The Story Girl by L. M. Montgomery (1911) #ReadingStoryGirl

By Rebecca Foster on November 29, 2023

Six months after the Jane of Lantern Hill readalong, Canadian bloggers Naomi (Consumed by Ink) and Sarah Emsley have chosen an earlier work by Lucy Maud Montgomery, The Story Girl, and its sequel The Golden Road, for November buddy reading.

The book opens one May as brothers Felix and Beverley King are sent from Toronto to Prince Edward Island to stay with an aunt and uncle while their father is away on business. Beverley tells us about their thrilling six months of running half-wild with their cousins Cecily, Dan, Felicity, and Sara Stanley – better known by her nickname of the Story Girl, also to differentiate her from another Sara – and the hired boy, Peter. This line gives a sense of the group’s dynamic: “Felicity to look at—the Story Girl to tell us tales of wonder—Cecily to admire us—Dan and Peter to play with—what more could reasonable fellows want?”

Felicity is pretty and domestically inclined; Sara knows it would be better to be useful like Felicity, but all she has is her storytelling ability. Some are fantasy (“The Wedding Veil of the Proud Princess”); some are local tales that have passed into folk memory (“How Betty Sherman Won a Husband”). Beverley is in raptures over the Story Girl’s orations: “if voices had colour, hers would have been like a rainbow. It made words live. … we had listened entranced. I have written down the bare words of the story, as she told it; but I can never reproduce the charm and colour and spirit she infused into it. It lived for us.”

The cousins’ adventures are gently amusing and quite tame. They all write down their dreams in notebooks. Peter debates which church denomination to join and the boys engage in a sermon competition. Pat the cat has to be rescued from bewitching, and receives a dose of medicine in lard he licks off his paws and fur. The Story Girl makes a pudding with sawdust instead of cornmeal (reminding me of Anne Shirley and the dead mouse in the plum pudding). Life consistently teaches lessons in humility, as when they are all duped by Billy Robinson and his magic seeds, which he says will change whatever each one most resents – straight hair, plumpness, height; and there is a false alarm about the end of the world.

I found the novel fairly twee and realized at a certain point that I was skimming over more than I was reading. As was my complaint about Jane of Lantern Hill, there is a predictable near-death illness towards the end. The descriptions of Felicity and the Story Girl are purple (“when the Story Girl wreathed her nut-brown tresses with crimson leaves it seemed, as Peter said, that they grow on her—as if the gold and flame of her spirit had broken out in a coronal”); I had to remind myself that this reflects on Beverley more so than on Montgomery. From Naomi’s review of The Golden Road, I think that would be more to my taste because it has a clear plot rather than just stringing together pleasant but mostly forgettable anecdotes.

Still, it’s been fun to discover some of L. M. Montgomery’s lesser-known work, and there are sweet words about cats and the seasons:

“I am very good friends with all cats. They are so sleek and comfortable and dignified. And it is so easy to make them happy.”

“The beauty of winter is that it makes you appreciate spring.”

This effectively captures the long, magical summer days of childhood. I thought about when I was a kid and loved trips up to my mother’s hometown in upstate New York, where her brothers still lived. I was in awe of the Judd cousins’ big house, acres of lawn and untold luxuries such as Nintendo and a swimming pool. I guess I was as star-struck as Beverley. (University library)