emma_in_dream

I suspect not many people have read this book for a long, long time, so here is a quick recap of the plot.

Ellen is very close to her pious mother who is very ill and sent off on a long journey to die. Ellen is sent to stay with her hard-hearted Aunt Fortune. You’d think this would cue Ellen converting the aunt to love (*Anne of Green Gables*, *Emily of New Moon*, *Pollyanna*), but she remains flinty hearted to the end and boots Ellen out as soon as possible.

Ellen spends time with the pious Alice Humphreys and eventually goes to stay with them. Alice’s brother John takes a great interest in her (she is aged ten at this stage). You think he will wind up marrying her but that is not entirely clear (flirted with in *Emily of New Moon*, *Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm*).

Alice dies as well and then Ellen is passed on to her grandparents who jealously guard her from contact with her previous friends. Nonetheless, John, who is a serious control freak finds her and promises they will be forever in a few years (she is aged fourteen at this stage).

When I first picked it up I happened to open to the place where Mrs Montgomery is preparing Ellen for her departure. Ellen cries three times in two pages, culminating in realising that her Mamma love God more than her.

‘Mamma,’ said Ellen, tearfully. ‘O, mamma, what shall I do without you?’
...
‘Mamma,’ said Ellen, after a few minutes, ‘can I have no true love to Him at all unless I love Him best?’
‘I dare note say that you can,’ answered her mother seriously.
‘Mamma,’ said Ellen after a little, again raising her head and looking her mother full in the face, as if willing to apply the severest test to this hard doctrine, and speaking with an indescribable expression, ‘do you love Him better than you do me?’
She knew her mother loved the Saviour, but she thought it scarcely possible that herself could have but the second place in her heart; she ventured a bold question to prove whether her mother’s practice would not contradict her theory.
But Mrs Montgomery answered steadily, ‘I do, my daughter;’ and with a gush of tears Ellen sunk her head again upon her bosom.... ‘I do, indeed, my daughter,’ repeated Mrs Montgomery, ‘that does not make my love to you the less, but the more, Ellen.’

That sums up the level of commitment to God preached in this book. Pretty much unattainable.

It’s hard to get through all this piety. This was enormously popular at the time, but it is definitely dated in a way that, say, *Little Women* has not.

Possibly because this is because the book is actually quite weird. Quite apart from the religious obsession, Ellen is the most weepy heroine ever. She just oozes liquids - tears at the drop of the hat. I can’t help but think that all this liquid is a demonstration of her femininity. (Yick, menstrual blood/tears.)

And people spend a lot of time looking at her crying or lying asleep with tears on her eyelashes. Her mother, Alice Humphries, Alice Humphries’ father, John Humphries, her grandmother. It is like a succession of Edward Cullens are stalking her. (Tears and blood!)

One of those weird Edward Cullens figures is ‘her brother’ John Humphries who, frankly, is grooming her to be his child bride in the future. Their entire relationship is creepy, creepy, creepy, starting with taking a kiss the first time he saw her.

‘Then if I am to be your brother you must give me a brother’s right, you know,’ said he, drawing her gently to him, and kissing her gravely on the lips.

Probably Ellen thought there was a difference between John and [other men who have randomly tried to kiss her or buy her kisses], for though she coloured a good deal, she made no objection and showed no displeasure.’

Remember that at this stage she is ten. Though John is surprised by this and says he thought she was twelve or thirteen.

Ellen obeys John absolutely. He moulds her, chooses her reading, annotates what he directs her to read, and arranges her life. He is just too creepy for words - how weird is it for him, as an adult, to take up with a little girl?

All in all, it is a very, very strange book. One that could only be written in a pre-Freudian age.

As a bonus: A game you can play with this book is to flick open to any page, randomly, and find the place where Ellen cries and where she quotes the Bible or reflects on God’s will. It is almost impossible to lose as this happens every few lines.

That's the book for the end of the month.

BTW, I'm reading a biography of Lewis Carroll and he gave Alice a copy of a Charlotte Yonge book and also submitted a series of connundrums to her monthly magazine.