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Category: Scholarship

Spotlight on International Scholarship

Every once in a while, I consult a variety of online sources (including search engines available to researchers through university libraries) to ensure that this website’s lists of materials pertaining to L.M. Montgomery—particularly book-length studies, book-length extensions, journal articles, book chapters, paratexts, dissertations/theses, and reviews—are as complete and up to date as possible. Not only are new contributions to the field of L.M. Montgomery studies being published all the time, but also, as search engines expand their reach and as more and more older print materials are digitized and thereby made text searchable, I frequently have the pleasure of discovering older items that I missed.

Recently, I stumbled upon several contributions that so far had escaped me, by virtue of the fact that they were not in English. But because most of them had been published in journals that offer English translations of titles and abstracts, I was still able to understand each item’s approach and argument.

Because I run this website on my own time, it isn’t possible for me to expand the scope of this website beyond materials available in English or in French. Instead, I offer a spotlight on a selection of international contributions to Montgomery scholarship published in the last five years or so, as a way to help fellow English-speaking readers and researchers get a better sense of international scholarship about Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy.

Anne på svenska: Hur tidsanda och produktionsvillkor påverkat huvudpersonens karaktärsdrag i svenska översättningar och adaptioner av Anne of Green Gables

English Title: Anne in Swedish: How the Spirit of the Age and Production Terms Influence the Protagonist’s Character Traits in Swedish Translations and Adaptations of Anne of Green Gables

Author: Anna Vogel

Language: Swedish

Details: Barnboken: Journal of Children’s Literature Research 44 (2021). https://doi.org/10.14811/clr.v44.577.

Abstract: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) has received much academic interest. Drawing on related research on the novel and its Swedish editions, my article investigates how the variation in the Swedish versions influences the characterization of Anne 1909–2018. My study acknowledges the feminist view within translation studies as expressed by Sherry Simon, and uses Norman Fairclough’s linguistic model for contextualization. The primary material consists of Montgomery’s original text, the translations and adaptations by Karin Jensen, Aslög Davidson, Margareta Sjögren-Olsson, and Christina Westman as well as correspondence between the publishing houses and translators. Further, I have interviewed Westman and corresponded with her publisher. The texts are analysed regarding omissions and additions. On a micro-level, all active verbs where Anne is the grammatical subject are analysed. My results show that all editions give prominence to Anne’s academic ambition. A major finding is that the 1941 and 1962 versions increase Anne’s ambition by using more active verbs and stronger expressions. Westman’s 2018 edition, however, is a subtle revision of the first Swedish translation, with the result that Anne’s ambition is diminished again. Despite girls and women having gained more freedom over the last 100 years, the latest edition thereby interrupts the tendency to stress Anne’s ambition. This is understood as a result of clashing discursive and social norms. On the other hand, the emphasis on Anne’s ambition in the 1941 and 1962 editions comes with a cost of religious, moral, intellectual, and emotional aspects, creating a one-dimensional Anne.

『빨강머리 앤』에 재현된 아동기의 상상력

English Title: Childhood Imagination in Anne of Green Gables

Author: Yunjeong Yang

Language: Korean

Publication Details: The Korean Society for Teaching English Literature 26, no. 2 (2022): 233–54. https://doi.org/10.19068/jtel.2022.26.2.09.

Abstract: This paper intends to study the pastoral world of childhood in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908). The work has a vivid childhood imagination that expresses the writer’s own experiences, such as a deficiency in childhood and wish-fulfillment, a satire of religious practice, and awareness of a national important issue regarding the preservation of rural Canada in a literary way. Anne, an 11-year-old orphan girl and main character, was a hopeless, skinny child who was initially exposed to all kinds of excesses. However, she slowly grows up in a loving home provided by Matthew and Marilla, taming passion and imagination, and learns to live up to Avonlea’s social and behavioral expectations. Anne not only brings Matthew and Marilla a much more fulfilling and happy life than ever before, but she also influences the Avonlea community. Anne never loses her childhood imagination, even though she grows up to be a great member of Avonlea. Anne’s childhood imagination lets her move forward, keeping her and the community’s desperate needs alive in search of a utopia.

