I was baffled that everybody cared so much. Rather than dwell in self-righteous anger, I focused on the thought of having to write a new essay when I liked the one I had already composed. Neither Anne Shirley nor Emily Byrd Starr—the proudly obdurate heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s Emily trilogy—would have acquiesced where their writing was concerned, although I never considered myself in possession of their courage. For my part, I skirted any possibility of trouble, and had taken care—to the extent that an insecure thirteen-year-old girl could—to critique with humor and insight, rather than to lob ad hominem insults. I genuinely didn’t want to be unkind. Mostly, I wanted to be liked.
One day, in the midst of this imbroglio, my English teacher asked me to meet with her and with the other, notoriously intimidating eighth grade English teacher after my last class. Certain that I was bound for punishment, I agonized for the remainder of the day and asked my best friend to wait for Mom at carpool so she could explain why I wasn’t there (in my terror it apparently never occurred to me to call home).
Once the meeting began, my fears were assuaged: they supported me wholeheartedly, these teachers assured me, and they were going to ensure that I did not have to rewrite my essay in order to placate my classmates or their parents. My stricken limbs loosened, and I began to breathe with regularity.
Until, as if on cue, Mom appeared at the classroom threshold, windswept and wild-eyed. She was as furious as I had ever seen her, and before I could assure her that all was well, she settled her white-hot glare on this pair of unsuspecting teachers and drew a full-bodied breath. The court of Katherine Florio Vorona was in session.
“My daughter has been treated like shit at this school for nearly two years,” she snarled. I’m ashamed to say that garden-variety teenage embarrassment nullified what should have been pride. I broke in as quickly as I could, all agitation and squirms—“Mom! Mom! It’s okay! They’re on my side! I’m not in trouble!” But in retrospect, Mom stormed into that classroom like Athena on a righteous rampage. She was a warrior waving the banner of motherly justice, determined to defend her daughters from the perils of juvenile nastiness.
At the time, I didn’t fully appreciate this, didn’t appreciate her. Certainly my reaction was born, in part, from snotty adolescent panic over my own reputation: Mom was an extension of me, and if her behavior raised eyebrows, or if my classmates overheard this wrath-soaked expostulation, I would be mocked for it. After all, earnest, outsize reactions—a quintessential aspect of Mom’s too muchness and mine—were regarded as absurd and unseemly. Having fully absorbed this ideology, one in which we were premium examples of lesser people, I could not be proud of the mother whose fierce empathy had summoned this act of parental heroism. Instead, I was mortified by her too muchness, particularly the aspects of it that seemed to have engendered my own. I saw only what I feared becoming, what, in my bones, I knew I already was: tremulous and sensitive, constitutionally incapable of feeling anything by half. These were traits that oriented my mother and that begot what was most precious in her. She may have been predisposed to empathy, but she also chose it, cultivated it—even when it burned. It took me years to interpret her fire as something exquisite and rare; finally, I understood that those flames blazing within her—scorching her—had lovingly kept me warm.
* * *
Mom and I may have fretted over each other’s inclinations toward maximalist emotion, but she also orchestrated my literary education in exuberant and temperamental girls—the girls who would become my mentors and, collectively, my solace. My mother came late to classic literature, so I read the Brontë sisters, Jane Austen—oh, the ache of recognition in Sense and Sensibility’s Marianne Dashwood—Louisa May Alcott, and L. M. Montgomery not long after she did, and upon her recommendation. Montgomery supplied me with two kindred variations of feminine too muchness: her aforementioned heroines, Anne Shirley of Green Gables and the lesser known but beloved Emily Byrd Starr of New Moon. I gulped these books like Hi-C Ecto Cooler (my beverage of choice) and, as bookish girls do, contemplated their characters with solemnity and devotion equal to the consideration I gave my companions in daily life. But just as my anti–too muchness, wholly internalized by preadolescence, stirred me to look askance at Mom’s emotional vulnerabilities, so did I begin evaluating Too Much heroines according to how I thought I ought to navigate, and feel, the world.
