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stitchinthyme 's review for:
Anne's House of Dreams
by L.M. Montgomery
The Anne series continues to be a favorite of mine that I reread every few years or so (except for "Anne of Ingleside" and "Rainbow Valley", which are too full of small children to be much to my taste). However, maybe it's because I'm reading it through a modern lens (which is the only kind I have), but parts of LMM's works have really started to grate on me in recent years.
For instance, the subplot of Leslie and Dick Moore. If divorce weren't such a completely unthinkable thing in LMM's time and place, Leslie could have easily avoided more than a decade of servitude by simply divorcing Dick while he was away at sea. (Of course, she probably wouldn't have allowed herself to be coerced into an abusive marriage in the first place had she been a more modern woman, but I digress.) Did everyone in a bad marriage really have to be a martyr and stick with their awful spouse for life? Obviously not, since there are several estranged couples in LMM's works who, while they didn't get divorced, certainly went their separate ways, sometimes for years (e.g., Jane's parents in "Jane of Lantern Hill" and the Harrisons in "Anne of Avonlea"). LMM's estranged couples are probably somewhat unusual in that they actually reunited, but LMM was writing for children, so the desire for happy endings makes sense. I also wonder how much influence LMM's own bad marriage had on her fictional couples.
That said, I still enjoy how Leslie's story comes out, dubious medical procedure aside.
The supporting characters range from flat (Gilbert) to alive (Miss Cornelia). I read in a book about LMM once that she deliberately made Gilbert something of a blank slate so that her readers could project their own desired qualities on him, but it makes it hard to understand why Anne loves him so much. And Anne herself seems to have lost a lot of the spirit and whimsy that defined her before her marriage.
So I knocked off a star for these issues, but for all that, I do still reread it every now and then. LMM does have a knack for telling good stories, even if she had a tendency to recycle some of them. (For example, one of her short stories featured an "Uncle Jim" who was basically the same character as Captain Jim -- in fact, she even refers to him as "Uncle Jim" in one place in this book; I assume that she copied the text verbatim and missed that one when changing them, since global search-and-replace didn't exist back then.)
For instance, the subplot of Leslie and Dick Moore. If divorce weren't such a completely unthinkable thing in LMM's time and place, Leslie could have easily avoided more than a decade of servitude by simply divorcing Dick while he was away at sea. (Of course, she probably wouldn't have allowed herself to be coerced into an abusive marriage in the first place had she been a more modern woman, but I digress.) Did everyone in a bad marriage really have to be a martyr and stick with their awful spouse for life? Obviously not, since there are several estranged couples in LMM's works who, while they didn't get divorced, certainly went their separate ways, sometimes for years (e.g., Jane's parents in "Jane of Lantern Hill" and the Harrisons in "Anne of Avonlea"). LMM's estranged couples are probably somewhat unusual in that they actually reunited, but LMM was writing for children, so the desire for happy endings makes sense. I also wonder how much influence LMM's own bad marriage had on her fictional couples.
That said, I still enjoy how Leslie's story comes out, dubious medical procedure aside.
The supporting characters range from flat (Gilbert) to alive (Miss Cornelia). I read in a book about LMM once that she deliberately made Gilbert something of a blank slate so that her readers could project their own desired qualities on him, but it makes it hard to understand why Anne loves him so much. And Anne herself seems to have lost a lot of the spirit and whimsy that defined her before her marriage.
So I knocked off a star for these issues, but for all that, I do still reread it every now and then. LMM does have a knack for telling good stories, even if she had a tendency to recycle some of them. (For example, one of her short stories featured an "Uncle Jim" who was basically the same character as Captain Jim -- in fact, she even refers to him as "Uncle Jim" in one place in this book; I assume that she copied the text verbatim and missed that one when changing them, since global search-and-replace didn't exist back then.)