Emily of New Moon Timeframe
The timeline and timeframe of the Emily books is a mess. Emily Climbs is the only one of the Emily books not to have errors in its timeline of Emily’s life. By my count, Emily of New Moon has Emily being 12 for two years, while Emily’s Quest has her being 19 for two years and never 20.*
But if we ignore these glitches in the matrix, it looks like the historical time frame has to be:
Emily turns 11 in May 1897, 12 in 1898, 13 in 1899, 14 in 1900, and 15 in May 1901.
This is the only thing that I can make work with the following two dates:
In November-December when Emily is 11, she quarrels with Ilse about whether they would rather be Joan of Arc or Frances Willard (a suffragist and temperance advocate), and Emily says Frances Willard because she is still alive. Frances Willard died in Febrary 1898, therefore the latest this Nov-Dec can be is 1897.
In the September when Emily is 15, she hears the story from “The Woman Who Spanked the King”, and therefore Edward VII must be king. Queen Victoria died in February 1901 and was succeeded by her son Edward. Therefore, the earliest year this moment can take place is 1901.
This means that in July 1914, when World War I begins, Emily would be 28. Ignoring the internal-timeline issues, this is 2 years after she and Teddy finally reunite and get together at the end of the book.
Dean is 36 when Emily meets him, so he’d be just over 50 when World War I begins.
*[Detailed calculations if wanted:
The series starts in May; Emily’s birthday is in late May. Emily describes herself as 11 in the June after the book starts (“Trial by Fire”), so she was 10 – a couple weeks from 11 – when it began. This lines up with her father’s description (4 years from her birth until her mother’s death, then 3 years until her father gets sick, and then 4 after her gets sick, for 11 total).
In the chapter “Living Epistles” Emily describes her birthday in May and says it has been nearly a year dince she came to New Moon. In September, she tells Father Cassidy she is 12. The next summer, when she visits Great-Aunt Nancy, she is still 12. Late that summer she writes her vow to climb “the Alpine Path” to literary success and gives her age as “12 years and 3 months”. So we’ve got 2 years of her being 22.
In Emily’s Quest, there are the following years (from summer to summer):
Emily is 17: One (uneventful) year between the start of the book (summer) and Mr. Carpenter’s death (the following May), taking up chapters 1-3.
Emily is 18: Ilse and Teddy don’t come back for the summer. The year includes Emily having a short-lived whirwind romance. Chapters 4 and 5.
Emily is 19: Ilse and Teddy come back for the summer (when Emily has just turned 19), before Teddy’s departure for Europe, but he and Emily are cold to each other. Emily writes A Seller of Dreams, burns it, gets injured, recovered, and decides to marry Dean. She should turn 20 in May of the spring that she becomes engaged to Dean. But the book says they can’t marry in autumn as they prefer because Aunt Elizabeth won’t consent to them marrying before Emily is 20. So the book has her being 19 for two years. Yes the timeline appears to work as though she were 20 in this year (based on counting up to the year she turns 24 and reads the leter written by herself at 14) , so we have no year in which she’s 20.]
