“When I am asked if Anne herself is a “real person” I always answer “no” with an odd reluctance and…”
“When I am asked if Anne herself is a “real person” I always answer “no” with an odd reluctance and an uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real to me that I feel I am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save Dreamland. Does she not stand at my elbow even now — if I turned my head quickly should I not see her — with her eager, starry eyes and her long braids of red hair and her little pointed chin? To tell that haunting elf that she is not real, because, forsooth, I never met her in the flesh! No, I cannot do it! She is so real that, although I’ve never met her, I feel quite sure I shall do so some day — perhaps on a stroll through Lover’s Lane in the twilight — or in the moonlit Birch Path — I shall lift my eyes and find her, child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I have always known she was somewhere.”
–
Lucy Maud Montgomery (via anne-withan-e)
This quote brings tears to my eyes. I’ve always felt this way about Anne, too.
It reminds me of a conversation I had with my six-year old a few months back.
For maybe a year, my husband has been reading her the Harry Potter books at bedtime. (They’re midway through Order of the Phoenix.) She’s madly in love with them. She’s been making plans for what she’ll do when she gets her Hogwarts letter in a few years — she’s a little concerned about being away from home so young.
And then one day, she sat down on my lap and asked: “Is Harry Potter real?”
I think I was more prepared to have the sex talk than that one.
I told her that sometimes, people in books are just as real as the people we see every day. (Sometimes they’re more real, I wanted to say.) They can be friends. They can help make us who we are.
And I found, to my surprise, that I was fighting back tears.
She seemed satisfied — and quickly bored — and jumped down to go play. But I haven’t gotten over it.
YES! I wanted to say. Yes Anne is real, and Harry is real, and Harriet Welsch and Elizabeth Bennet and Jane Eyre and all the other great literary loves of my life.
But at school they’re learning about the difference between “fiction” and “non-fiction,”
and last week she told her sister: “Harry Potter is just a story.”
And I fought back tears again.
Reposted from http://ift.tt/1symtSf.
