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A couple months ago I was talking with my roommate about the new Anne of Green Gables TV series (I have not seen it, she had opinions about it) which led to us reminiscing about Other L.M. Montgomery Books We Had Known, which led to me last weekend rereading The Story Girl and The Golden Road.

I was actually much more attached to these books than I ever was to Anne -- they're about an extended group of cousins who have very wholesome adventures together. The cousins include:

Beverly, Our Narrator, most notable for his mildly purple narration and deeply sentimental soul
Felix, his little brother, who is Fat and Sensitive About It
Felicity, who is Very Beautiful and Very Prosaic and also Extremely Bossy, like Lucy from Peanuts if she also looked like Elizabeth Taylor
Cecily, who is Very Good and Very Serious and probably also Doomed to Die Young Like Good Children Do
Dan, Felicity and Cecily's brother, who is an Annoying Brother
Sara Ray, who lives down the road and cries all the time
Peter, who is But a Hired Boy but Clever and Talented and also In Love With Felicity
and, of course, Sara Stanley the Story Girl, who is not pretty but interesting, and has a spellbindingly beautiful voice, and is prone to stopping in the middle of any given conversation to announce that she knows a story that has some vague relation to the topic at hand and will then proceed to relate that story come hell or high water, which: oh god, of course I imprinted on these books as a kid, because I of course do the exact same thing, except without any vestige of a spellbindingly beautiful voice, and also instead of 'I know a tragic story about our uncle's great-aunt's wedding' my version is usually 'I read a book once in which somebody banged a griffin.' But, much like the Story Girl, once I get started on an anecdote of this kind there is very little chance of stopping me. I apologize to anybody who has suffered from this.

ANYWAY. Fortunately, the other kids (with the occasional exception of Felicity) never get fed up with the Story Girl and are always glad to hear an entertaining anecdote about the minister's cousin's grandmother or whatever the topic of discussion is that day.

The kids also get into normal turn-of-the-century-Canadian kid stuff, like pretending to be ministers, or freaking out because the local old-lady-who-might-be-a-witch sat in their pew at church, or panicking that it might be the Day of Judgment. Normal turn-of-the-century-Canadian kid stuff centers very prominently on appropriate church behavior, as it turns out. L.M. Montgomery's world is composed of Methodists and Lutherans and that's about it. I don't remember this being weird for me as an emphatically-not-Christian youth but it is slightly retroactively weird for me now.

Other notable things that happen in The Story Girl and The Golden Road:
- Dan eats poison berries because Felicity tells him he would be an idiot to eat the poison berries, nearly dies, then goes back and eats more poison berries because Felicity made the mistake of saying she told him so
- Cecily the Very Sweet and Very Good is mean to exactly one person in both books, a boy in her class who conceives a terrible crush on her and will not leave her alone despite multiple stated requests until she publicly humiliates him in class, which she ruthlessly does; a good lesson
- The Story Girl gives a great and instantly recognizable description of synesthesia without ever actually using the word
- The Story Girl befriends a desperately shy neighbor who is known as the Awkward Man, "because he is so awkward," our narrator Bev helpfully explains
- the Awkward Man is later revealed to have a secret room in his house containing women's clothing, which, the Story Girl explains, is because he's spent years buying things for an imaginary girlfriend - and, I mean, far be it from me to question the Story Girl! but some grad student could probably get a real good paper on gender and sexuality in turn-of-the-century children's lit out of this is all I'm saying

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- The Story Girl gives a great and instantly recognizable description of synesthesia without ever actually using the word

I remember that! She says Beverly has stripes, and everyone laughs.

or panicking that it might be the Day of Judgment.

And that! They were playing at being ministers and giving sermons, and one of them (Felix?) had been reading Dante's Inferno, so his sermon was the best/most nightmare-inducing. This made me want to read Dante.

Peter is the one who gives the hellfire sermon! Peter also reads Shakespeare and the Bible all the way through, and generally seems like the most actual fun of the kids. Beverly's sermon, unsurprisingly, is boring. Felix never gets a chance to give his sermon, and is annoyed about it.

'I know a tragic story about our uncle's great-aunt's wedding' my version is usually 'I read a book once in which somebody banged a griffin.'

Hee!

Methodists and Lutherans

I thought that in the later Anne books it was Methodists and Presbyterians? I recently read that Montgomery's husband Ewen McDonald opposed the merger of the two denominations to form the United Church of Canada, which might explain Montgomery's fixation on them as tribal identities. (I definitely found the bit where everyone was either a Methodist or Presbyterian notable as a kid, though I don't think I found it weird, even though, whatever I was it certainly wasn't either of them.)

