think I’m giving much away by revealing that Valancy does not die at the end of her year — but the reason for that, and its consequences, I will leave for you to find out on your own. This is also the only Montgomery novel that takes place entirely off Prince Edward Island. It’s set the Muskoka region of Ontario, and Valancy’s hometown is a lightly-disguised Bala. That gave it a little extra something for me, since I have never seen the famous red roads of PEI, but do know a little something about this part of Ontario, where my childhood summer camp is located. If for no other reason, I’m glad to have taken on this reading project because it brought me The Blue Castle.

Jane Victoria Stuart, called Victoria by her family but Jane by her self, is the young protagonist of Jane of Lantern Hill, a novel set half in Toronto and half on the Island. Young Jane lives with her mother in a shabby-genteel neighbourhood in Toronto,  both equally under the thumb of her extremely strict and overbearing grandmother. Jane is domestically inclined, but is not allowed to do anything in the house by her grandmother; although she is being educated at an expensive girls’ school, her only friend is Jody, the orphaned servant who lives and works in the boarding house next door. Naturally, her grandmother disapproves of this friendship as well as of most other things that would bring Jane joy.

Jane’s world is turned upside-down when her father, whom she thought was dead, sends a letter to her mother asking her to send him Jane for a summer on PEI. Her parents, as it turns out, were only separated; Jane is summarily packed off to meet this unknown father. She lands in a world completely unlike that which she inhabited in Toronto, and is delighted to be trusted to keep house for her father — cooking, cleaning, and arranging to her heart’s delight — and to make friends without anyone being concerned whether her connections are “low”. It is a sweet story, and it was a pleasure to watch Jane blossom through her summers in PEI and learn to stand up to her grandmother. And of course, there is the requisite happy ending. All in all this was a satisfying read, and if Jane is occasionally a bit unbelievable in her domestic giftedness and enthusiasm, she makes up for it in other ways.

Marigold Lesley is the young protagonist of Magic for Marigold — very young indeed, as the novel opens when she is just four months old. I just read, when looking the book up online, that it is an expansion of four short stories. This explains some things about the structure: the novel makes large jumps in Marigold’s age between sections, which makes sense if those sections were originally stories in their own right. Marigold lives in a large, multi-generational home with her mother, grandmother, great grandmother, and various aunts, uncles, and domestic help. It’s more episodic than other books with a more overarching narrative, but the episodes (sections? vignettes?) provide a perfect blend of ridiculous (see: the family council called in order to name Marigold), touching (see: Marigold and Old Grandmother in the garden on the latter’s last night on earth), and funny (see: a terribly mischievous playmate who — so she says — is really a Russian princess). Magic for Marigold is a charming book.

Incidentally, Magic for Marigold makes me wonder if I have stumbled upon one of the reasons that a lot of these books by Lucy Maud Montgomery are so poorly known compared to the Anne series (besides the fact that Anne of Green Gables was published first and to great acclaim, giving it a natural edge on the competition). Her stories have aged very well, but I don’t think that her titles have all done the same. When I picked this book up from the library I had no idea what it would be about, but judging from the title alone I was expecting something, well, rather dumb. The Pat books (below) suffer from the same sort of thing, especially Mistress Pat. And in fact, even some of the Anne books have titles that don’t really recommend them (Anne’s House of Dreams leaps immediately to mind) — only those probably get an automatic pass since they are part of a very well-known series. There’s nothing in the title Magic for Marigold to make me think “yes, I want to read that” — which is a pity.

Patricia Gardiner, of Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, is the protagonist I had the hardest time liking — though I should qualify that by saying that I enjoyed her well enough in Pat of Silver Bush. It’s only in Mistress Pat that I began to find her… well, in all honesty, I found her unbearably tedious and by the time I was halfway through I was sorely tempted to just put the book down and walk away. I didn’t; I finished it, but the last hundred pages or so were certainly a bit of a slog. Pat’s whole schtick is that she is very attached to her family home, Silver Bush, and its inhabitants, and that she desperately hates change. She lives with her parents and various siblings, as well as the family’s old Irish housekeeper, Judy Plum, who speaks in a brogue that took some getting used to in terms of reading the accent as written. There are many, many cats.

The trouble is that what is charming in the young girl who graces the pages of Pat of Silver Bush is much less so in the woman of 20, 25, or 30 whose life is chronicled in Mistress Pat. Pat deeply resents even the happiest events in the lives of her family and friends, because she hates the thought of things changing; she rejects multiple suitors and breaks two engagements because she can’t bear the thought of leaving her home; she completely misses the fact that she’s really in love with her childhood friend, Hilary “Jingle” Gordon — misses it for decades — which drove me insane; and her constant raptures over Silver Bush and its environs eventually seem less sweetly sentimental than psychologically unwell. Pat of Silver Bush was an average sort of read; it lacks the sparkle of most of Montgomery’s other offerings, but didn’t grate on me either. Mistress Pat was a tremendous disappointment, and the only one of the new-to-me LMM books I’ve read through the past few months that I wouldn’t care to recommend.

