Lindsey Palka’s previous, slightly more academic work for The Toast can be found here.
Anne is usually described as the intelligent, cultured, beautiful wife of the doctor in Glen St. Mary, Prince Edward Island. But her mysterious origins may hold a key to the bizarre episodes of her time-traveling children.
Those of us who spent our childhood and teenage years obsessively reading L.M. Montgomery books instead of getting drunk in basements and smoking illicit cigarettes in our friends’ cars (full disclosure: definitely did way more of the former than either of the latter) may have noticed a suspicious….ripple in the timeline of the eight books. The nice thing about ending up with a final book with a definite real-world timeline means that in a hundred years or so, your fans with too much time on their hands will be able to overanalyze the entire series based on the tiniest context clues!
Jem, Anne’s oldest son, is the first key to the puzzle. He is described as being twenty-one years old in 1914, giving him a birth year of 1893. If we venture back to Anne’s House of Dreams, Jem is described as being born in the summer, around late June or early July. Therefore, according to the highly accurate conception-date calculator I found online at Baby2See.com (because that was the first search result), he would have been conceived in October of 1892. This directly follows the birth and death of Anne’s first daughter, Joyce, who is described as being born in June of 1892, giving her a conception date of September 1891, which very neatly coincides with Anne’s September wedding.
So far, so good. Walter is consistently described as being one year younger than Jem, giving him an 1894 birth year. There is then a two-year gap before the twins, Nan and Di, are born, who are consistently described as being three years younger than Jem. But then things get weird.
Shirley is the forgotten Blythe child. He doesn’t get his own story in Anne of Ingleside and is mentioned maybe twice in Rainbow Valley. But the real reason seems to be quite likely that he was too busy traveling through time to appear in the story.
In Anne of Ingleside, Shirley is described as two years old when Rilla is born. In Rilla of Ingleside, he is described as “a lad of sixteen” at the outset of the war in 1914. But Rilla is described as turning fifteen in July of 1914 (which is consistent with the description of the night of her birth in Anne of Ingleside as being “the coldest July night….in years”). This would, of course, give Rilla a fairly incontestable birth date of July 1899, and a conception around Christmas of 1898. However, Shirley would have to have been simultaneously born in 1897 in order to be two years old at Rilla’s birth and in 1898 to be sixteen years old in 1914. (The first wrinkle!)
To throw a wrench into the works, Anne is described multiple times as having a very difficult pregnancy and birth with Shirley, and to have been very ill for “many months” following his birth. This would support the theory of his birth being in 1897, giving Anne a decent recovery period before conceiving again in Christmas of 1898. However, how then to explain Shirley’s enlistment into the flying corps? This lines up neatly with America’s entry into the war. America officially declared war on Germany on April 6th, 1917, which was a Friday. Shirley tells his parents “I was eighteen last Monday” (April 2nd) when he tells them of his plans to enlist, in the same week of America’s entry. This would put his birth on April 2nd, 1899! (About April of 1899 is also when Anne of Ingleside opens, which features Anne and Diana reminiscing about their school days when Anne is either six or seven months into her pregnancy with Rilla, immediately recovering from Shirley’s horrid birth, or possibly both, which adds insult to injury when she is described as being still thin and lithe as a young girl.)
So—what to believe? Is Shirley born in 1897, two years older than Rilla, and is Anne ill enough to refrain from conceiving any more children for a year and a half? Or is he born in April of 1899, turning him eighteen in 1917 and able to join the armed forces? Shirley’s mysteriously fluctuating age to whatever is most convenient for the plot makes him either the most expendable Blythe child and the one whose details are least important, or it gives him the ability to time travel, which explains his mysterious absence from most of the books. His birth in April 1899 would certainly explain the difficulty of his birth, as it must indeed be difficult to give birth to one child when you are six months pregnant with another one. Perhaps the difference is that he spent the equivalent of two years flitting back and forth in time, visiting Ronbledore, and learning why he was The Unfavourite of the Blythe family.
Does this have something to do with Anne’s slightly murky origins as the impoverished daughter of a pair of schoolteachers? Did Walter and Bertha Shirley know something more than they should have? Was the reason for their early deaths not an epidemic of fever, but a flutter in the space-time continuum that would eventually pass through Anne and onto her youngest son in the form of the ability to walk through space and time?