Limited animation, unlimited seriality. Die Konfigurationen des Seriellen in den Anime-Serien Haha o Tazunete Sanzann Marco, Akage No Anne und Tanoshî Mûmin Ikka

English Title: Limited Animation, Unlimited Seriality: The Configurations of the Serial in the Anime series Haha o Tazunete Sanzann MarcoAkage No Anne and Tanoshî Mûmin Ikka

Author: Herbert Schwaab

Language: German

Publication Details: In Fernsehwissenschaft und Serienforschung: Theorie, Geschichte und Gegenwart (post-)televisueller Serialität [Television Studies and Series Research: Theory, History and Present of (Post-)Televisual Seriality], edited by Denis Newiak, Dominik Maeder, and Herbert Schwaab, 315–38. Wiesbaden: Springer, 2021. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-658-32227-4_13.

Abstract (provided by Google Translate): This article deals with the Japanese animated series Marco, Anne with the Red Hair and The Moomins, which were produced in the 1970s and 1990s and which offer idiosyncratic adaptations of children’s book classics in 50 to 52 episodes of 25 minutes. The slowness and precision of these adaptations is discussed as a specific form of seriality, as “unlimited seriality,” which fits into the television program in an awkward way. It is viewed as a product of an aesthetic of anime and limited animation described by Thomas Lamarre and other authors, which creates a different form of movement and a complex interplay of movement and stillness, which also affects an unsegmented televisual narrative form of constant advancement.

Tłumacz architekt a tłumacz konserwator zabytków: Kanoniczny i polemiczny przekład Anne of Green Gables Lucy Maud Montgomery jako ogniwa serii translatorskiej

English Title: The Translator as an Architect or as a Conservator: Polemical and Canonical Translations as Links in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Series of Translations into Polish

Author: Dorota Pielorz

Language: Polish

Publication Details: Wielogłos 45 (2020): 79–103. https://doi.org/10.4467/2084395XWI.20.023.12831.

Abstract: Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables has always been very popular in Poland. Since its first publication in 1908, there have been more than a dozen Polish renderings of this novel, which can therefore be regarded as a translation series. This paper compares two opposite links in the series: Rozalia Bernstein’s canonical and Paweł Beręsewicz’s polemical translations. This paper also includes an analysis of those passages which reflect some characteristics of the juxtaposed renderings, especially the different roles that the translators can play in the reception of a foreign language text as well as the translation strategies they use.

Normer och restriktioner i det litterära polysystemets periferi: Om utelämningar i översättningar av klassiska flickböcker

English Title: Norms and Constraints in the Periphery of the Literary Polysystem: On Omissions in Translations of Girls’ Classics

Author: Laura Leden

Language: Swedish

Publication Details: Marginalia, edited by Ritva Hartama-Heinonen and Pirjo Kukkonen, 100–17. Helsinki: University of Helskini, 2020. Translatologica Helsingiensia 4. https://hdl.handle.net/10138/312804.

Abstract: Girls’ books are a genre about girls and girlhood reflecting girls’ contemporary conditions and possibilities. This genre has had a peripheral status in the literary polysystem due to the patriarchal structures of the society. This paper will analyze norms and constraints at work in the Swedish translation of L.M. Montgomery’s classic Emily trilogy to test Even Zohar’s (1990) polysystem hypothesis about translation, according to which translations with a peripheral status are likely to be acceptancy-oriented rather than adequacy-oriented. The analysis of the Swedish translations from 1955–1957 targeting a younger readership than Montgomery’s originals shows that due to didactic and pedagogical norms the translations are subject to major adaptation and abridgement in the form of purification, cultural neutralisation and plot-driven abridgement. The translations are used for educational purposes and the constraints imposed reflect a more restrictive image of girlhood conveyed to young girl readers.

Imaginando un pasado feminista: subversión femenina y asuntos de género en la serie Anne with an E

English Title: Imagining a feminist past: female subversion and gender issues in the show Anne with an E

Author: Camila Andrea Picardo Barrientos

Language: Spanish

Publication Details: Comunicación y Género 4, no. 2 (2021): 125–36. https://doi.org/10.5209/cgen.72030.

