Returning to an Old Friend

I, Adonia, am a 27 year old who studies cultural anthropology. I'm looking forward not only to reflecting on these three books on this blog, but also to seeing the impressions they give my friend Sarah, who has not read them, and my little sister Vera, who read them just once.
L.M. Montgomery's descriptions of Emily and the way she sees the world had a profound impact on my identity as I grew up. I can't remember when I first read the books; sometime after reading the Anne books, probably around age 11 or 12. I found in Emily a mirror for my own solitary tendencies, my own joy in the beauty of a landscape. I used to read these books over and over, considering a Saturday spent immersed in one to be quality time. I took them to college with me, tattered as they were, but somewhere over the years since then I lost my original copies. When we decided to write this blog I was happy to think that I'd have an excuse to buy new ones.
So, cracking a new copy of Emily of New Moon filled me with tremendous pleasure. Would I love her as much? Would I have grown too different in the 10 years since these books fed my visions of what my future would be?
The book starts with one of Emily's raptures over her pastoral surroundings. She flies through the air with her fairy spirits, overcome with feeling the picturesque world around her. And then it comes crashing down with Ellen Greene's blunt statement about her papa's impending death. One aspect of Montgomery's works that I've noticed more as an adult reader is the way she portrays contemporary (early 1900s) views on children. Ellen thinks she is helping Emily by revealing Douglas Starr's illness, but I think the reader is supposed to sympathize with the sensitive little girl and her contemptuous father (I agree with Sarah that the rude descriptions of Ellen reflect poorly on the dying Starr, but I cut him some slack since he never got over losing Emily's mother. I really sympathized with him when I was reading this first part because I was melancholy about being separated from someone dear to me).
Emily has existed in an unconventional world of words and imagination, kept sheltered from the worldly view that her father is a failure and her mother a disgrace to her family. I think Montgomery does a great job of setting up the contrast between this bohemian existence and the strident Protestantism of the Murrays, who seem awfully petty and their treatment of that poor little girl grotesque.
How fascinating that Montgomery paints so keenly Emily's anxiety over the world at the same time that her setting has no tolerance for such sensitivity! It's almost gothic.
I'd like my sign off to be Wind Woman, but that's a little too hippie for me. I shall be, instead,
-The Flash