Emily of Deep Valley
A Deep Valley Book
Maud Hart Lovelace
Illustrated by Vera Neville
For
ELIZABETH RILEY
Contents
Foreword
1. The Last Day of High School
2. Emily’s Slough
3. Class Day
4. Decoration Day
5. Commencement Day
6. Under the Locust Tree
7. They All Go Away
8. The Slough of Despond
9. Hair Up
10. Emily Musters Her Wits
11. Crack the Whip
12. Poetry, Music, and Dance
13. “The Sweetheart of Sigma Chi”
14. A Christmas Party
15. Old Year into New
16. The Wrestling Champs
17. Supper with Miss Fowler
18. Mr. Jed
19. Webster Talks a Few
20. Don Comes to Call
21. Under the Locust Tree Again
About the Author
About Emily of Deep Valley
About Illustrator Vera Neville
Praise
Other Books by in The Betsy-Tacy Books
Credits
Copyright
About the Publisher
Foreword
One Saturday morning when we were new to America, my sister and I walked to the New York Public Library’s Flushing branch, two miles from our apartment. It was my first visit to a library. I wandered through the stacks wide-eyed, fingering spines of unread books like a beggar in a bakery. I could take seven of them home with me! I chose carefully, knowing I’d savor them later on our fire escape, my secret reading sanctuary.
It didn’t take long to find Maud Hart Lovelace’s concoctions. Her classic novels served as a superb orientation for a newcomer eager to understand the history and heritage of a new world. They took me back to the early 1900s, a time when America shared many of the values that resonated in my old-world home, but they also sparkled with timeless humor that made me laugh out loud on the fire escape.
I was starting to see that the best stories blended three main ingredients: people, place, and plot. Mrs. Lovelace’s books had all three, but her characters easily danced off the pages into my friend-hungry heart. I finished the “high school” Betsy-Tacy books first and immediately added Betsy to my growing list of fictional best buddies. She has a fun group of friends, loving parents, and big writing dreams. What was not to like?
Then, in Emily of Deep Valley, Mrs. Lovelace introduced me to Emily Webster, a teen who attends the same high school as Betsy. This novel is full of familiar characters—robust Bobby Cobb, stately Miss Bangeter, fun-loving Cab Edwards, and “little, dark-eyed” Miss Fowler, Deep Valley’s treasure of an English teacher. Alice, Dennie, Winona, Tacy, Tib, and even Betsy herself make appearances in the book. But even Betsy plays a minor supporting role in what is indisputably Emily’s story.
I began rooting for Emily from the get-go. She’s treasurer of her class and a master debater—the only girl on an all-guy team who helps her school win the Southern Minnesota Championship two years in a row. Even though she’s an orphan, she isn’t jealous of her popular, pretty second cousin’s doting parents. I admired how Emily sticks to her own classic, simple style when it comes to clothes and doesn’t try to imitate Annette’s frills and lace. And while other people her age (Don!—more on him later) scoff at tradition, Emily rises early to decorate the graves of her ancestors, dutifully presses her grandfather’s uniform, and esteems the old Gettysburg soldiers marching on Decoration Day. When Miss Fowler suggests that a housekeeper take care of her grandfather so that Emily can go to college, Emily’s answer is quick: “No. He’s eighty-one. I’ve lived with him all my life.” I was impressed by her loyalty and self-sacrifice.
Yes, Emily has many likeable character traits, but unlike Betsy, she isn’t best friend material at all. Why not, you might be wondering? Well, because Emily is me.
Despite her strengths, she has serious flaws—more serious than any of Betsy’s foibles. Emily is shy and socially awkward, and she struggles with resentment. She battles loneliness, weeps in despondency, and wistfully tries to cling to childhood. All of those emotions felt really familiar to the girl reading on the fire escape. In fact, Emily’s all-too-human shortcomings and challenges resonate with most girls, even those growing up a century later.
