Emily Of New Moon

One day at Wyther Grange, Emily wanders near the bay shore. She spots a flower she wants to pick, but when she reaches for it, her feet slip on the moss, and she slides with the rocks falling beneath her. As she clings to a ledge, unable to move for fear of falling on the boulders below, she meets Dean Priest.

She recognizes him because of his hunched shoulder, which has earned him the nickname “Jarback.” He is Nancy’s nephew and is 36 years old. He runs to get a rope while his dog, Tweed, stays with her. After Dean returns and pulls Emily to safety, they introduce themselves, and Emily learns that Dean had known her father in college. Emily immediately likes him, and they spend much of her remaining time at Wyther Grange, taking long walks and talking. Though he is more than 20 years her senior, Dean intends to marry Emily when she is older.

Aunt Nancy decides rather abruptly that she is tired of Emily and tells her it is time for her to return to New Moon a couple weeks earlier than planned. Emily is sad to leave, especially now that she has met Dean Priest, but she has also missed her aunts, cousin, and friends. Dean promises to send her letters and visit her since his sister lives in Blair Water.

When she arrives home, Elizabeth makes her favorite cream puffs for dinner. Ilse shows Emily the last of Saucy Sal’s kittens. They argue about who gets to keep it and eventually agree that it will stay with Emily, but Ilse can name it Daffodil.

Emily goes to visit Teddy and meets his new puppy, Leo. They talk about how Teddy’s mother dislikes anything he likes, including Emily and Leo, because she is jealous. Teddy is afraid that his mother might poison Leo because he suspects she poisoned his cats. Emily advises him to tell his mother that if she poisons the puppy, he will not love her anymore, so killing the dog out of jealousy for his love would be pointless.

After growing accustomed to sleeping by herself while Emily was gone, Aunt Elizabeth decides to give Emily her own room when she returns from Wyther Grange. She lets Emily move into the bedroom that was once her mother’s. She loves the view from this room, which they call “the lookout,” and the privacy it affords. She begins writing in her room instead of in the garret, and now that she is in her mother’s bedroom, she feels closer to her mother and starts to include her in her letters to her father as well.

In one letter to her parents, Emily tells them that Dean Priest sent her a letter with a poem called “The Fringed Gentian” enclosed. The last stanza of the poem particularly thrills her, and she copies it down:

Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep

How I may upward climb

The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep,

That leads to heights sublime.

How I may reach that far-off goal

Of true and honored fame

And write upon its shining scroll

A woman’s humble name (290).

Emily experiences “the flash” when she reads those words and envisions herself climbing the Alpine Path to fame as a writer. She writes a vow that she will climb the Alpine Path and inscribe her name on the scroll of fame, and then she seals it in an envelope. She tells her parents she has also been thinking about what name she wants to use as a writer and has decided on “E. Byrd Starr” (291).

Miss Brownell leaves Blair Water school when she gets married and is replaced by a new teacher, Mr. Carpenter. Emily and her friends all come to like him because he teaches in a more dynamic way and recognizes the talents of his students. Because he sees potential in Emily as a writer, he criticizes her work more harshly than other students who do not show such promise. He does the same with Ilse, Perry, and Teddy to help them hone their talents of reciting, speech-making, and illustrating.

When Emily’s Aunt Ruth and Uncle Wallace visit New Moon, Emily tells them she is at the top of her class. Her aunt and uncle ask what her plan is for after school. Emily would like to continue her education. However, Aunt Elizabeth insists that Murray women do not work outside of the home, and she does not plan to send Emily to another school to get a teaching certification or any other degree. Emily is disappointed in Elizabeth’s decision but helps Perry study for his entrance exam and write more poetry than ever.

Emily decides to submit her best poem to the Charlottetown Enterprise, which has a “Poet’s Corner” column that prints poems by local writers. She copies her best poem, “Evening Dreams,” on her nicest notebook paper and sends it to the newspaper. When the newest edition arrives on Saturday, Emily is devastated to see that they did not print her poem. She had not told many people she had submitted anything except for Perry. When she tells Perry that it hadn’t been accepted, he rages and threatens to beat up the editor of The Enterprise. Emily is hurt that the editor didn’t think her poem was good enough to print, but she feels better after writing a story where she casts the editor of the Enterprise as a villain. A year later, Emily rereads that poem and realizes it was not very good. At that point, she also knows that she should not have written on both sides of the paper, so she understands why it was not accepted. As Emily grows older, she rereads her old writings and burns the ones she does not think are very good.

