The first eleven chapters of the total twenty-seven of Emily’s Quest (1927) focus on the relationship of Dean and Emily and on Emily’s consequent mistrust of her inner voice. The central psychic experience of this novel occurs in these chapters as a response to the deepest needs of the woman and the writer. Because she believes so implicitly in Dean – despite her intuition of his jealousy – Emily does not credit herself with understanding when her writing is good. Instead she lets Dean decide and, when he lies to her, she is almost destroyed – as woman and as writer. This last Emily volume, like the earlier two, insists on the inseparability of the woman from the writer; to doubt and betray one is to silence and revoke the power of the other.
In Emily Climbs, Emily listens to many people in order to decide about her own abilities – Mr Carpenter and Dean are rivals for her ear, but in apprenticeship Emily favours Mr Carpenter. Mr Carpenter dies early in Emily’s Quest and, though Emily continues to live by his teaching, she does not have the benefit of his critical judgment to offset the condescension of Dean. Besides, by the age of seventeen, persuading Dean that she can write has become crucial, as she confesses to her diary: it is ‘a sort of obsession with me to make Dean admit I can write something worthwhile in its line. That would be triumph. But unless and until he does, everything will be dust and ashes. Because – he knows’ (15–16). Emily is right about Dean’s knowing, but she is wrong about his having to admit what he knows; Emily’s own moral standards make her believe that knowledge is power, but she does not understand that Dean’s knowledge is useful to him only when he withholds it from her. Emily’s eventual triumph shows that power over is not the most potent form of power. Emily regains her personal and artistic powers when she refuses to be dominated and controlled by Dean. Perhaps Montgomery was ahead of her time in (remembering?) suggesting that a partnership model (with Teddy) rather than a dominator model is truly supportive of men and women and art (Eisler).
The narrator is careful to alert the reader to Dean’s methods of control. The scene where Dean suggests to Emily (rather than directly telling her) that her writing is frivolous and ephemeral is ingenious. For the scene to work, Emily’s quick intelligence must not be able to detect what the reader must not avoid seeing; Montgomery’s use of dramatic irony is admirable. Emily is telling Dean how lonely she will feel that winter since he and Teddy and Use will all be away: ‘“But I’ll have my work.” “Oh, yes, your work,” agreed Dean with a little, tolerant, half-amused inflection in his voice that always came now when he spoke of her “work,” as if it tickled him hugely that she should call her pretty scribblings “work.” Well, one must humour the charming child. He could not have said so more plainly in words. His implications cut across Emily’s sensitive soul like a whiplash. And all at once her work and her ambitions became – momentarily at least – as childish and unimportant as he considered them. She could not hold her own conviction against him. He must know. He was so clever – so well-educated. He must know’ (30). The fact that the narrator qualifies with ‘momentarily at least’ suggests that Emily still has her own thoughts, that she can spring back from Dean’s crushing patronage. But the threat is there – one day, it says clearly, she will not be able to resist and she will accept what he thinks. In the next few lines of the scene Dean speaks and, having lashed Emily with his partially disguised sneer, he compliments her beauty and at the same time reinforces his contempt for her writing: ‘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’ (30). And Emily and the reader, prompted by the narrator, isolate the sting within the honey: ‘“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’ (30–1). True to herself, Emily pushes the crucial question. Notice how the narrator carefully describes Dean’s gesture of surprise. Emily can be forgiven for being taken in by this worldly, skilled actor: ‘“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 Brontë or an Austen – and wake to find you’d wasted your youth on a dream”’ (31). What a diabolical put-down. His pretended reluctance and surprise, his damning words ‘amuse,’ ‘little hobby,’ and ‘shekels’ are perfectly offset by the use of the names of Brontë and Austen, especially when we remember that Emily had claimed to Mr Carpenter (EC 306) that she did not regard herself as a Brontë. How clever of him to debase her work with so much apparent gentleness and then to hold up her mutilated scribblings next to the solid accomplishments of acknowledged genius. He lies easily to her, ‘doing it very well.’ As the narrator paints it, the wonder is that Emily holds out so long, not that she capitulates eventually.
For she does hold out a while yet – until she no longer feels, that is, that Teddy Kent is in love with her. Emily’s belief in herself is firmly attached to her love for Teddy – her moments of greatest creativity (at least early in her career) and keenest pleasure are usually influenced by him, either directly or indirectly. Montgomery’s point here is the same as Barrett Browning’s point in Aurora Leigh: the two greatest creative forces – art and love – come from the same well-spring. Where Teddy (or hopeful thought of Teddy) is, there also will be inspiration. In Emily Climbs Emily looks at Teddy and imagines out a whole novel; in Emily’s Quest, she writes the novel and gives to it the joy, love, life, and youth she shares – at least spiritually – with Teddy.
And, of course, it is this novel, A Seller of Dreams, that finally gives Dean control over her. The fact that she has written it, has been rapt and remote from him during the six weeks that she wrote it, attests to the strength of her own voice. As with the essay ‘The Woman Who Spanked the King’ in Emily Climbs, so here Emily defies Dean’s judgment in writing the story at all. She is true to herself. It is anguish over a cool visit and parting from Teddy that makes Emily dig out the old outline of the novel. It is as though in writing the story she recaptures the essence of her relationship with Teddy – their mutual acknowledgment of love in the old farmhouse where Emily was inspired with the ‘immortal wine’ of creation. Dean must take a second place to this story, though he does not know that she is writing it. He has witnessed the recent coolness with Teddy and rejoiced at it. Doubting her own voice, Emily gives Dean the manuscript to judge, and the narrator leaves the reader in no doubt about what that judgment will be: ‘Dean looked inscrutably at the little packet she held out to him. So this was what had wrapped her away from him all summer – absorbed her – possessed her. The one black drop in his veins – that Priest jealousy of being first – suddenly made its poison felt. He looked into her cold, sweet face and starry eyes, grey-purple as a lake at dawn, and hated whatever was in the packet … ’ (51). When he comes to give his verdict, the narrator says, ‘Dean looked at her, guilty’ (51), and we know what he will say. His lie sounds very much like his other lies and is close enough to what Emily expects from the larger world to make her believe his opinion is honest: ‘It’s a pretty little story, Emily. Pretty and flimsy and ephemeral as a rose-tinted cloud. Cobwebs – only cobwebs. The whole conception is too far-fetched. Fairy tales are out of the fashion. And this one of yours makes overmuch of a demand on the credulity of the reader. And your characters are only puppets. How could you write a real story? You’ve never lived’ (51–2).