First of all, she’s left behind by her friends. As the senior girls in her crowd head off to college, we feel her desolation on the train platform. Depression comes next—a state of mind that Mrs. Lovelace must have understood before doctors began diagnosing it as a treatable condition:
“A mood like this has to be fought. It’s like an enemy with a gun,” [Emily] told herself. But she couldn’t seem to find a gun with which to fight.
What young teen hasn’t experienced or feared some type of friend-initiated abandonment? In all good young adult Bil-dungsroman, or coming-of-age stories, the main teen character must confront her own problem. Mrs. Lovelace knew that, and that’s why her books are still being read today. Somewhere in the middle of the book, Emily begins to “muster her wits and stand in her own defense.” I can, too, the reader thinks.
Second, Emily falls in love with a guy who treats her poorly. We discover this in one short, revealing sentence in Chapter One: “Moreover, Don Walker had danced with her.” Don makes his appearance not long after that sentence, making Emily feel “the small tumult which he always created in her heart.” By Chapter Two, we know he’s a show-off, hypocritical, sullen. He’s the one who informs Emily how “stuck” she is in Deep Valley. In short, he’s a jerk. Which of us makes it through high school without a crush on a jerk? Readers today still celebrate as Emily discovers (on our behalf, too) that a true lover not only accepts you but also treats you with special care. Maybe I’ll wait for one of those.
Third, Emily has big dreams to change the world. She admires Jane Addams’ Hull House and longs to study sociology so she, too, can help the poor. The good news is that despite the limitations of Emily’s life, she finds a way to make that dream come true. Doesn’t that mean I can, too?
Mrs. Lovelace was adept at creating characters who face challenges we can understand. But Emily of Deep Valley also offers the other two intgredients required for a great story: a good sense of place and an intriguing plot.
When it comes to place, we first see the Websters’ old-fashioned house with a sagging gate, sloping yard, faded picket fence, and dim, crowded little parlor. By the end of the book, seen through the eyes of love, Emily’s home becomes the “Hull House of Deep Valley” and a “treasure of a little house.”
Deep Valley’s slough in winter provides the perfect metaphor of a desolate, apparently lifeless situation. But it’s the slough—the slough Emily loves—which first brings Kalil and Yusef to her with their basket of frogs’ legs. Little does she know that this chance meeting is the start of her dream coming true. By the last chapter, the slough in late May is “full of violets and white boughs of blooming wild plum which were dizzily sweet” and “birds singing in the newly leaved trees.” Beyond it, Emily can see the ever-present humble rooftops of the Syrians and the lights of the town.
The dilemma of the Syrian families in Deep Valley is intertwined with Emily’s internal transformation in the novel’s plot. Persecuted in their home country for religious beliefs, these newcomers are struggling to make a living and to become part of the Deep Valley community. For twenty years the townspeople kept them at a distance, but Mrs. Lovelace doesn’t allow us to do that. She introduces us to the feisty, outgoing Kalil and his “chunky, square-faced” compatriot, Yusef, and we smile at the closene
ss of their friendship. She has Kalil remove his cap and say, “Goodbye, my grandpa. I am full of thanks to you. Peace to your age,” and our hearts melt. We celebrate Christmas with the shining-eyed Syrian children and visit them at Easter, imagining the taste of Kahik, a sweet cake, and watching their traditional egg-breaking contest.
Maybe that, too, explains why I loved Emily of Deep Valley so much. Yes, I was Emily, like every girl, but I also was Yusef, Kalil, and Layla, longing for a warm American welcome. I wanted Deep Valley to give me a cup of hot cocoa, a unanimous vote, a joyful babel of hurrahs, a hearty handshake, a bottle of violet perfume. I wanted American neighbors to come to our house so my father could overflow with hospitality: “What a blessed day! You have come to my house! It is yours. You may burn it.”
Thanks to the power of Maud Hart Lovelace’s pen, I did.
