In these descriptions, we get not only the same general feel, but we end up with readily identifiable connections between Montgomery’s Doreen and Streatfeild’s Rowena. Perhaps it was the clothes, which were short-skirted and little-girlish that year, but certainly she looked less like somebody’s mother even than she had done before. Surprisingly she looked, Gemma thought, younger than when she had last seen her. Her hair was rather a brighter gold, and she wore artificial eyelashes all the time instead of only when working, which she had not done before she went to Hollywood. įor one thing, Rowena’s appearance had hardly changed. “I like a mother who looks like a mother,” was the thought that whisked through Pat’s head.

Beautiful…oh, yes, very beautiful! But not…somehow…like a mother!

She might have stepped off a magazine cover. Tall, slender, graceful as a flower, in a soft fluttering chiffon dress like blue mist pale, silvery-golden hair sleeked down all over her head like a cap under a little tilted hat of smooth blue feathers: bluish-green eyes that never seemed to see you, even when they looked at you, under eyebrows as thin as a line drawn in soot a mouth that spoiled everything, so vividly red and arched was it. Pat saw her more clearly than Jingle did. The two passages, while markedly different in style, share definite similarities: For the first time, I realized that this scene was reminding me of another fascinating scene: the moment when Noel Streatfeild’s heroine Gemma Bow in Gemma Alone (1969) sees her mother Rowena Alston again after a gap of several years. One of my favorite scenes is when Jingle’s mother, Doreen Garrison, comes for a visit, and Pat is an onlooker to the uncomfortable reunion.

It happened while I was recently rereading Montgomery’s Pat of Silver Bush (1933). I was so focused on the differences between these authors that I was surprised to find a possible connection between their books. I wrote to friends in a reading group: “My two favorite authors are stylistically dissimilar…I’ve read 20+ books by each of them and one author is very flowery, elegant, and artistic, while the other is matter-of-fact and concise. Montgomery and Noel Streatfeild, should have such different writing styles. I have often thought it interesting that my two favorite authors, L.M.

The Magic Summer by Noel Streatfeild