Emily's father, Douglas, is a victim of consumption and on doctor's orders to "give up work" and live a simple life in the country. He and Emily have been living for four years in a little cottage just outside of Maywood with their housekeeper, Ellen Greene. When Douglas is told that he has perhaps a week to live, Ellen breaks the news to Emily rather bluntly. He is furious with Ellen for this--but he does not last another month. Emily misses him greatly, especially when she is introduced to her mother's family, the Murrays. Of them all--Oliver, Addie, Wallace, Eva, Ruth, Jimmy, Laura, and Elizabeth--only Laura and Jimmy seem to have any sympathy for her at all. Jimmy earns her affection almost immediately by guarding the door late one night when she says goodbye to her dead father.
The first major snag comes when it is discovered that no one wants to take Emily in. She wants to live with Aunt Laura, but doing so will mean living with Elizabeth as well. So when they make her draw lots to decide who she will go with, she is both glad and distressed to find herself being shipped off to New Moon, just outside of Blair Water, where Laura and Elizabeth and Jimmy live. Along the way, Elizabeth only makes her more distressed, not seeming to understand that the child is grieving for her recently-dead father. After all, when old Archibald Murray died, Elizabeth felt only a suppressed, guilty sense of relief. And Emily, in typical Murray fashion, refused to let her relatives see her cry; Elizabeth assumes that the lack of tears means a lack of feeling.
However, when Emily arrives at New Moon, she finds it a charming place and loves the farm and the house on it immediately. Her only disappointment is that she must sleep with Aunt Elizabeth.
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The day starts out badly when Aunt Elizabeth makes her wear a sunbonnet and a "baby apron"--an ugly thing with sleeves, if you can imagine sleeves on an apron. The children giggle at her, of course. Emily retreats into her dream-world, as she is wont to do, but makes the mistake of letting the teacher, Miss Brownell, discover this. When Miss Brownell asks what Emily is thinking about, the dear child replies in the most Murray-like of tones that it is a matter which concerns only herself. Wrong move, Em. Miss Brownell hates Emily from that day on and takes every opportunity to ridicule her, starting with keeping her in at recess for her impertinence. At noontime, Rhoda Stuart sidles up to Emily and says she wants to be friends, offering Emily a present. When the box is opened, it reveals a dead snake. Emily screams and throws it away from her. Ilse, hearing the commotion, bounds up (I believe that "bounds" is the words Montgomery uses, and I have never been able to get that picture out of my mind) and defends Emily--quite vociferously. There is no more problem with teasing, as the girls are unsure about whether Ilse would really wrap the snake around their necks or not. Rhoda Stuart later apologises, explaining that she was an innocent victim as much as Emily.
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Emily has just broken off a longish and intense friendship with none other than Rhoda the Betrayer and is moping about. Elizabeth concludes that Emily simply has too much hair and declares that it will be "shingled". Emily is horrified; her hair is her one vanity; can't she just cut a good big bang? (Emily desperately wants a bang.) No, it must all come off. But the scissors make a sound in opening that trips some switch in Emily. She jumps up and informs her aunt that this will not happen and she will hear no more of it. Elizabeth, meanwhile, is seeing an expression on Emily's face that can only be decribed as "the Murray Look"--and it looks frightening imposed on features that were inherited from the Starr side if anywhere. Elizabeth drops the scissors and flees.
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Emily's visit begins on a bad note. At the last minute, transportation is unavailable, but if she doesn't show up on time Great Aunt Nancy may just turn her away. Reluctantly Elizabeth lets Emily go over to Priest Pond with Jock Kelley, who gives her a hairbrush with a mirror back, a partial recipe for a love charm, an iron nail to protect her against the "witch" Caroline, and some advice: never marry a Priest.
Aunt Nancy and Caroline are indeed shriveled old women. Nancy was a beauty in her youth, but Caroline never looked good to begin with--she looks awful now. They have a short interview in which it is decided that Emily has wonderful ankles and she will do far better with them than with all the brains in the world. Emily is then put into the "pink room" to sleep--or, rather, to try to sleep while the swallows in the chimney behind her bed keep her awake and thinking of ghosts. All in all, though, she has a pleasant visit and is allowed to do as she pleases.
One evening, "as she pleases" is a walk along the cliffs by the sea. A spectacular flower catches her attention and, when she bends to pluck it, the edge of the cliff crumbles out from beneath her. The piece of ground she is laying on catches just over the edge and hangs there--but the slightest movement will send her crashing to the rocks below.
The same flower that caught her attention catches the attention of Dean Priest, walking his dog Tweed. He is astonished to see such a rare creature on the verge of death and goes to get a rope as fast as he can. (Admittedly, not very fast.) He hauls her up and she grabs the flower as she passes it. They have a pleasant walk back, at the end of which Dean tells her that her life is his, since he has saved it. She throws down the flower, twists it with her bootheel, and storms off--but they are the best of friends already. And he is headed straight down the road not just of friendship but of love.
