Posts Tagged ‘lucy maud montgomery’

Today opened with news that L.M. Montgomery’s The Blythes are Quoted will finally be published, extremely posthumously, in October.  Anyone who read Rilla of Ingleside and got a glimpse of the Blythes’ darker and more tragic side will probably relish the book, which is being teased as actually addressing adult themes like (shock!) adultery and (scandal!) revenge.  Sounds juicy…and I wonder if it will ever live up to the hype.

But that’s not what I really want to talk about.  I want to talk about prequels.

See, in perusing the news over TBAQ’s October debut, I found a note that Before Green Gables, Budge Wilson’s prequel to Anne, has already sold a whopping 50,000 copies.

Can I get a whaaaaaaaaaaaaaaat?!

Though I am sure Wilson’s readers love his book for good reason, the popularity of prequels never ceases to amaze me.  Mike has often been witness to my not-so-silent rage over, for example, the hideous monstrosity that is the Little House on the Prairie sequels, the bizarre reimagining that is the Little Women diaries for girls.

Here’s the problem with prequels:  They are produced by writers who will never, ever be able to recreate the inner landscape, historical context, or internal motivations brought to the table by the original author.  For me, prequels puncture part of the magic of the Heroine’s Bookshelf…the existence of stories that won’t ever be fully imagined or completed.  My imagination (shock!) or my historical research always had to fill in the tantalizing blank spaces, gray areas, and gaps left by my favorite authors…and I am very okay with that.

What’s your take on prequels?

Soulful future author or freaky Victorian child?

Both.

This freckle-faced girl is Lucy Maud Montgomery:  Canadian, teacher, tortured optimist, dutiful preacher’s wife, “passionate friend,” and author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series.

We’re hanging out for the next week as I plunge into the writing process, on which Maud had this to say:

For five months I got up at six o’clock and got dressed by the lamplight. The fire would not yet be on. The house was very cold but I would put on a heavy coat, sit with my feet up to keep them from freezing and with fingers so cramped that I could scarcely hold a pen. I would write my “stunt” for the day. Sometimes it would be a poem in which I would carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.

When people say to me, as they occasionally do, ‘Oh how I envy your gift, how I wish I could write as you do’, I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.