Abstract: This article analyzes the period drama and TV series Anne with an E from a gender perspective discussing its female representation and empowerment narrative. The methodology consisted on a textual analysis through characters and a sample of episodes which are contrasted with theoretical gender criteria. It was found that the show rescues the period’s female problematics highlighting the otherness discourse in opposition to the hegemonic patriarchal system. The female representation is subversive, innovative and the protagonist’s agency contains a type of feminist heroism which is uncommon to find in TV fiction. The show’s gender subversion discourse refutes the late 19th century gender rules and at the same time achieves to show relevance with present day gender issues.

„Festiwal kanadyjskiej pisarki”, czyli o mniej znanych polskich tłumaczeniach Anne of Green Gables Lucy Maud Montgomery

English Title: “A Festival of the Canadian Writer” or on the Lesser Known Polish Translations of Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery

Author: Dorota Pielorz

Language: Polish

Publication Details: Porównania 26, no. 1 (2020): 235–53. https://doi.org/10.14746/por.2020.1.13.

Abstract: The article deals with Polish translations of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s book Anne of Green Gables. The author focuses especially on the renderings published at the turn of the 21st century, when the so called “festival of the Canadian writer” began. This phrase is used in reference to the renascence of the popularity of Montgomery’s work in Poland. This cultural and marketing phenomenon not only affected readers, but also influenced the publishers’ and translators’ choices. In the article, some dimensions of this casus are discussed. Then some excerpts of translations are compared in order to show the features of the image of Canada inscribed in them by translators. What is more, the author points out that the Polish renderings can provide interesting information about the different aspects of Polish reality at the turn of the 21st century, in particular about the publishing policies and the Polish culture, aesthetic norms and trends or stereotypes.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’nin “YeĢil’in Kızı” Adlı Kitabının Yazın Çevirisi Ve Makine Çevirisi Çerçevesinde KarĢılaĢtırmalı Ġncelenmesi

English Title: A Comparative Analysis of “Anne of Green Gables” by Lucy Maud Montgomery within the Framework of Literary Translation and Machine Translation

Author: Rabia Aksoy Arıkan

Language: Turkish

Publication Details: LOTUS: International Journal of Language and Translation Studies 1, no. 1 (2021): 22 pp. https://dergipark.org.tr/en/pub/lotus/issue/72313/1166936.

Abstract: This study includes a discussion on the literary translation and machine translation of Anne of Green Gables, a novel by the Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery, one of the popular culture publications, the novel is a summary of the events that are narrated in what is originally a collection of eight books. In this article, differences between human and machine translation have been studied, with special emphasis on the importance of human factor in translation. This study has been conducted by using online machine translation applications such as Google and Yandex translation tools. The article aims to highlight the importance of features peculiar to the writer and the work at the stage of post-editing done by a human translator. Besides, this study tries to find out the best way to make translations of literary works in recent technological research on machine translation. An assessment has been made on the translation of the novel by conventional methods and by applications of computer-aided machine translations. One of the goals of this study is to show that, as with many types of publications, popular culture publications can be rendered through machine translation. In the evaluation, the method of “rule-based machine translation” has been preferred. This method, which allows the researcher to work more actively, has been found to be more scientific than other types of machine translation. Moreover, it has been found that machine translation systems such as Google Translate and Yandex Translate have a number of shortcomings in transferring concepts related to the sense being communicated, and that they operate by a system based on structures at lexical level. Today, with the machine translation becoming more widely available, it has been seen that postediting done by human editors contributes significantly to enhancing the quality of literary translations, including works of popular culture. In this process, special emphasis has been placed on issues such as post-editors’ conception of the task being done, their way of looking at the world, and their knowledge about literary translation. The examples given in this study revealed that, particularly in literary translation, every post-editing procedure does not always yield effective results, and that everything depends on the translator’s background knowledge and his/her competence in literary translation. Discussions have been made on this topic, with special emphasis on the translator’s ability to interpret a literary text.

