Wise words, thank you. I love your phrase "finds places and displaces to go…" I believe as well that Anne is a product occurring when scripts have been exhausted, a protean energy as can be used by later authors for very different purposes.

I remain unclear if Montgomery herself had a 'sexuality', per se. I wonder if she was a rather exquisite being who just felt the nearness of others as a pleasurable (or painful) event. I think Isobel might've challenged her to think of herself as sexual. Intimacies between regular married couples might be expected to be brief and formal—and done, as my grandfather was supposed to have said, only as many times as one wanted children.

In M's later journals she makes a few leading remarks that suggest she thinks highly of sex. She writes in a 1920 entry: "I have not yet found anything much pleasanter than talking with the right kind of man - except - but I won't write it. My descendents might be shocked."

I think she means to imply that the pleasanter task she'd rather be doing with a man didn't involve talking. But I wonder if this was later revision.