Of the two, Anne Shirley, in all her Anne Shirley-ness, has endured more prominently in our cultural zeitgeist. She is the one my mother knew, and prodded me to know as well. Anne, not Emily, was the one bestowed with a now-canonical CBC miniseries, followed by a 2017 reboot; she is the one who has been elevated to archetype. Nowadays, her name functions as the nineties girl’s shorthand: to be an “Anne Shirley” is to be bookish and daydreamy and bold, with just a dash of impulsive charm. It’s an alluring moniker, one that acknowledges a nerdy, literary soul without professing undesirability—and without the negative connotations of identifying with a Zooey Deschanel character. In this way, her too muchness becomes as palatable as Western culture typically permits. But Anne’s widespread appeal also waters down the sense of uniqueness we might feel in identifying with the character; I suspect that most cusp-millennial women have at one point or another fancied ourselves Anne Shirley. With Jonathan Crombie’s death in 2015—verily, the death of Gilbert Blythe—our mourning manifested itself as fierce projection. We not only remembered Anne and Gilbert; we remembered being her and opining the arrival of our own Gilberts—that is to say, someone who loved and exulted us with steadfast devotion.
It would be satisfying to believe that Mom was motivated by recognition of my blossoming intensities, but I doubt that was the case. I do wonder if she found fragmented reflections of herself in Anne Shirley, thereby inspiring the intermittent comparisons. But when I strongly identified with a character, I was liable to be repulsed, particularly when she reminded me of my own unwieldy feelings, or I recognized in her some of my own, more aggravating traits (like Anne, I was and am a chatterbox). So when I discovered Emily Byrd Starr of the titular Emily trilogy—passionate, poetic, but uncannily self-possessed—she became my object of desire—my aspiration.
My encounters with these characters were significantly staggered. I met Anne Shirley years prior to finding Emily, though whether it was on the page or through the interpretation of Megan Follows, I can’t recall. Either way, I quickly acknowledged our kinship: garrulous and gawky, passionately devoted to our dearest girlfriends, and eager to love those who loved us—not to mention some who didn’t. Her delicate nose was the focal point of her wobbling vanity; mine, contrastingly, was conspicuous in an ungainly, ill-fitting way; it seemed a curse designed for schoolyard torment. But we both plotted out our lives according to storybook conventions, and our first attempts at authorship were similarly schmaltzy.
Anne joined ranks with the coterie of fictional odd girls—Jane Eyre, Matilda, Jo March—who kept my neurotic, lonely heart company. L. M. Montgomery, like so many of my favorite authors, begot a heroine who transcended her narrative. Anne of Green Gables (1908) gave me worthy cause for optimism. My peers found me peculiar, but perhaps that assessment was not as damning as I had previously feared. After all, Anne Shirley befriends kindred spirits scattered throughout Avonlea, and though she aims to please, she never compromises the sanctity of her selfhood. The Anne novels thus became cherished evidence: one day, I too would find fellowship.
And yet, I didn’t really love Anne Shirley.
Instead, love found me when, one weekend—dawdling through Barnes and Noble—I stumbled upon another Montgomery creation: Emily Byrd Starr, the titular character of the Emily of New Moon trilogy. Emily enthralled me in a way that Anne never could: she was haughty and incandescent and altogether intimidating. Her first book was published in 1923, fifteen years after Anne of Green Gables, with Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest following in 1925 and 1927, respectively. But in spite of the distance spanning their publication dates, Emily’s story ar
c will sound familiar to readers already intimate with Anne. Accustomed to a quiet, companionable life with her widower father, Emily is bereft when he dies of consumption. Now an orphan at age twelve, she must abandon her childhood home to become the ward of her mother’s priggish relatives, the Murrays.
But slowly, she comes to love New Moon Farm, where her mother lived as a girl, and which her spinster aunts Elizabeth and Laura, and cousin Jimmy, inhabit and maintain now. The farm and surrounding town of Blair Water are bathed in myths and hauntings—ideal for an aspiring poet. And before long, Emily befriends three similarly maverick souls: the warm-blooded Ilse Burnley—a Too Much girl in her own right—the ambitious Perry Miller, who loves Emily, and the artist Teddy Kent, whom Emily loves (although it is years before she expresses her affections outright). She relies on the un-Murray-like sympathy of her gentle aunt Laura and cousin Jimmy; meanwhile, she and the intractable Aunt Elizabeth assume a power play that, in time, gentles into an affectionate and fiercely loyal kinship. Even more herculean than familial frictions are her efforts to earn a living as a writer, and to suss out the future she desires with Teddy.
