The Tragedy of Emily Byrd Starr

I think Emily is my second-favorite heroine. Second-favorite, because my favorite is my favorite and can be no-one else. I'll devote a blog post to her later. For Emily's posts, I must use italics whenever the case calls for it. I hope I won't be too extreme with them. Emily's story is my favorite, not because I was misunderstood as a child, but because of how she grows up. In fits and starts, you see how she puts away childish things and becomes a girl and later a woman.

Emily's books were a birthday gift from my eldest brother. I think our mother told him what to get me. When you're a child, your parents usually tell you what to get someone else as a gift, or else the receiver will end up with the electronic chess set the giver really wants. Regardless, they're from my brother. He purchased the only copies available at the tiny Waldenbooks store in the plaza mall in town. I was told this when I received them, because my brother was apologetic about the dreadful crease on the cover of Emily Climbs. Larger bookstores were half an hour away - we didn't live in a small town, but apparently the library was the preferred source for reading materials. The Waldenbooks had a corner devoted to children's literature - preschool picture books and Nancy Drew, and a singular shelf near the floor for Anne and her ilk. Every time I went into the store, I checked that shelf for a book I didn't have. Usually it was full of Anne-books, but sometimes there was something new.

I didn't love Emily right off. A young reader can be excused for skipping the long paragraphs and first-person diary entries. I hated those diary entries. I knew there were probably some gems in there - Emily quoting Aunt Elizabeth or some description of a school day - but mostly they were unbroken paragraphs full of descriptions of trees. It took me years to fully appreciate Emily and Rilla Blythe and the other books full of diary entries.

Despite this dislike for tree descriptions, I kept coming back for those bits I loved. After all, you can skip the boring bits. Ilse Burnley and Perry Miller, Aunt Elizabeth, the Shrewsbury years and Emily's long walk back to New Moon after getting locked out by Aunt Ruth - oh, do you ever eat donuts and try to be dramatic? - the tragedy of Emily's first novel, but most especially, Emily's second sight. I reread the books within the last two weeks, and again my views shifted. As you get older and reread those books you loved as a child, you see more clearly how the books are put together. I see now the obvious set up for Emily to find out about Ilse's mother and the little boy. Emily could easily have put together all the clues about Ilse's mother - well, perhaps not easily, but there it is. In the case of the boy, she could have heard him yelling in the house, or seen some footprints against the wall where he had climbed to get in the window. Perhaps. The fact that she "couldn't draw" worth a lick adds to the mystery. I suppose it was just setting up for the fantastic fourth incident.

And it was fantastic. Projecting her spirit across the ocean to stop Teddy from booking passage on a doomed ship is romantic, and the end of the engagement with Dean is positively heart-wrenching. (For the young reader who doesn't understand how creepy and awful Dean is). But there you go, Teddy and Emily are soul mates. I will need to post about Teddy later, he's probably the worst soul mate in all of the books.

That third incident really clinches the series. Emily can't lose the gift, and so it must be used again. The growth of Emily's gift is paralleled with her increasing skill in her writing. When her book Moral of the Rose was published, she reached the start of a long and successful career. No more hurdles remained, only accolades and recognition for her work. Can you imagine Emily receiving a Newberry Medal?

And there is the great tragedy of Emily for the readers. Her story ended. She reached the top of her Alpine Path and found happiness. It would have been horrible of L.M.M. to make her story more interesting for the sake of writing about it - like Anne's House of Dreams. Anne experiences a real tragedy in that book, and Emily did not need any more tragedy. Her mother died when she was small and her father passed on when she was old enough to experience real grief. Putting Emily through something horrible, like the death of one of her children or Teddy would be too cruel.

Even revisiting with Emily's children would be difficult, because this would require a return to New Moon. Elizabeth, Laura, and Jimmy would be dead or aged, leaving Andrew to install gas lamps, a modern dairy, and clear out the old orchard. The magic would be lost. Other places in Blair Water are rarely mentioned - Emily sticks close to home in Lofty John's Emily Byrd Starr's bush, the farmhouse, and the orchard. There is no Lover's Lane or Lake of Shining Waters. In Emily's world, the fairies live at New Moon. When changes come, and they will, Emily's childhood magic is lost and this leaves her children to find their magic elsewhere.