#me reading this with my tortoise shell glasses on 😟😟😟

[gogandmagog]

I have always been glad that there is something in human nature which makes us feel when we have read a book that we want to tell the author what we think of it. If it were not for this my “literary career” would have been minus much real pleasure and not a little amusement. Ever since the publication of my first book I have received a continuous stream of letters from all over the world. The great majority of these have been kind, appreciative missives from older readers and girlish outpourings of pleasure from the sweet ’teens. But occasionally a letter comes which gives me that choicest gift of the gods of any cult – a good laugh.

One earnest being in tortoise-shell spectacles – he didn’t tell me he wore tortoise-shell frames but I know he did – wrote to me last year, solemnly assuring me that my “habit of marrying my characters off” was calculated to bring contempt upon the holy state of matrimony. I seldom take any notice of “freak” letters, but I did send a reply to this – a flippant one, I fear, asking my mentor if he thought I’d better let my characters live together without marrying. I never got any reply to my question.

— excerpt from “Freaks of an Author’s Mail Bag” by Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1931, as published in the Montreal Gazette