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Beatrice Burnley was rumoured to be quite enamoured of her seafaring cousin, Leo Mitchell. So when one night she was seen going aboard his ship, which left before dawn, it was assumed that she had run off with him, leaving her husband Allan and baby daughter Ilse behind. Allan forbade that her name should be spoken in his presence and ignored his young daughter.
Naturally, Emily is very distressed when she hears this story from Great Aunt Nancy. She doesn't want to believe it, and worries constantly about what might have happened to Beatrice. And so, when she falls ill with a bad case of the measles and goes into delirium, it is only natural that Beatrice is what she sees. She comes suddenly awake one night when Laura is keeping bedside vigil and Dr. Burnley is out of town. She cries out that she sees "her" coming over the field, laughing, singing, thinking of her baby--and falling into the Old Lee Well. Her final shriek awakens Elizabeth, who gets to the room in time to hear a summary of what Emily has just seen. When asked who "she" is, Emily replies that it's Ilse's mother, of course--she can tell by the ace of hearts (a birthmark, red, heart-shaped, over Beatrice's left eyebrow). She begs them to get Beatrice out of the well. Laura says that they will, but Emily knows when she is being put off--Laura only wants her to calm down. So she makes Elizabeth promise. And Elizabeth keeps the promise, sending Jimmy down into the well.
And there they find the remains of Beatrice Burnley.
It is an incident which always makes Emily uncomfortable. Her "flash" is one thing; this is quite another. She does not want to be "psychic", as Mr. Carpenter dubs her. And yet her ability will prove useful later.
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Dean has come to read something or other to or with Emily. They are sitting in the garden when, from Lofty John's Bush, Teddy's signal (thre notes, two high, one low) is heard. Emily gets up to go, briefly telling Dean that Teddy is here and she must see him; he only uses that call when he especially wants to see her. Dean, anguished, replies that he especially wanted to see her tonight! Emily is torn for a long moment, until finally Dean bitterly tells her to go to Teddy.
It is not a big moment in the book, but I think it's very significant. It's typical of the situation through the whole trilogy, especially the last book; Dean wants her for himself, but realises that her heart has always belonged to Tedy and probably always will.
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Dr. Burnley is out of town and Emily gets rare permission to spend the night with Ilse. She intends to tell Ilse this at prayer meeting, but Ilse is late (as usual) and so does not get the message. Emily gets bored during the sermon and jots down some notes on a scrap of paper, which she folds inside of her hymn-book. After the meeting, she remembers the paper at the last moment and goes back for it. However, by the time she finds it, the church has been locked up (the caretaker being a little deaf and not having heard her). She is not so worried at first, but then a storm starts to come up. She is frightened, but it takes one more thing to truly terrify her.
Her hand brushes something hairy--a big black dog.
Mad Mr. Morrison's dog. She is alone in the church with Mad Mr. Morrison--locked in.
In her terror, she cries out--to Jimmy, Laura, Teddy--but the final shriek of dispair is a second call to Teddy. A mile away in the Tansy Patch, it wakes him up (though no one else heard) and he comes to Emily's rescue. He tells her where the key is; she lets herself out at long last and clings to him as Mad Mr. Morrison asks about his Annie. Emily is still too frightened to be much good even after the madman leaves, and Teddy helps her to an old, flat gravestone to sit and catch her breath for a moment. With his arm around her, of course, to keep the chill off. He tells her that she is the sweetest girl in the world, and then... "Emily thought Teddy was going to kiss her; Teddy knew he was." (Emily Climbs) But before he can, his mother appears. There is a brief fight during which Emily tells Mrs. Kent that she is a selfish old hag and Mrs. Kent tries to force Teddy to choose between the two of them. However, Emily disdainfully tells Teddy to go home with his mother.
But it is a moment which she remembers all her life.
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While going to high school, Emily and Ilse decided to make a little extra money by selling newspaper subscriptions. They had a very nice plan about how to get around without having to stay with strangers, and eventually even Aunt Ruth had to agree. But of course things couldn't be that simple. Short on time on the first evening, Emily and Ilse decide to cut through the woods to get to the town Ilse's aunt lives in--but they come out on the east side instead of the north, and find themselves near Hardscrabble Road. They spend the night on a haystack and move on.
The next evening finds them in the house of a young boy who has been missing for several days. Most people have given up hope, but the search parties are still at it, looking for his body if nothing else. Emily goes to sleep worried. The next day, when she and Ilse awaken, they are accosted by an old lady who will not allow them to get out of bed until they have heard the story of how she spanked the king. (Montgomery describes the lady as "something of an Ancient Mariner".) Eventually, Emily publishes this as an essay, with credit given where credit is due. But when she goes to jot it down in her notebook, the notebook is missing. It is found on the table.
