Around the Hearth and After Many Years: Lucy Maud Montgomery short stories

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote Anne of Green Gables, and 19 other novels, and it is a heart-break of mine to ever get to the very end of all her writings, and have nothing new of hers left to read.

Of course, we are so so blessed because she has left us so much more than just her novels to read. There’s also her journals, which are thousands of pages; letters she wrote; and over half a thousand short stories!

They are still finding some of the short stories that she wrote. I imagine that people are going to house garage sales, buying bundles of 100-year-old newspapers, and reading them all to see if they can discover any of her stories. And they still are! Thanks to those wonderful nice people hunting for them.

“Around the Hearth” and “After Many Years” are two of these new short story collections. The former I found in the Los Angeles library, the latter in Davis library in Chapel Hill. What would we do in a world without libraries? Just die, I suppose!

Well, I loved these story collections. Maybe my favorite from Around the Hearth was the story about Jennie Thompson taking the train to see her aunt and getting into a mess of trouble, and from After Many Years, it was Jim’s House, written in 1926 and so cute! The Old Homestead (1907) was so cute, too.

In “After Many Years”, it was also interesting because plot points that I recognized from Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novels showed up. It was like she was exploring and developing pieces of the plot in these short stories, and then stuck them into her novels.

The commentary for “After Many Years” talks about some of these parallels to her novels, BUT they have missed some crucial ones! So let me tell you what they are!

1. “Our Neighbors at the Tansy Patch” (1918): the commentary just states that readers will find similarities between the character of Salome Silversides in the story, and Susan Baker, the maid in the later Anne books. But that’s not the parallel at all! Salome Silversides is the exact same name of the maid in Magic For Marigold. I think it’s much more likely that the Salome of this short story, and the Salome of Magic for Marigold, are pretty much the same character. And what they also missed is that Teddy Kent in Emily of New Moon also lives in a place called the Tansy Patch. But most important of all is the fact that the neighbors at the Tansy Patch are in large part the forerunners to the crazy family that Marigold and Gwendolyn stumble upon when they run away. Granny Phin, T.B., the carloads of fashionable people driving up that Granny Phin screams at and throws plates of gravy and bacon bits at — it was all there. So mostly, this short story is a forerunner to pieces of Magic for Marigold.
2. “Tomorrow Comes” (1934): the commentary states that readers will find parallels with this short story and Jane of Lantern Hill (1937), and that is true. But they missed that that’s really only half the story. Fully the other half of the story — like wishing for tomorrow to come, and The Woman, and visiting the island and the wreck at the end — are exact forerunners of the plot with Little Elizabeth in Anne of Windy Poplars. Anne of Windy Poplars was published two years later.
3. “The Use of Her Legs” (1936): the commentary states that we will see similarities to Kilmeny of the Orchard, and also that the psycho character of Daniel Random will remind us of Marshall Elliot, just because of a simple matter of the shaving of their bears. Now, this is wholly unfair! Marshall Elliot is entirely harmless, kind, fair, jolly, while Daniel tries to kill someone. Daniel Random actually reminded me of Mad Mr. Morrison in Emily of New Moon. Second, parts of the plot also heavily reminded me of “Some Fools and a Saint”, another Lucy Maud Montgomery short story (“short” is relative, it’s like 40 pages long.) This short story appears, in a somewhat decapitated form, in the short story collection “Among the Shadows”. But then it appears again in “The Blythes are Quoted”, and here, all the details about the Blythe family and the location being in the Glen St. Mary environment are added in, which I like much better.