Emily burns the manuscript. Crushed by Dean’s words she contemplates the burning, and then she sees Vega of the Lyre, the star she and Teddy had gazed at long ago and promised always to think of each other when they saw. Urged by this despairing reminder of Teddy, she believes Dean at last, and in the death of the novel comes the symbolic death of her youth: ‘Where had gone all the wit and laughter and charm that had seemed to glimmer in its pages – all the dear folks who had lived in them – all the secret delight she had woven into them as moonlight is woven among pines? Nothing left but ashes’ (53). Emily flees the room, falls downstairs, and hovers for weeks between life and death. No saving truth comes to her, no vision of life over the borderlands, such as she experienced in Emily of New Moon; here she lives as a restless shadow of her former self.
This wraith, who forswears writing as a frivolous amusement, belongs to Dean Priest. So long as her inner voice, the voice of vocation, as Jane Urquhart calls it (332), is silent, Emily is willing and able to sacrifice herself to Dean. Montgomery is careful to show her readers just what this sacrifice means – Emily has moments when she feels the fetters too strongly and takes off Dean’s emerald engagement ring, just to feel, guiltily, free. When she pictures out her future in their home to be and accidentally imagines Teddy there instead of Dean, she denies what her reviving voice is trying to whisper to her. Once she admits that the house they are furnishing together means more to her than Dean does, and then she quickly denies it. To the undiscerning or wishful, Emily looks the same, but the eyes of disinterested love know that this Emily is not what she was: ‘For she was changed. Cousin Jimmy and Aunt Laura knew that, though no one else seemed to notice it. Often there was an odd restlessness in her eyes. And something was missing from her laughter’ (84). Secure in his possession of her, Dean tells her where they will put her writing desk. Emily responds listlessly, ‘I thought you didn’t want me to write any more stories,’ to which he replies with more candour than she is able to understand: ‘That was when I was afraid it would take you away from me. Now, it doesn’t matter. I want you to do just as pleases you’ (78). But with her belief in herself shattered and without her buoying love for Teddy, Emily has no will or power to write. In response to Aunt Laura’s gentle questions, she thinks ‘She could not write – she would never try to write again’ (85).
If Emily had not been psychic, she would have married Dean Priest, she would probably never have written again, and she would have frozen and buried her love for Teddy. Montgomery’s cautionary tale is indeed powerful: it is only Emily’s gift of second sight that saves her from the control and the silence that characterize the lives of many women, even (perhaps especially?) women of great talent. Perhaps she would not have needed psychic forces to liberate her if she had been able to listen more faithfully to her own voice, but Emily fights more than just Dean Priest in Dean’s efforts to silence her. The cynical outcast is a wonderfully disguised representative of several binding traditions: he is part of the romantic-hero tradition (Radway; Kreps), a misunderstood misanthropic genius who can be humanized by perceptive love (the fairy tale ‘Beauty and the Beast’ is the prototype for the wished-for conclusion of the Byronic hero’s story); he is the scholar who has, like the sculptor Pygmalion, helped to create in Emily the woman he loves and so believes he deserves to enjoy his own creation; he is the older man of authority and wisdom, one who knew Emily’s own father and takes over from him in nurturing Emily’s affections and her independence from the ‘stifling’ femaleness of New Moon; he is a man who demands that his woman be submissive to him and trust his weighty word over her own intuition; he is the wealthy, worldly man of a family as aristocratic as her own-who asks to shelter and protect her feminine weakness from the ravages of a pitiless world; he is the man who has desired her and persisted in his suit despite the disapproval of clan and household and on whom she can confer happiness merely in offering herself. In short, Dean’s offer to Emily carries with it centuries of endorsement for (romanticized) gender roles; by accepting Dean – outcast though he chooses to be – Emily is acting out the self-sacrifice and subservience her culture approves for her. And since family and clan do not approve of Dean, he has the added attractiveness of appearing to be different from them – and Emily can pride herself on seeming to make her own choice in their very teeth. But we have only to remember how much Emily prizes all the New Moon traditions to see that her form of rebellion is really a capitulation to the most potent and least acknowledged of their beliefs: the man rules and the woman obeys. For all his cosmopolitan cynicism about small-minded rural Blair Water, Dean would be a domestic despot. The boy next door, Teddy, would not. When we stop to analyse some of the forces that give Dean power over Emily, we may find it amazing that she is able to escape at all – hence the necessity and believability of the psychic force that liberates her from Dean and eventually enables her to regain her voice.
Looking into the gazing ball Great-aunt Nancy had willed to her, Emily sits in the living-room of the house she and Dean have been making into a home. As she stares, she is suddenly in a train station, and she knows Teddy is in danger. He sees her, responds to her command to ‘Come,’ and pursues her retreating figure down the platform. He misses his train and thus misses the ship Flavian, which subsequently strikes an iceberg and sinks. Emily finds herself sitting again in the living-room, and she knows that she cannot marry Dean Priest if she is still so intimately connected with Teddy that she can reach across the Atlantic to save him. But this knowledge and even the breaking of the engagement are not what restore Emily to herself. Even with the revived connection with Teddy, Emily is not whole. She is not herself until Dean acknowledges to her his lie about the novel. Only then does Emily have a chance of recovering her voice and regaining her will to love and create. The fact that Dean does acknowledge his lie keeps him from being a villain in the novels – he even achieves some-of the nobility he formerly possessed before a jealous love warped him. The narrator says, ‘If he had gone then she would never have been quite free – always fettered by those piteous eyes and the thought of the wrong she had done him. Perhaps Dean realised this, for there was a hint of some malign triumph in his parting smile as he turned away’ (96). But he does turn back and, in his non-Priest generosity, he restores her faith in her writing: ‘You remember that book of yours? You asked me to tell you the truth about what I thought of it? I didn’t. I lied. It is a good piece of work – very good’ (97). He is truly astonished that she burned it, and we know through his surprise that even he had no idea how powerful his judgment had been with her – he had not manipulated events neatly as a dastard would have done, but had, jealously and then wishfully, attributed Emily’s change towards her writing to some love-leaning towards him. Even he had not realized what the artist’s silence had cost her. He says, genuinely, ‘It seems very idle to say I’m bitterly sorry for all this. Idle to ask your forgiveness.’ But Emily is ‘Her own woman once more,’ and she can forgive him in knowing that ‘The balance hung level between them’ (97).