It's definitely Methodists and Presbyterians, because Anne and the Cuthberts are emphatically Presbyterian (and Tory) and in the later books, Miss Cornelia loathes both Grits and Methodists and, after conceding to marry a Grit (Norman? I think his name was Norman) says that at least he's not a Methodist, because that would be just too far.

Edited 2017-08-22 03:29 (UTC)

And Valancy rebels, to the horror of her family, by going to church with the Free Methodists.

But I feel like Valancy's family might actually be Anglican, now that I think about it.

I was absolutely convinced it was Lutherans, but I went back and checked and you are indeed correct, it's totally Presbyterians. I wonder where I got Lutherans from? But that's a fascinating bit of backstory that I had no idea about!

(I still don't actually understand the difference between a Methodist and a Presbyterian and a Lutheran...)

(I still don't actually understand the difference between a Methodist and a Presbyterian and a Lutheran...)

*rolls up sleeves*

~~I read this Bible once in which someone banged a griffin...~~

L.M. Montgomery was a Presbyterian herself. It's a Very Fucking Grim sect. They're an offshoot of Calvinism, which is itself a very hardline offshoot of Lutheranism. Presbyterianism is definitely on the stiff upper lip end of the stiff upper lip/happy clappy spectrum on which all of English speaking Christianity can be plotted.

Methodism (which I think would have been considered a lower class sort of religion in that place and time. They had people from all walks of life including aristocrats, but... they had people from all walks of life. Convicts! Servants!) is English and broke away from Anglicanism. (There might be a demographic issue there too, in terms of what white colonists the religious groups in Canada descended from -- Presbyterianism is Scottish.)

Methodists are Arminian in doctrine, via John Wesley, which means similar to Calvinists in some ways but not others. On the stiff upper lip/happy clappy spectrum, they are to the happy clappy of Presbyterianism, but that's not saying much. They're famous for their hymns, which have pretty banging tunes by the standards of the day, but by a modern perspective still range from over the top grim to unintentionally hilarious (Psych! This one was actually sung by both Methodists and Presbyterians!)

Summarising the major doctrinal differences from Wikipedia here, because if I try to do this from my own memory I get hopelessly confused (WHO did WHAT to a griffin?):

Calvinists believe in:
- total depravity (the nature of all humans is to be too sinful to follow God unless God intervenes and saves them by making them able to follow him.)
- unconditional election (the people God saves didn't somehow merit this, God is just merciful to those he chooses to be merciful to. Why isn't he merciful to everyone? Isn't that kind of dickish? The fact that I can ask this is evidence that God did not in his mercy choose to make me one of the Saved. Or if he did, I'm gonna get chastened and will repent. Watch this space.)
- limited atonement (Jesus' willing sacrifice accomplished complete remission of all the sins of the saved, but it only accomplished that for those people, not for all humans ever. I repeat: dick.)
- irresistible grace (if you are saved, God will make you able to follow him and thereby be saved whether you want to or not. You won't be able to help it. Free will? What free will? You will be a good Calvinist. You can reject the Bible, but you can't reject the Holy Spirit coming from inside your heart. You weren't using that free will anyway, you sinner.)
- perseverance of the saints (all who are saved will continue to be saved forever. If they stumble and are sinful then this is temporary and they'll be chastened and repent and come back to God.)

A convenient acronym for these five doctrines: TULIP. (The Netherlands were a bit Calvinist hangout back in the day.)

Arminians believe in:
- prevenient grace (all humans are sinful, yes, but God grants everyone the freedom to accept or refuse his salvation. This grace existed before sin and cannot be taken away by sin.)
- conditional election (anyone can be saved, but only if they accept the offer. There's a catch: God knew all along, before you were born or conceived or the universe even existed, whether or not you would accept the offer. You might have free will, but God's omniscient.)
- unlimited atonement (Jesus' sacrifice paid for everyone's sins... but only if they Accept Jesus. Are you noticing a theme?)
- synergism, as opposed to Calvinists' and Lutherans' monergism (Calvinists believe in irresistable grace. Lutherans believe you can resist it. Arminians believe it's to some extent a cooperative effort between God and the saved. This is also what Catholics and Orthodox Christians and Pentecostals believe about the matter.)
- conditional perseverance (just because you're saved doesn't mean you can't backslide into damnation. God's grace, much like Diane Duane's wizardry, does not live in the unwilling heart.)

