Emily’s childhood is neatly partitioned off from her adolescence by the psychic experience of death and renewal (Use’s mother’s ‘legitimate’ death restores Dr Burnley’s faith in women and life). Emily of New Moon ends on an upbeat note, with Emily’s triumph with Mr Carpenter and her decision to write her own story as a diary. Emily has won a place and the liberty to explore it. In Emily Climbs (1925), which covers Emily’s three years at Shrewsbury High School, we find her grappling with others’ conceptions of art and with her own voice. Now she says what she thinks about some of what she reads, and her journal entries are as entertaining as many of Montgomery’s own.
The psychic experience in Emily of New Moon comes near the end of the novel as a culmination of powerful forces in Emily’s development; in Emily Climbs, the major psychic experience comes just over half-way through the book. The experience itself makes exciting reading, but is important in our understanding of Emily for the literary gift it brings for her. This time Emily’s vision saves a little boy’s life – she ‘dreams’ where the lost boy is to be found, and then, still in sleep or trance, draws a picture of the house she and Use had passed the day before, a house that had called strangely to Emily. The child is found, all but dead, on the floor of the little room Emily’s trance-drawing marks with a cross. When she and Use wake, before Emily has seen her own drawing, they are honoured with a visit from old Mrs Maclntyre and with the telling of her story, which eventually becomes Emily’s ‘The Woman Who Spanked the King.’ They later learn that Mrs Maclntyre does not tell her story to everyone, but has discerned Emily’s specialness even before her drawing of Allan Bradshaw’s whereabouts is discovered. She tells Emily, ‘you haf the way and it is to you I will be telling my story’ (193). As with the beginning of the vision of Use’s mother and its accompaniment of the friendship of Dean Priest, so here it is as though the psychic experience prepares the way for some larger creative possibility. Emily’s eventual publication of Mrs Maclntyre’s story attracts the notice of a New York editor, and the meeting with her confronts Emily with one of her biggest career decisions – whether to go to New York as she has been invited to do or stay at New Moon, where she can develop a truly Canadian voice. In this second book, the psychic experience helps to precipitate a crisis of identity for the writer that then separates the apprentice from the skilled worker.
As its title suggests, Emily Climbs is about literary apprenticeship. Emily tests herself against others – Use, Teddy, Perry, Dean, Aunt Ruth, Cousin Andrew – and also tries her own literary judgments. The book has many wonderfully told adventures and scenes that I am not going to write about here but that I recommend for their scrupulous truth to adolescent ego, restlessness, and zest for life. Emily writes in her journal, sends poems out for publication, studies what is and what is not on the school curriculum, and even writes for the local paper. She is learning to know herself and is constantly exercising her new voice. She must frequently defy Aunt Ruth, another gatekeeper for the establishment; she is sensitive to criticism from others and is still shaping herself, in some ways, according to what others think of her abilities. The essay and then the story of ‘The Woman Who Spanked the King’ offer a touchstone for others’ reactions to Emily and for her own to herself. This early in her career – the second Emily book takes her from fourteen to seventeen – Emily is independent enough to try to ignore Dean’s growing condescension.
Mr Carpenter is still the literary mentor of most importance in Emily Climbs. He admonishes Emily to curb her departures from realism, to stick to what she knows, and to eschew the clever, caustic satire she is capable of writing, but that hurts others and will, he warns her, twist her own spirit. When Aunt Elizabeth makes Emily promise that she will not write any fiction while she is at Shrewsbury High School, Mr Carpenter is pleased – he believes sticking to truth and details will make Emily give up some of her more fatuous fancies. When Emily shows him the essay (Aunt Elizabeth’s injunction keeps her from making it into a story) about Mrs Maclntyre’s spanking of Prince Bertie, Mr Carpenter is frankly delighted. After the ban on fiction is lifted, Emily turns the essay into a story, and when a large New York magazine accepts it, she shows it to Mr Carpenter. He thinks it is ‘absolutely good’ (263) and praises her for not trying to improve on Mrs Maclntyre’s way of telling the story: ‘“But you didn’t try to [improve it] – that makes it yours,” said Mr. Carpenter – and left her to puzzle his meaning out for herself (263). A good teacher, he frequently leaves Emily to figure out what he means, and she grows by searching. (One could argue that he doesn’t bother to help her understand what he says.) He refuses to advise Emily about her career and says he will not tell her how to answer Miss Royal’s offer to go to New York (though his opinion of it is perfectly clear).
