A Second Look (3)

To make a long story short, based on an earlier blog about book clubs, my book club decided to read Emily's Quest by L.M. Montgomery. Now, although I have always been a major fan of the Anne of Green Gables series, I have never read the Emily books. Since Emily's Quest is the third book in the series, I decided to take this opportunity to read the first two Emily books as well. Boy, was it ever an eye opener. Now I want to re-read all the Anne books to see if my impressions of those will be different as well.

I've read the first two Emily books so far, and I am finding them almost unbearably sad. As I'm reading them now, I keep wondering how much of herself L.M. Montgomery put into them. Emily's story is painful to me now. Her family seems so unloving and non-understanding. I find it so hard to empathize with Aunt Elizabeth. I get indignant just reading about her. How dare she read Emily's letters to her father? How dare she open the mail that is sent to Emily? How dare she decree that Emily can't go to high school unless she gives up writing? These things seem so unfair. I just want to reach through the pages and shake her. And don't even get me started on Emily's other aunts and uncles. They are horrible, horrible people.

I feel so sorry for Emily, because her life seems so unfair. I can see that she doesn't shrink from her own shortcomings, which I like; I'm not a fan of perfect characters because they irritate me. Emily doesn't irritate me because she admits her flaws. Characters like Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Ruth do irritate me because they are highly flawed but won't admit that they have any flaws. I'm not too sure why these fictional characters have struck me so deeply. On the one hand, it is definitely a sign of a great writer that the characters seem so real; on the other, I wonder just how real they are. How much of Lucy is in Emily? How many of the incidents related by Emily were experienced by Lucy?

I want to cry when I read about Emily's need to write and how her family mocks her efforts and her achievements. Her life seems unfairly difficult, and in some ways unnecessarily difficult. Yes, it's terrible that her beloved father dies when she is 11 and she becomes an orphan, but it is unnecessary that none of her family want to take her in. Her mother's relatives do nothing but tell her how difficult and unruly she is. Sly is the word most often used to describe her, and it's simply not true. She is an imaginative child who needs love and support. All she gets is disappointment and disapproval.

I have to wonder what I would have thought about Emily if I had read the books when I was 11. Would I have seen her life the same way I'm seeing it now? Would I be as upset by her circumstances as I am now? I'm also wondering how I'll feel if I re-read the Anne series. Anne was another orphan who had a fairly difficult life. Will I find the same things in the Anne books that I'm finding in the Emily books? Maybe L.M. Montgomery wrote herself into Emily the way things really were and wrote herself into Anne the way she wished things had been. Maybe Anne is the ideal and Emily is the reality. I don't know enough about L.M. Montgomery to be sure.

I am sure that I'll be reading Montgomery's journals in the not too distant future. I would like to see what her life really was like; I know it wasn't a bed of roses, but I don't know the details. I'm always interested in how real life affects fiction, and I think in L.M. Montgomery's case there will be a lot of overlap.

Has anyone else had an experience of re-reading a favourite from childhood and seeing it in a completely different way? I'm feeling very unsettled by reading the Emily books. It's not a comfortable feeling.