Emily Byrd Starr

Emily Byrd Starr is a fictional character created by Lucy Maud Montgomery and featured in the series of novels including Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily's Quest.

The series takes Emily from age ten to twenty-eight. She starts out a small, dark-haired child with a vivid imagination and passion for writing, and the series closes on her as an adult woman and professional writer. She goes through many difficult times in this period, and deals with near-death experiences, the deaths of those around her, love affairs, psychic experiences, and her quest for fame.

Throughout the three novels of this series, Emily grows up an orphan under the care of her strict, old-fashioned relatives, the Murrays. Emily loves the farm, called New Moon, and her Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy but has a difficult relationship with her autocratic Aunt Elizabeth.

Emily enjoys the stimulating friendship of Dean Priest, a distant relative and former schoolmate of her father, and they are briefly engaged during the final volume of the series. Emily finally marries her childhood sweetheart, Teddy Kent and her best friend Ilse Burnley is married to another of their friends, Perry Miller, who was also New Moon's hired chore boy in the first volume.

Throughout the series, Emily ponders what it means to be a writer and a woman and has 'very decided ideas of what she was going to make of herself'. Living up to her place as a Murray and a woman of New Moon, she often acts to protect her pride and reputation rather than her happiness.

Emily is the daughter of Douglas Starr, a poor journalist, and Juliet Murray, a woman from an elitist family who would not allow her to marry Douglas and rejected her when the two eloped. Juliet died when Emily was four and her father dies of consumption at the beginning of the first novel when Emily is ten. Emily is then taken in by her mother's family and moves to New Moon, her mother's family's ancestral home, in nearby Blair Water.

She is described as slender, tall, and pale, with black hair and grayish-purple eyes.

Emily is introduced as a ten-year-old living with her ailing and penniless father, with her mother having died when she was four. When her father dies, taken in by her mother's family and moves to New Moon, her mother's family's ancestral home, in nearby Blair Water. Emily falls in love with New Moon and soon comes to love her guardians, Aunt Elizabeth, Aunt Laura and Cousin Jimmy, although she always has a difficult relationship with the old-fashioned and unyielding Elizabeth. Other relatives mentioned in the series are Aunt Ruth Dutton, Uncle Wallace Murray and his wife Aunt Eva, Uncle Oliver Murray and Aunt Addie, and two of their children, Jen and Andrew.

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