Miss Royal, an Island woman who has made it big in publishing in New York, decides to visit her aunt on P.E.I., partly because she wants to meet the young woman who wrote the short story ‘The Woman Who Spanked the King.’ After a very funny interview with Miss Royal (the chapter ‘Love Me, Love My Dog’ is delightful reading) – a chapter of farce – Miss Royal invites Emily to come and live with her in New York, to live and work in the heady, sophisticated centre of talent and opportunity. Miss Royal has been attracted by the gifted pen of the writer, but she is charmed by Emily herself, and the invitation marks the turning point in Emily’s career as a writer and a young woman. The double validation of herself as author and independent woman strengthens a voice rejections and Dean are doing much to quiet. Interestingly, Emily must learn to reject female and male mentors.
Montgomery does not tell us directly what Teddy Kent (or Use) thinks of the short story, but she does not have to. We believe without being told that Teddy is as thrilled for her as she is for him when a Montreal man buys two of his pictures for a price that allows Teddy to spend another year at Shrewsbury. To Teddy, Emily is evidently as powerful as she in her best moments believes herself to be. Shortly after Aunt Elizabeth has told Emily she cannot write fiction at Shrewsbury, Emily meets Teddy and together they dream about their futures. Emily predicts that he will be a ‘great artist,’ and then she sits with rapt expression, vowing silently that she will climb her Alpine path, no matter what the obstacles. Teddy rejoins most appropriately, ‘When I am I’ll paint you just as you’re looking now … and call it Joan of Arc – with a face all spirit – listening to her voices’ (79). It is the ‘random word,’ the ‘airy voices’ that Emily hears that make her, in her own imaginings, as strong as the Soldier of Amiens. Teddy’s choice of an androgynous image is particularly apt when we recognize the perdurable stereotype of femininity Dean tries to impose on Emily. Teddy’s instinctive recognition of and reverence for the spiritual warrior is what makes him support Emily the artist – his admiration for Emily is, apparently, not merely a product of (male) romantic longing and fantasy, though it is pictorial and idealized. He sees Emily as Emily sees herself.
Dean Priest’s response to the essay ‘The Woman Who Spanked the King’ exposes his jealousy and narrowness – fully to the reader, partly to Emily. In the very same breath that she records Mr Carpenter’s verdict of the essay – ‘excellent’ – she describes in her diary Dean’s dismissal of the piece and her own subsequent doubts: ‘I think in a way Dean doesn’t like to think of my growing up – I think he has a little of the Priest jealousy of sharing anything, especially friendship, with any one else – or with the world … For instance, Mr Carpenter was delighted with my Woman Who Spanked the King, and told me it was excellent; but when Dean read it he smiled and said, “It will do very well for a school essay, but – ” and then he smiled again. It was not the smile I liked, either … It seemed to say, “You can scribble amusingly, my dear, and have a pretty knack of phrase-turning; but I should be doing you an unkindness if I let you think that such a knack meant a very great deal.” If this is true – and it very likely is, for Dean is so clever and knows so much – then I can never accomplish anything worth while. I won’t try to accomplish anything – I won’t be just a “pretty scribbler’” (211). In this we hear all the dangerous susceptibility of the young woman writer – she thinks she understands Dean Priest’s jealousy, and yet, insecure and admiring, she is willing to believe he does know best about her limitations. But in this second book Emily is still weighing and testing, and Dean’s possessiveness does not destroy her hopes. She has a saving resilience here that enables her to turn the essay into a story and send it off to a big New York magazine despite Dean’s condescension.