Because Montgomery dwells on similar themes in the Emily and Anne books, it’s fitting that her heroines share similar preoccupations. Their writerly inclinations and broad imaginations imply a twinned urge to remake the world into something befitting their dreams. And yet, each girl’s pious romance with the Prince Edward Island landscape communicates a love for the extant natural world. They revere their pastoral environs as unknowably enchanted, but nevertheless claim fellowship with the copses of trees and twinkling lakes that form the backdrop to their coming-of-age. In this comradely spirit, they christen everything that delights them: the Lake of Shining Waters, the Tomorrow Road, the Disappointed House, Dryad’s Bubble. Anne chases “scope for the imagination”; Emily refers to volts of creative energy as “the flash.” Their love, when it is bestowed, is lavish and boundless like the sea that compasses their island home.
In my despondent adolescence, when I longed to be someone else—someone who could cool out and care a little less, be just a little less—I would confide to Mom, tear-soggy with despair, my fear that nobody could possibly fall in love with me: puberty was, in my experience, a dreadful landscape of pustules, wire-thronged teeth, and graceless extremities. Perhaps my gargantuan emotions—ready tears and piercing outbursts—would have seemed more palatable if I had been beautiful, but I was not, or at least I didn’t think so. When Mom, ever the romantic, soothed me with promises that I would encounter my own Gilbert Blythe, I struggled to imagine a person who would not recoil in the face of my too muchness and promptly head for the hills. But Mom seemed confident, perhaps, in part, because she was a Too Much woman happy in love, and so I listed against the comfort of her conviction. And then there was Anne, and Emily, too: weren’t they lovable?
So I took consolation in L. M. Montgomery’s passionate young heroines; they seemed to me textual evidence that my own coming-of-age would not be a hapless misadventure. Still, my visceral preference for Emily Byrd Starr signaled to me, albeit implicitly, the variety of girlhood. Now, it lays bare the obsessive focus of my anti–too muchness conviction. Convinced that my own outpourings of earnestness and nakedly cellophane skin were detriments to my character, I assumed the same for Anne, cleaving instead to Emily’s performative cool. With the exclusion of a few, spare resonances, I shared precious little in common with her, and therein lay the linchpin of my preference. Indeed, I was taken with her precisely because I doubted that she would approve of me or, for that matter, cheery, obliging Anne. Though it would be, as it were, a scenario of the pot calling the kettle black, I wondered if Emily might have found both Anne and me to be too much.
Montgomery writes Emily as basically enigmatic, and in so doing, I could only ever conceive of her in an aspirational context: she feels with a thundersome fullness but, through pride and wellsprings of restraint, conceals the brunt of it. When the CBC announced its plans for the new Anne of Green Gables miniseries, the 2017 adaptation, Anne with an E, I grumbled, “Always Anne, and never Emily.” But, admittedly, I understand. Anne has always wanted us to know her; Emily has never been sure. The latter’s book, written as biography, emphasizes our distance from the character—even her diaries, which she intends as posthumous publications, are contextualized as archival materials, temporally removed. She’ll never write directly to us.
From the first pages of Emily of New Moon, I was primed to favor its heroine. She writes—poems, letters to her deceased father, stories, and diary entries—with an urgency her aunt Elizabeth castigates as pathological. Although she eschews demonstrations of romantic vulnerability, she betrays a curiosity about boys—or at least one boy. And she is sensually porous: the world laps against her skin, seeps underneath, and startles her marrow. Her so-called mysteriousness, of which her family accuses her, is her primary means of self-preservation in a milieu where her quirks and strange delights will always draw suspicion or, at best, confusion. But because she trusts in her façade of stoicism, she need not resort to silence in the face of adversity. On the contrary, she can speak on her own behalf when she chooses, and leave both schoolmates and stony relatives trembling in her wake.