Prawo do inności i protodziewczyńskość – Jo March i Anne Shirley w perspektywie girlhood studies

English Title: The Right to Otherness and Proto-Girlhood: Jo March and Anne Shirley from the Perspective of Girlhood Studies

Author: Michalina Wesołowska

Language: Polish

Publication Details: Czas Kultury 38, no. 2 (2022): 148–57. https://czaskultury.pl/sklep/prawo-do-innosci-i-protodziewczynskosc-jo-march-i-anne-shirley-w-perspektywie-girlhood-studies/.

Abstract: The author analyzes the creation of two heroines of canonical texts of so-called novels for girls—Jo March from Little Women by Louisa May Alcott (1868) and Anne Shirley from Anne of Green Gables by Lucy Maud Montgomery (1908). She reads them as proto-girlhood predecessors of Pippi from Astrid Lindgren’s novels. She examines the way in which the heroines are socialized and how they negotiate their independence and otherness. For context, she uses the film and series adaptations Little Women (2019, directed by Greta Gerwig) and Anne with an E (2017–2019, created by Moira Walley-Beckett).

O brincar como experiência criativa na psicanálise com crianças

English Title: Play as a Creative Experience in Psychoanalysis with Children

Authors: Taísa Resende Sousa, Regina Lúcia Sucupira Pedroza, and Maria Regina Maciel

Language: Portuguese

Publication Details: Fractal: Revista de Psicologia 32, no. 3 (September–December 2020): 269–76. https://doi.org/10.22409/1984-0292/v32i3/5754.

Abstract: This study focuses on the play as a creative experience in psychoanalysis with children, from Freudian contributions and deepening in Winnicott’s concepts, especially in relation to playing: an assumption that goes beyond the typical way children usually express themselves, regarding the continuity of the self. The objective is to reflect upon this theme, considering playing as a transitional phenomenon and creative experience peculiar to the expansion of the self. Two clinical vignettes are introduced, to illustrate the theoretical constructions of psychoanalysis with children, of playing, of the scribble game and of the melody as a transitional phenomenon. In conclusion, we used a Canadian television series, Anne with an “E,” as a reference and inspiration to reflect upon the life of a teenager who was adopted by a family that managed to provide the young girl a suitable environment. Just as in the analytical sessions, we understand that there must be a willingness to play, as well as a fruitful meeting between people so that they can achieve their creative potential.

L.M. Montgomery, Jane Austen, and Self-Repetition

By the strangest of coincidences, a few evenings ago I took a break from writing some contextual material for an item in my next volume of Montgomery’s periodical work, specifically a headnote that mentions that four extracts from Anne’s House of Dreams had appeared in Donald Graham French’s anthology Standard Canadian Reciter: A Book of the Best Readings and Recitations from Canadian Literature, published in 1921 (something I had already mentioned in my overview of Montgomery’s career in my introduction to Volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader). Donald G. French (1873–1945) was co-author, with J.D. Logan (1869–1929), of Highways of Canadian Literature (1924), the first of six book-length surveys of Canadian literature published in the 1920s. In that volume, which includes a biographical sketch of Montgomery and a summary of her books published up to that point, Logan and French place Anne of Green Gables in a list of Canadian novels “of the Community type,” alongside Marian Keith’s Duncan Polite and Nellie L. McClung’s Sowing Seeds in Danny.

While searching for something else Montgomery-related on the open-access website Early Canadiana Online, I came across for the first time a much earlier article by French—entitled “Canada’s Jane Austen” and appearing in the December 1914 issue of The School, a Toronto publication—from which the bulk of Logan and French’s remarks about Montgomery in Highways would be lifted. The full text of this earlier article is as follows:

No history of English literature is considered complete unless it gives due place to the work done by Jane Austen in her portrayal of rural English domestic life; and no history of Canadian literature, when such comes to be written, should fail to recognize that L.M. Montgomery has done for Canada what Jane Austen did for England.

L.M. Montgomery (now Mrs. (Rev.) Evan [sic] Macdonald) was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and spent her childhood in Cavendish—a seashore farming settlement which figures as “Avonlea” in her stories. Like many another young Canadian she has to the credit of her experiences a few years as teacher in the schools of her province. That her life so far has been spent chiefly within the limits of the little island province and the bounds of an Ontario country parish does not narrow her outlook although it necessarily confines her to themes bounded by rural experiences, for her forte is the portrayal of what she has seen and knows. She has the imaginative and creative gifts, but she uses these in enabling us to see the beauty, the humour, and the pathos that lies about our daily paths.

