Emily of New Moon - Help me figure something out

How far did you get through the Netflix series? I barely made it through the first episode.

I wish Kevin Sullivan hadn't fallen out with the LMM estate. There was plenty of material for a third Anne film that wasn't the awful thing he produced. The first two were so good!

Still sad about Jonathan Crombie.

Ooh my people! I also thought Dr Burnley was appalling, mistreating his daughter for the perceived sins of her poor mother.

Ditto Dean Priest wtf? Although look at Jane Austen's Emma where Mr Knightley tells her he's loved her since she was 13.

Ditto Douglas Starr, what an irresponsible idiot!

I far preferred Emily to Anne. I didn't like the recent grim Netflix Anne series but as a pp said, it would've been very unlikely for a child to have such an unstable, unloving upbringing by a succession of rough ignorant people, yet to turn out so emotionally sunny, articulate and functional. It doesn't ring true.

I had never heard of the Blue Castle so just went looking and came across this:
www.amazon.co.uk/Complete-Novels-Lucy-Maud-Montgomery-ebook/dp/B01GHQRFSU/ref=sr_1_2?s=books&keywords=the+blue+castle&tag=mumsnetforum-21&ie=UTF8&qid=1512155167&sr=1-2

All the LMM books for 49p, if you have a Kindle. I will always have them with me..!!!

I've found my home! My eldest dd is called Emily. I'm going to be very, very wary of anyone called Dean who comes sniffing round....

Even as a child, I loved Anne but just felt it was all a bit too happy, considering what she'd been through. I loved the slightly waspish element to Emily.

It does read differently as an adult, but that's mainly because I didn't really think too much about the ages. I really only vaguely pictured him as a bit older than Emily.
I really disliked both Teddy's mum and Isle's dad, but again, only in the sense of 'nasty grown ups making life difficult for children', almost in an Enid Blyton type way. I didn't really think about it in terms of how they should have behaved towards their children. Not until I read it as an adult did that side of it occur to me.

The other thing I tended to do, as a kid, was file away things I didn't like as 'how people behaved back then'. So if someone showed behaviour towards a child that I thought was shocking, I was quite quick to think "That was how it was done then, it wouldn't happen now". So I rationalised a lot based on my own perception of history! In hindsight, sometimes I was justified in this, other times I was horribly wrong and the behaviour in question would have been no more acceptable then than it is now. But it allowed me to skate over things I might otherwise have been uncomfortable with, and enjoy the story.

Oh no that was my epoch moment to visit PEI.

I may have google imaged it heavily to see

My Canadian cousin just sadly shook her head at me when I said I wanted to visit PEI. No red roads any more.

Beautifully put Humphrey and so true. I grew up wanting to visit PEI, only to realise it wouldn't really look like I pictured it anymore! A small tragic revelation in my teens

I often think of the landscapes LMM describes in the Anne books and wish I could go back in time to see them as they were then. She evokes the countryside and the seashore beautifully.

Yes! That's very good. There's also that wonderful dream she has where she's trying to live in a palace with Prince charming, and Gilbert keeps on coming round and hanging pictures and cracking jokes.

I hate Paul and Miss Lavender! I'd forgotten how much until now. I love Island too, particularly the bit where Anne realises that the romantic hero is not all he's cracked up to be!

Those twins do scream "Plot device!" don't they? Davy's antics are the only thing that make Anne of Avonlea readable, otherwise it would be all detestable Paul and Miss Lavender.

I always felt sorry for Dora. Dismissed at every turn as good and boring. She doesn't get any good lines.

Aren't Davy and Dora relatives? They'd have got Green Gables eventually over the adoptee. I think Davy gets it anyway as Anne is well set up at Ingleside.

Lesley! Sorry!

Oh, good point about Jane being Emily in other circumstances, only New Moon is all charming and quirky and candle-lit compared to Jane's Granny's frigid Toronto mansion.

(Robin is another parent who doesn't appear to be blamed, or not much, by LMM, but even giving her all possible benefit of the doubt as a weak woman dominated by her nasty mother, it's hard not to want to kick someone who stands by and allows her mother to bully her vulnerable only child, while acceding to Granny's demands that she not show her daughter any affection or ever spend time with her...?

(I also always have Dark Intimations too about whether the Titus sisters' adoption of poor pushed-around Jody will work out, though one hopes they're going to treat her as an actual daughter, rather than as hired hand, which is what the boy orphan Anne is supposed to be is being adopted for. I suppose the trade-off is that he'd eventually inherit Green Gables, after he'd served his time working on the farm...?)