What is it that Dean is trying to make of Emily? After their meeting in Emily of New Moon, Dean Priest seems to feed Emily’s love of language and hunger for knowledge about the world and the mysterious and faraway things Dean has seen and studied. Even in the opening pages of Emily Climbs he seems supportive. It is no accident that within two pages of each other Montgomery has both Dean and Mr Carpenter quote Emerson to Emily in order to encourage and strengthen her. But the lines of Emerson’s poetry that Dean quotes to Emily give us a curiously ambivalent message:
The gods talk in the breath of the wold,
They talk in the shaken pine,
And they fill the reach of the old seashore
With dialogue divine;
And the poet who overhears
One random word they say
Is the fated man of men
Whom the ages must obey. (EC 10)
Can he be suggesting that Emily is that ‘fated man of men’ or is he showing her that even the blessed and inspired hear only a ‘random word,’ a piece of the truth, and cannot achieve whole knowledge? Even if Dean is encouraging Emily here, shortly after their ramble he first exposes his jealousy and possessiveness – his true feelings. Dean and Emily are rereading the magical Alhambra together, when Teddy whistles and Emily tells Dean she must go: ‘“He only calls like that when he wants me especially and I have promised I will always go if I possibly can.” “I want you especially!” said Dean. “I came up this evening on purpose to read The Alhambra with you”’ (29). Though he does eventually shut up the book and tell her to go, Emily feels that ‘things seemed spoiled, somehow’ (29). True to her thorough indoctrination in female accommodation of male ego, she does not blame Dean for being selfish.
Less than a week after Emily has answered Teddy’s call, Dean and Emily are again talking, and this time the jealousy takes a new and, as the reader sees, unmistakably dangerous form. Dean is careful to laugh when he says it, but his sincerity is obvious. He tells Emily that Teddy puts a part of her in every picture he paints and he wants him to stop. Dean’s words and Emily’s response establish early in this book what should be the clear lines of Dean’s desires and Emily’s. Dean says, ‘“But let him keep his pencil and brush off my property.” Dean laughed as he said it. But I held my head high. I am not anybody’s “property,” not even in fun. And I never will be’ (31). The young Emily intuits the demands that are being made, and she has the ready answer. But the world around Emily so frequently echoes Dean’s perception of the female, and of her in particular, that by the time she writes the essay about Prince Bertie, she is not sure anymore that Dean’s objections about her writing are really what they so obviously are. Emily’s inner voice saves her many times through this second volume, as in the first, but we can see how the culture around conspires to silence the woman writer and encourages her to marry and get on with her proper roles of wife, mother, and inspirer to men. Even the successful Miss Royal, we remember, is nothing in the eyes of Aunt Ruth and Shrewsbury because she is not married. Certainly no one knew better than Montgomery herself how the unmarried woman is regarded by neighbours and family – even the woman who writes a best-seller or is invited to meet the governor general of Canada because her writing has touched him.1
Dean does not want Emily to be just like everyone else, of course, because he sees himself as different and wants a soul mate. Her writing is getting to be too powerful, and we know he fears he may lose her. He steadily works to transform her into a priestess of some mystical (but inevitably domestic) rite, some besieged heroine who will exchange everything (even writing, of course, if she did any) for love.
Scarcely a month after Dean has tried to deflate her over the writing of her important essay, he is talking to her about romance and love – disguisedly, of course. Emily tells him that she sympathizes with the unfortunate heroine of Mrs Browning’s poem ‘The Lay of the Brown Rosary.’ In the poem Onora trades her soul to the bewitched ghost of a nun, in exchange for life with her beloved. The nun has told her that she will not live to be the bride of her hero, and Onora sells her soul so that she can live and marry her love. On her wedding day, Onora’s lover falls dead, slain evidently by the very evil to which Onora has mistakenly sold herself. In the poem, Barrett Browning makes it clear that Onora chose foolishly the life on this earth over the eternal life in heaven. Not surprisingly, Dean applauds Emily’s sympathy with Onora. She says, ‘“My favourite poem is The Lay of the Brown Rosary – and I am much more in sympathy with Onora than Mrs Browning was.” “You would be,” said Dean. “That is because you are a creature of emotion yourself. You would barter heaven for love, just as Onora did’” (216). As with most of Dean’s knowledge of Emily, he is partly right, or right for the wrong reasons. She may be willing to give up reward or even the promise of reward, for love, but she is not willing to give up her writing until she can no longer believe in it. What Dean would clearly like to see as the romantic renunciation of all for love, Emily sees as a possibility only when she no longer has an ambition to strive for. But that despair comes in Emily’s Quest, and only after many defeats and Dean’s own huge lie about her novel.
