The world knows one red-haired orphan of the Canadian farms — Anne of Green Gables. But L. M. Montgomery herself loved another of her creations more, and put more of her own soul into her: Emily Starr, of the Emily of New Moon trilogy, a girl who does not merely have adventures but is driven, from childhood, to write.
Where Anne is sunny and social, Emily is stranger, prouder, more solitary — a child who feels ‘the flash,’ Montgomery’s name for the sudden mystical glimpse of beauty behind the world, and who scribbles poems on the backs of letter-bills because she cannot not write. Orphaned and taken in by cold, proper relatives who disapprove of her ambition, Emily fights across three books for the one thing she will not surrender: her vocation. It is the most autobiographical thing Montgomery wrote, the story of how a real writer is made.
For that reason the Emily books have become a quiet touchstone for women who write — less famous than Anne, but dearer to those who share Emily’s particular hunger. She belongs with Sybylla Melvyn and Jo March in the small, fierce company of heroines who chose the pen.
This edition gathers the complete Emily trilogy.
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