Montgomery and Brontes and Austens

So the title of this blog is a quote, if you haven't figured that out.  Yes, my writing does tend to be old-fashioned a lot (kind of unfortunately), but I don't usually go around bandying verbs like "fancy" (or the noun form of "fancy" either, really).  The quote is from Emily's Quest by L.M. Montgomery, whom many already know is my favorite author (rivaled only by Tolstoy, my old-time love).  Montgomery is best know for her classic, Anne of Green Gables, and don't get me wrong, Anne of Green Gables is a fantastic book.  But Emily--Emily Byrd Starr--is a writer, you see, and beyond that, I've always looked at her as an ingeniously drawn character who seems so real that I've wished several times I could meet her.  (It will always be a great sorrow for me that I can never meet Montgomery, who died much too early.)

But anyway (before I start digressing like crazy), here is the passage I took my title from:

"I shall carry pictures of you wherever I go, Star," Dean was saying.  Star was his old nickname for her--not a pun on her name but because he said she reminded him of a star.  "I shall see you sitting in your room by that old lookout window, spinning your pretty cobwebs--pacing up and down in this old garden--wandering in the Yesterday Road--looking out to sea.  Whenever I shall recall a bit of Blair Water loveliness I shall see you in it.  After all, all other beauty is only a background for a beautiful woman."

"Her pretty cobwebs--" ah, there it was.  That was all Emily heard.  She did not even realise that he was telling her he thought her a beautiful woman.

"Do you think what I write is nothing but cobwebs, Dean?" she asked chokingly.

Dean looked surprised, doing it very well.

"Star, what else is it?  What do you think it is yourself?  I'm glad you can amuse yourself by writing.  It's a splendid thing to have a little hobby of the kind.  And if you can pick up a few shekels by it--well, that's all very well too in this kind of a world.  But I'd hate to have you dream of being a Bronte or an Austen--and wake to find you'd wasted your youth on a dream."

"I don't fancy myself a Bronte or an Austen," said Emily.  "But you didn't talk like that long ago, Dean.  You used to think that I could do something some day."

"We don't bruise the pretty visions of a child," said Dean.  "But it's foolish to carry childish dreams over into maturity.  Better face facts.  You write charming things of their kind, Emily.  Be content with that and don't waste your best years yearning for the unattainable or striving to reach some height far beyond your grasp."

But, Dean--how do you stop "yearning"--for anything?  If we're Brontes or Austens or nothing but scribbling fools?

It's odd, but, while most fans of the Emily books hate Dean, I don't.  I never have.  He is good and he is bad, like all of us, and just as selfish and giving by turns.

There--I'm starting to talk old-fashioned again--it happens a lot more when I just get done reading something "old."

Maud (as L. M. Montgomery was called, for her middle name) didn't think she was an Austen or a Bronte either, and she isn't, of course.  She's only recently made it into the literary canon, and she has little more than a dusty corner in it now, at best.  Besides, she could never get away from being classified as a "children's writer," even though she wrote books aimed at adult audiences as well.  Even today, those adult books--A Tangled Web, The Blue Castle, and in my opinion Emily's Quest and several of the later Anne books--can be found only in the children's section, if they can be found in a bookstore at all.

And, sure, much of the prose she wrote was purple--it drips still with flowers and dew and "pretty cobwebs" spun up in old farmhouse garret rooms--but she has created, for me, the best damn characters who have ever "lived."  And she has truths in her "children's books" that still ring out for me, and she has been my idol since I was in my early teens for a reason.

If I could have met her, I would have told her that.  And quite unabashedly, too.