Emily has a conflict with Aunt Elizabeth when Elizabeth realizes that Emily has been writing stories and poems and plans to write novels one day. Elizabeth thinks writing fiction is “wicked” and forbids her to do it. Emily tries to explain that she has to write, just as Teddy has to draw, because they have that artistic impulse. Elizabeth stands her ground, and even Laura doesn’t quite understand Emily’s need to write stories. Emily writes her father a letter describing how unfair and cruel Elizabeth is to blow off some steam.

Much later, Elizabeth is cleaning the house when she finds Emily’s stack of letters to her father. She reads all of them and finds that many contain harsh depictions of Elizabeth as a tyrannical oppressor. When Emily comes in from outside that day, Laura tells her that Elizabeth wants to speak to her. When she sees that Elizabeth has read all the letters, Emily is angry at her invasion of privacy, which surprises Elizabeth because she was expecting Emily to be instantly remorseful and apologetic. Elizabeth wants Emily to burn all the letters, but Emily refuses because they were written to her father.

When she cries over the incident alone in her room, Emily reflects that she does feel bad that she has hurt Elizabeth. She apologizes to her and offers to add footnotes to the letters, explaining that she didn’t mean all the things she said about Elizabeth; she had written them when she was angry.

Elizabeth surprises Emily by also apologizing—she has learned from this incident that children and adults don’t have different sets of rules. If it wasn’t okay for her to invade Laura or Jimmy’s privacy, then it also wouldn’t be okay for her to do that to Emily. Elizabeth and Emily are both surprised at Elizabeth’s show of emotion when she adds that she hates to think that the daughter of her beloved sister Juliet hates her.

After this incident, Emily stops writing letters to her parents. She was outgrowing the practice, but the anger and bitterness that passed between her and Elizabeth was enough for her to stop for good.

Over the summer, both Emily and Ilse grow rapidly, and Laura worries about who will look out for Ilse as she becomes a woman if her father won’t. Emily continues to grow as a writer, burning old pieces when she deems them unacceptable.

One evening, she develops a headache and soon develops a fever. Dr. Burnley believes she caught the measles from the children at Derry Pond. Emily goes to bed, and her fever gets worse and worse. She is visibly distressed over something and rants incoherently, repeating, “She couldn’t have done it!” (319) over and over. No one understands what she is talking about, but Elizabeth believes there is more to what she is saying than just the ramblings of a fever dream. Eventually, her aunts are able to get her to say more. Emily says she sees a woman coming home to her baby through a field, but she falls into a well. When they ask her who she is talking about, she tells them that Ilse’s mother fell into a well; she didn’t run away with her cousin and abandon Ilse. She begs Laura and Elizabeth to go to the well and check if she’s there. Laura thinks this is a silly request from a delirious girl, but Elizabeth takes her seriously and promises they will check the well.

Dr. Burnley checks on Emily a few days later, and Cousin Jimmy tells him that Laura and Elizabeth want to speak to him. He finds them waiting for them and can tell something is very wrong. They tell him that they found the remains of his wife in the well.

When Emily recovers, Dr. Burnley tells her that her fever-induced revelation changed his life; he believes in God again, and he will make up for the lost time when he rejected Ilse. Ilse happily accepts his love without holding a grudge about his 12 years of neglect.

Emily does not remember her fever dreams, but when she hears what happened she is extremely happy because the story of Ilse’s mother had bothered her so much.

It takes Emily a while to recover from the measles. When she is finally better, she has no one to play with because Teddy, Ilse, and Perry all got the measles after she did. Dean Priest comes to Blair Water during this time, and Emily goes on long walks with him.

When she returns to school, Mr. Carpenter notices that Emily seems different, as if her spirit had aged from being sick. He asks her to bring some of her poems to him, and he will read them and give her feedback. Emily is excited about this opportunity and spends much time choosing which poems to show him. When Mr. Carpenter reads them, he says many harsh and mocking things about a lot of her work but admits there are about 10 good lines among the hundreds of terrible ones. This hurts Emily’s feelings at first, but then he tells her that most people don’t write 10 good lines of poetry in their entire lives, so it’s an achievement to have done so at only 13 years old. He tells her that if she keeps working hard, she’ll be able to write many more by the time she is an adult.

He asks Emily why she wants to write, and she answers that she wants to be rich and famous. Mr. Carpenter presses her, asking if she would still write even if she never made any money from it. She says that she must write, and he can tell that she is driven more than by just the idea of fame. He tells her if she must write, there is no point in him trying to talk her out of it; he acknowledges that real artists have to strive for “the hills” (338) because they cannot survive in the valleys. After she leaves, he thinks she has a gift for writing that he’d only dreamed of having.

Emily goes home and sits in her room. She takes out a new sheet of paper and, instead of writing a letter to her father, she decides to keep a diary to be published after she dies.