Pat aside, it has been a pleasure encountering these additions in the Lucy Maud Montgomery canon. I will always have a soft spot in my heart for Anne Shirley, the perpetual companion of my childhood and young adulthood, but most of these other heroines compare with her very favourably. Many of them deal with similar circumstances — note the theme of overbearing families in several of the books above — but each has her own unique personality and charm. None feels like a rehash of Anne; Lucy Maud Montgomery succeeded very well in making each of her protagonists and new and fresh creation. And some of them, I’m sure, will eventually become my old friends too. Except Pat!

The work for which we are fitted

/ Christine Pennylegion / 3 Comments

Last night I finished the last book in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s “Emily” trilogy, Emily’s Quest, and was happily struck by the following passage towards its end, which I copied into my notebook. For context, the protagonist, Emily Starr, is a budding writer who had found herself unable to write after a bad injury and difficult convalescence (and an unwise love affair); this diary entry details her feelings upon finding her way back to her work:

“Get leave to work–
In this world ’tis the best you get at all,
For God in cursing gives us better gifts
than men in benediction.”

So wrote Elizabeth Barrett Browning — and truly. It is hard to understand why work should be called a curse — until one remembers what bitterness forced or uncongenial labour is. But the work for which we are fitted — which we feel we are sent into the world to do — what a blessing it is and what fulness of joy it holds. I felt this to-day as the old fever burned in my finger-tips and my pen once more seemed a friend.

“Leave to work” — one would think any one could obtain so much. But sometimes anguish and heartbreak forbid us the leave. And then we realise what we have lost and know that it is better to be cursed by God than forgotten by Him. If He had punished Adam and Eve by sending them out to idleness, indeed they would have been outcast and accursed. Not all the dreams of Eden ‘whence the four great rivers flow’ could have been as sweet as those I am dreaming tonight, because the power to work has come back to me.

Oh God, as long as I live give me “leave to work.” Thus pray I. Leave and courage. (Lucy Maud Montgomery, Emily’s Quest, Ch. XII.ii)

This jumped out at me immediately because I wrote my thesis on work — specifically on Dorothy L. Sayers’s theology of ditto. Although Sayers and Montgomery lived on opposite sides of the Atlantic ocean, they were rough contemporaries in age, and it is intriguing to see them working on a common theme — what was it about the inter-war period that made the question of work so pressing? — for Sayers also was adamant that there is no work on earth so worth doing save that for which we are particularly suited. As she wrote in a letter to a young admirer:

“Success”, by the way, is finding yourself engaged in doing the thing you are best fitted to do. Consequently, of course, you can never really know whether other people are successful or not. But you may come to the moment when you say, “I am now doing the job I was made for”. That is success, though nobody will know about it but yourself. (Dorothy L. Sayers, Letter to Hilary F. Page, 10 August 1944)

For both Montgomery and Sayers, the fundamental mark of being successful in work is finding oneself pursuing the job for which one has been made — that is to say, for which one is particularly suited by temperament, inclination, call, and training. In this scheme, there is no value judgement to be made between persons who are each doing the work for which they are best suited; a stay-at-home-mother may be regarded as equally successful to a neurosurgeon, provided that she works in a way that is faithful to her particular calling. Where they disagree, however, is in a subtle (but important!) matter of theology: was work cursed in the Garden of Eden, or is work itself the curse?

Montgomery, following Elizabeth Barrett Browning I suppose, accepts the premise that work is God’s curse upon mankind — though she finds that this does not leave it wholly unredeemable. But this is a misreading of Genesis. In the Creation->Fall narrative, work is present in the garden before the fall; it is part of God’s plan for an unfallen mankind in paradise. As Sayers points out in her essay Vocation in Work, the “new and ominous thing” that the curse brings in Genesis 3 is the fact that work “was [now] to be conditioned by economic necessity” (Dorothy L. Sayers, Vocation in Work).

Work has now become necessary for survival, not just for our flourishing. It is in this way that work has been cursed — but it is not, Sayers strongly asserts, a curse in and of itself. I believe that her interpretation is the correct one. Work is redeemable; one of the ways we can participate in that redemption on a personal level is by seeking out and then faithfully serving the work which seems to have been made for us alone. And when we find it, then we also will rejoice with Emily/Montgomery and Sayers, for the blessing and fulness of joy that it brings.