Lesley. Persis is her daughter, because in the Anne books no child can have a name that doesn't belong to a preferably deadrelative or Diana. Sorry to nitpick. The name thing in Anne really bugs me.

Emily's father is silly. Ever since I read it, I've been thinking Jane is actually a companion to Emily. Jane is what would have happened if Juliet had left Douglas with Emily and gone back to the Murrays.

I quite like Emily being deeply flawed, I think it's more than the narrative voice seems to go along with her being a second-sighted, purple-eyed, literary genius knockout, as though she's not actually also a quite annoying person. Like, I don't know, the way the novel asks the reader to get angry at the unimaginative housekeeper who works for Emily and her father at the start of Emily of New Moon because she tells Emily abruptly that her father is dying. When in fact, while she could have been more sensitive, in fact the irresponsible person is Emily's father, who is still presented as having been right to conceal his own fast-approaching death from a ten year old he is leaving alone in the world and penniless! Only the fact that the housekeeper blurts out the truth means that Emily has the slightest warning of her beloved father's death, because he dies suddenly, when he's alone with Emily, only a few days later...

It's pretty dark stuff, like Ilse's mother's story, and the episode which freaked me out as a child, where Emily gets locked into the isolated church with the madman with the blood-red hand and psychically summons Teddy. Or the other second sight one where Emily psychically finds the missing boy when he's almost dead in the emoty house. The only bit as dark as that in the Anne books (other than Anne's own pre-Green Gables past) is Persis-married-to-the-intellectually-disabled man who turns out, years later, not to be her husband at all, but his identical cousin.

I had never thought that Ilse's mother might have had a lingering death. It's terrible.

Dr Burnley is an awful, awful man.

but no one seems to give a second thought to the fact that she fell down an open well in a field and possibly died a horrific, lingering death, with her husband, rather than sending out a search party, leaping to the conclusion that's she'd run off!

YY to this, it has always appalled me. And the fact that the doctor can now love Ilse and treat her decently all because her mother didn't run off with someone else! What a complete arse, to take it out on his innocent daughter.

Having said all that, I love the first two books, most of the Anne books, and thanks to reading about it on here, The Blue Castle.

I highly recommend The Blue Castle also by LMM. I saw it recommended on here and it is fab. I never got along with the Emily books, my main memory is that she was obsessed with having a 'bang' and I couldn't work out for the life of me what that was (I realise now it was a fringe). Anne of the Island is my fave too!

Oh, Jane of Lantern Hill is absolutely lovely -- total wish-fulfilment. Unhappy, unappreciated child with a social butterfly mother and a father she thinks is dead, and dominated by a tyrannical grandmother discovers her real self by rediscovering her father and her real 'home' on PEI and eventually reconciles her parents who turn out to be really still in love but don't know it. (But yes, Jane has a giant crush on her father, too and keeps bustling about in a pinny apologising for the lumps in his porridge.)

LMM much preferred spiky Emily to nice Anne -- she only kept writing the Anne books because her publishers wanted more, and she says somewhere she's sick of being 'dragged at the cartwheels of the detestable Anne'. Agreed Anne is far too immediately sane, sweet and functional to have had such an utterly brutal first ten years.

I always find Ilse's mother's backstory rather horrible -- the novel seems to be entirely celebrating the fact that she turned out not to have abandoned her husband and baby and run off on a ship with an old flame as completely fabulous, but no one seems to give a second thought to the fact that she fell down an open well in a field and possibly died a horrific, lingering death, with her husband, rather than sending out a search party, leaping to the conclusion that's she'd run off!

I picked up Jane in a charity shop a few months ago. It is all a bit strange.

I think Teddy, Emily and Ilse all have proper flaws. The best of the lot is Perry.

I found Emily much easier to like than Isle. What a selfish madam at times!

Teddy definitely has Mum issues but it’s not really his fault. And he gets there in the end.

I’ve never read the jane books but that all sounds very dysfunctional!

The Emily books are interesting. If you think about it, Anne's sunniness isn't at all realistic. She should have some sort of attachment disorder and the cruelty she suffered was terrible.

Emily's grief at the loss of her father is well handled and the characters seem more real.

I love Anne, but actually my favourite book isn't when she's a child at all. It's Anne of the Island. Who wouldn't want to live at Party's Place?!