In this book, Dean is beginning to act as a lover, even though Emily chooses not to understand. She is sixteen (he is forty), and he calls her a woman, flattering her, she believes, but keeping her firmly in her place as inspirer to others, not creator in her own right. Even Mr Carpenter tells her cynically that being able to dress well will be of more advantage to her than all her understanding of poetry or prose (Miller 163–4), and Dean, as the aspiring lover, goes further in his bid to transfix Emily as beloved: ‘“You looked like a seeress gazing into the future as I came down the walk,” said Dean, “standing here in the moonlight, white and rapt. Your skin is like a narcissus petal. You could dare to hold a white rose against your face – very few women can dare that. You aren’t really very pretty, you know, Star, but your face makes people think of beautiful things – and that is a far rarer gift than mere beauty”’ (215). Alive to his compliments, Emily does not know how she pays for them. His insistence here on her physical beauty and its power to inspire comes a very short time after his dismissal of her essay and her power to inspire through her writing. To listen to Dean Priest, intoxicating as his visions and stories and comments are, is to conspire in her own silence. Her inner voice becomes strong through success, but it is correspondingly weakened by rejection slips and by the subtle, insistent vision of herself as seer that Dean promotes. Her own failures and her own perception of her second sight serve to reinforce his silencing image. Dean’s ‘seeress’ has only to embody her visions, not speak or act upon them. Teddy’s picture of Joan of Arc listening to her voices is obviously empowering by contrast – for Teddy, Emily is inspired action. It will take all Emily’s psychic power and spiritual introspection to enable her to throw off the image Dean has constructed for her and that her own culture – through its advocacy of marriage and domesticity and romantic myth – reinforces.
But Emily is able to throw off much of Dean’s condescension in this novel because she is young and eager and resilient. Montgomery begins and ends the book with Emily’s writing, and the whole novel, really, shows Emily experimenting with success and vision. She learns to trust much about her own judgment. A younger Emily or an older one might not have been able to disregard Dean’s damning faint praise of her essay; but the adolescent Emily is full of grit and heart and wants to succeed. The very first chapter entitled ‘Writing Herself Out,’ shows Emily wrestling with Mr Carpenter’s criticism, vowing to succeed, and even pulling from her mattress a secreted candle so that she can disobey the bedtime hour in order to write out a story that has just occurred to her. She is sure of her calling and in tune with her inner voice. Despite Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Ruth, and the dampening condescension of an infuriating student, Evelyn Blake, Emily writes and sends out her poems for publication. Even the injunction against writing fiction does not keep her from revelling in her diary and in the writing of poems. She exercises her own literary standards – while she enjoys The Alhambra with Dean and discussions of the poetic, sentimental story of At the Back of the North Wind with Use, she is reading and thinking about books she formerly thought perfect. She learns to be her own best critic. Writing in her journal one night she describes a scene as she wants to describe it, and then finds just fault with it. As we read the sentence for ourselves, we can appreciate Montgomery’s sly humour here. The description sounds very much like ones her detractors accused her of writing all her career (and which she may have been guilty of in many short stories but came dangerously close to in only one novel, The Golden Road): ‘And every night we have murky red sunsets flaming in smoky crimson across the harbour, with a star above them like a saved soul gazing with compassionate eyes into pits of torment where sinful spirits are being purged from the stains of earthly pilgrimage.’ But Emily (like Montgomery) pulled herself up short: ‘Would I dare to show the above sentence to Mr. Carpenter? I would not … It’s “fine writing”’ (259).
