Contributions by Yoshiko Akamatsu, Carol L. Beran, Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, Allison McBain Hudson, Kate Lawson, Jessica Wen Hui Lim, Lindsey McMaster, E. Holly Pike, Katharine Slater, Margaret Steffler, and Anastasia Ulanowicz Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was a Canadian author best known for writing the wildly popular Anne of Green Gables. At the time of its publication in 1908, it was an immediate bestseller and launched Montgomery to fame. Less known than the dreamy and accidentally mischievous Anne Shirley is Emily Byrd Starr, the title character in the trilogy that followed much later in Montgomery's professional career, Emily of New Moon. Published in 1923, Emily of New Moon is the first in a series of novels about an orphan girl growing up on Prince Edward Island, a story that mirrors Anne's but intentionally resists many of the defining qualities of Montgomery's most famous creation. Despite being overshadowed by the immense popularity of Anne of Green Gables, the Emily of New Moon trilogy has become a subject of endless fascination to fans and scholars around the world. The trilogy was conceived during an important phase in Montgomery's career during which she turned from Anne and plunged into more intricate aspects of gender, adolescence, nature, and authorship. While the novels have attracted rich critical attention since their publication, book-length studies proved surprisingly scarce. L. M. Montgomery's "Emily of New Moon": A Children's Classic at 100 is the first scholarly volume exclusively dedicated to the trilogy, coalescing different research perspectives. It offers a fresh point of entrance into a well-loved classic at its one-hundredth anniversary.
Yan Du is a Cambridge Trust scholar in children's literature in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge. She has presented and published on topics ranging from young adult literature and media culture, Chinese girls' literature, gender and sexuality in Chinese adolescent fiction, girls' authorship, and verse novels. Joe Sutliff Sanders is a specialist in children's literature in the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and a fellow at Lucy Cavendish College. He is author of Disciplining Girls: Understanding the Origins of the Classic Orphan Girl Story and A Literature of Questions: Nonfiction for the Critical Child, and editor of The Comics of Herge: When the Lines Are Not So Clear, the latter published by University Press of Mississippi.
Introduction Yan Du and Joe Sutliff Sanders Part One: Literary Resonances 1. Warring with Failure: Emily's Quest and the Victorian Past Kate Lawson 2. Exile and Instrumentality in the Emily Books Jessica Wen Hui Lim 3. Emily Byrd Starr Meets Brene Brown: "Braving the Wilderness" and Achieving "True Belonging" Lesley D. Clement Part Two: Emily's Things 4. Everyday Objects: Material Culture in the Emily Trilogy Allison McBain Hudson 5. "Something Incalculably Precious": Diary Writing in Emily of New Moon Lindsey McMaster Part Three: Gender 6. The Japanese Reception of the Emily Trilogy through Translation Yoshiko Akamatsu 7. Claiming and Reclaiming the Maternal: Mothering and Mothers in the Emily Books Rita Bode 8. "A Ghost You Can Feel and Hear but Never See": Queer Hauntings in Emily of New Moon Katharine Slater Part Four: Time 9. The Romance of History in the Emily Novels E. Holly Pike 10. Encroaching Darkness: L. M. Montgomery's Books about Emily Carol L. Beran 11. Reading Emily out of Time and Place: Breaking Chronology and Space Margaret Steffler 12. Emily's Afterlives: Trauma, Repetition, and (Re)Reading in Emily of New Moon and Russian Doll Anastasia Ulanowicz About the Contributors Index
Du and Sanders present a robust collection providing new, unique, and exciting approaches to L. M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon series." - Ashley N. Reese, author of The Rise of American Girls' Literature "A hundred years after the first installment of Montgomery's Emily of New Moon, this essay collection makes clear that Emily Byrd Starr's coming-of-age story is as relevant as ever." - Dawn Sardella-Ayres, research associate for the L. M. Montgomery Institute
