Hortus Deliciarum

As I watch my son slowly, slowly start to learn the sounds of letters and recognize words, I realize that I’ve been reading for the better part of three decades. Books are comfortable companions, solace in lonely times when other friends have been scarce or far away, and there are certain tomes that I treasure more than others, their familiar words taking me down well-loved paths. On this my birthday week, I thought I’d start with a book that I’ve loved for most of my life and, indeed, originally received as a birthday present. I first read it only a few years after I started reading at the age of three and a half and have revisited it periodically ever since.

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The house in the hollow was “a mile from anywhere”–so Maywood people said. It was situated in a grassy little dale, looking as if it had never been built like other houses but had grown up there like a big, brown mushroom. It was reached by a long, green lane and almost hidden from view by an encircling growth of young birches. No other house could be seen from it although the village was just over the hill. Ellen Greene said it was the lonesomest place in the world and vowed that she wouldn’t stay there a day if it wasn’t that she pitied the child.

Emily of New Moon, L.M. Montgomery, 1923.

It’s probably a fair guess that the majority of book-loving pre-teen and teenage girls have picked up a copy of Anne of Green Gables at some point in their reading career. Most young women tend to start with the Anne books, I suspect, and maybe find their way through to Rilla at the end of that series. I, on the other hand, started with Emily. One of my African aunties, a Canadian missionary linguist, brought me a copy of Emily of New Moon when she came back from furlough. I was six or seven and devoured the book in a couple of days. I remember my mother showing me how to look up the words that I didn’t recognize in a dictionary and I can still point out, in those first few chapters, a few of those words that I had to look up. That old copy still bears the scars of younger siblings, who tore out part of the title page and colored on the next page in. At one point in time I took it into my head to underline particularly meaningful passages, because that was what ALL intellectual people did, you see (I think I was in junior high at the time). Because I chose to do this in pen, and my later high school self was mortified by the “childish” comments that I made in the margins, I then took a Sharpie to them. So, several of the pages have black splotches in the margins, with the traces of red and blue pen occasionally barely legible.

I was Emily, you see, although I didn’t have a cute neighborhood boy like Teddy to draw my interest, or a rascally Perry to challenge him for my affections. My tempestuous best friend lived a long, long drive over unpaved bush roads away, unlike Emily’s faithful Ilse (although our arguments were the no less dramatic for that). I yearned to live in a giant Victorian mansion like New Moon, with crazy-yet-sweet Uncle Jimmy boiling the pigs’ potatoes and plotting with me about next year’s garden. The allure of a room of my own, with diamond-paned windows was sometimes too much to bear, as my own blue-metal-shuttered, glassless bedroom window could not compare to Emily’s beloved attic room.

I had no idea that there were sequels to the book at that time and you can imagine my joy, my bliss, when we returned to the US and I discovered that yes, Emily did become a writer! Teddy and Emily do end up together, although I always felt a little sorry for Dean, and I was happy that Ilse and Perry, to paraphrase C.S. Lewis’s description of the protagonists of The Horse and His Boy really did love arguing so much that they got married so as to do it more conveniently. And, of course, the Disappointed House was, in the end, no longer Disappointed. I read and re-read the trilogy in junior high and high school. When I went to France for my final semester of high school, I had to pack light. It is, perhaps, the most telling measure of my esteem that the three Emily books made it into my suitcases.

Anne of Green Gables is funny. She is a delightful character but she is just that: a character, beloved though she might be. Her woes are always gentled. Her tragedies, at least until adulthood, are passing (and I don’t know many junior high or high school students who understand the devastation that a stillbirth can bring to a mother, or the loss of a son at war). I liked her but I didn’t love her. Emily, on the other hand, I felt with every bone in my body. When I struggled with my own midnight fears and insomnia, I knew Emily understood. When Emily felt ashamed, and that shame drove so deeply into her soul as to paralyze her, I knew what she felt, because I felt it too. I was no Anne, to smash a slate over a boy’s head. I was an Emily, pierced to the core by cruel words but too awkward and fumbling around my peers to ever stand up for myself. In elementary school, when the school bullies taunted me for being different, there was no Ilse there to defy them and defend me but I could revel in the fact that she was there for Emily.

Both the Anne books and the Emily books are on my shelves as an adult. I re-read both periodically but the one that is closest to my soul is Emily. While I grew up in West Africa and hot California instead of lovely old PEI, Emily and I were, to use Anne’s phrase, kindred spirits. I could never be as patient, clever, or funny as Anne…but Emily and I were both flawed, both fumbling, both struggling to find our paths and it is she I love best, perhaps because it is in her fictional childhood that I see so much of my own mirrored.