In recognizing that the loss of her romantic, youthful, witty novel is equal to the loss of Dean’s future happiness, Emily for the first time in her relationship with him accords herself equality with Dean. At last she values herself and her creativity equally with (perhaps more than) her woman’s role as healer and giver. It is interesting that although the psychic experience liberates Emily the woman from Dean the man, it takes Dean’s word to liberate Emily the writer. Thus it is that Montgomery, in all her works, reinforces her belief in the interconnectedness of human beings. No character of hers is ever the richer for isolation. And it is further interesting that the psychic force itself is something that comes from Emily but does not belong to her. Dean wishes that the ‘old Highland Scotch grandmother who passed that dangerous chromosome down to you had taken her second sight to the grave with her’ (95), but we can see that Emily’s lack of control over the force is an endorsement of its sanctity. It belongs to the realm of mystical creative energies she must strive to be open to use – her Alpine Path and airy voices urge her to enter and grow into this realm. But the sanctity of the psychic force also suggests that her love for Teddy is incontestably allied to her creative energy. Dean silences Emily’s best nature; Teddy releases it.
A less thought-provoking writer than Montgomery would have made Emily’s subsequent writing somehow dependent on Teddy. Instead, in the remaining sixteen chapters of the novel we see Emily developing her voice independently. Her recovery is painful, and misunderstandings with Teddy persist. She even writes her second novel almost in defiance of him. His picture entitled The Smiling Girl, which Use writes to describe to Emily, is an international success, and it is nothing more nor less than a portrait of Emily, just as he had promised her in childhood he would make it one day. Rather than recognizing in the portrait his own medium’s A Seller of Dreams, she is irritated to think Teddy does not love her but will still use her face. Half in defiance and wholly out of love, she writes a series of chapters to amuse Aunt Elizabeth who is convalescing from a broken leg. There is no flashing inspiration this time, as with the earlier book, but she becomes absorbed in the writing of it and eventually loves it. Bereft of the passionate intensity of her first creative effort, largely inspired by Teddy, she writes what proves to be a good, popular novel. Dean writes to tell her how good it is, and Miss Royal writes from New York to say that Emily had been right to stay on Prince Edward Island – she could never have written The Moral of the Rose in New York: ‘Wild roses won’t grow in city streets. And your story is like a wild rose, dear, all sweetness and unexpectedness with sly little thorns of wit and satire. It has power, delicacy, understanding. It’s not just story-telling. There’s some magicry in it. Emily Byrd Starr, where do you get your uncanny understanding of human nature – you infant?’ (178). Emily goes on to write other books before the last chapter, where Teddy finally comes to her and braves her open rejection. They meet as adults in their thirties, having spent years yearning for one another while remaining determined to express themselves on canvas and page.
They meet as equals and friends and lovers and satisfy Montgomery’s own preference for a happy ending.1 Their ‘late’ joining is not merely a sop to romantic convention, however, nor a denial of feminist principles, nor a pandering to audience taste. Montgomery does not let Teddy and Emily wed in their first youth perhaps because both still have so much to learn about their respective gifts. Through their separation Montgomery shows how a strong woman can live without conventional (or unconventional) romance if she once recognizes the power of her inner voice. Emily’s psychic experience with Teddy shows her the foundation of her spirit, and she is true after that to both its dictates: the critical standards of the writer and those of the lover who knows only one choice. To have joined Emily and Teddy quickly would have made their union simply a matter of fairy-tale convention; but to let her young, talented heroine endure and grow for years suggests Montgomery’s larger vision. I know few readers who have not been distressed by the lapse of years at the end of the book, the ‘wasted time’ while Emily and Teddy are kept (they think) perversely apart by misunderstanding and by the fear of Teddy’s mother. Montgomery was too astute a writer not to know how she was challenging her reader. With so many years of sorrow and loneliness behind her, Emily’s eventual marriage to Teddy is a relief rather than a positive joy. A more conventional book and story would not have risked so much. Montgomery has her way with the story and thus makes her points about the writer and the woman. This passage near the end of the book’s penultimate chapter shows Montgomery steering away from convention (yet using it in showing Emily’s sadness):
Alone? Ay, that was it. Always alone. Love – friendship gone forever. Nothing left but ambition. Emily settled herself resolutely down to work. Life ran again in its old accustomed grooves. Year after year the seasons walked by her door. Violet-sprinkled valleys of spring – blossom-script of summer – minstrel-firs of autumn – pale fires of the Milky Way on winter nights – soft, new-mooned skies of April – gnomish beauty of dark Lombardies against a moonrise – deep of sea calling to deep of wind – lonely yellow leaves falling in October dusks – woven moonlight in the orchard. Oh, there was beauty in life still – always would be. Immortal, indestructible beauty beyond all the stain and blur of mortal passion. She had some very glorious hours of inspiration and achievement. But mere beauty which had once satisfied her soul could not wholly satisfy it now. (221) Is there any sense to the ‘year after year’ here? Montgomery is winding up the story, why didn’t she just kill off Mrs Kent and make a few months pass after Use’s jilting of Teddy?2 The answer may be found in the nature of Emily’s suffering and in her (partial) reconciliation of life and art. An immediate solution or resolution would be at variance with the other lessons of the novel.
Just as Emily’s psychic bond to Teddy may find its prototype in the story of Jane Eyre, so Emily’s determination to value and pursue her art is registered in another of Emily’s favourite works, Aurora Leigh. The narrator reinforces the parallels between Emily’s story and Jane Eyre, but it is Emily who tells us, in Emily Climbs, that she loves studying Mrs Browning and who quotes from Aurora Leigh to characterize her own feelings in Emily’s Quest. There are some fascinating similarities between the lives and choices of the two heroines Aurora and Emily, and readers of Montgomery who know Barrett Browning’s novel-poem will understand something more about Emily by considering why Montgomery chooses to encourage simultaneous reading of Emily’s career and the career of Aurora Leigh.
In the novel, Emily turns to Aurora Leigh shortly after she has said goodbye to Dean. She has been struggling to write – and failing. Then one day the divine flash comes again and she finds her voice. She records her jubilation in her diary:
I flung down my pen and bowed my head over my desk in utter thankfulness that I could work again.
‘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 … the work for which we are fitted … what a blessing it is and what fulness of joy it holds. (102)
Without knowing the exact source of the lines, the reader acknowledges their truth and their appropriateness for Emily. Knowing the source and the story invites another kind of speculation. These lines occur in Barrett Browning’s poem just after Aurora has said farewell to Romney Leigh and begun her years of struggle alone as a writer in London. She is at one of the low points of her career emotionally, but she is firm in her resolve and in her desire to do good work. It is as though Montgomery uses the Victorian story to suggest both the determination of the female writer and the blessing of finding and using her own voice. Like Emily’s story, the story of Aurora is the story of the female writer’s fight for recognition and dignity.