It is time that we, the readers, demand the truth of Shirley’s long-form birth certificate! Unfortunately, with suspicious timing, births were not required to be civilly registered in Prince Edward Island until 1906 and never for fictional characters. Coincidence? Or is there more to this shocking and suspicious story?
Tags: books, conspiracy theories, lindsey palka, lm montgomery, magic
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The simplest of explanations is that Anne is actually the child of Robert and Rosalind Lutece.
Susan Baker knows more than she’s letting on, and that you may tie to.
I love you. I love you the way Anne (used to) love pumpkin preserves.
BEST.
Susan did say to Anne that Shirley was “hers”. Maybe she wasn’t just referring to the fact she nursed him? 😉
Shall I throw in the additional complications?
Anne was obsessed with puffed sleeves when she was 11 – 12. Everyone knows that puffed sleeves were an 1890 trend, not 1876.
In addition, everyone knows that the first telephone line wasn’t run on the Island until 1911, yet Avonlea has phones in 1890.
SUSPICIOUS????
THE PLOT THICKENS FURTHER!
At the beginning of AHoD, when Anne is 25, she remarks “By the way, I can’t realize that we really have telephones in Avonlea now. It sounds so preposterously up-to-date and modernish for this darling, leisurely old place.”
Except there are multiple mentions of telephones on the Island in AoA, when Anne would have been 16-18. Are we really expected to believe that on such a small province as PEI, it would have taken 7-9 years to get phones from one town to the other?
FURTHERMORE, Diana credits the Avonlea Village Improvement Society with bringing phones to Avonlea. Who founded the Avonlea Village Improvement Society?
ANNE
SHIRLEY
Bless you both.
<3 <3
I can’t edit my comment anymore, but I wanted to add that nobody in their mid-20s is going to consider the technology that existed in their mid-teens to be “preposterously up-to-date and modern.”
Although, for a novel that was published six years after the relevant technology had been introduced to that location, it would seem “preposterously up-to-date and modern” (especially to someone no longer young)
I really really love your Anne pieces.
I wish all the Canadian lit toasties lived close to me, and we could meet up for tea and discussion of Anne and other works.
I must put forth my periodic call that if anyone is passing by on the 401 between Toronto and Kingston they are totally welcome to stop by and discuss all things LMM!
I actually might take you up on the offer some weekend, if it wouldn’t be weird. I drive between Ottawa and Toronto a lot.
DUDE I am completely serious and it would not be weird!!! You can email me at s d q s d q at gmail without spaces next time you are passing through and we can host a LMM discussion session in my little town!!!
…the scary thing is, that actually gave me chills.
THANK YOU for addressing the puffed sleeves issue, which has bugged me for years.
So annoyed as a child obsessed with Victorian fashions.
Lindsey! This is amazing. As much as I have obsessively chronicled Anne’s timeline and that of her family, I have never done the math on Shirley. Honestly, I have never done much of anything on Shirley, except imagine what happened to him after the war. Time traveling seems as good an explanation as any, and now I demand some fanfic on this.
Can the fanfic somehow involve Shirley saving Walter through time travel? Because, Walter.
I may or may not have read a fanfic in which Walter is saved on the front by the father of Edward Cullen…
OHMYGOD
I didn’t want to wander through A03 on my work computer, but now that I am back home, HERE YOU GO
http://archiveofourown.org/works/70103/chapters/9…
THIS IS THE GREATEST DAY
Finally, we have answers! And, as the depths of my heart may have suspected, the AoGG and HP fandoms finally have a crossover point.
Shirley is probably a Gryffindor, right? Maybe Hufflepuff. I’m imagining him flitting out of Ingleside being like “Oh Rilla, you had some kind of…thing with a cake? And everyone thinks you’re adorable?” Yawn. BRB, going to a quidditch scrimmage with the Weasleys in the 1990s.
Shirley is definitely a Hufflepuff.
Walter is a Ravenclaw?
Jem & Di are total Gryffindors
Nan, I don’t know.
Rilla I think is also a Hufflepuff.
There is something a bit off about several of the Blythes’ births if you take literally that grossly twee chapter in Anne’s House of Dreams about the stork dropping off Jem.
I’m trying to follow this but am being tripped up by the stuff about America entering the war in 1917, since the books are Canadian & set in Canada and Canada was lumped into the war right away in 1914. I haven’t read the books in ages, but I thought he’d just been waiting on his birthday. It doesn’t have to be 1917, though – just any date after (I think) August, 1914.