She recognizes that Mrs Hemans is not great, even though she defends her from Mr Carpenter’s utter contempt by citing her own favourite, highly romantic lines (253). She also turns her criticism to Tennyson and Keats. Whereas a younger Emily found Tennyson wholly delightful (as did Anne Shirley throughout her life), a more self-reliant Emily judges with revealing coolness: ‘I like Tennyson but sometimes he enrages me. He is beautiful – not too beautiful, as Keats is – the Perfect Artist. But he never lets us forget the artist – we are always conscious of it – he is never swept away by some splendid mountain torrent of feeling. Not he – he flows on serenely between well-ordered banks and carefully laid-out gardens. And no matter how much one loves a garden one doesn’t want to be cooped up in it all the time – one likes an excursion now and then into the wilderness. At least Emily Byrd Starr does – to the sorrow of her relations. Keats is too full of beauty. When I read his poetry I feel stifled in roses and long for a breath of frosty air or the austerity of a chill mountain peak. But, oh, he has some lines – ’ (256–7). This love of an occasional wildness, this passion, is what would attract Emily to the Brontës and ally her partly with Dean. Perhaps even more revealing of Emily’s sense of herself is her outrage over Tennyson’s men and women in Idylls of the King, a point of view unshared by anyone in the Anne books. ‘I detest Tennyson’s Arthur. If I had been Guinevere I’d have boxed his ears – but I wouldn’t have been unfaithful to him for Lancelot, who was just as odious in a different way. As for Geraint, if I had been Enid I have bitten him. These “patient Griseldas” deserve all they get. Lady Enid, if you had been a Murray of New Moon you would have kept your husband in better order and he would have liked you all the better for it’ (222). It is revealing that Emily did not fault Guinevere for adultery, as Tennyson clearly did, and it is appropriate that Emily would reject the pale, virtuous, long-suffering Arthur, as well as the distracted and self-loathing Lancelot. Clearly Emily believes Geraint’s uncourteous treatment of women could be remedied by spunk. The emerging portrait of the strong woman is perfectly in keeping with the heroine Jane Eyre and also with the characters in two other novel-length stories we later find in the third Emily volume to have been influential in Emily’s construction of her self-concept: Aurora Leigh in Barrett Browning’s novel-poem Aurora Leigh, and the combined characters of Waldo and Lyndall in Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. Through her literary apprenticeship Emily gains a strong sense of self-worth, but, as we have also suggested with Dean, this self-image is dependent on her faithfulness to her own voice, and the ability to hear that voice clearly is dependent on her success as a writer.
Emily is strong in this novel, but we can see where her vulnerability lies. She pledges herself to her Alpine Path and to the ‘airy voices’ from Keats’s poem, and she dares to write her pivotally important essay and then to defy Dean’s judgment and rewrite it as a story. But before she hears of the story’s acceptance, her inner voice has been sorely tried. She has received rejection after rejection and has vowed to keep trying: ‘Still, her inner voice had grown rather faint under so many discouragements. The acceptance of The Woman Who Spanked the King suddenly raised it into a joyous paean of certainty again. The check meant much, but the storming of that magazine much more’ (263). Flushed from this victory, Emily becomes conscious for the first time of loving Teddy Kent. Teddy and Perry and Use and Emily are storm staid in an abandoned farmhouse. As they sit together, Emily and Teddy both know the other loves: ‘For just a moment their eyes met and locked – only a moment – yet Emily was never really to belong to herself again’ (269). This belonging to someone else is very different, we see, from Dean’s notion of ownership. Montgomery underscores the difference by making Emily, minutes later, inspired with the idea for a story. It is as though Teddy fits into Emily’s artistic world, can even call out the best creative impulses in her. Dean wants to kill what he cannot touch. Here Teddy says, ‘I’ve a pocket full of dreams to sell … What d’ye lack?’ and ‘Emily turned around – stared at him for a moment – then forgot thrills and spells and everything else in a wild longing for a Jimmy-book. As if his question, “What will you give me for a dream?” had been a magic formula opening some sealed chamber in her brain, she saw unrolling before her a dazzling idea for a story – complete even to the title – A Seller of Dreams … it unrolled itself before her in the darkness. Her characters lived and laughed and talked and did and enjoyed and suffered – she saw them on the background of the storm … Use had got drunk on Malcolm Shaw’s forgotten Scotch whiskey, but Emily was intoxicated with immortal wine’ (270–1). 2 This wonderful story, inspired by Teddy, is only an outline for the apprentice Emily, but in Emily’s Quest, she writes the novel and it is as rich and rare and vital as she dreamed it could be – and she kills it for Dean.
