I took another look through Emily’s Quest and I think the fundamental problem of the book is that it feels like a synopsis of itself.
It describes events (Emily’s short-lived passion for Aylmer Vincent, her increasingly impersonal letters to Ilse and Teddy, all the other people who court her, really most of what happens) from a distance and in brief. In the other two Emily books – in most of LM Montgomery’s books – we’re close to the characters’ thoughts and feelings, even when written in third-person. Emily’s Quest is mostly just a list of things happening; her feelings are described but not shared. We’re told the outcome of events before they happen.
One day in the last week of October Cousin Jimmy began to plough the hill field, Emily found the lost legendary diamond of the Murrays, and Aunt Elizabeth fell down the cellar steps and broke her leg.
This. This is how you write an outline, not a book. It might have been intended as a good juxtaposition, but it removes all the surprise and drama from what should be a dramatic event! The Lost Diamond gets about a page of space.
Similarly the romance with Aylmer Vincent. If the reader were actually encouraged to enter into Emily’s feelings – to ignore that this is near the start of the book and can’t be the endgame – rather than having its short-lived nature treated as a foregone conclusion, it might have some bite.
I’ve seen in other posts that LM Montgomery was seriously depressed when she wrote this, so maybe she did publish her moderately touched-up outlines. The book has the sense of blankness that comes with depression.
This is an interesting observation, and I would agree that this book felt far more impersonal than the first two. It also spans a great deal of time in the least amount of pages; Emily's Quest is the shortest of the trilogy, while following her from when she is 18/19, all the way past 24 (she reads the letter from her 14 year-old-self, and then it is implied that Teddy comes back to Blair Water at least some years after his almost-wedding to Ilse). The events are viewed through a far-off lens. You don't get the same colour and vibrancy in the goings-on of Emily as you did with the incident of the poisoned apple with Lofty John, for example. I feel the greatest loss as a result of this narrative delivery was the romance between Teddy and Emily. Dean Priest was given several chapters of momentary happiness (I would argue the parts of the book which felt the most like the others was their engagement and the feelings of doubt that plagued Emily and her toiling over them), while Teddy spent most of the narrative off-page and in Europe. His confession at the end felt a little unearned. You were in love with Emily the whole time? Really? Are you sure? Moments like the Lost Diamond could have greatly benefited from more room to breathe, but the romance was completely suffocated.