It is open to a drawing which was not there previously--Emily can't draw--of a particular cottage that she and Ilse had noted the previous day. A cross is drawn over one high, unshuttered window, and a note in Emily's handwriting explains that the boy is there. The search party is sent to the house and finds they boy exactly there. He had gotten in through the basement window and then gotten trapped in a closet when the spring-lock shut on him. By the time the search party reached the area he was too weak to cry for help. But he is still alive.
Another of those incidents Emily doesn't like to think about; something used her as a tool, a distinctly odd feeling.
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Emily is asked to take place in a "dialog" at the school. Aunt Ruth reluctantly agrees to allow this. However, the dialog is changed to a play. Aunt Ruth, who has become ill and is bedridden for several weeks, is not aware of this fact. Emily has made no attempt to hide it from her, or anyone; the very idea is ludicrous, since the whole town is talking about it and it was even mentioned in the Times, which Ruth reads scrupulously. However, on the night of the play, Ruth finds out and is convinced that Emily did it on purpose. She tells Emily that she may go to the play, but that she should not expect to come back home. Ruth is going to lock up at nine o' clock and that is final. Emily's rage actually spurs her into a better performance than she would otherwise have given, but she cools off.
Until she comes back at eleven to find the doors locked and barred. She then proceeds to walk the entire seven snowy miles from Aunt Ruth's to New Moon. There, she had planned on slipping in and going to her own bed for the night, but she finds Cousin Jimmy up tending a sick cow. He offers her some donuts and talks things through with her. By the time the talk is over, she is ready to walk back to Shrewsbury.
She dons heavier shoes and clothing and does so, arriving just as Aunt Ruth is beginning to get ready for breakfast. She tells Ruth that she'll forgiver her this time, but it is not to happen again--a phrase Aunt Ruth has used often in respect to Emily. The victor in the situation is clearly Miss Starr.
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Janet Royal is a Shrewsbury woman who packed up and went to New York. Now she is well-connected in the writing world, and when she comes back for a visit Emily is anxious to meet her. She gets her chance when the editor of the Times sends her to interview Miss Royal.
As she apporaches the house, a dirty white dog frisks around her. She assumes that it is Miss Royal's chow dog. Miss Royal, opening the door, assumes that the dog belongs to Emily. The dog gets off to a bad start by putting paw prints all over Miss Royal's favourite gown and then proceeds to eat the flowers off of Emily's hat, disappear with Emily's manuscripts, track mud all over the place, destroy at least one pillow, and knock Angela Royal's prized rex begonia from its perch. Each of the women is frostily polite to the other, each supposing that the dog is the other's and that the owner simply doesn't care to discipline it. The mistake is discovered when Emily leaves; Miss Royal suggests that she ought to take her dog with her, and Emily replies that she thought it was Miss Royal's dog.
After that point, the two get along quite chummily. Miss Royal reveals that her purpose in coming was expressly to meet Emily and ask her to come to New York. There is a position open on her magazine--small, but Emily could work her way up. After much consideration and after asking everyone's opinion including Old Kelly's, Emily declines the offer. At the time, Miss Royal declares that Emily is making a horrible mistake, but when Emily's first published novel The Moral of the Rose comes out, she acknowledges that Emily could never have written it in the city.
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Emily, Teddy, Perry, and Ilse are driving home from a party one night when a snowstorm comes up. The road is blocked by fallen trees and their only choice is to spend the night in the Old John House, which has long been abandoned. Once inside, the boys get a fire going--and Ilse begins to feel ill. Perry finds some whiskey and gives it to her for medicine; she promptly gets drunk. The rest of the evening, she doesn't say a word for fear she'll say everything that's on her mind. Emily and Teddy exchange an incredibly significant look that suggests they'd rather Perry and Ilse weren't there. Later, Teddy makes a whimsical little speech about selling dreams. This inspires Emily and The Look is forgotten as she spins out her first novel in her head. But more about that later.
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Inspired by Teddy's comments in the Old John House, Emily writes her first novel, entitled A Seller of Dreams. She writes so constantly and so long in a day that her aunts begin to worry about her, but in six weeks she has it done. She sends it off three times and three times it is rejected. Despairing, she hands the manuscript to Dean and asks for his opinion.
It is my opinion that she should have known better. Dean loves her and hates her writing, especially this book, for taking her away from him. He reads the novel, but tells her that it is bad. Not just bad, but awful. She burns the manuscript. In tears over what she has done, she runs down the hall and falls down the stairs after tripping over Aunt Laura's sewing basket. The scissors pierce her ankle and foot and there is some debate about whether she has injured her back. She hovers between life, death, and amputation for some time before starting her slow recovery. Dean helps her through the long hours of enforced idleness--she cannot walk for a while and then does so with a limp before fully recovering--and she repays him by agreeing to marry him.