Barrett Browning’s four-hundred-page poem tells the story of the young poet Aurora Leigh. Her beautiful Italian mother dies when Aurora is four years old, leaving her to the care of her grief-stricken English father, who has chosen to stay in Italy first with the wife and now with the child rather than return to his disapproving aristocratic family in England. Aurora’s beloved father, who has given her a scholar’s training with books, dies when she is thirteen, and she is taken to England to live with her father’s stern, humourless sister. Aurora learns to love England, though it is so different from her warm Italy, and she revels in her father’s books, which she finds in her aunt’s home. She learns to write poetry. A solitary young girl, she frequently meets with her cousin, Romney Leigh, who lives at the ancestral home and is to inherit all his aunt’s lands on her death. Aurora and Romney argue about life and literature – he thinks only good works can benefit the human race and scorns her love of letters and writing. When she is twenty, he finds her with a fresh wreath of ivy in her hair, her own symbolic consecration to the world of writing and poetry. He is amused. He asks her to marry him, to join him in his good works; she tells him of her own ambitions, and he smiles at her talk of work. He openly dismisses her writing and tells her: ‘Keep to the green wreath, / Since even dreaming of the stone and bronze / Brings headaches, pretty cousin, and defiles / The clean white morning dresses’ (2.93–6). He has found her book of handwritten poems, and he damns it without even bothering to read it: ‘That book of yours, / I have not read a page of; but I toss / A rose up – it falls calyx down, you see! / The chances are that, being a woman, young, / And pure, with such a pair of large, calm eyes, / You write as well … and ill … upon the whole / As other women. If as well, what then? / If even a little better … still, what then? / We want the Best in art now, or no art’ (2.141–9).
Aurora will not marry her cousin Romney, and after her aunt dies she takes her very small inheritance and moves to a tiny flat in London where she writes prose and books of poems. Meanwhile Romney goes in for large-scale reclamation of the poor, even turning his ancestral home into an almshouse. All the while Aurora hopes that one day he will acknowledge that she can write and that her pen also has power to heal the hurts of humankind. It is obvious to the reader that Aurora loves Romney and would gladly spend her life with him, but that he scorns her devotion to art and she cannot marry where there is no sympathy with what she conceives to be the best and highest in herself. After years of struggle and hardship, Aurora writes a book with the best that is in her, and it is recognized by critics and readers as a masterpiece. Instead of feeling the elation of success, she feels a restless depression. She is satisfied to have devoted her best energies to art, but is this all there is to life? Is she to have no personal happiness, always to serve? As she gazes at her moonlit Italian garden (she has at last returned to Italy and helps Romney’s lost Marian Erie raise her illegitimate child), she is thinking of the starkness of her life despite success – and Romney appears. He has come to tell her how wrong he has been about life and especially about her writing. Her latest book has finally shown him the meaning of life and taught him a humility and joy he had never known before: ‘for the book is in my heart, / Lives in me, wakes in me, and dreams in me: / My daily bread tastes of it, – and my wine / Which has no smack of it, I pour it out, / It seems unnatural drinking’ (8.265–9). They have both learned deep, hard lessons – he, that a woman can write and that writing itself can unite earth with heaven: ‘You have shown me truths, / O June-day friend, that help me now at night, / When June is over! truths not yours, indeed, / But set within my reach by means of you, / Presented by your voice and verse the way / To take them clearest’ (8.608–13). She has learned that love is the best thing this earth has to offer: ‘Art is much, but Love is more’ (9.656). But she also goes further and declares that, in ignoring her woman’s need for love, she lost the best part of her human self and thus could not be so great an artist: ‘Passioned to exalt / The artist’s instinct in me at the cost / Of putting down the woman’s, I forgot / No perfect artist is developed here / From any imperfect woman’ (9.645–9). But Barrett Browning’s point is not that woman should forget striving and art, but that she must not also forget, as man must not forget, that the best on this earth is love, and art inspired by love will carry the strongest and highest this life has to offer. Just as Aurora will not let Romney abase himself to her, so he will not let her negate what she has done. The final feeling of the poem comes back to his tempering words: ‘Oh cousin, let us be content, in work, / To do the thing we can, and not presume / To fret because it’s little’ (8.732–4). As with most of her poetry, Barrett Browning is suggesting that the man and the woman fit together and that neither is complete without the other. But she does go further at moments in this poem and wonder if the life of the common woman with children is not the best life after all. She writes the poem in the first person, telling her story seven years after the initial separation from Romney and, when she catches up to her present, she makes the poem a kind of diary of events and thoughts. Thus we see at the beginning of the poem evidence of the untempered lament we find at the end – she is lonely and despairing when she begins to write and recalls all of her life before returning to Italy. Since the lament at the end is then tempered by Romney’s praise of her poetry and assurance that she has been doing the work she was meant to do, it may be misleading to look at the sorrows at the beginning of the poem as though they carry the final thoughts on the debate between types of life. If we believed the early voice, we would hear Aurora telling us that if her cousin Romney had loved her as she had wanted to be loved, she would not have been a poet. And at the end of the poem, she blames herself more than him for their years of unhappy separation: ‘He mistook the world; / But I mistook my own heart, and that slip / Was fatal’ (9.709–11). Do we hear in Aurora’s impassioned plea to Romney (he is blind and does not want to marry her if she is merely pitying him) the true thoughts of the woman, or do we hear the exaggerated wrong she naturally feels in claiming her share in the misunderstanding that has kept them apart?
The irony of the novel-poem is that the woman proves her ability to write, even fights to make her voice heard, and then, having won the ear of him she most longed to convince, is willing to renounce art for love. And here is a crucial point in understanding Barrett Browning’s poem and Montgomery’s treatment of a similar theme. Aurora may be willing to renounce art, but her true partner will not allow her to make that needless sacrifice – he will help her to temper her rash desire to fling away a vital part of herself in mistaken self-immolation. The fact that Aurora finishes and publishes her story is proof itself that Romney has indeed learned to value her voice and her gift and will not let her silence herself, just as she will not let him devalue the good works he has done for others. The true mate for the poet will encourage her work, and so the loving woman can become an even greater artist. Thus it is that Barrett Browning reinforces the necessity of one sex for the other – mutual help, mutual trust, mutual love are the best of this world.
