Jane of Lantern Hill

Jane Victoria Stuart is an eleven-year-old girl living with her family in a gloomy mansion in Toronto. Her grandmother is sharp-tongued and jealous, and insists on ruling every household matter; her mother, always submissive before the grandmother, can express her love for her daughter only in secret. No one in the house has ever spoken to Jane of her father, and Jane has always believed he is dead. Her only friend is Jody, an orphan who lives in the boarding house next door and supports herself by working. She also loves to cook, but the grandmother forbids it as too "common." One day an unexpected letter breaks into her repressed, monotonous life: her father—whom she thought long dead—invites her to spend the summer on Prince Edward Island. Jane sets out anxiously, meets her father for the first time, and steps for the first time into a world utterly different from Toronto—country air, a cottage by the sea, plain-spoken neighbors, and abundant home-cooked meals. Here she cooks, tends the cottage, and makes friends with the neighbor children, and her childlike free nature is fully released. The novel moves back and forth between the oppressive city and the pastoral island, using the sharp contrast to mirror the changes in the characters' inner lives, and tells how a girl recovers confidence and independence through being loved and needed. This is a later work by Montgomery, published in 1937; her characteristic poetic style and loving descriptions of the Prince Edward Island landscape are equally vivid here. In 1990 the book was adapted into a television film of the same title. This Chinese edition is an e-book in the "YeeYan Gutenberg Project."