REVIEW: Magic for Marigold
Aug. 25th, 2016 06:02 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
feather_ghyllMagic for Marigold: L.M. Montgomery Harrap 1935
This story of Marigold and her clan, the Lesleys (of Cloud of Spruce, Prince Edward Island), starts like a fairy story, with a baby in need of a name. Marigold’s beginnings are rather sad, her father died before she was born and her mother was ill for several months after the birth. Lorraine Lesley is very sweet, but not very confident, certainly not enough to stand up to a proud family run by a ninetysomething martinet in Old Grandmother. Fortunately, when the time comes to name the child, nobody in the family can come up with something that will satisfy the rest. The baby has a fairy godmother of sorts – or rather, she falls seriously ill, so seriously that the family even turns to a woman doctor. Not only does she save the babe, but she attracts Marigold’s uncle, who was dead set against matrimony. The grateful family decide to name Marigold after the woman who becomes her aunt.
Marigold can find the magic in anything, like so many of Montgomery’s heroines. Nature, anthropomorphised and imagined, thrills her. She wants an interesting life. And she gets it. I was chuckling heartily at a lot of her adventures and the acerbic anecdotes her family drops. (Lesley pride could give Murray pride a good run for its money.) The humour balances out the rhapsodising.
Old Grandmother insists on staying alive long enough for Marigold to remember her and to realise the old woman had a youth, too. Young Grandmother becomes simply Grandmother and she, along with Marigold’s beloved mother, are responsible for Marigold’s upbringing. The latter has ‘too much’ imagination while the former has too little. There are other influences, of course, on Marigold.
What’s interesting is that for a long time, Marigold only really has an imaginary friend in Sylvia. For a while all the girls she meets are bad influences, lively, but ultimately unsatisfactory. She doesn’t chum up with anyone at school, but as she becomes old enough to visit relatives, she comes to meet girls who are of ‘the tribe of Joseph’ and even one or two boys who fall into that catgeory.
I found that the book had a tendency to get more episodic as it went on, or rather to have clumps of chapters with variants on the same theme – friendship, the influence of religion on Marigold (she is easily impressed) and then visits.
It ends with Marigold aged 13 or so, which weirdly means that she’s having boy troubles from the age of 11 onwards. Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning, but the intensity of her interactions with irritating and disappointing boys and then one who has the power to hurt more than her pride at an age where she is obviously too young to have a ‘beau’ and yet is teased about becoming some boy’s future wife feels as if Montgomery was trying to cram in too much life experience in this limited chronicle of her heroine’s life.
Montgomery writes with sympathy of what Marigold undergoes because she feels things so strongly like her long-standing jealousy on her mother’s behalf of her dead father’s first wife. But there’s also an awareness of the piquancy with which children think – from an early age, Marigold becomes grateful that people can’t read her mind! And there’s the very human nature of the people living around her, oh, and talking cats – not really, but sometimes Marigold ‘understands’ them or Montgomery transcribes the thoughts of black Lucifer and the Witch of Endor, which are the names that are given to a series of Cloud of Spruce cats. It is of a piece that something I often find an irritating affectation when other writers try it on (especially with dogs) works here.
While I understand perfectly why Anne and Emily were more popular, and this is just a collection of Marigold’s antics as she grows up from babyhood to various points in childhood to what seems like a slightly precocious girlhood (as opposed to the stronger plot of Jane of Lantern Hill) it was great fun to read a new-to-me Montgomery.
This story of Marigold and her clan, the Lesleys (of Cloud of Spruce, Prince Edward Island), starts like a fairy story, with a baby in need of a name. Marigold’s beginnings are rather sad, her father died before she was born and her mother was ill for several months after the birth. Lorraine Lesley is very sweet, but not very confident, certainly not enough to stand up to a proud family run by a ninetysomething martinet in Old Grandmother. Fortunately, when the time comes to name the child, nobody in the family can come up with something that will satisfy the rest. The baby has a fairy godmother of sorts – or rather, she falls seriously ill, so seriously that the family even turns to a woman doctor. Not only does she save the babe, but she attracts Marigold’s uncle, who was dead set against matrimony. The grateful family decide to name Marigold after the woman who becomes her aunt.
Marigold can find the magic in anything, like so many of Montgomery’s heroines. Nature, anthropomorphised and imagined, thrills her. She wants an interesting life. And she gets it. I was chuckling heartily at a lot of her adventures and the acerbic anecdotes her family drops. (Lesley pride could give Murray pride a good run for its money.) The humour balances out the rhapsodising.
Old Grandmother insists on staying alive long enough for Marigold to remember her and to realise the old woman had a youth, too. Young Grandmother becomes simply Grandmother and she, along with Marigold’s beloved mother, are responsible for Marigold’s upbringing. The latter has ‘too much’ imagination while the former has too little. There are other influences, of course, on Marigold.
What’s interesting is that for a long time, Marigold only really has an imaginary friend in Sylvia. For a while all the girls she meets are bad influences, lively, but ultimately unsatisfactory. She doesn’t chum up with anyone at school, but as she becomes old enough to visit relatives, she comes to meet girls who are of ‘the tribe of Joseph’ and even one or two boys who fall into that catgeory.
I found that the book had a tendency to get more episodic as it went on, or rather to have clumps of chapters with variants on the same theme – friendship, the influence of religion on Marigold (she is easily impressed) and then visits.
It ends with Marigold aged 13 or so, which weirdly means that she’s having boy troubles from the age of 11 onwards. Perhaps it’s cultural conditioning, but the intensity of her interactions with irritating and disappointing boys and then one who has the power to hurt more than her pride at an age where she is obviously too young to have a ‘beau’ and yet is teased about becoming some boy’s future wife feels as if Montgomery was trying to cram in too much life experience in this limited chronicle of her heroine’s life.
Montgomery writes with sympathy of what Marigold undergoes because she feels things so strongly like her long-standing jealousy on her mother’s behalf of her dead father’s first wife. But there’s also an awareness of the piquancy with which children think – from an early age, Marigold becomes grateful that people can’t read her mind! And there’s the very human nature of the people living around her, oh, and talking cats – not really, but sometimes Marigold ‘understands’ them or Montgomery transcribes the thoughts of black Lucifer and the Witch of Endor, which are the names that are given to a series of Cloud of Spruce cats. It is of a piece that something I often find an irritating affectation when other writers try it on (especially with dogs) works here.
While I understand perfectly why Anne and Emily were more popular, and this is just a collection of Marigold’s antics as she grows up from babyhood to various points in childhood to what seems like a slightly precocious girlhood (as opposed to the stronger plot of Jane of Lantern Hill) it was great fun to read a new-to-me Montgomery.
