Book Review: Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) by L. M. Montgomery #1937Club

On the lines of stories like Frances Hodgson Burnett’s The Secret Garden, Elizabeth Von Arnim’s The Enchanted April, and Lucy Maud Montgomery’s own, The Blue Castle, where a change of scene and importantly nature bring about a life changing transformation in the characters’ until then dreary and oftentimes even miserable lives, is Jane of Lantern Hill (1937). While written for a younger audience, as are most of the Canadian writer’s books, this one deals with among other things a broken marriage and in Jane gives us an eleven-year-old in some ways wise beyond her years.

Jane of Lantern Hill opens in Toronto, on 60 Gay Street, where Jane ‘Victoria’ Stuart lives with her beautiful loving mother and stern, cold grandmother leading a not very happy life. Her grandmother and aunt Gertrude leave no opportunity of putting her down, always calling her out for her ‘low’ tastes; she is well looked after of course has everything but can never do anything she likes, isn’t ‘allowed’ to run in the house or laugh or have a cat which she very much yearns for. Her mother loves her but lacks the strength to stand up to her own mother. Jane’s one friend is Jody an orphan who lives a couple of houses away, herself in miserable circumstances (even worse than Jane for she has to earn her keep) and the moon which is the place of Jane’s dreams.

After a few strange (or at least out of the ordinary) occurrences almost seeming to foreshadow what’s coming, a letter arrives from Jane’s father, Andrew Stuart asking for her to be ‘sent’ to him for the summer to Prince Edward Island where he lives. Her grandmother and mother are reluctant but compelled to agree and Jane is anticipating an even more miserable three months with a man she can’t help but hate. Her arrival on PEI is far from ideal but things change when she finally meets her father for the first time, for he turns out to not be a stranger at all (there’s a fun surprise here which would be a spoiler to reveal). Now her visit takes an almost 180 degree turn from what she was anticipating as with her dad, she not only finds a ‘home’ where she belongs as much as the home belongs to them—a little cottage on Lantern Hill which they buy (Andrew was so far in lodgings) for it has just the ‘magic’ they are looking for—but also a place where she can have/do all that she likes—a garden of her own with the flowers she wants, cooking and keeping house which have always appealed to her, pets (cats for her and a dog, Happy for her dad), and countless, yes countless friends—from their neighbours, the Jimmy Johns and the Snowbeams to Min a gypsy girl to many others, who love and are loved by her. Not only that, with her dad, lessons that didn’t ever interest her, suddenly begin to appeal. Here she can be Jane, not ‘Victoria’ as all at her grandmother’s call her but which she doesn’t feel like at all.

Now when she returns to Toronto, her grandmother finds a very different ‘Victoria’, one she can no longer hurt. Jane too, is no longer worried, but she does want to find out why her parents separated, and whether there is the slightest chance of bringing them back together. Does she manage to do so? Do they have a ‘happily ever after’?

Jane of Lantern Hill is essentially a ‘feel good’ story and it is both delightful and uplifting seeing Jane not only ‘free’ of the stifling, forbidding and cold atmosphere of 60 Gay Street but finding a place where she can finally be herself. She has always wanted to cook and she can do so in Lantern Hill; she can have the cats she’s always longed for, and shine in ways she didn’t know possible. Even more than Jane’s happiness in PEI where she knows she will return the next summer is the change in her when she returns (not too willingly) to Toronto—one can’t but be thrilled when her grandmother finds she can’t get to her anymore or indeed see her try all sorts of tricks to win Jane over knowing she will fail.

Prince Edward Island and its beauty are staples in L. M. Montgomery’s books and it is much the same here as she inspires in the reader the same love for the place that she herself has. Consider this for instance, when Jane wakes up on her first morning in PEI waiting for her father to collect her from her Aunt Irene’s home:

Jane did not know she was looking out on the loveliest thing on earth . . . a June morning in Prince Edward Island . . . but she knew it all seemed like a different world from last night. A wave of fragrance broke in her face from the lilac hedge between Aunt Irene’s house and the next one. The poplars in a corner of the lawn were shaking in green laughter. An apple-tree stretched out friendly arms. There was a far-away view of daisy-sprinkled fields across the harbour where white gulls were soaring and swooping. The air was moist and sweet after the rain. Aunt Irene’s house was on the fringe of the town and a country road ran behind it . . . a road almost blood-red in its glistening wetness. Jane had never imagined a road coloured like that.

Montgomery’s skill is much the same when it comes to describing houses—her vivid descriptions not only make them ‘real’ (as they must have been) but she gets the reader to also ‘feel’ the same magic as they must have held for her. The cottage at Lantern Hill (or more specifically Aunt Matilda Jollie’s cottage) Jane finds

… squatted right against a little steep hill whose toes were lost in bracken. It was small . . . you could have put half a dozen of it inside 60 Gay. It had a garden, with a stone dike at the lower end of it to keep it from sliding down the hill, a paling and a gate, with two tall white birches leaning over it, and a flat-stone walk up to the only door, which had eight small panes of glass in its upper half. The door was locked but they could see in at the windows. There was a good-sized room on one side of the door, stairs going up right in front of it, and two small rooms on the other side whose windows looked right into the side of the hill where ferns grew as high as your waist, and there were stones lying about covered with velvet green moss.

There was a bandy-legged old cook-stove in the kitchen, a table and some chairs. And a dear little glass-paned cupboard in the corner fastened with a wooden button.

On one side of the house was a clover field and on the other a maple grove, sprinkled with firs and spruces, and separated from the house lot by an old, lichen-covered board fence. There was an apple-tree in the corner of the yard, with pink petals falling softly, and a clump of old spruces outside the garden gate.

Wouldn’t you want to live in it? I certainly do!

For all the pleasantness in the story, there is also the issue of Jane’s parents’ broken marriage. Initially Jane has only snippets of information from different sources (her cousin among them) most of which seem to hold her to be the cause of the falling out. But talking to people on the island and then her parents themselves separately, she finds the fault lay in both of them. And here Jane proves herself very mature, able to recognize the flaws in both her parents without necessarily faulting them for it (this also comes through also in how she begins to face her grandmother and separately Aunt Irene, her confidence in herself and inner strength meaning that she need do nothing to get the message across). She wishes them to reconcile of course and there is the typical ‘threat’ in the form of a possible love interest for her father—but the solution, through a touch abrupt, doesn’t come instantly or miraculously. Her parents haven’t really ‘changed’ as such but one knows that Jane’s sense and understanding will bring what was missing in the equation.

Current-day readers might find Jane’s enjoyment of housekeeping and cooking (and likewise her father’s inability to do the latter) stereotypical but I think (aside from the time the book was written), they tend to get too demonized to times—enjoying cooking or looking after one’s home is perfectly fine (as is also not liking doing these).

This review has already got a little too long but it won’t do to not mention the cast of singular and fun characters we meet on PEI—each nicely drawn out even though they don’t get much space on the pages. There are an assortment of animals too—cats and dogs and cows mostly but also a lion—yes you read that right!

A very lovely revisit which I enjoyed each moment of.

This was my second pick for Karen and Simon’s #1937Club