155. Emily of Deep Valley

Emily of Deep Valley. Maud Hart Lovelace. 1950. 304 pages. [Source: Library]

First sentence: "It's the last day of high school...ever," Annette said. She said it gaily, swinging Emily's hand and pulling her about so that they faced the red brick building with its tall arched windows and doors, its elaborate limestone trimming, its bulging turrets and the cupola that made an ironical dunce's cap on top of all. Annette threw a kiss at it, then lifted her right hand and opened and shut the fingers in a playful wave. "Good-by, old jail!" she said. "Don't you dare call the Deep Valley High School a jail!" Emily tone was joking but there was warmth in it, too. 

Premise/plot: Emily Webster, our orphan protagonist, loves her home in Deep Valley, no question. But when almost all of her classmates either go away to college or university [or marry] and she is left behind seemingly on her own [to represent the Class of 1912] in Deep Valley, well, she gets a little out of sorts. While her classmates and chums are busy living new lives--with new opportunities, experiences, adventures--Emily is left not even with the same old, same old. For she no longer "belongs" in high school. [Though she attempts to find joy in life by still going to all the games. That works for a while. Until she realizes that NO, she's not in high school. She's a grown woman not a child. No matter of pretending will change that.] Her days are filled with caring for her grandfather, a Civil War veteran, but not completely filled. Not in the way they are filled in her daydreams. She tries various interests and hobbies. One of which leads to perhaps the biggest change in her life: her interest in the Little Syrian [immigrant] community in Deep Valley. She befriends a few Syrian boys and through them takes an interest in the neighborhood at large. 

Emily longs for a love story. It's quite easy to imagine a perfectly perfect romantic lead, but imagining herself into that story is a little more bumpy. She wants to be wanted and fears she never will be wanted. 

Emily of Deep Valley chronicles about a year of time May 1912 to May 1913.

My thoughts: I really LOVED this one. It was new to me. I liked this coming of age novel very much. It was written in 1950 and set in 1912/1913 so it definitely qualifies as historical fiction. I liked the setting very much--both the time period and the geographical setting. [Fictional town of Deep Valley, Minnesota]

Quotes:

In Deep Valley, as everywhere, the Roosevelt-Taft feud was tearing friends and family apart. Emily favored Roosevelt, believing, as Jane Addams did, that he spoke for the cause of social justice.

Depression settled down upon her, and although she tried to brush it away it thickened like a fog.

“A mood like this has to be fought. It’s like an enemy with a gun,” she told herself. But she couldn’t seem to find a gun with which to fight.

She did bring home books from the library, in armloads, replenishing them every two or three days. She read avidly, indiscriminately, using them as an antidote for the pain in her heart.

She wrote more letters than she received.
“They certainly are slow in answering,” she thought, beginning a letter to Nell who already owed her a letter. “But then,” she admitted to herself, “they’re not living in my life the way I’m living in theirs.” 

At church next day Dr. MacDonald said something that helped her. Emily’s mind kept drifting away from the sermon to last night’s fun. But suddenly this sentence flashed out—it was a quotation from Shakespeare, she thought: “Muster your wits: stand in your own defense.” She had no idea in what sense he had used it, but it seemed to be a message aimed directly at her. “Muster your wits: stand in your own defense,” she kept repeating to herself on the long walk home.

She forced herself to conversational overtures but they sounded hollow. No one seemed to respond. “I shouldn’t be trying so hard. No one else is trying,” she thought.

“I tag them around, but I’m like a shadow. Well, I won’t do it anymore!” She wasn’t tired of her friends, but she was tired of pursuing them as though her own life were worthless. 

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