They both had something to say about the feeling of being innately different from the people around them and the horrors of having to live an ordinary life. They both came to realise that their marriage was a terrible mistake.
Shared feelings of being different
Feeling fundamentally different is so common in creative people as to be almost a cliché. I have quoted Kathleen Raine on the subject.
This feeling usually goes with the territory, although they don’t
all go as far as Stella Benson did and believe that they have the souls of snakes!
As previously mentioned, Stella Benson felt different in kind from the throng of ‘real girls’ who surrounded her. Sometimes she felt superior to them. She wrote, “I know I have something infinitely more important which these giggling girls have not.“
L. M. Montgomery too felt this way. I
mentioned in a previous article that, like many others of her kind, she felt
that she did not fully belong in this world. She seems ambivalent about this:
“It was really dreadful to be so different
from other people…and yet rather wonderful, too, as if you were a being strayed
from another star.”
From Anne of Windy Poplars
