Emily Of New Moon

In October, Emily loved to watch Cousin Jimmy boil potatoes for the pigs in a giant cauldron outside. Jimmy would recite his poetry for her when it was just the two of them. Sometimes, Ilse and Teddy would come, too, and Jimmy would tell them stories. When he was finished, he would let the children eat several of the potatoes with salt.

Emily was given a new kitten named Mike II by a traveling salesman. At first, Elizabeth would not let her keep it and instructed Jimmy to drown the kitten in the nearby pond. Jimmy left to do it, and Emily refused to eat. After dinner, she ran to the pond and found the kitten still there, soaking wet and stuck on a small island in the middle of the pond. Emily waded into the water and rescued it. When she returned home with the kitten, she told Aunt Elizabeth that she would be keeping it and gave her the Murray look. Once again, Elizabeth was so startled and taken aback by the expression on her face that she gave in and let Emily keep the kitten.

One day, Emily is exploring a well that Cousin Jimmy had told her about when she finds herself face-to-face with Mr. James Lee’s English bull. When the bull moves toward her, Emily is paralyzed with fear.

Luckily, a boy sits on the fence watching and yells for her to run. She finally does and barely escapes from the bull charging at her by jumping over the fence. The boy who called out to her is Perry Miller, who lives with his Aunt Tom in a poor area of Blair Water called Stovepipe Town. He tells her that his father is dead, but when he was alive, he was a sea captain, and Perry sailed all over the world with him.

Perry likes Emily immediately; when he learns that she lives at New Moon, he decides to take a farmhand job that Jimmy had once offered him, which he’d declined. He also decides that he wants to go to school because Emily goes. Perry is determined to do well in school and quickly moves through the work until he is at the head of his class. He is also competitive, telling Emily, Ilse, and Teddy that he can write poetry, recite, and draw as well as they can.

In a letter to her father, Emily writes that Teddy and Perry don’t like each other much. Perry once threatened to punch Teddy, and Teddy once drew a caricature of Perry hanging from a tree. Once, a girl at school borrows Emily’s ring, which is really Aunt Laura’s, and tells her that she dropped it in the brook. Perry demands that the girl give it back, knowing that the girl is just playing a prank on Emily. Emily is grateful that she has Perry to stand up for her.

She tells her father about the other children at school and various things that have happened at home. She ends her letter by describing how the snow and ice have transformed the farm and how beautiful it is.

Emily and Ilse have been rewarded by being allowed to sit on the side bench in the schoolhouse, where they can see everyone else sitting in rows. This is a rare occasion for Emily because Miss Brownell still holds a grudge from when she felt Emily was rude to her on the first day of school. They are supposed to be working on math problems, but Emily is writing poetry, and Ilse is reading it and making suggestions. Emily is absorbed in her writing and does not realize Miss Brownell is walking toward them.

Miss Brownell takes the slate from Emily’s hands and reads what she has written. She mocks her for her misspelled and misused words while the other children laugh. When she reads a line that she thinks is good, she says that Emily couldn’t have possibly written it herself. Emily is humiliated. Rhoda raises her hand and tells Miss Brownell that Emily has even more poetry in her desk. Miss Brownell goes to the desk and takes out the stack of poems.

Meanwhile, Perry is spitting wads of paper at Rhoda, and Teddy has drawn caricatures of both Rhoda and Miss Brownell.

Miss Brownell reads a little of each poem, continuing to mock them. When she heads toward the stove to burn them, Emily jumps up and snatches them out of her hands. She refuses to give them to Miss Brownell and calls her “an unjust, tyrannical person” (166). Miss Brownell tells her that she will visit her house to tell her aunts about her behavior.

Later that evening, Emily stays in the garret until Aunt Laura tells her to come down. Aunt Elizabeth and Miss Brownell are waiting for her. Emily wants to tell her side of the story, but Aunt Elizabeth won’t hear it. Suddenly, Perry pokes his head through the hole in the kitchen ceiling and says everything Miss Brownell said was a lie. Everyone is surprised by his presence, and Aunt Elizabeth tells him to come down from the hole in the ceiling. He is about to obey until they realize he is naked because he fell into the brook earlier and got wet and hadn’t put dry clothes on yet. Elizabeth shouts at him to change, then tells Emily that she must kneel in front of Miss Brownell and ask her forgiveness. Emily does not do this, and Elizabeth threatens to have the entire household shun her if she does not obey. Jimmy intervenes and says that no one should have to kneel in front of anyone except God, and Elizabeth concedes that he is right. Emily does not have to kneel, but she does have to apologize.

Emily apologizes to Miss Brownell, who is disappointed that Emily had not been forced to grovel for her forgiveness. After she leaves, Emily has to eat her dinner alone in the pantry. Laura visits her and says she is on Emily’s side and that Emily can have a ginger cookie later. However, Emily is in the middle of composing a poem and is too absorbed in it to care about cookies.

This chapter consists of a series of letters Emily writes to her father. In them, she summarizes the major events that have happened to her over the last few months. She tells him about a fire that started at Ilse’s house that she noticed first and that the newspaper even mentioned her by name when it reported the fire.

She tells her father that once, some unexpected company showed up at New Moon while her aunts were out, and she was able to prepare cake and tea. Jimmy helped her set the table so she could entertain their guests by herself.

Other stories include Teddy carving their initials into a tree and someone else cutting them out, her progress on a long poem she is writing, her birthday, Aunt Laura teaching her how to sew, and writing her first letter sent by post to her Great Aunt Nancy, who called her stupid once she read it. She tells him that Aunt Elizabeth is still very stern and strict with her and won’t let her read her father’s books until she is a grownup.

Her final story is about how she dropped her coin for the collection basket onto the church floor, which made such a loud sound that she was embarrassed. Perry tried to make her feel better by dropping his own, but it upset her more because she worried everyone would think she dropped hers twice. Later, the minister, Mr. Dare, visited New Moon, and he and Emily talked about God. She confesses that she is worried that she loves some things more than God, such as beautiful things in nature, and he reassures her that everything beautiful is made by God, so she does actually love God most of all. She likes this interpretation and believes that Mr. Dare’s God must be the same as her father’s. She ends her last letter with a regretful postscript, saying how sad it is that he can never write back to her.

Emily is still holding a grudge against Lofty John for the trick he played on her with the apple, and Lofty John is still holding a grudge against Aunt Elizabeth for how she scolded him for playing the trick. As a result, Lofty John decides to cut down the brush and tree area between their two houses that Emily, Teddy, and Ilse love to play in. The children are distraught and try to think of ways to stop this.

Since Lofty John is Catholic, Teddy suggests that if a priest told him he couldn’t cut down the trees, he would have to listen. Emily knows that Aunt Elizabeth would never ask a priest to intervene, so she decides to walk to White Cross and talk to Father Cassidy herself.

She is nervous about meeting Father Cassidy because she has never met a Catholic priest before and is unsure if there are rituals or requirements for this kind of meeting that she doesn’t know about. As soon as she sees him, though, she is immediately at ease. Father Cassidy is a pleasant Irishman who is delighted to meet Emily. He tells her that she must be an elf or fairy. After listening to her troubles with Lofty John, he promises to talk to him and save the trees from being cut down. Emily shares one of her poems with him and he encourages her to keep writing, which means a lot to Emily.