Introducing Tannegents

Book 1. Chapter 1. Tannegent 1. Why is LM Montgomery so … wordy?

Bonjour/hi, I am Jean-Daniel, the world’s biggest fan of Anne of Green Gables, and welcome to Tannegents, a series of short educational tangents inspired by LM Montgomery.

I realize some of you are doubting my credentials. First of all, I am willing to accept people may TIE with me for world’s biggest Anne fan.

But as a sampler of some my credentials, my dog is named Bertha Marilla Blythe Ford, my fireplace is guarded by two porcelain dogs named Gog and Magog, and I have toured Canada with an award winning comedy that has more Anne of Green Gables references than any other show in the history of the Fringe Festival.

But you’re not a girl?! I know. But I was in foster care at age 11 after my mother’s death and found my solace in summers in the Canadian Maritimes, so I feel entitled to relate to Anne, thank you very much. Anne is complicated. I am complicated. Don’t do lazy gender essentialism.

Now, welcome to the first edition.

Let’s look at the first sentence of Anne of Green Gables.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.

That, my friends, was one single sentence. No periods until I stopped.

So our tannegential topic: where does this stylistic choice come from?

Let’s look at a classic of literature about young women, from a generation ahead of LM Montgomery, the opening sentence of Little Women by Louisa May Alcott.

“Christmas won’t be Christmas without any presents,” grumbled Jo, lying on the rug.

The clearest parallel I see is that the opening sentence immediately introduces us to a character and reveals a lot about that character. So much of Jo is in that one sentence. Grumbled and lying on the rug do a lot of work here.

But Mrs. Rachel Lynde is not so succinctly introduced!

A contemporary of Anne of Green Gables, The Secret Garden by Frances Hodgson Burnett, was published three years after Anne. Its opening sentence:

When Mary Lennox was sent to Misselthwaite Manor to live with her uncle everybody said she was the most disagreeable-looking child ever seen. 

This is a reasonable length sentence I suppose.

Note all three examples introduce to us a character. We meet Mary Lennox based on what other people say about her. We meet Jo March through what she herself says and does. And we don’t meet Anne at all. We meet her future neighbour.

I would argue—I am arguing right now—That LM Montgomery cares profoundly about context for her characters, the social and geographic setting against which they shine. And so we don’t even meet Anne in this first sentence, or indeed this first chapter at all.

However, LM Montgomery admired an author named Edward Bulwer-Lytton immensely, though he was yet another generation or two even earlier than Louisa May Alcott. He did not write about young girls as much as Montgomery, Alcott, or Burnett, but his prose may have had influence.

Brace yourselves for the opening of his book Paul Clifford. This may sound cliché, but he invented the cliché I am about to read:

It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.

Some influence is clear. Wordy but a true word painting.

Bulwer-Lytton and LM Montgomery also shared being immensely popular, and then having a critical backlash, the sort of shallow snobbery where people try to prove how smart they are by hating the popular thing. Being descriptive fell out of favour with literary critics, even the unwashed masses who like Bulwer-Lytton, such as LM Montgomery, or who like LM Montgomery, such as … me, don’t mind this so-called purple prose.

If you want to learn more about the ebbs and flows of LM Montgomery’s respectability with the literary snob class, Mary Rubio’s biography, The Gift of Wings, is a great starting place.

As for me, I love being able to picture Lynde’s Hollow, Mrs. Rachel’s overseeing of it, and seeing how LM Montgomery took the conventions of adult literature to tell a little girl’s story. Because it is not, in fact, a children’s book. It is a book about an entire community that changes with the arrival of a child, and LM Montgomery’s rich exploration of many characters and how they change Anne and are changed by Anne means you don’t have to be an eleven year old redheaded orphan to love the stories of Anne of Green Gables.