Why Read? scholar and literary-cultural critic Mark Edmundson asks in his best-selling book. The answer I give for why I read Montgomery may have changed many times over more than fifty years of reading and studying her works, and yet something, though differently described, has remained the same: my reading of her affects how I experience struggle in my everyday life.

Since I was old enough to listen, I have claimed Montgomery’s characters and settings as vital parts of my life and identity. I have made life-changing decisions – even changed my citizenship -- based on my love for Montgomery’s writing. Her works continue to inspire me to think and to study in new ways. In recent years she has led me to pursue visual imagination, synaesthesia and synaesthetic metaphor, perception and sight, haptic sensing, archetypal shapes and patterns, conceptual metaphor and cognitive linguistics, eco-criticism, the uncanny, queer theory, to name a few. Always, of late, I am trying to understand how my reading of Montgomery’s richly metaphoric writing engages me in a process where I experience the transformation of the everyday into the extraordinary or the extraordinarily comforting.

The autobiographical Emily books feature the creative ways (the avid reader) Montgomery’s nimble imagination and well-stocked memory distilled real-life experience and perceptions into art. Emily’s “flash,” psychic visions, and thrill at finding the right word are all invitations to the reader to experience transformation – made accessible through reading and then reproducible in life beyond the page.

The four linked chapters in the middle of Emily Climbs, describing teen-aged Emily’s vision of art and artistry and then her psychic vision of the lost little Bradshaw boy, reveal a process of seeing and the transformative power of art as they are beset by everyday annoyances and also by trauma and tragedy. The artist persists, Montgomery’s novel suggests, partly despite and partly because of her daily struggle to recognize and to engage with beauty and meaning in a life inevitably challenged by negativity and loss.

I suggest Montgomery’s shaping of image and scene, her rhythmic alternations of compression and expansion of colours and shapes in her descriptions, encourage the willing reader to engage with and to become the seeing artist able to struggle purposefully.

I conduct ethnographic research with adult readers who read for pleasure and at last count had over 300 open-ended interviews with avid readers. In these interviews, readers reflect on such topics as factors that fostered reading in childhood, how they choose books to suit a mood, genres that they prefer or avoid, how they feel about rereading books, the role of reading in their life, and books that have made a big difference to them in one way or another and why. I will share some of my discoveries about the reading experience itself, focusing on the experience of real readers who read L.M. Montgomery. In particular, I consider why so many children and adults read (and reread) LMM and what various roles these books have in the lives of the readers, including readers who become writers. Reading researchers and critics often denigrate “reading for escape” as a reading practice and “escapist reading” as a low-status genre, declaring that they waste time that could be better spent confronting life. However when we examine the role of reading for escape within the context of the lives of actual readers, we get a more nuanced picture in which reading for escape—either “escape-from” or escape-to” reading—is reading for connection.