Somehow, in my quest to read everything Montgomery, it took me about forty years to get to Jane of Lantern Hill. It was published in 1937, between Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside.
In the beginning, Jane is not “of Lantern Hill.” She lives with her mother and grandmother at 60 Gay Street in Toronto. Grandmother is a manipulative tyrant, and life isn’t easy for Jane. In spite of that, Jane believes her mother is happy.
Jane believes her father is dead. Not because anyone has told her that, but because no one ever mentions him. One day, Jane’s mother receives a letter from Jane’s father insisting that he be allowed to see Jane. “The letter was a bolt from the blue.”
Jane’s father lives on Prince Edward Island. She thinks she hates her father, and she knows she will hate Prince Edward Island. However, as soon as Jane sees her father, she likes everything about him. “She felt at once the call of that mysterious kinship of soul which has nothing to do with relationships of flesh and blood.” Now, instead of “father,” he is “dad.”
Summer with dad on P. E. Island is perfect. For an eleven-year-old, Jane is amazingly capable of doing anything she puts her mind to. She is completely able to keep house for her dad, not because she has had practice, but because she loves to help, and because she has watched her grandmother’s cook.
Once summer is over, Jane goes back to Toronto for the school year. She survives the winter counting the months until she can go back to P. E. Island. Everyone in the neighborhood on the Island loves her, and she finds her place among them.
Dad’s nasty, insinuating older sister takes every chance she gets to hint to Jane that her dad is going to go to the States to get a divorce from Jane’s mother so he can marry someone else. While Jane is still in Toronto in early spring, she gets two letters that lead her to believe that her dad is really going to do it. She takes some money she had saved from Christmas and gets on a train for the 1,000 mile trip to P. E. Island alone. When she gets there, she walks five miles in the rain to Lantern Hill, which inevitably leads to pneumonia. The crisis brings her mother back to the Island, and Jane’s mother and dad reconcile.
Despite some over-the-top incidents, such as Jane being instrumental in capturing an escaped circus lion, she is a loveable character. Montgomery gives her some unbelievable wisdom and talents for a girl her age, which isn’t unusual for Montgomery’s heroines. Bringing Jane’s parents together because of a life-threatening illness is an awfully tired device, one that has been used by some of the best authors. In the end, the good people are happy and the not-so-good people get their come-uppance, which is a neat ending for a children’s story.
What troubles me is that, as everything comes together for a happy ending, Jane thinks, “There would be no more misunderstandings. She, Jane, understood them both [her parents] and could interpret them to each other. And have an eye on the housekeeping as well. It all fitted in as if it had been planned ages ago.”
The way the ending landed for me reminds me of how I felt about Pat of Silverbush. Montgomery didn’t seem to know how to manage a well-adjusted family. Not only is neither of Jane’s parents well-suited to keeping house as well as their twelve-year-old daughter can, but she is also going to have to keep an eye on their marriage? Throughout the story, the responsibility Jane felt for taking care of the adults in her life was slightly off kilter, but I hoped that when her parents got together again, they would lift that responsibility from her young shoulders. For me, the story ended completely out of balance.
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Jane of Lantern Hill at Amazon.com.