"The children believed she amused herself counting the gold in the big black box under her bed. Spencervale children children held the old lady in mortal terror; some of them--the "Spencer Road" fry--believed she was a witch [. . .]"
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From Chronicles of Avonlea,
character Anne Shirley |
It's Day 17 of National Short-Story Month. Until today, every selected story has been by a United States author. Today's selection, however, if from the United States' close relation, Canada.
L.M. Montgomery's story collection, Chronicles of Avonlea, follows the place, people, and the main character Anne Shirley, from Montgomery's popular series Anne of Green Gables. By this time, Anne Shirley is a young woman; however, knowledge of Anne Shirley's past is not necessary to enjoying these works. Most, if not all, the characters are not from the original series.
It has seemed to her every time she had read any of Montgomery's work, whether at age 12 or 30, that Montgomery is a superior writer at, especially, the crafting of landscapes. It is somewhat easy to have a reader imagine, let's say, an orchard. But it is something quite other to walk the reader through the orchard as another person. But Montgomery can do that, and does that consistently. It is a beautiful world L.M. Montgomery gives us.
There is a fragile lightness and cheer and underlying wish for goodness that comes beneath Montgomery's work, but that does not come from, for example, a negligence of the desperation of humankind. No, Montgomery does not have a sort of Pollyanna-with-closed-eyes perspective but seems almost constantly aware of the precipice, and it is that that enriches her work.
But we can save what she might think about Montgomery's work for another day. Today we must read the story "Old Lady Lloyd", and celebrate that such a work and writer should be in the world.
by L.M. Montgomery
(1912)
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| Text for Our Lady Lloyd by L.M. Montgomery |
![The New York Sun. [From the Pioneers.] The Tell-Tale Heart. By Edgar A. Poe. Art is long and Time is fleeting, And our hearts though stout and brave, Still, like muffled drums, are beating Funeral marches to the grave. [Longfellow. Then text of story begins.](https://blogger.googleusercontent.com/img/b/R29vZ2xl/AVvXsEi0A6rP0oD0wX-3X9YU8E1H-Ae38Ql7l7WIPWE5DAl0Kyj4ODhHlrFEKfXt61I0TmRyvetcziDeTSnY3LzRVQANRfPf48dvDLBUz1kZ5GG_0UyA1UeLoMJS0wJ__JfWIqLFo4hGc-2KUDI/s1600/tell-tale+heart.jpg "Newspaper article where The Tell-Tale Heart first appeared")