And the rest is another story.
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Dean leaves for a time and Emily begins to get lonely. She wanders up to the Disappointed House--their house--and goes in. Inside, she lights a candle, sits down in a chair, and stares at the gazing-ball left to her by Great Aunt Nancy. She finds herself standing in a train station, at the ticket window. Teddy is buying a ticket for the train that will take him to his boat, the Flavian. In England, Teddy feel a touch on his arm and looks up to see Emily standing beside him. She retreats; he follows until she disappears, leaving him lookig around wildly. He has missed the boat-train.
When word comes that the Flavian has sunk, Emily goes to Mrs. Kent and demands to know whether Teddy sailed on it or not. Mrs. Kent answers that he did not. Emily takes the first opportunity to break her engagement with Dean, knowing that she cannot marry anyone but Teddy. It is now that Dean admits that he did like her book. She sends him away, telling him that she may one day forgive him, but just now she hates him.
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Ilse, who just knew she couldn't have Perry, agreed to marry Teddy, who just knew that Emily was not in love with him. Each knew that it was "love warmed-over", as Ilse puts it, and they were fine with that. Everything was fine until a certain relation, arriving slightly late for the wedding, said that there had been a terrible automobile accident and Perry Miller had been killed.
Well, that was just it, of course.
Ilse wrapped her train around her shoulders and climbed out the window. She "borrowed" someone's car and went just as fast as she could to Perry's side. He had not been killed, only hurt; but then and there he and Ilse were engaged. Ilse has no recollection of who did the proposing, or if it were just a thing that was understood now. The "right couples" are starting to fall into place!
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Emily Starr and Aileen Kent share a tenuous friendship for some time. Emily borrows a book from Mrs. Kent and is surprised to find a letter inside adressed to none other than Aileen herself. I turns out to be from her dead husband, who apparently wrote it on his deathbed and stuck it in the book for her to find. But she never could bear to read those books again, and so it lay there undiscovered until Emily happened upon it.
Whatever was in the letter, it brought an immediate sense of closure to the part of Aileen's life that had been twisted. And in return she tells Emily of something dreadful that she has done. The last time Teddy went away, he left Emily and Ilse letters. Emily's contained only some verse he had promised to get her a copy of. Mrs. Kent admits that when she saw the letter to Emily waiting to be mailed, she steamed it open and read the contents. The letter she burned, and she sealed up some poetry that had been with it. Teddy mailed it never knowing the difference. (Although if the fool boy can't tell the difference between an envelope that has a letter in it and one that contains only a newspaper clipping, I'm not sure I approve of Emily's choice after all.)
The letter told Emily that he loved her, and if she could love him, even a little bit, to write and tell him so--but if not, then not to write at all.
Emily never wrote him at all.
We begin to see, now, how hurt Teddy must have been, and how awful this whole misunderstanding was.
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The "happily ever after" of the Emily books. Teddy has been away and evidently had some time away. Emily has read that he is in the Orient, so she is understandable startled when, sitting in her room one evening, she hears Teddy's old signal from Lofty John's Bush. I will not attept to do justice to the scene that follows; Montgomery did it first and best, as with all of these little "events". Suffice it to say that there was an affirmation of love on both sides and Emily revealed to him the matter of the letter. And by the next day they were engaged.
Thre is some muttering among the aunts about Emily's "fickleness" and "taking Ilse's leavings", but Emily refutes them by explaining that she has always belonged to Teddy and he to her. Dean sends his congratulations and, as a wedding present, the deed to the Disappointed House and all it contains.
...And they all lived happily ever after--or at least Teddy and Emily did.
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Places:The Death of Emily's Father and Her Arrival at New Moon
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Emily's First Day of School
Emily later finds out that not only was Rhoda completely guilty, but the whole trick was Rhoda's idea.
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"The Murray Look"
(AKA "The Haircut")
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Emily's Visit to Wyther Grange and Rescue From the Cliffs
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Ilse's Mother
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One Night in the New Moon Garden...
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Emily Gets Trapped in the Church
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Ilse and Emily Canvass the Province for Subscriptions to the Shrewsbury Times
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The Play at Shrewsbury High School
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Miss Royal and Her Interview With Emily
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A Winter's Night in the Old John House
On their return to Shrewsbury, Ilse talks a good deal about her drunken escapade, and scandal spreads through the town. Emily, though innocent, is snubbed everywhere. When Aunt Ruth hears of it, she sails out and sets things right with two of the worst offenders; the rest of the town follows suit. Emily is amazed at this behaviour from her aunt.
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A Seller of Dreams
Dean later admits that the book was quite good--needed work, but was good. He lied to Emily in hopes that she would pay more attention to him and less to her writing.
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The Flavian
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The Wedding That Wasn't
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Mrs. Kent and the Letter
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Teddy's Homecoming