It is remarkable in how many ways Emily’s struggles with life and art parallel those of Aurora. But just as Barrett Browning’s poem seems partly inspired by events in Jane Eyre3 and yet focuses on very different issues ultimately, so Montgomery’s novel, while echoing Aurora’s story, is ultimately very different from Aurora’s. The similarities are certainly striking: both poets learned a love of language and literature with a doting father; both were later orphans brought up by stern relatives; both struggle in obscurity for an audience and eventually achieve success; each loves from early years one who, through misunderstanding, is kept from marrying her; each faces an amused contempt for her writing from one whose judgment she prizes above that of all others; in loneliness and despair each questions the path she has taken and wonders if a more conventional one would not have been happier. But there are numerous differences, and none so important as this: the man who scorns Aurora’s writing does so sincerely (though ignorantly) and is honestly won to greater vision and love when he can recognize the truth of her poetry. Blind and despairing, Romney listens to Aurora’s book read aloud, and his hope of life is restored. Emily’s work is dishonestly condemned, and the man who finally acknowledges her talent has not been redeemed or reformed by her visions. There is this difference, too: the man Emily loves does inspire her, and there is no question at the end of Emily’s Quest that Emily will continue to write after she and Teddy are married. Neither she nor Teddy questions her need to write nor the demands of art. Interestingly, Montgomery’s story seems to have split Romney Leigh into two characters (themselves, in turn, similar to Brontë’s St John Rivers and Rochester). One is a disapproving man who believes women should inspire men but not through words (Dean), and the other is a loving admirer who accepts her art as her best self (Teddy).
Aurora’s struggle is, after all, Barrett Browning’s interpretation of the Victorian question: Which life would a woman choose, if she were given a choice? Emily’s twentieth-century story puts the choice into different terms (though it comes up with the same answer) – Emily can remain single and write, or she can marry the man she loves, and write – if she chooses the right man. Montgomery’s story shows the woman artist recognizing and claiming her own voice and power when she throws off false domination. But reading Montgomery’s story with a knowledge of Barrett Browning’s makes us appreciate more fully the choices Emily does make and especially Emily’s growing restlessness at the end of the novel when she knows that beauty is no longer enough to satisfy her soul. Montgomery obviously endorsed Barrett Browning’s conclusions about art and love and the wholeness of men and women. Emily is incomplete as a person without Teddy, just as Aurora is incomplete without Romney (and he without her). Whether this brand of romance is really preferable to (or even fundamentally different from) the irresistible attraction of apparent opposites in Jane Eyre is something each reader of Montgomery must work out for herself. Clearly, Montgomery is approving of the position that life is better with love. Perhaps (though I doubt it) Montgomery meant to write the kind of romance John Cawelti describes in which the career woman finds out that, after all, conventional love is better than career.4 Teddy’s support – and perhaps his blandness – does leave readers free to believe that Emily’s voice will not be weakened or silenced in a subsequent life with him. And yet, we notice that this wonderfully compatible and mutually supportive love is given at the end of the novel as though Montgomery herself would not dare to picture it but offered it as the fairy-tale release from Emily’s lonely struggle. Montgomery gives us alternatives but no solutions for the romantic puzzle many women face.
Just as triumphant quotation from Aurora Leigh marks Emily’s re-emergence as a writer (Emily, like Aurora at this point in her story, has years of early work ahead of her before she is united with Teddy/Romney), so other poems Emily draws on in Emily’s Quest suggest changes in Emily’s consciousness. Four more of Emily’s favourite writers surface in important moments in the story. Emily has been wondering how she would face Teddy – he wrote to her after his encounter with her spirit on the platform of Liverpool station, and the narrator sets the scene for Teddy’s whistle-call to her: ‘Emily was reading by the window of her room when she heard it – reading Alice Meynell’s strange poem, “Letter From a Girl to Her Own Old Age,” and thrilling mystically to its strange prophecies’ (106). It is indeed a ‘strange’ poem, full of tears and burden, as though the young girl, who does eventually caress and forgive the older form of herself, is almost too weighed down by current hardships (and/or shadows cast backwards to her youth from her older self) to be able to see much joy ahead: ‘all thy memories moved the maiden, / With thy regrets was morning over-shaden, / With sorrow, thou hast left, her life was laden’ (35). How appropriate that Emily should be reading this unsettling poem when she hears Teddy call. The meeting itself, as though to belie the poem’s sorrow, is joyful; but we know that, though their brief time here is happy, they have much misunderstanding yet to face. There are always complications where hesitant Teddy and sensitive Emily are concerned, and they have already been through so much misunderstanding.
Soon after the reading of Meynell’s poem, Emily again meets Teddy, this time by accident early one morning. Sitting in the rapturous silence and beauty of the dawn, Emily is reminded of Marjorie Pickthall’s poem ‘Dawn.’ ‘How dear it was to sit here with Teddy on the banks of Blah Water, under the coral of the morning sky, and dream – just dream – wild, sweet, secret, unforgettable, foolish dreams. Alone with Teddy while all their world was sleeping. Oh, if this exquisite stolen moment could last! A line from some poem of Marjorie Pickthall quivered in her thought like a bar of music – “Oh, keep the world forever at the dawn.” She said it like a prayer under her breath’ (116). The poem indeed captures Emily’s feelings of wonder and rapture with nature and with this isolated moment, stolen from time, with Teddy. Pickthall’s lines are full of the images and spirit of Montgomery’s own descriptions before and during this same scene. The poem pictures many of Montgomery’s favourite themes and moments and suggests how, together, Emily and Teddy understand beauty. In Pickthall we find: ‘And hush the increasing thunder of the sea / To murmuring melody’; ‘And veil each deep sea-pool in pearlier mist, / Ere yet the silver ripples on the verge / Have turned to amethyst’; ‘Check all the iris buds where they unfold / Impatient from their hold, / And close the cowslips’ cups of honeyed gold’; ‘From forest pools where fragrant lilies are / A breath shall pass afar, / And o’er the crested pine shall hang one star’ (44–5). A few pages before this morning meeting, the narrator has described the month of Teddy’s visit with these images, perhaps inspired by Pickthall: ‘A wonderful month followed. A month of indescribable roses, exquisite hazes, silver perfection of moonlight, unforgettable amethystine dusks, march of rains, bugle-calls of winds, blossoms of purple and star-dust, mystery, music, magic’ (108). Then, when Emily quotes the line from the poem, the narrator interprets Emily’s perception of the world around her in words that are deliberately reminiscent of the poem: ‘Everything was so beautiful in this magical moment before sunrise. The wild blue irises around the pond, the violet shadows in the curves of the dunes, the white, filmy mist hanging over the buttercup valley across the pond, the cloth of gold and silver that was called a field of daisies, the cool, delicious gulf breeze, the blue of far lands beyond the harbour, plumes of purple and mauve smoke going up on the still, golden air from the chimneys of Stovepipe Town where the fishermen rose early’ (116). The narrator prepares us for the perfect dawn, pictures it through Emily’s eyes (deliberately noting irises and buttercups; purple, silver, gold), and records Emily’s quotation from the poem. Clearly Teddy is associated for Emily and for the reader with poetry; he inspires in her a lyric joy of nature, but a nature enriched by her human love for him.