I actually wrote an entire article on Rilla that ran not long ago, so I’m intimately familiar with the setting of the books and I reread them quite closely for this article. Rilla is really explicit in the timeline for Shirley’s joining-up. It’s in Chapter 25, as Susan and her cousin are discussing America joining the war, and reads “Just at that moment Shirley was sitting on the edge of the table in the living-room, swinging his legs—a brown, ruddy, wholesome lad, from top to toe, every inch of him—and saying coolly, “Mother and dad, I was eighteen last Monday. Don’t you think it’s about time I joined up?”
Yeah, I didn’t mean at all to imply you didn’t know the setting – I read your bio – just looking for clarification on the 1917 connection. Thank you.
Shirley wanted to join the Flying Corps, which was not an option in Canada until 1917, the coinciding with the American war entry date was just an aside!
Thanks! As I said, I haven’t read the books in ages, so I was just looking for this clarification.
We take our imaginary time traveling v seriously, it seems!
“Imaginary”
Shirley being some sort of time-traveling warlock also explains why he didn’t die in the War – life expectancy for pilots at the time was just a few weeks so realistically, if any of the Blythe children had to die, it should have been him.
(I have no clue why my html isn’t working this time but if anyone is curious, I got that fact from this book, just do a search for “life expectancy” http://books.google.ca/books?id=RlPDAqRQV88C )
I am here for every LMM post. I read these books 1,000,000 times between the ages of 8-18. And they hold up so much better than most of the books I read as a kid.
This article is everything.
WAK UP PRINSE EDWARD ILAND
I always forgot Shirley even existed! Perhaps there’s some kind of Mandela effect (http://www.buzzfeed.com/perpetua/mandela-effect#ezcpcv) going on…. Or maybe L.M. Montgomery was seeding some epic Doctor Who story. I remain hopeful.
This is excellent.
which adds insult to injury when she is described as being still thin and lithe as a young girl
Another thing that adds insult to injury: as if all the fat jokes about Diana weren’t bad enough, LMM feels the need to specify that “she had tipped the scale at one hundred and fifty-five that morning.”
155 pounds is not an unusually high weight for a grown woman who’s had 3 children, and it’s not fat, period.
Right after The Toast started, I pitched an article to Nicole about the TOTALLY FUCKED interpretations of weight in the Anne books (Christine constantly being described as “full-figured” / CONSTANT references to Gilbert keeping his figure in The Blythes Are Quoted / Rachel Lynde constantly huffing and puffing around / that same 155 lb reference / Phil describing herself as becoming “fearfully thin since the babies came”). She rightfully turned the pitch down for being triggering, but WHAT THE FUCK, L M MONTGOMERY.
There’s even more dissonance with regard to their weight – at least for me – when you take into account the diets of Anne & Co. Cakes and puddings and plum puffs and cream puffs and pies and mince pies and bread and butter and eggs and lard all over the place. How is Anne so slender when that’s how she eats on a daily basis? Does she travel forward in time to visit a personal trainer at a gleaming 21st-century gym?
You know what else is weird? Diana is a working farm wife and probably way, way more active than Anne (the society wife) on a daily basis. Yes, bodies are different and metabolisms are crazy, but it is still insane that Diana the working farm wife with three kids is jeered for being plump, when Anne, the Doctor’s Wife, who has borne seven children, is still thin as a rake. What.
Maybe they mistake being TOTALLY RIPPED for plumpness and Diana is 155 pounds of PURE MUSCLE, able to LIFT HEAVY FARM EQUIPMENT OVER HER HEAD and CRUSH MEN WITH HER THIGHS.
“Oh, I guess you’re right, Anne dear, I have put on a few! [flexes menacingly at the Blythe boys, sending them scampering].”
(Don’t mind me, I’m just falling in love with my own mental image of secretly buff Diana Barry.)
can we please get Kate Beaton on this stat
I was kind of imagining it with her illustrations, I admit
So you’re saying that Diana Barry is secretly Diana Prince aka Princess Diana of Themyscira AKA WONDER WOMAN?
Because I am on that train.
The clues have been there all along. Diana Prince would definitely be bosom friends with somebody, she is all about sisterhood. They both have lustrous dark hair. It is so obvious.