Anne of Green Gables,” which was Miss Montgomery’s first novel, has an interesting literary history. She tells us that upon being asked for a short serial story for a Sunday school weekly, she cast about for a plot idea. A faded note book entry suggested: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy; a girl is sent to them.” The writing of a serial was started, but time did not allow the author to complete it for the purpose intended. As she brooded over the theme it began to expand and the result was a book which may already be confidently labelled a “Canadian Classic.”

In Anne we have an entirely new character in fiction, a high-spirited, sensitive girl, with a wonderfully vivid imagination; wise beyond her years, outspoken and daring; not always good but always lovable. The basis of the story is already explained; its working out is somewhat different from the original suggestion. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an elderly bachelor and his sister, living alone on the farm of Green Gables, send a message to an orphan asylum asking that a boy be sent them. Through some mistake a girl comes—the girl Anne. At first Marilla wants to send her back, but sympathy with the child’s longing for a real home, and an interest in her very quaintness, ends in establishing her as a member of the Green Gables family—and then the story has only begun. It is Anne who dominates the whole book. There are other characters, quaint too, and well-drawn, but the introduction of Anne into the community—Anne, so unconventional, so imaginative, and so altogether different from the staid, prosaic, general attitude of the neighbourhood proves to be the introduction of a peculiar ferment, and the incidents which discover to us the process of fermentation are most delightfully odd and mirth-provoking.

In “Anne of Avonlea” we follow the career of our orphan heroine. When we said goodbye to her she was fitting herself to become a teacher and it is with two eventful years of school teaching that this book deals. The writer understands children thoroughly and makes her child characters of all types perfectly natural and life-like. The same creative faculty which gave us in Anne an entirely new shadow-child shows itself in the portrayal of the mischievous but lovable Davy Keith, his demure twin sister Dora, the imaginative Paul Irving, and the many individualities of the pupils of Avonlea School.

Plot interest is not a strong feature of this or of any of L.M. Montgomery’s books. There are, nevertheless, several threads of action which bind together the series of incidents. Her novels are novels of incident rather than of plot; they do not, however, lack in continuity and unity. Frequent passages of nature description reveal at once the author’s intimacy with nature and her poetic attitude of mind.

Here is a typical descriptive passage: “A September day on Prince Edward Island hills; a crisp wind blowing up over the sand dunes from the sea; a long, red road, winding through fields and woods, now looping itself about a corner of thick set spruce, now threading a plantation of young maples with great feathery sheets of ferns beneath them, now dipping down into a hollow where a brook flashed out of the woods and into them again, now basking in the open sunshine between ribbons of goldenrod and of myriads of crickets.”

Chronicles of Avonlea” is a volume of short stories, which contains some of the most finished work of this author. The perfect art that conceals all art is shown in many of these short stories. There is a strong vein of simple humour in this as in all Miss Montgomery’s work; there is also a very keen personal sympathy of the author towards her characters.

Two other books by this author, “The Story Girl” and “The Golden Road,” are written with even less attention to a central plot than either of the two “Anne” books. They are somewhat loosely connected series of incidents in which the same characters take part. But they have none the less a high value when viewed from our standpoint; we are to remember that our Canadian Jane Austen need not invent for us thrilling plots. Other writers can do that, but other writers cannot or at least do not hold before us the mirror of Canadian country life.

Kilmeny of the Orchard” is in a sense but an expanded short story. It is a prose idyll and does not, perhaps, bulk very large when compared with the other books. It is really one of the extended “chronicles” of Avonlea.

In characterizing L.M. Montgomery the Jane Austen of Canada, let it be understood that we are not regardless of the difference in the scope of the work of the two writers. Jane Austen’s canvas is immensely broader, yet L.M. Montgomery’s portrayal of her fellowmen and fellowwomen shows a much keener personal sympathy; her work has more heart to it.