I devoured Emily of Deep Valley so often I knew parts by heart. I kept sneak-reading it as an older teen and as a college student, hiding my habit while discussing trendy intellectual novels. On wintry evenings, curled up by the fire in New England, I still turn to my copy as comfort fare, drawing nourishment and inspiration from the pages.
I never grow tired of cheering for Emily, and neither will a new generation of readers. The reissue of this book is especially timely given that hospitality for strangers from South Asia and the Middle East is…a bit more shaky. In her 1995 Horn Book essay called “Against Borders,” Hazel Roch-man describes the peacemaking power of authors like Mrs. Lovelace:
A good story lets you know people as individuals in all their particularity and conflict; and once you see someone as a person—their meanness and their courage—then you’ve reached beyond stereotype.
I know that girls coming of age in our fast-paced, multicultural, high-tech culture will continue to identify with Emily’s struggles and dreams. More of them have faith, care about the poor, and identify with so-called “old-fashioned” values than the media likes to admit. I’m excited that they’ll get to meet Emily, come to love the Syrians, and be inspired to “muster their wits and stand in their own defense.”
But as this new edition goes soaring out to shelves of libraries and bookstores around the country, forgive me if I like to picture a newcomer to America discovering Emily. I can see her now, turning the pages, as enrapt as I was, with dimples as deep as Layla’s in both cheeks. Can’t you?
—MITALI PERKINS
1
The Last Day of High School
“IT’S THE LAST DAY OF high school…ever,” Annette said.
She said it gaily, swinging Emily’s hand and pulling her about so that they faced the red brick building with its tall arched windows and doors, its elaborate limestone trimming, its bulging turrets and the cupola that made an ironical dunce’s cap on top of all. Annette threw a kiss at it, then lifted her right hand and opened and shut the fingers in a playful wave.
“Good-by, old jail!” she said.
“Don’t you dare call the Deep Valley High School a jail!” Emily’s tone was joking but there was warmth in it, too. “Besides, we’ll be coming back for Class Day!”
“It won’t be the same!” Annette tilted her little dark head on which a complicated structure of puffs and curls was protected by a net and held in place by a ribbon. She smiled up engagingly. “You’re sorry, aren’t you, Em?”
“Yes, I am.”
“I’m not, a bit. That’s funny, isn’t it? When I’ve had so much more…that is, when I’ve had so much fun here.”
Emily knew what she had started to say…“When I’ve had so much more fun than you have.” It was true that Annette had been a belle, and Emily certainly hadn’t. But she loved the high school more than Annette possibly could.
“I’ve been happy here,” she said.
It had been a refuge for her. Staring up at the cupola roof, outlined against the blue May sky, she thought affectionately of the hubbub in the Social Room at noon intermission…so different from the brooding silence of her home. She thought of the fun she had had with the girls, of the companionship she had known in classrooms, of the joyful challenge she had found in debating on the Assembly Room platform. Emily was on the star debating team which had won the Southern Minnesota Championship for two years running. And there had been parties, too, like last night’s Junior-Senior banquet.
“Wasn’t the banquet wonderful?” she asked, as she and Annette started down Walnut Street. The high school stood on the corner of Walnut and High. Walnut descended a steep hill, following terraced lawns. There were snowy drifts of bridal wreath around almost all the houses, and birds were as busy as seniors, full of talk and song.
“Marvelous!” answered Annette. “Of course…” she laughed contentedly, “I had my hands full. Did you notice how sulky Jim Baxter was because I came with Don?”
“I certainly did.”
“Did you really have fun?” Annette looked pleased but puzzled. And Emily knew that she couldn’t understand why the Junior-Senior banquet had seemed wonderful to Emily when she hadn’t even come with a boy.
But it had. The familiar battered halls transformed by bunting, flags and balloons; the dinner, formally served by excited junior girls; the speeches by Miss Bangeter, the principal, and by the junior and senior class presidents—Hunter Sibley of the Class of 1912 had done a wonderful job. And the dancing! That had been best of all!
