Living on the page

Did you know LM Montgomery had written another heroine after Anne Shirley? Nope, me neither. Of course if you're Canadian, you'll know because Emily of New Moon is a major TV series. Please could someone show it here immediately. Because Emily Byrd Starr is brilliant.


She's a bolder, angrier Anne Shirley. She's also more committed to writing. She starts writing as a child; when she's unhappy she "writes it out". Later on, she hones her craft, withstands mockery and professional disappointment and makes it. And she burns her own work. 


All the heroines of the girls' books I loved got their work burned. In Little Women, Jo's sister burns her book, Katy's work gets burned in What Katy Did, and in Frost in May, Nanda's book is cast into hellfire. But LM Montgomery spins the convention. Emily first burns her work to save it from being mocked by an unsympathetic aunt. Later there's a storyline which could be in a writer's primer.


A trusted friend tells her that her first novel is no good. It's "a pretty little story", he says, adding: "How could you write a real story? You've never LIVED." She burns the book and gives up writing. She agrees to marry him. For many, anguishing pages, they plan their wedding. But at last she breaks away. He eventually admits the book was good, and he trashed it out of envy. We've all had toxic critics. And it's easy to criticise him from a feminist perspective—of course, with the benefit of being both older and a man, of course he's been able to have a more obviously interesting life than Emily. But what I love is that eventually Emily realises something I've written about before: she doesn't need to wait to know who she is to start writing. It's not about living and then writing about it; the two activities are entwined. You work out who you are by writing it. You work out what you think by writing it. (Joan Didion agrees!) You can live on the page. I'm writing a play that is challenging everything I think about men, women, relationships, feminism, role models, desire and the enormous, unanswerable question of whether we have an essential self that never changes or whether, in fact, we can fashion ourselves into whoever we want to be. And it's incredibly exciting. And I have no idea, none, how it ends.