This is not the first time Montgomery had been referred to as the Canadian counterpart to Jane Austen; the earliest instance of this that I’ve found (so far) is a Toronto World review of Chronicles of Avonlea (included in Volume 3 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader) that suggests that “we might perhaps call L.M. Montgomery the Jane Austen of Canadian literature.” And it is also not the first time French would recycle some of his own work. Take a look at an article (signed “D.F.”) entitled “Rilla, Daughter of Anne” that French published in the Toronto Globe in 1921, shortly after the publication of Rilla of Ingleside:

The creation of the character “Anne” was a literary achievement which won enthusiastic commendation from writers of the highest rank—Bliss Carman and Mark Twain. Since then L.M. Montgomery has definitely fixed her place as the Jane Austen of Canadian literature and she has gone on employing her wonderful imaginative and creative gifts in portraying the beauty, the humor and the pathos that lies about our daily paths.

Possessed of a keen personal sympathy, a close intimacy with nature, a poetic attitude of mind, she captivates an ever widening circle of readers with the lightness, spontaneity, quaintness and humor of her stories.

“Rilla of Ingleside,” her latest book, follows up the career of the daughter of “Anne” of “Anne of Green Gables.” Rilla is impetuous, fun-loving, like Anne Shirley, and yet different. Anne herself and the doctor have important parts; Susan, Miss Cornelia and many other old friends reappear.

Canada’s tiny sea-girt Province, Prince Edward Island, was her birthplace. Her childhood was spent at Cavendish—a seashore farming settlement, which forms the background of many of her stories. She attended the country school and Prince of Wales College, Charlottetown, afterwards teaching for three years.

“As far back as my memory runs I was writing stories for my own amusement,” she says. In 1909 [sic], with the publication of her first book, she found the true field for her talents, although she is equally successful as a writer of verse and short stories.

In 1911 she married Rev. Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and came to Ontario to live, her husband’s charge being not far from the city of Toronto.

Although the bulk of this article is original, notice the echo between the 1914 piece (“She has the imaginative and creative gifts, but she uses these in enabling us to see the beauty, the humour, and the pathos that lies about our daily paths”) and the 1921 piece (“she has gone on employing her wonderful imaginative and creative gifts in portraying the beauty, the humor and the pathos that lies about our daily paths”) in addition to the connection in both pieces between Montgomery and Austen.

With only minor changes, the text of the 1914 article would be reused for Logan and French’s Highways ten years later—but without the connection between Montgomery and Austen. Instead, they add a paragraph to discuss the novels that Montgomery had published in the intervening time:

The story of Anne Shirley continues through several volumes—Anne of the Island pictures her college days; Anne’s House of Dreams sees her established as mistress of her own home; while Rilla of Ingleside carries over the history into the second generation, Rilla being the daughter of Anne. There is no new development of method or treatment in these. In Emily of New Moon (1923) Miss Montgomery created a new child character, with a new environment, new conditions, and a new group of minor personages, yet in effect it is of the same type and in the same literary field as her previous novels. The chief difference to be observed is that she employs a more analytic psychological method in depicting her heroine—a method that tends to produce an adult’s story of youth. In a way it marks an advance in literary technique but is not as yet entirely divorced from that minute objective observation which makes equal appeal to the young in years and the young in heart.

Given the amount of repetition between these 1914, 1921, and 1924 pieces on Montgomery by French, how to account for the mysterious disappearance of Austen? Could it be that French’s co-author, J.D. Logan, didn’t share French’s enthusiasm for the literary merit of Montgomery’s work? That seems unlikely, given that, according to Montgomery’s journal entry dated 30 April 1923, Logan had approached her at a recent social function and exclaimed, “Hail, Queen of Canadian Novelists.” Might this be due to a decreased enthusiasm for women’s writing generally? Maybe, yet in Highways Logan and French claim that 1908 marked “the real beginning of the Second Renaissance in Canadian fiction” due to the publication of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, McClung’s Sowing Seeds in Danny, and Keith’s Duncan Polite (even though Keith’s book had actually appeared in 1905). Might Logan and French have preferred to keep the focus on Canadian authors? Possibly, and yet their discussion of Keith’s novels a few paragraphs later links them to the Thrums books of Scottish author J.M. Barrie, best known as the author of Peter Pan.

