L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon: A Children's Classic at 100

Last month, on April 23, 2024, L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon: A Children's Classic at 100 was published by the University Press of Mississippi. This new book of scholarship on the Emily of New Moon series was edited by Yan Du and Joe Sutliff Sanders of the University of Cambridge. The scholarly volume contains 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.

Here's the description of the volume from the University Press of Mississippi:

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.

Reviews

"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

Image credit:
Book cover of L.M. Montgomery's Emily of New Moon: A Children's Classic at 100 by the University Press of Mississippi.

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Created May 11, 2024.
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