Montgomery’s uses of allusion and echo with Emily remind us of Emily’s own artistic voice and Teddy’s positive effect on it. Shortly before Teddy calls to Emily (while she is reading Meynell), Use is visiting and hurls across the room an old copy of The Rubaiyat of Omar Khayyam. The narrator makes a point of identifying the book and saying that it had been given to Emily by Teddy when they were in high school (109). The reference serves no other purpose there, it seems, and we may wonder why the title of the volume mattered. Couldn’t it just have been any book Teddy had given Emily – Use’s throwing any gift from Teddy would have made Emily angry. But later in the novel, when Emily finds out from Use that Use and Teddy are engaged, Emily’s words to herself are an echo from Khayyam’s (or, rather, Fitzgerald’s Khayyam’s) yearning, melancholy, but determinedly Epicurean poem. Emily stares into her mirror and says, ‘Well … I’ve spilled my cup of life’s wine on the ground – somehow. And she will give me no more. So I must go thirsty’ (176). Fitzgerald’s poem is full of the wine of life and the wine of the grape, and though he admonishes all to drink and so to forget care and sorrow and this world’s mockery of pain, he ends his rendering of Khayyam’s poem (stanza 101, fifth version, 1889) wistfully:
And when like her, oh Saki, you shall pass
Among the Guests Star-scatter’d on the Grass,
And in your joyous errand reach the spot
Where I made One – turn down an empty Glass! (157)
Emily’s words to her reflection have the self-mocking, self-dramatizing quality of the poem, and it would be characteristic of her artistic and mimetic impulses that she would draw from Teddy’s gift to picture her own emptiness without him.
But indirect self-mockery is not Emily’s usual way. Like her mentor Mr Carpenter, she speaks most often directly and says what she thinks. And just as in her writing she tries to heal, so in her own constructing of a self, she also is often kindly and reassuring. Especially in spring is she able to rejuvenate herself in sympathy with nature around. We remember that it was in spring that she surprised her family by recovering almost overnight from her terrible fall, when she had been lagging in winter. And though Emily later is to find that the beauty of nature is not enough to fill her soul, she does identify with Wordsworth’s praise of nature’s restorative and inspiring powers, even when she is estranged from Teddy. Amid sorrow she sees the beauty of April and is reminded, by her ‘supernal moment,’ the flash, of her own immortality. Of course with nature and immortality she thinks of Wordsworth, and also, true to form as a writer, she selects among her favourites by him ‘Tintern Abbey,’ the one poem most in tune with her need to look, with a loving eye, backwards and forwards. She tells herself in her journal, as Wordsworth tells his sister in the poem: ‘After all, freedom is a matter of the soul. “Nature never did betray the heart that loved her” She has always a gift of healing for us if we come humbly to her. Corroding memories and discontents vanished’ (158). In the poem, Wordsworth is revisiting the Wye River country, and he recalls his five-years’-younger self and his joy at first beholding the hedgerows, cottages, mountains, and fields. He stored up those pictures to solace him in darker times:
how oft –
In darkness and amid the many shapes
Of joyless daylight; when the fretful stir
Unprofitable, and the fever of the world,
Have hung upon the beatings of my heart –
How oft, in spirit, have I turned to thee,
O sylvan Wye! (50–6)
And Wordsworth shares his memories and wisdom with his sister:
May I behold in thee what I was once,
My dear, dear Sister! and this prayer I make,
Knowing that Nature never did betray
The heart that loved her; ‘tis her privilege,
Through all the years of this our life, to lead
From joy to joy … (119–25)
A childhood favourite of Montgomery, Wordsworth is shown here to be woven into Emily’s understanding of her own depressions and transcendent joys, reminding her, in her own times of ‘fretful stir,’ of the enduring blessing of nature. The descriptive passages of the three Emily books, as with all Montgomery’s writing, show the effects of Montgomery’s Romantic view of nature; but in the Emily books, the writer Emily not only gives us many of these descriptions themselves, but also – as Montgomery does in her own journals – pays tribute to one inspirer of them. We are never to forget with Emily that she is a worshipper of nature and literature – and a worshipper who also creates.
The three Emily books are storehouses for many of Montgomery’s personal treasures. As a rapid reader and keen appreciator of beauty, Montgomery thrived on poetry and later fiction and history; Emily reads and loves many of the same books – and grows and changes in her opinions, just as Montgomery did. We understand Emily and the rich possibilities of her imagination and pen through Emily’s monologues, dialogues, and diary entries, and also through the narrator’s descriptions and interpretations. In many ways, the Emily books show themselves to be a writer’s celebration of writing – Montgomery uses in her creation of them an inspired variety of narrative strategies.
The major ironies of the novels, the novels’ internal tensions and compromises and challenges, are suggested by the narrator. The narrator turns our attention to Jane Eyre in Emily of New Moon and again in Emily Climbs, and the narrator brings into our analysis of Emily’s adult story Montgomery’s beloved feminist novel, Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm. In Emily’s Quest Schreiner’s novel seems barely to have a part at all – it is merely mentioned in the story as being the book Emily has asked to borrow from Mrs Kent and in which Emily finds a sealed letter from the dying David Kent to his wife. The letter has been in the book for twenty-seven years, undisturbed, and for all those years Mrs Kent has punished herself for her parting angry words to her husband (he died on a business trip after they had separated in a quarrel). A reader unfamiliar with Schreiner’s novel, which the narrator miscalls A South African Farm here, would find Emily’s discovery and Mrs Kent’s subsequent confession dramatic even without being able to compare the two stories. But for those readers who do know the Schreiner novel, Montgomery’s choice of it as an instrument of delivery is indeed inspired.
