Abby Chandler — L.M. Montgomery’s Emily of New Moon and the Arts and Crafts Movement

Abby Chandler

Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery is best known as the author of multiple novels including Anne of Green Gables, but she was also a passionate gardener who filled her novels with carefully detailed gardens. The early 1920s found Montgomery at a turning point in her literary career. Having finally finished the early Anne books, she was ready to start writing about a new heroine whom she christened Emily Byrd Starr. Unlike the cottage gardens in her earlier books, the gardens that Montgomery created for Emily’s New Moon Farm were rooted in the traditions of the Arts and Crafts Movement. Now in her forties, Montgomery knew that the “ideal garden” that she had carried about in her mind for years was unattainable in her own life but she was, at last, ready to create it in fiction. Examining the New Moon garden in context with the Arts and Crafts Movement tells a new story about a beloved writer and the worlds that she created, while highlighting the real life gardens that shaped and influenced Montgomery’s writing.