So while I can’t guess what’s behind French’s decision (or possibly Logan and French’s decision) to drop the connection between Montgomery and Austen, it’s fortuitous that I came across this instance of repetition when I did. The next phase of my research on Montgomery’s periodical work focuses on periodical short stories in which Montgomery tested out characters, situations, and settings that she would rework—sometimes decades later—in her book-length fiction. Individually, these stories have been referred to as “practice exercises” by Elizabeth Waterston, as “prequels” by Irene Gammel, as “brief periodical warm-ups” by Wendy Roy, as an “early working-out in narrative” by Cecily Devereux, and as “recycled” and “replanted” by Claire E. Campbell. My earlier volumes in The L.M. Montgomery Library highlighted several instances of self-repetition in her non-fiction and her poetry—in A Name for Herself, for instance, I noted that parts of her essay “A Half-Hour in an Old Cemetery” and of her newspaper column “Around the Table” had been woven into Anne of the Island, whereas in my afterword to A World of Songs I noted that the fourteen extracts from the poems Emily shares with Mr. Carpenter in the last chapter of Emily of New Moon had been taken from Montgomery’s own poems. But when it comes to short fiction, the self-repetition becomes more strategic, more nuanced, and more complex. And so, discovering Donald French’s 1914 essay when I did was especially fortuitous, because it reminded me that Montgomery was hardly the only author who repurposed and revised their own work for new audiences, and there are multiple possible reasons for doing so.

Bibliography

Campbell, Claire E. “‘A Window Looking Seaward’: Finding Environmental History in the Writing of L.M. Montgomery.” In The Greater Gulf: Essays on the Environmental History of the Gulf of St. Lawrence, edited by Claire E. Campbell, Edward MacDonald, and Brian Payne, 283–318. Montreal and Kingston: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2019.

Chronicles of Avonlea.” In The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 3: A Legacy in Review, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, 115–38. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2015.

Devereux, Cecily. Headnote to “Our Uncle Wheeler,” by L.M. Montgomery. In Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery, edited by Cecily Devereux, 335. Peterborough: Broadview Editions, 2004.

D.F. [Donald G. French]. “Rilla, Daughter of Anne.” Globe (Toronto), 8 October 1921, 19.

French, Donald G. “Canada’s Jane Austen.” The School (Toronto), December 1914, 268–70. Online at https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.8_06954_28/.

Gammel, Irene. Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. Toronto: Key Porter Books, 2008.

Lefebvre, Benjamin. Afterword to Montgomery, A World of Songs, 105–20.

—. Introduction to The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, 3–28. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.

Logan, J.D., and Donald G. French. Highways of Canadian Literature. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1924. Online at https://archive.org/details/highwaysofcanadi0000unse/.

Montgomery, L.M. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. The L.M. Montgomery Library.

—. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 3: 1921–1929. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1992.

—. A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2019. The L.M. Montgomery Library.

Roy, Wendy. The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche. Waterloo: Wilfrid Laurier University Press, 2019.

Waterston, Elizabeth. Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2008.

Announcing The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1

Announcing the forthcoming publication of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, which will be published by University of Toronto Press in December 2013.

The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles significant primary material on one of Canada’s most enduringly popular authors throughout her high-profile career and after her death. Each of its three volumes gathers pieces published all over the world to set the stage for a much-needed reassessment of Montgomery’s literary reputation. Much of the material is freshly unearthed from archives and digital collections and has never before been published in book form.

The selections appearing in this first volume focus on Montgomery’s role as a public celebrity and as the author of the resoundingly successful Anne of Green Gables (1908). They give a strong impression of her as a writer and cultural critic as she discusses a range of topics with wit, wisdom, and humour, including the natural landscape of Prince Edward Island, her wide readership, anxieties about modernity, and the continued relevance of “old ideals.” These essays and interviews are augmented by additional pieces that discuss her work’s literary and cultural value in relation to an emerging canon of Canadian literature.

Each volume is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that trace the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and public Montgomery. This volume—and the Reader as a whole—adds tremendously to our understanding and appreciation of Montgomery’s legacy as a Canadian author and as a literary celebrity both during and beyond her lifetime.