Throughout Emily Climbs the questions about identity and love and art are bound up with each other. Dean belongs to the enchanted world of the Alhambra; it is appropriate that the real Alhambra is only a ghost of its former grandeur, a legend of mystery and passion. Readers of Irving’s work would find it significant, too, that there is always something sinister about the Moorish ruins, with their blood-stained marble courts and their legendary key and lions. Dean’s charm for Emily is always tinged with danger – she does not yet know how intimately he can undermine and manipulate her as a woman and as an artist. Teddy, on the other hand, is always associated with Emily’s deepest emotions – with what she feels and thinks, not with what he wants and tries to impose on her. The coolness readers feel about Teddy shows how difficult Montgomery’s problem with romance is: jealousy and possessiveness are violent and all-consuming; friendship and equality are tepid in terms of conventional romance (Kreps 145–54).
Montgomery intensifies the difference between Dean and Teddy and their power with Emily in an early episode in this novel. She ironically reveals Teddy as Rochester and Emily as Jane Eyre, but with the actions, again, reversed from Brontë and conforming to traditional rescue of the damsel in distress. While the discovery of the little lost boy may be the central psychic experience of the novel, this early echo of Jane’s rescue from St John Rivers sets the tone for the romantic events and questions of the novel. Emily is accidentally locked in the church at night with mad Mr Morrison, an old crazed man who wanders everywhere looking for his lost child bride, Annie. Emily is terrified that he will touch her, mistaking her for Annie, and in her agony she calls out to Teddy. The church is tightly closed and Teddy lives more than a mile away, but Emily’s call wakes him and he rushes to her and rescues her. When they are sitting safely outside in the graveyard together, Emily asks Teddy how he knew where she was. His answer reveals the psychic quality of the experience: ‘“Why – I don’t know,” said Teddy confusedly. “I didn’t stop to think – I just seemed to know you were in the church when I heard you calling me, and I must get here as quick as I could. It’s – it’s all – funny,” he concluded lamely’ (53). Readers familiar with Jane Eyre will have no trouble accounting for the power of the voice. After Jane has been estranged from Rochester for more than a year, she is being hard pressed by the bloodless minister St John Rivers to marry him so that she can serve with him as his missionary wife in India. He does not love her, and he uses the arguments of duty and love of God and declares that she should spend her life in servitude not in earthly pleasures. Jane is stirred to the depths of her strong being and, when she cries out for a sign from God, she hears Rochester’s voice calling her name clearly, over the miles of heath and mountain. It is Rochester’s call that gives her the courage to leave St John Rivers – in rushing to rescue Rochester, she rescues herself. In the novel, Jane Eyre explains the phenomenon modestly, saying that in the long-distance message nature did ‘no miracle – but her best’ (Brontë 370). When she is back with Rochester he tells her, in his inimitably passionate way, how her voice came to soothe him as it replied to his call. Emily’s call to Teddy is modelled on this famous, romantic experience of Jane and Rochester. As with the rescue of Emily by Dean, Montgomery again chooses the more conventional form of having the knight rescue the lady – Brontë’s heroine, on the other hand, is always, it seems, rescuing the hero. But, roles apart, the message is unmistakable: Teddy is the one spiritually joined with Emily. Since Teddy has complete faith in Emily and her voices, the love-link with him is a reinforcement of her artistic independence. Thus, when the novel ends and Montgomery is neatly tying up threads about love and career, she can show that Emily’s love for Teddy is a source of happiness, not a fetter. The relationship with Dean causes her a literal nightmare in which she chooses Teddy over Dean and leaves Dean lamenting in despair that ‘My star has set’ (322). Psychic experience, dream vision, and artistic inspiration link Emily with Teddy.