The South African novel, originally published in London in 1883 under the protective male pseudonym Ralph Iron, is an audacious book. It is a book in which a writer and appreciator of language and ideas would delight, for it ignores the conventions of time and character boundaries as it explores, in its first half, the confused consciousness and baffled goodness of Waldo, German work-boy on a Boer farm. Waldo’s fumblings for truth and his numbed incredulity at the cruelty inflicted on him make the story’s first part poignant and irresistible. But the true audacity of the book is found in the second half, in Lyndall, the beautiful step-niece of the crude Boer farm woman Tant Sannie. Lyndall and Waldo are like the two sides of one brain – where he is befuddled, she is incisive; where she is intolerant, he is all patience. Lyndall’s long explanation to Waldo about women’s oppression and slavery reads like the best radical feminist writing (the impassioned outbursts of Jane Eyre herself naturally come to mind). But Lyndall, unlike Jane or Aurora, breaks free from her oppression only by sacrificing herself. She refuses to give her complete love (to become a slave in her own estimation) to the selfish dastard who pursues her (and to whom she is irresistibly physically attracted), and she eventually has her baby alone in a small country inn, far from the loving help of Waldo or her cousin Em.
Lyndall’s tragic death and the sorrow she leaves for Waldo and the others who have loved her seems at first to have no bearing on the gentler lines of Montgomery’s story of Emily. But when we think of Teddy’s mother, Aileen Kent, and her part in Emily’s story, we understand how the wisdom and passion of Schreiner’s book have their parallels in Montgomery’s novels.
When Montgomery first read Schreiner’s novel in 1897, she was struck by the similarities between the Boer girl Lyndall and herself (Journals 1: 197). At the outbreak of the Boer War, Montgomery reread the novel and analysed it: ‘It is one of my favorites. It is speculative, analytical, rather pessimistic, iconoclastic, daring – and very unconventional. But it is powerful and original and fearless, and contains some exquisite ideas. It is like a tonic, bitter but bracing. Also, many people call it a dangerous book. Perhaps it is so, for an unformed mind – but there is more of truth than pleasantness in many of its incisive utterances’ (Journals 1: 248). In 1920, when Montgomery had been copying out her early journals and conjuring up the character of Emily, she quotes a long passage from the novel, prefacing it with, ‘In Olive Schreiner’s African Farm – which long ago was one of my wonder books – is a very fine and unforgettable paragraph on love’ (Journals 2: 370). The quoted passage describes different types of love, and Montgomery, in quoting it, uses italics to highlight the part that has always meant so much to her: ‘There is another love that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death lasting for an hour. But it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour.’ The quotation continues with an analogy between kinds of flowers and kinds of love, and the quoted passage concludes with these lines: “There is no flower that has the charm of all – the speedwell’s purity, the everlasting’s strength, the mountain-lily’s warmth; but who knows whether there is no love that holds all – friendship, passion, worship?’ (Journals 2: 370). Montgomery goes on in the journal to talk about her own experiences: ‘I have never loved any man with the whole force of my nature – with passion and friendship and worship. They have all been present repeatedly but never altogether in any of my loves. Perhaps it is as well, for such a love, in spite of its rapture and wonder and happiness, would make a woman an absolute slave, and if the man so loved – the Master – were not something very little lower than the angels I think the result, in one way or another, would be disastrous for the woman’ (Journals 2: 370).
Interestingly, the quoted words are Lyndall’s (Schreiner 215,216), and Montgomery’s own response to them is a summary of Lyndall’s experience. Lyndall succumbed to the passionate love, refused belatedly to become the slave of a man very much lower than the angels, and died. In the novel, Lyndall shares her thoughts about women with Waldo, her emotional equal, but she talks to the posturing Gregory Rose about love. He cannot understand her then (though he later, inspired by his own tender love for her, disguises himself as a woman and nurses Lyndall until her death and gains some understanding of her). Lyndall’s question about whether one love can have ‘passion, and friendship, and worship’ is a question Montgomery weighed frequently in her own life and debated, albeit subliminally, in her fiction. Emily’s ‘love’ for Dean was without passion (despite the sexual tension generated by Dean’s jealous desire for Emily), was almost all friendship, and what there was of worship was riddled with lies. Emily’s love for Teddy would seem to have all three, but Teddy, as with so many of Montgomery’s male characters, is such a shadowy character that we do not get any sense of his being the inspirer of ‘worship.’ Could the boy next door inspire worship? And passion coupled with friendship seems to work against the most powerful patterns of conventional romance, where mystery discourages friendship. In her private thoughts Montgomery wrestled with the stereotypes and formulae and patterns her culture endorsed – and the inclusion of The Story of an African Farm in her most self-revealing fictional series is a marker of depths, registered but overtly unexplored in her text.
Part of the problem with the passion and the worship parts of Montgomery’s characters is found in the conventions Montgomery believed she had to follow. She laments to her journal and to MacMillan (to whom she dedicated Emily of New Moon) that she could not write a young girl’s romantic experiences as they really are. Having finished the second Emily book she says to MacMillan: ‘The second volume of a series, especially if it deals with a very young girl, is the hardest for me to write – because the public and publisher won’t allow me to write of a young girl as she really is. One can write of children as they are; so my books about children are always good; but when you come to write of the “miss” you have to depict a sweet insipid young thing – really a child grown older – to whom the basic realities of life and reactions to them are quite unknown. Love must scarcely be hinted at – yet young girls often have some very vivid love affairs. A girl of Emily’s type certainly would’ (Letters 118). If she had trouble restraining the descriptions in the second Emily book, she must have found the curb on the adult in the third almost unbearable. It is too bad Montgomery didn’t choose to risk her publisher’s and public’s condemnation if, indeed, she was at this late point in her career capable of writing the book she thought she wanted to write.
There is unrestrained passion in Emily’s Quest, but it belongs to Teddy’s mother. She has seemed half-crazed in the first two Emily books, always jealously guarding Teddy, especially against Emily. She stays in her tiny house in the Tansy Patch (did Montgomery know that tansy is a natural abortive?) as though it is her cell, and is usually described with reference to her hungry or wild eyes. Perhaps half-wild Mrs Kent is as close as Montgomery comes to a literary unconscious for Emily; perhaps Mrs Kent’s uncontrolled love is a cautionary reminder of the possibly degenerative powers of passionate love unbridled. One is reminded of how critics Gilbert and Gubar argue that mad Bertha Mason Rochester in Jane Eyre is Jane’s shadowed self, the part of her that could rebel savagely against restraint and domination (336–71). Emily and Mrs Kent have usually avoided each other, for in their few encounters each has been driven to bitter or hurtful words. But when Use is engaged to Teddy, Mrs Kent suddenly seeks out Emily. She probes Emily’s wound and asks about her love for Teddy. Mrs Kent assumes that Emily will now hate Use for taking what is hers, just as Mrs Kent had always hated Emily since she knew Teddy loved her. She tries to enlist Emily’s hatred of Use, as though she sees Emily and herself as two deserted women, allied by their loneliness and despair. Mrs Kent says: ‘I used to hate you. I don’t hate you any longer. We are one now, you and I. We love him. And he has forgotten us – he cares nothing for us – he has gone to her’ (186). When Emily responds to her, we hear Montgomery’s echo of Lyndall’s discussion of love: ‘He does care for you, Mrs Kent. He always did. Surely you can understand that there is more than one kind of love. And I hope – you are not going to hate Use because Teddy loves her’ (186). Mrs Kent cannot understand that there is more than one way of loving – passionately, exclusively – and she has never read the novel she lends to Emily a short time afterwards.