Please believe that if I sound approving of Methodism, that is only by comparison to Presbyterianism and indeed Calvinism in general. I went to Methodist Ladies' College for two horrible years when I was 12-14, and I haven't been a Christian since.

tl;dr: they're all Jesus-people, but they have different interpretations on who gets to go where after they die, which is a thing Christians think matters a lot in ways that may seem strange if you come from a religious background focused on trying to repair this world.

CHRISTIANITY IS SO MYSTERIOUS. Thank you for this explanation! The Methodists do sound marginally warmer-and-fuzzier by, um, comparison. I am not sure Montgomery really does justice to the grimness of the Presbyterians given how much time all the youths spend stressing about whether or not they're wearing their nicest clothes to church!

...is that hymn really titled "Blest Is The Man Whose Bowels Move????"

YEP because I studied the Bible in college and there is a really unfortunate moment in the KJV, Song of Solomon -- "My beloved put in his hand by the hole of the door, and my bowels were moved for him" -- really there's a whole lot of moments like this in the Bible. "Put on therefore, as the elect of God, holy and beloved, bowels of mercies, kindness, humbleness of mind, meekness, longsuffering," "the bowels of the saints are refreshed by thee," "ye are straitened in your own bowels," I could go on -- but anyway, I don't know what the Hebrew word is, but in Greek it's the "splanxa" -- your guts, we would say today, or entrails, or lights and livers maybe. Not necessarily your heart or mind or soul, but the very visceral (viscera, get it) parts. (IIRC this is why Prometheus has his liver torn out.) So the sense is something like, your guts are drawn out, your viscera, the very physical foundation of your being, is moved, quaked, by the sight of your fellow man's suffering. It's like how Aristotle uses the word katharsis -- usually a medical sense, like a purgative -- to metaphorically describe the act of tragedy on the mind. Purification, cleansing, clarification, purgation, critics love arguing over the details but it's pretty specific.

But yeah that's how we get

Blest is the man whose bowels move,
And melt with pity to the poor,
Whose soul, by sympathising love,
Feels what his fellow-saints endure.

His heart contrives for their relief
More good than his own hands can do;
He, in the time of general grief,
Shall find the Lord has bowels too.

Supposedly Watts is riffing on Psalm 41:

Blessed is he that considereth the poor: the Lord will deliver him in time of trouble.
The Lord will preserve him, and keep him alive; and he shall be blessed upon the earth....

ETA Also my tutors would despair of me, the transliteration is more like "splankhna," σπλάγχνα, and survives into English as "splanchnic," because gosh doesn't everything medical sound better in Latin ("splanchnicus"), meaning organs in the abdominal cavity mostly. In books about Greek sacrifices it gets translated as "entrails," which puzzled me mightily as a kid because I thought that meant intestines and I did not know why gods, or anyone at all, would want those.

Edited 2017-08-25 03:55 (UTC)

Does The Story Girl take place in the same universe as the Anne books? I remember Felicity and Felix being in both the Road to Avonlea TV show (fun fact: one of my drama teachers actually played Felicity in the show) and in the truly execrable animated series which set the benchmark for awful AOGG adaptations.

I don't know that it's anywhere explicit that they do -- Avonlea is never mentioned, and if there are crossover characters, they certainly weren't obvious to me not having read the Anne books in a million years -- but it wouldn't be at all hard to slot them in, I think.

did you ever read _the blue castle_? i reread it every couple years. :)

No, I never read that one! Nor the Emily books either. My only L.M. Montgomeries were Anne, the Story Girl, and Magic for Marigold.

If you're interested, it's here! Not long, and not about children at all, actually. Its really delightful :) http://gutenberg.net.au/ebooks02/0200951h.html

And serious overwrought agony about methodists (free or otherwise).

Thank you!! I shall read it next time I'm in an LMM mood. :D (Or next time I'm on vacation and loading up on Project Gutenberg.)

Blue Castle is AWESOME, seriously. I love the Emily books, but I think BC might be her best book.

I enjoyed the Blue Castle as well - which is saying something as I read mostly fanfic - and made an ebook from it to read on kindle, with a cover and all. Happy to share - it's in Calibre so can be converted to any file format.

Definitely my LMM favourite. I think the fact that we never really see them grow up gives it an open-ended edge that somehow sticks (we know they grow up because Felix is clearly narrating this as his old self, but who did they become? what did they do? how far did Sara go? WE'LL NEVER KNOW) I liked getting to see Anne grow up! But it's like Story Girl weaponised a kind of bittersweet longing effect on me.