Emily didn’t go to many high school dances. It wasn’t customary to go unless a boy invited you. But even unattached girls came to the Junior-Senior banquet, and it had been thrilling to hear the music of piano and violin and to join the maze of rhythmically moving figures.
She had danced a number of times—with Hunter, and other class officers; she was treasurer of the class. Moreover, Don Walker had danced with her.
He had done it, probably, because he had come with Annette, who was Emily’s second cousin. But it had seemed a breathless boon to Emily that she should dance with Don before high school was over—closed like the covers of a book that could never be read again no matter how much one might wish to do so. They were on the debating team together, and she had a special feeling for him.
Tall and rangy in ankle-length skirts, her curly hair woven into a braid which was turned up with a ribbon, Emily walked smilingly beside her pretty cousin. Annette was so small that she often made Emily feel hulking, and Annette was so pretty—with her sparkling eyes and staccato birdlike movements—that she always made Emily feel plain. Emily wasn’t plain, exactly, but her face was serious. She was shy and quiet, although her blue eyes, set in a thicket of lashes under heavy brows, often glinted with fun. Both boys and girls liked her.
“Emily isn’t a lemon,” she had once overheard Annette say heatedly. Annette and Gladys Dunn had been planning some boy and girl party in the cloakroom and Emily had stumbled in. She had escaped without being seen, but she had never forgotten Annette’s blunt defense of her.
It was true, she decided later. She wasn’t what the high school called a lemon. But she had never learned to joke and flirt with boys. Or perhaps boys just didn’t joke and flirt with a girl who lived with her grandfather in a funny old house across the slough.
Walnut crossed Broad Street and Second and went on to Front, the business thoroughfare, which paralleled the river. The girls were nearing Front when they heard a clatter behind them and the sound of shoe leather sliding along the cement walk.
“Hi, there! Wait!”
They turned to see handsome Hunter Sibley and Ellen, his girl, hand in hand, along with Fred Muller and Scid Edwards and Don. At the sight of Don’s tall erect figure Emily felt the small tumult which he always created in her heart.
“How about stopping at Heinz’s?” called Scid. “Celebrate the last day of school?”
Annette smiled at Don. “But Em and I have to try on our graduating dresses.”
“And Hunter has to practise his oration in the Opera House,” put in Ellen, sounding proud.
“Me, too,” said Don. “I’m a
bright boy, too.” He had a deep resonant voice.
“How about you, Em?” asked Hunter.
“I’m practising mine tomorrow.”
“You Honor Roll people!” jibed Scid. “You walking encyclopedias! You grinds!”
Hunter grinned. “Don and I could meet you at Heinz’s afterward,” he said. “Even intellectual giants like us eat ice cream; don’t they, Emily?”
Emily laughed, but she didn’t know how to respond. It always irritated her, this slowness in repartee, for on the debating platform her tongue was as quick as a bird.
“I’ve an idea,” cried Annette. “Why don’t you all come to our house? Em and I have to be there anyway. I know!” she added radiantly, “I’ll give a party! Miss Annette Webster cordially invites you to a last-day-of-school party…!”
“We’ll bring ice cream from Heinz’s,” Scid yelled. He was a short, merry boy called Scid because he had said in class one day that Columbus “scidovered” America.
“Also Nabisco Wafers!”
“We’ll play the phonograph and dance!” And Scid began to dance on the corner of Walnut and Front, circling an imaginary partner.
Don laughed as he always did at other people’s antics…always, that is, when he was in a good mood.
“We’ll expect you then,” cried Annette. “But don’t come until Em and I are through with our fittings. Mamma will be nervous as a witch.”
The crowd broke up and the cousins hurried south along busy Front Street past the Melborn Hotel and the Lion Department Store. Emily felt both pleased and uncomfortable. Every festivity that could be crowded into these last days was a gain. But she well knew she was included in this one only by chance, because she happened to be going home with Annette.