Emily of New Moon

The Writer’s Novel

Montgomery always maintained that Emily Starr was closer to herself than Anne Shirley ever was. Emily of New Moon, published in 1923, has the feeling of a novel written with a different kind of pressure — a portrait not of the charming, social child Montgomery made famous, but of the specific, solitary, intensely literary child she herself had been.

Emily is ten when her father dies and she is sent to the austere Murray family at New Moon Farm. Like Anne, she is an orphan sent to live with relatives who did not especially want her. Unlike Anne, she is not primarily defined by her social gifts and appetite for belonging. She is defined by her need to write.

Emily and Anne

The comparison between the two heroines is instructive. Anne transforms the world through her imagination and her talk — she makes the world around her brighter by narrating it. Emily observes the world and writes it down. She has what she calls “the flash” — sudden moments of piercing beauty and perception that feel like glimpses behind the surface of things. She knows from very early that she is a writer, and every pressure brought against her — Aunt Elizabeth’s hostility, her teacher Mr. Carpenter’s deliberately harsh criticism, the social expectation that writing is not a suitable female ambition — is resisted with a stubbornness that Anne’s more flexible nature never required.

Aunt Elizabeth

Aunt Elizabeth Murray is one of Montgomery’s greatest achievements in characterisation. She is strict, cold, unjust in her treatment of Emily, and absolutely resistant to any display of sentiment. She is also not a villain. She is a woman shaped by a culture that valued discipline and duty above warmth, and her incapacity for demonstrated affection is precisely calibrated as failure rather than malice. The reader understands her and resists her at the same time, which is exactly what Montgomery intends.

The Landscape

New Moon Farm and its surroundings are rendered with the particular intensity of Montgomery’s most engaged nature writing. The old farm, the Blair Water, the Disappointed House — these have the quality of places experienced in childhood and never entirely left behind. Montgomery’s PEI in this novel is less pastoral than in the Anne books, more ancient and strange, as befits a protagonist whose relationship to the world is aesthetic and spiritual rather than social.

Our rating: 4.4/5 — Montgomery’s most personally felt novel and perhaps her finest achievement — a portrait of artistic vocation in childhood that remains without equal in its genre.