The Awkward Man vaguely rings a bell and ahaha, the alternate reading never occured to my younger self but from the perspective of NOW, the explanation does seem... rather more suspect...

Yeah, there are all these hints, but there's no definite answers about any of them one way or the other except that Sara Stanley Gets Famous and Cecily Dies. The fact that they all have to split up in the end, too, is definitely like - oh, ok, this is what nostalgia is.

There are many ways to interpret the mystery of the Awkward Man, is all I'm saying.

I only remember, from those books, the nightmares that the kids get by eating snacks late at night. Horrors!

The dream-telling competition! Very exacerbated by late-night pickles.

I always secretly felt like Felicity didn't get enough credit for being the most like a real person.

I have a great fondness for Felicity, and secretly I think L.M. Mongomery does too -- or at least she's much more interested in her than she is any of the other kids besides Sara. Sara and Felicity are really the two centerpieces of the book. And while, on the one hand, you have the age-old terrible dichotomy of Beautiful And Dull vs. Interesting And Clever, on the other hand I do kind of love that Felicity is so prosaic and useful around the house and good at real, practical things.

Despite loving Anne with every fiber of my being, I have never read these! (Or any of LMM's non-Anne books, idk, it's a thing.) These sound kind of exactly like the Ingleside/Rainbow Valley transitional stage where the Anne books go from being about her to about her kids and while Anne of Ingleside is actually a miserable book*, I love Rainbow Valley so am heartened to finally give these a shot.

*I didn't realize this until my most recent reread circa 2014, although I had never been very fond of it; closer examination led me to discover that 99% of the stories are "[X Kid] is hugely anxious and upset about something" with perfunctory Kids Have the Darnedest Ideas So It's Cute bows on top. Perhaps not coincidentally, this was LMM's last book before her death by possible suicide.

I thought Rilla of Ingleside was LMM's last book? Rilla is also miserable, but at least it has the excuse of being about WWI.

(I would say 98% of Ingleside is stories about the kids being hugely anxious and upset. The other 2% consist of "Di tries to make a friend and discovers that other children are terrible" and "Anne pouts because Christine Stuart still exists.")

Actually, Rilla of Ingleside was written very close to the source event and published in 1921. (That's why it is so idealistically pro-war; she wrote the book really believing it had been the War to End All Wars. LMM didn't die until 1942, by which time she had reportedly become very embittered by the dashing of that dream.) All of her Emily and Pat books came later, as did Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside, written nearly 20 years out of sequence and snuck back into the chronology to confuse future readers.

Edited 2017-08-23 03:44 (UTC)

Rainbow Valley was also the Anne book I loved best -- it was the only one I owned (that and Anne of Avonlea, I think) and I don't know who was responsible for this random assortment but I definitely Imprinted. I was real attached to the minister's barefoot children.

I suspect Anne of Ingleside stressed me out enough that I blotted it from my memory because I don't now remember anything about it, at all. I was about to go quote you the summary of Anne of Ingleside that I wrote when I was nine, but when I went back to look you already commented on it in 2013 so I will not inflict it on you again.

I never read these but I watched the shit out of Road to Avonlea on Dinsey Channel as a kid so I'm pretty familiar with most of the characters. Felicity is annoying and great...and idk if your Probably Die Young thing is a joke or if this happens in the book, but Cecily does in fact get CONSUMPTION and goes to a sanitarium, where she befriends a cheerful newsie, and returns home having learned lessons about life and being played by an actress who looks entirely different??? Story Girl Sara is acclaimed director Sarah Polley, also Marilla and Rachel Lynde are even gayer and co-parent the twins after Rachel Lynde has a stroke (I think?), and there's an Intense Old Lady named Hetty who is meaner than both of them, it's such a time all around.

Practically every other sentence about Cecily in the second book is like "but ALAS, did we but know it, Cecily's time on the GOLDEN ROAD of YOUTH would be BUT SHORT!!!!" Cecily deserved better frankly, I'd be happy to adopt instead a fate of sanitarium+cheerful newsie.

I am a bit sad that (from what I could tell from Wikipedia) it seems like Road to Avonlea had neither Peter the Shakespeare-Reading Hired Boy, who is the best, nor Bev, who is honestly the worst but whose deep pretentiousness would probably have been hilarious onscreen. On the other hand: gay co-parenting!

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