Emily’s imperiousness dazzled me. Meek and agitated, I spent my youth far too terrified of judgment to speak with her frankness. Taking issue with others seemed a luxury totally unavailable to me—after all, I was too desperate to be loved. When Gilbert Blythe so crassly calls Anne Shirley “Carrots,” she smashes a slate over his head. Under the same duress, Emily’s knuckles might have whitened as she gripped her own slate more fixedly, but her revenge would have been delivered as a dart of smooth, rhetorical evisceration. Tormented on the first day of school, Emily returns the gawking of the other schoolchildren with her own tenacious stare. “Why don’t you like me?” she asks, eliciting a dumb silence. Finally, her flustered adversary stutters, “Because you ain’t a bit like us.”2
“I wouldn’t want to be,” said Emily scornfully.
“Oh, my, you are one of the Chosen people,” mocked Black-eyes.
“Oh course I am,” retorted Emily.3
Emily, it seemed to me, had won the too muchness honey pot. It’s true: her disposition mixes with those of her peers like oil and water, and perhaps she is a bit eccentric, too. But she’s glad of it, regardless of whatever loneliness may result in the schoolroom—even when the duplicity of a supposed friend leads to her exclusion from a much-anticipated birthday party, or when her aunt bars her from chasing fads (bangs, for instance). Whatever tremors of agitation or pain may disturb her proud heart, Emily only endeavors to be precisely who she is.
What’s more, her too muchness does not preclude the chilly composure with which she takes the measure of her bullies and, with a few barbed words, summarily levels them. (To be sure, Anne is also quick with a retort. Although more inclined than Emily to make friends, she generally does not find herself in these sorts of showdowns. And if she did, she wouldn’t want for support.) Emily, moreover, demands the respect of her elders—even when they refuse it—and she does not shrink from calling injustice by its name. Even in the wake of her father’s death, neither grief nor trepidation diminishes her verve. À la Jane Eyre, her rigid aunt Elizabeth locks Emily in a darkened spare room as punishment; unlike Jane, Emily escapes through the window and spends the evening cavorting with Ilse.
Still, Emily is not wholly immune to the carping chorus of her relatives and the Blair Water schoolchildren. Adopted by her late mother’s half sisters, the Murrays, she recoils from members of the clan whose dispositions chafe against her own. But even as she struggles to adapt, she absorbs the infamous “Murray pride,” which fortifies her with self-possession, and a touch of arrogance. “The time will come when they will not laugh at me,” she avows in a diary entry, with foreboding italics.4 At the time, it was wonderful to me: here was a young girl who preferred the company of books and her own chimerical thoughts, who coul
d not shrug off the world, even if she pretended, and who was determined not merely to survive, but to thrive like a rose bursting from cracks in slate. Too muchness had always seemed—often still seems—like a condition to be endured, and just barely. I have often felt as if it is organically toxic. When I only knew Anne Shirley, I took comfort in the elegance of her maturation: she does not change in essentials, but she cultivates a discipline that I thought would perhaps, one day, burgeon inside me, too (the jury is still out on this particular matter). But Emily—she is young when she makes this declaration: she will not suppress her predilections, nor will she police herself for the comfort of others (though, of course, she summons stoicism for a kind of power play). If she is too much for others, then this is an index of her community’s failings, not hers, and one day they will stand in awe of her.
I admit, I have never imagined that my too muchness would command the sort of admiration that Emily envisions. Tolerance always seemed to be the most for which I could hope, and so I sought that. Even now, I beat back my sheepishness in the face of a culture that barks at us to be thankful for belonging, even when we are difficult pills to swallow. There is no shame is our yen for appreciation, or for compliments. Nothing could be more human than hoping others find us pleasant. After all, girls are taught to please with social direction that is both insidious and explicit, and in each case, unceasing. And because I regarded my elders—and, frankly, anyone more popular than me—as authorities, I, too, was voracious for approval, particularly in the realm of beauty. To be called “consumptive” or “plain” by my family would have shattered me just as Anne is mortified by references to her homeliness. Emily, however, sustains these blows time and again. Her tenacity discomfits the Murrays; they, accordingly, cast aspersions in a desperate grasp for the upper hand. Emily is less inclined to court approval from those she does not like, but as a matter of principle will not endure the Murray family’s onerous discussion of her appearance while she is seated in the same room:
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