The Story Girl

The Story Girl shows Lucy Maud Montgomery's gift for making oral storytelling alter the mood of ordinary family life. Breakfast must wait while a sick cow is tended, so the Story Girl fills the pause with a tale about a young poet asleep in an orchard and the mischievous girl who kisses him after mistaking him for a cousin. As she speaks, Felix and the narrator stop watching busy Felicity and begin to see the remembered scene.

The effect matters as much as the anecdote. A bench, a sleeping visitor, a blush, and a later poem become vivid through voice, and the listening children immediately argue about how the story should have ended. They also act it out, assigning roles according to personality, appearance, and affection. Story passes into play, then returns to the social relations of the present.

Within Montgomery's corpus, which includes Anne of Green Gables and its sequels, The Story Girl centers the imaginative power of a young speaker rather than merely presenting another narrated adventure. The excerpt also lets class enter the circle through Peter, a hired boy whom the Story Girl defends against Felicity's condescension. Education and status may determine how adults rank him, but storytelling creates another measure of distinction. Montgomery makes attention itself transformative: when the Story Girl begins, everyone else sees more than the room before them.