Seems legit
omg omg yes
Yeah, it’s an interesting contradiction. I notice it a lot in the Harry Potter series – much gluttony, with these creaking tables, but only the rotten characters seem to hold onto excess weight.
Phil describing herself as becoming “fearfully thin since the babies came”
Okay LMM, I KNOW you know how physiology and childbirth work because you gave birth to three kids of your own so WHERE DID YOU GET THIS.
I know I’m reaching here, but Phil and her husband were pretty poor compared to Anne and Gilbert – he was a minister in an impoverished fishing village – so maybe she just lost a lot of weight while breastfeeding and couldn’t get enough calories in to make up for it.
Plus, with Phil being so chronically indecisive, you know she probably did extended breast-feeding totally by accident, just because she couldn’t make up her mind whether or not to wean them.
I like that idea. I mean, become undernourished while breastfeeding is definitely a thing. And she could also be suffering from some diagnosed ailment…
I am on track to illustrate this very phenomenon (the accidental extended breast-feeding due to lack of decision, not the weight loss.)
I remember asking my mother about that line when I was in middle school, and that was the explanation she gave me.
If she implied losing weight after having babies happened to all women I’d have a problem with that, but it does happen to some. One’s metabolism can go either way after the shake-up of pregnancy. The year after my son was born, I was constantly too warm and constantly losing weight (I don’t think I ever zipped my coat up the whole winter, and I’m usually too cold — and I had my thyroid checked, so it wasn’t that). Montgomery herself got very thin after Stuart was born, though IIRC that was because she was ill several times with mastitis and such. And I’ve certainly known women with a lot of kids who were also naturally thin — one of my aunts had seven kids and one had eight, and neither was even plump (okay, one of them put on some weight when she was into menopause, but not while she was running around after little kids).
I had no idea there even were Anne books that continued into her adulthood, so this entire thing impresses me more than I can ever say.
omg go and read them all immediately 4 srs
Seconding the “Read them now!!” I read them for the first time this past year and it was so great. They’re all free on project gutenberg!
We are kindred spirits. The Shirley age thing has bothered me for years!
Maybe someone can get to the bottom of why the cover illustration of my childhood copy of Rainbow Valley had two redheaded girls on it (along with two brunette girls and two brunette boys)…obviously there must be some Merediths mixed in with an incomplete set of Blythes, but who are the two redheads?
I had that same copy! And it always drove me insane as well. Because Jem is usually described as having red hair, Walter black hair, Nan has brown hair and Di “red-gold” like her mother’s–Shirley is a brunet and Rilla has dark red hair. The Meredith’s are all dark-haired, I believe, and Mary Vance is blonde. (I think.) So I GUESS you could argue that the redheaded girls are Di and Rilla, but that’s stupid because for most of Rainbow Valley Rilla is a toddler or very little girl and doesn’t enter into the playing or the story.
COME ON, ILLUSTRATORS.
Haha, yes it really drove me crazy as a kid. I mean, I know the real answer is that the illustrator goofed, but I just kept trying to figure it out.
The “old” Rainbow Valley cover, aka the one I read in the early 90s that featured Nan with a pink dress and a huge hat on the cover, was so much better. Also included an image of Shirley running away from his siblings, LOL.
Yes! That cover is wayyy better. It’s very clear that Jem is the one fishing on the log, Di is the one with the cake, Nan has the pretty hat and dress, and Walter is (perfectly) lounging in the background dressed all in white and reading a book. Rilla isn’t in there b/c she’s too tiny!
I think that image of lounging Walter inspired most of my romantic fantasies about boys when I was a tween/young teen.
I had that cover, too! The way I thought of it was that Jem is fishing on the log, Una Meredith is the one in the hat, Faith is holding the cake, Carl is wading with the net (in pursuit of bugs), and Jerry is in the background reading. Una is described as having “braids of straight, dead-black hair…and her almond-shaped, dark-blue eyes had something wistful and sorrowful in them,” rather like the girl in the hat. That’s how I pictured her when I was eight years old, at least…although now I think of it, that could just as well be Nan, since Anne is glad she has at least one daughter who can wear pink. (What’s wrong with wearing pink while red-haired, anyway???)
I’ve always thought it’s Una too.
The “can’t wear pink if you have red hair” thing is still around, or at least was when I was growing up ion the 80s and 90s. I didn’t wear pink until I was 25.
I got mad at Molly Ringwald because I took my fashion cues from Anne.