Guilt and sorrow threaten Emily as shadows of the future, but for now, Emily is happy to be on her own and to taste the successes of her pen. Emily’s thoughts about Teddy and his possible indifference to her (after all) suggest the optimism and honesty of this book: ‘I am conscious of three sensations. On top I am sternly composed and traditional. Underneath that, something that would hurt horribly if I let it is being kept down. And underneath that again is a queer feeling of relief that I still have my freedom’ (320). This ‘queer feeling of relief will buoy Emily through more years of her struggle as a writer, but will fail her when she truly thinks Teddy and his love are gone. Montgomery’s story pictures the inseparability of the dancer from the dance, Emily the writer from Emily the woman. Whether sincerely or wishfully or falsely, Montgomery suggests that romance and art are somehow fundamentally connected.
It is Emily’s determined listening to her inner voice – her determination to be whole – that enables her to refuse Miss Royal’s offer to live with her in New York. The offer and the refusals of those she consults to give advice about it show how far Emily has come in being recognized within her family and by Mr Carpenter as an independent woman. Something about Miss Royal’s offer does not strike Emily right – she keeps thinking that Miss Royal won her own way to New York and that she should somehow win her own way, too. And perhaps Emily detects in Miss Royal’s slight patronizing a female version of the male ownership/dismissal power she feels from Dean. As a proposal, Miss Royal’s should be the fairy tale come true, and Emily’s refusal may suggest several levels of suspicion and rebellion operating at once. With Miss Royal, Emily also rejects the bachelor-girl life and/or the lesbian love relationship (Tausky 12) and/or the economically dependent artist’s position. But more potent than any of these subliminal reasons for rejecting Miss Royal, we find that Emily’s identity is bound up with New Moon farm and with Prince Edward Island. Her aunts leave the decision up to her; she does not want to ask Teddy what he thinks, Dean is away (mercifully), and even the old peddlar, Jock Kelly, refuses to advise her. Mr Carpenter, predictably, comes closest to giving her the best reasons to refuse the offer – claims for Canadian literature: ‘Janet Royal is Yankeefied – her outlook and atmosphere and style are all U.S. And I’m not condemning them – they’re all right. But – she isn’t a Canadian any longer – and that’s what I wanted you to be – pure Canadian through and through, doing something as far as in you lay for the literature of your own country, keeping your Canadian tang and flavour. But of course there’s not many dollars in that sort of thing yet’ (305–6). It is interesting that Mr Carpenter uses Haworth Parsonage in his argument. When Emily says she is ‘not a Charlotte Brontë’ he does not argue the point, but he does not agree with her, either. He clearly believes that talent should stand out no matter where it is found. Emily, taking the part of most Canadian writers of the time, says she needs more than talent to get anywhere. But at the end of the interview Mr Carpenter throws her back on her own wishes – he leaves her to consider her own voice and its demands. She eventually accepts the lesson: she must decide for herself, know her own mind. Then the decision is effortless. She tells a very sceptical and disappointed Miss Royal that ‘Some fountain of living water would dry up in my soul if I left the land I love’ (311). And then Miss Royal gives her what is better than sympathy – she gives Emily a challenge. She says that if she ever thinks she is wrong and Emily is right about staying, she will write and tell her so. With this challenge in the back of her mind, the young woman Emily is ready to leave apprenticeship and move into the difficult world of career. She has recognized her own voice; now she must, in the third book, Emily’s Quest, find out what she wants to say in that voice.