Kilmeny of the Orchard

A novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables. A young man named Eric Marshall goes to teach a school on Prince Edward Island and meets Kilmeny Gordon, a mute girl who has perfect hearing. He sees her when he is walking in the woods and hears her playing the violin. He visits her a number of times and gradually falls in love with her.

"It was an elusive, haunting melody, strangely suited to the time and place; it had in it the sigh of the wind in the woods, the eerie whispering of the grasses at dewfall, the white thoughts of the June lilies, the rejoicing of the apple blossoms; all the soul of all the old laughter and song and tears and gladness and sobs the orchard had ever known in the lost years; and besides all this, there was in it a pitiful, plaintive cry as of some imprisoned thing calling for freedom and utterance."
 * Beauty Equals Goodness: Kilmeny is very beautiful. And so painfully, perfectly good.
 * Comedy of Remarriage: Averted with Kilmeny's mother, Margaret Gordon. Margaret marries Ronald Fraser and the two are very happy...until Ronald's first wife shows up. Ronald goes back to his first wife and dies shortly thereafter, while Margaret is permanently embittered by what has happened. Whhile the setup is the same as it would be for a romcom with a Disposable Fiancee, the novel makes it clear that for Margaret, Ronald and Kilmeny, this was a tragedy.
 * Crowning Music of Awesome: Kilmeny's violin playing. Eric, on first hearing it, thinks of it as "the very soul of music, with all sense and earthliness refined away."

"Kilmeny: "It would be doing you a great wrong to marry you when I cannot speak, and I will not do it because I love you too much to do anything that would harm you. Your world would think you had done a very foolish thing and it would be right. I have thought it all over many times since something Aunt Janet said made me understand, and I know I am doing right. I am sorry I did not understand sooner, before you had learned to care so much.""
 * Cute Mute: Kilmeny--for most of the book, anyway.
 * Disabled Love Interest: Kilmeny.
 * Fourth Date Marriage: Eric and Kilmeny.
 * Happily Ever After: Implied.
 * Heroic Bastard: Kilmeny. Her parents thought they were legally married. They weren't.
 * I Want My Beloved to Be Happy: Kilmeny.


 * In the Blood: Characters in the book are distrustful of Neil Gordon, the child adopted by Thomas and Janet Gordon (the brother and sister of Kilmeny's mother Margaret). Neil's jealous and violent behaviour is attributed to his being the child of Italian parents, a view the author appears to endorse by making him the villain of the story.
 * Love At First Sight: Eric falls in love with Kilmeny the moment he sees her, which he discovers later during his...
 * Love Epiphany
 * Missing Mom: Eric's mother died when he was young. Kilmeny's mother passed away a few years before the story opens.
 * Parental Abandonment: Neil's mother died when he was born, and his father abandoned him right after.
 * Scenery Porn: Like all Montgomery's novels. The setting is almost a character in itself.
 * So Beautiful It's a Curse: Kilmeny's mother felt this way.
 * Suddenly Voiced: Kilmeny...at the dramatically appropriate moment, of course.
 * Unfortunate Implications/Literature: It's stated that Neil is not a decent or trustworthy person because he's the biological child of two Italian peddlers. In fact,he comes in for a lot of criticism before he even does anything wrong. He's described as "rather too much [Italian], for decent folks' taste"; his anger is "the untamed fury of the Italian peasant thwarted in his heart's desire"; and is consistently described as an animal--either in general or specifically as a wild animal.
 * Values Dissonance: The anti-Italian attitude seems to have been a depiction of how Italians were viewed by Canadians between 1880 and 1914. Canadian distrust of Italians and official favoritism towards British and Northern European immigrants was policy for a very long time. And America was no better; for quite some time, Americans didn't view Italians as white.
 * Also, Kilmeny's conviction that a disabled woman should not marry an able-bodied man.