I absorbed the idea completely, having read AoGG at a young age, and still don’t wear pink (although I will be 25 on Monday, so perhaps it will kick in for me then!).
Whole other piece: criticizing the illustrations on those LMM paperbacks.
Let’s find the person who created them and interview that person! My “old” LMM books say Darrel Greene did the covers and my “new” ones say Ben Stahl. (Also: EGADS, they’re men.)
Also, who on earth is this? If it’s Anne, then the haircut is a bit anachronistic and she’s barely in the story at all!
OMG, I went to grad school at a school with a huge collection of back copies of LMM books. Looking at the different hairstyles and outfits they gave Anne through the years was truly awesome. There’s this amazing 30s copy, of, I think AHOD that has her wearing like, a super-cute Castle clip or bob. So amazing.
Damn it, now you’ve sent me down the rabbit hole of google-image-searching LMM book covers.
What do you think is going on in this cover? The only thing I can think of is when they notice that the lighthouse light is still on and that’s how they find out Captain Jim is dead.
Anne’s getting her Garbo on in this one but you know that makeup would have gotten her run out of town on a rail, doctor’s wife or not.
Uh, maybe, but Anne has a serious case of the Intense Eyes going on there. More like she’s pointing to a UFO or the meth lab on top of the cliff or something. “GILBERT. COME. ON. Open your fucking male eyes and LOOK.”
In the second one Anne looks exactly how I imagine Nan from A Tangled Web to look–bobbed hair, rouged cheeks, drawn-on eyebrows, blood-red lips. Not quite the wholesome Anne Shirley we know and love.
“THAT is my house of dreams. Right there.”
“Anne, that’s just a pile of rocks on a cliff.”
“GILBERT, YOU PROMISED.”
I’m not sure what part of the book that first one is from, but since it’s pretty obviously Alice Morgan we can be sure it’s either right before or right after someone ends up dead.
This confused me too! Who is the second redhead? She looks too old to be Rilla.
MY PEOPLE.
There’s also the bit about how EVERY SINGLE TIME Shirley appears, LMM reminds us that he’s brown. I know that she wasn’t really implying that Anne had some torrid affair, but it’s such a “white author being ham-fisted about people of color” trope that I want it to be an official headcanon.
I mean, Ingleside was a port town! Perhaps it was retaliation for the Christine affair? (Does the timeline on this work? It’s been a while.)
Where is the Crazy Old Maurice tage hre?? That is the TRUE conspiracy!
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3z2j6F8fZII
How does Ronbledore play into this?
SHIRLEY is actually GILBEeeer– I just squicked myself out.
(After a few more moments of introspection, Shirley is actually Matthew?)
Huh. Well, Matthew has brown eyes and a brown beard, and he doesn’t talk much… OTOH, there are lots of people his age in Avonlea who’ve known him all his life. If he were a time traveler, Mrs. Rachel Lynde would KNOW.
Maybe Matthew faked his heart attack so that he could time-travel in peace without Mrs. Lynde suspecting anything! He wandered through space-time until he finally got homesick for the Island and came back as Shirley.
I can’t believe I’ve stumbled on a place where people care BOTH about LMM AND birth-timelines of fictional characters as much as I do! The internet really is for everybody! Brilliant article.
I’m really impressed by this – I came across a mention in Anne of Ingleside of Jem being in awe of someone in town who had survived the San Francisco earthquake, and I thought about it for about thirty seconds before concluding that I didn’t have enough information to figure out whether this made chronological sense. (I don’t think it does?)
Not even close! I think when Jem says that he’s like, seven or eight years old (or something) which would put it around 1898 or so, which still predates the earthquake by eight years.
Unless there’s more time travel going on in Glen St. Mary than just Shirley.
Other bizarre time traveling moments:
Where Aunt Mary Maria slips in the bathroom in Anne of Ingleside. Query: would Ingleside have had flush toilets in 1902? What was the sewer system like in Glen St. Mary?
All of the instances in “The Blythes are Quoted” with mansions and millionaires in Lowbridge which seems out of place for a sleepy PEI fishing village.
“Bathroom” doesn’t necessarily imply an indoor toilet. It could just be a room with a bathtub in it.
THIS IS THE GREATEST DAY
Clearly Shirley IS actually Susan’s “little brown boy,” born out of wedlock and fostered by the Blythe family.
