Annually, as the year draws to a close, I start thinking about my publishing predictions for the next year.
This year I’m focused on the power and hiding place offered by nostalgia, and not necessarily of a time past, but of a vanishing reality.
When I was growing up I read and re-read Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery. It was published at a time (1908) when most of its audience lived in cities and life on the land was being romanticised.
Pollyanna by Eleanor H Porter was published at a similar time (1913), although without the rural setting.
Both had orphaned heroines, but critically to their broad appeal, both presented the child as a reason for the adults in the novels to open their hearts.
Children want to be loved.
Adults want the courage to love and be loved.
The appeal is obvious today when so many of us feel exhausted; beleaguered, even.
I suspect that rather than a rural setting where the agricultural industry has stripped out small communities, the contemporary nostalgia will be for big suburban yards, neighbors sitting on porches, and an orphan finding a home. What aspects of contemporary life will be celebrated in these books I’m not sure, but I think freedom and independence will be as important as family.
When I was checking publishing dates for this post, I also looked up the Australian equivalent novel, A Little Bush Maid by Mary Grant Bruce. Norah lost her mother, but her father was a large and beloved part of the novel, along with her brother and his best friend. It was published in 1910. Celebration of the rural idyll was alive and well even Down Under. (Warning: racism and sexism are both on display in this series, as was true for many of the books from the era.)