Emily’s echo of Lyndall, and the deliberate mention of the book itself, which Emily reads before she returns it, suggests that to Montgomery, at least, Emily’s story is related to Schreiner’s book. Certainly Emily is capable of the passion of Lyndall; and Emily’s clear-headed appreciations of nature have all the love and warmth of Waldo’s ecstasies. Mrs Kent’s blind passion and self-destruction are in keeping with Schreiner’s pessimism, but Lyndall is never melodramatic or monomaniacal. At the end of their interview, Mrs Kent’s sorrow seems beyond help: ‘“I want rest – rest,” said Mrs Kent, laughing wildly. “Can you find that for me? Don’t you know I’m a ghost, Emily? I died years ago. I walk in the dark’” (189). ironically, Emily does bring her rest and release. The letter, tucked in the pages of the novel, tells Aileen Kent that her husband forgave her and loved her. He said on his deathbed (after having read Schreiner’s book himself?) that things were clearer to him now and he knew she had not meant the harsh things she had said. Emily is the means of restoring peace to Mrs Kent.
Ironically, the final passages of Schreiner’s passionate, powerful novel are about peace and rest. Waldo, sitting in the sunshine, is finally at one with nature and finds the rest that has eluded him since Lyndall’s death. He has finally put passion away and can find peace. Schreiner’s narrator describes Waldo’s search and reward in words that sound very much like Montgomery’s and Emily’s own: ‘He moved his hands as though he were washing them in the sunshine. There will always be something worth living for while there are shimmery afternoons. Waldo chuckled with intense inward satisfaction as the old hen had done; she, over the insects and the warmth; he, over the old brick-walls, and the haze, and the little bushes. Beauty is God’s wine, with which he recompenses the souls that love Him; He makes them drunk … There are only rare times when a man’s soul can see Nature. So long as any passion holds its revel there, the eyes are holden that they should not see her … when the old desire is crushed, then the Divine compensation of Nature is made manifest. She shows herself to you … Then the large white snowflakes as they flutter down, softly, one by one, whisper soothingly, “Rest, poor heart, rest!” It is as though our mother smoothed our hair, and we are comforted’ (Schreiner 284–5). Emily is the instrument for restoring David Kent’s forgiveness to his wife, and Aileen Kent finds rest for herself and the courage to tell Emily how she has thwarted Emily’s and Teddy’s love. In burning Teddy’s letter of proposal to Emily, Aileen Kent had thought to keep Teddy to herself, but she now knows that betrayal has brought her no comfort. And perhaps Emily cannot find lasting comfort in Nature – despite her fondness for Wordsworth – because her old passion has not been crushed, and she is not ready to renounce hope entirely. The only lasting peace for Emily, Montgomery’s book makes perfectly clear, would be in her own death or in union with Teddy.
We are invited to consider three principal texts – Jane Eyre, Aurora Leigh, and The Story of an African Farm – in relationship to Emily’s career and choices. It is indeed interesting that the most pessimistic of these is all but submerged in the narrative. The echoes are there for those who know Schreiner’s novel and its rich cadences, but we are not even told what Emily thinks of the book. Certainly all three books (Brontë’s, Barrett Browning’s, and Schreiner’s) debate women’s power and women’s place in cultures that misunderstand, scorn, and/or destroy women. By prompting consideration of Emily in relationship to these heroines, Montgomery’s Bildungsroman or Künstlerroman affirms women’s voices. Concentrating on the positive and openly supporting the view that a woman can be what a woman has courage to believe she can be, Montgomery makes Emily’s writing success an invitation to her female readers to strive for their own goals. And though Emily finds life without Teddy lonely, we see that she can survive without him (knowing that he did love her) and can prosper in her chosen work. The best of all possible worlds, Montgomery does suggest, is to have one’s own work and to find the ideal love partner, one who calls out the ‘passion, friendship, and worship’ that Lyndall describes. But barring that ideal, love in any of its positive and liberating forms is a good thing, provided one has found one’s true self and voice (and work) first. Montgomery’s Emily books do not sink to romantic formulae, though they use versions of those formulae; instead, Montgomery mixes voices and genres (autobiography, biography, drama, lyric, narrative) and allusions in ways that challenge accustomed boundaries and assumptions of girls’ fiction and domestic romance. When we consider Montgomery’s (limiting) choices to please publishers, offer happy endings, and concentrate on real but idealized life, we can appreciate how admirably free is Emily Byrd Starr.
Perhaps Montgomery’s own support of the teachings of Mr Carpenter account for a number of the unexplored possibilities in Emily’s life and career. Recently, Janice Kulyk Keefer has argued that Mr Carpenter’s advice to Emily from his deathbed in Emily’s Quest shows Montgomery’s own choices and self-imposed limitations (186–99, 239–51): ‘Don’t be – led away – by those howls about realism. Remember – pine woods are just as real as – pigsties5 – and a darn sight pleasanter to be in’ (24).6 Montgomery’s choice to stay almost exclusively among the pinewoods and an idealized realism probably limited her ability to expose the most intimate processes of the sensitive and intelligent mind. And these self-imposed limits probably made it difficult to render believably the adult problems an Emily or Use (or Montgomery) would work through. No wonder The Story of an African Farm must make its impact in Emily’s story almost subliminally.
But whatever their limitations in subject matter or perspective, the Emily books are remarkable. In them Montgomery creates an unforgettable heroine whose keen sense of self and love of writing add powerful dimensions to Montgomery’s favourite, continuing themes of identity and romance. As the story of a writer, the Emily books make an invaluable contribution to our understanding of a woman artist and the cultural pressures she will – even yet – defy, resist, or embrace if she is to have a voice she knows is her own.