That’s exactly what I was thinking! I’m going to examine this when I reach the married!Anne books in my reread.
Clearly Shirley IS actually Susan's "little brown boy," born out of wedlock and fostered by the Blythe family.
You think time travel is weird? I read this short story by James Alan Gardner titled “All The Cool Monsters At Once” in which all of Canada’s legends are suddenly made flesh: sasquatch, Ogopogo, Sam McGee, what have you. Anne Shirley appears and she’s a vampire.
I HAVE NEVER BEEN ABLE TO GET THAT OUT OF MY HEAD.
I think a more obvious explanation is that Shirley was simply born in 1897 and got his Hogwarts letter in 1908 (He would almost certainly be a Hufflepuff, considering they sort at 11.) While he was in Scotland, he was involved in an accident with a time-turner, and the repair work cost him 2 years. I don’t know why he messes around with sending telegrams home, rather than just owling.
Maybe he sends the owls to the telegraph office?
What if Shirley was sixteen when the war started but going to turn 17 before 1914 ended? That would fit with the 1897 birth date, although then he wouldn’t have turned two yet when Rilla was born. I can’t remember where exactly we learn that he’s two years older than her, but maybe that was meant as an approximation.
No, it’s stated very explicitly in Anne of Ingleside that Shirley is two years old before Rilla is born.
What if Shirley was sixteen when the war started but going to turn 17 before 1914 ended? That would fit with the 1897 birth date, although then he wouldn't have turned two yet when Rilla was born. I can't remember where exactly we learn that he's two years older than her, but maybe that was meant as an approximation.
The best I’ve managed to do with Shirley’s age is to generously assume that because Anne of Ingleside was written later than Rilla, L.M. Montgomnery realised she had mucked his age about and tried to correct the timeline for him, thereby seriously confusing her readers. The trouble is that once you take Shiley’s birthdate from Anne of Ingleside the rest of the ‘accepted’ timeline undoes at the seams, though admittedly not as badly as if you date events from Anne of Green Gables, in which case the 2890s somehow happen twice.
LMM and JKR both seem to have the same sort of timeline problems!
Oh my! This was fun 🙂 I should be out freezing and gardening but am snuggled in bed reading this article and comments…now to go face the cold…or shall I go search for your article about Rilla that you mentioned…hmmmmm. ..
Oh my! This was fun 🙂 I should be out freezing and gardening but am snuggled in bed reading this article and comments…now to go face the cold…or shall I go search for your article about Rilla that you mentioned…hmmmmm. ..
That's a very interesting theory Trisha.
The Anne timeline gets even more complicated if you factor in the federal election story in Anne’s House of Dreams. Just after Jem is born, there is a general election and a Liberal government forms for the first time in a long time (Chapter: Politics at Four Winds). We know it has been a long time because the stubborn Marshall Elliot shaves and becomes unrecognizable as he has not shaved since the Grits were last in power.
Since it is indicated that this is a federal election, this has to be the 1896 election when Laurier comes to power as it is the first time there has been a Liberal government since 1878 and the Liberals stay in power until the war. This would make Jem 18 in 1914, not 21, and makes the birth of all of the other children basically impossible in such a short period of time even accounting for the twins.
Maybe it is Anne with the time turner, not Shirley.
This is my new favourite page on the internet ever.
Great article, thanks, and I’ve enjoyed the comments too. The Shirley/Rilla age thing has always bothered me too, as well as some of the other time anachronisms in the books. My view is that when LMM first wrote Anne she was setting it in the late 1880s and early 1990s, the era of puffed sleeves. Of course when she wrote it she did not know she’d be writing all the sequels. Then when WW1 happened maybe her publishers suggested she set another Anne book then and she came up with the idea of making Anne’s children the right age for that. I think we just have to accept that it is fiction and the timelines are going to be a bit dodgy. Which is also easier to understand when you read her journals and realise the circumstances under which she wrote a lot of her stuff. (A very busy and stressful life with lots else going on.)
One other age/time thing that I’ve noticed is in Emily of New Moon. Basically there is an extra year in there that is not accounted for when Emily’s age is mentioned. She starts off being almost 11 and finishes at 14 but when you work out the years covered there are actually 4 years so she should be 15 at the end. Has anyone else noticed this?
I wish I could time travel this post back to my teenage self simply so I would know I was not the only person puzzling over this calculation at the kitchen table.