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

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 Hergé When the Lines Are Not So Clear, the latter published by University Press of Mississippi.