This Is September

For L.M. Montgomery, her characters, and me, September means new beginnings: new school year, new events, new projects, and new content.

Preamble

“Harvest is ended and summer is gone,” Anne Shirley declares at the start of Anne of the Island (1915)—a statement that, as Rea Wilmshurst notes in her 1989 article “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books,” is a misquotation of Jeremiah 8:20 (“The harvest is past, the summer is ended”) from the King James Bible.² For most academics, September marks the start of a school year after a summer busy with research and writing projects. This year—the 150th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth—fall also means new initiatives, new projects, new events, and new content to share.

Although Montgomery and her books are often associated with spring, the opening chapters of Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, and Anne of Windy Poplars all focus on the beginning of a school year—with Anne as schoolteacher, as undergraduate student, or as high school principal. Moreover, September 1889 marked a new beginning for fourteen-year-old Maud Montgomery, who on this day 135 years ago burned the diary she’d kept since the age of nine (an act she would later regret) in order to start anew.

Site Updates: Structure, Sitemap, Store, and Subscriptions

Over the last few years, I’ve learned as much as I can about how to write for the web. This includes best practices to ensure that web pages will appear prominently in search results—also known as search-engine optimization. Part of that involves making sure that written text is as readable as possible, which means shorter sentences, shorter paragraphs, and shorter sections of text. (Most academics don’t write this way, so learning how to do so has been “uphill work,” as Anne would say.) SEO is also what prompted me to reorganize this website by putting all content into the following categories:

Apparently having a ton of menus and submenus in the header of every page isn’t the best SEO move, so I’ve replaced the menus with a sitemap that lists the entire contents of this website.

Given that the market is so flooded with inexpensive (and likely unreliable) editions of Montgomery’s books, finding decent editions as well as the latest works of scholarship and book-length extensions can be time-consuming and overwhelming. In order to help fellow Montgomery readers find what they’re looking for, I have become an affiliate of several online book retailers. If you order a book through one of my affiliate bookshops, I’ll earn a commission. So this is a great way to help support this website!

I’ve recently switched to a new method for collecting subscriptions to this website and sending emails to subscribers. So if you’d like to receive occasional emails from me with all the latest news, please subscribe! And if you subscribed prior to June 2024, please subscribe again!

Two New Projects

I’m pleased to announce that Meghan Macdonald, publisher at Dundurn Press (Toronto), has acquired world print rights to two trade non-fiction projects that I’ve been working on for several years.

The Glory and the Dream: L.M. Montgomery’s Writing Life draws from some never-before-seen materials as well as articles, letters, and diaries by L.M. Montgomery to paint a comprehensive portrait of the professional career of one of the most successful writers of the twentieth century. Including an analysis of her depiction of writers in her fiction, issues of copyright, advertising strategies, and advice for aspiring writers, this highly contemporary work will be sure to enthral Montgomery’s worldwide readership with the inner life of the author of Anne of Green Gables.

Next, Reimagining Anne: A Century of L.M. Montgomery’s Literary Icon on Screen looks at film and television adaptations of Anne of Green Gables over a century, from a lost 1919 silent film to the CBC/Netflix hit Anne with an “E.” It examines the multiple ways that these productions draw from and reinterpret Montgomery’s iconic literary character and the text of her perennially bestselling novel, and it draws from rarely seen sources to piece together some of the controversies and disagreements happening behind the scenes.

Both deals were arranged by Chris Casuccio of Westwood Creative Artists, who has sold audiobook rights to both books to Tantor Media. For film and tv rights, please contact chris[at]wcaltd[dot]com. For all other rights, including translation rights, please contact rights[at]dundurn[dot]com.

Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lecture

I’m equally pleased to announce that I will give this year’s Helen E. Stubbs Memorial Lecture at the Toronto Public Library’s Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. My talk will be entitled “L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Through the Years: Texts, Covers, Readers.”

The text of L.M. Montgomery’s first and most famous book, Anne of Green Gables, has largely stayed the same since it was published in 1908. But everything else—from cover designs to the technologies people use to read and discuss books—has changed immeasurably since then. In this lecture, novelist and scholar Benjamin Lefebvre shares some of the discoveries he has made throughout his many years as a Montgomery scholar and offers new insights about this perennially popular book, how it fits within Montgomery’s lifetime body of work, and how it continues to be reprinted today.

Please join us on Thursday, 14 November 2024, at the Lillian H. Smith branch of the TPL! My talk begins at 6:30 p.m., and the text of my lecture will be published in some form, likely in 2025.

Montgomery in the Classroom

Texts

This fall, I’ve returned to the classroom after a three-year break to teach a third-year undergraduate course called Gender and Sexuality in Canadian Literature. This subject matter of the course consists of what I specialized in during my academic training, so I’ve really enjoyed returning to it. And so, when I put together my reading list, I wanted to assign a mix of older and recent work as well as a wide range of texts, including novels, short fiction, poetry, essays, and creative non-fiction.

Not surprisingly, I also wanted to assign some work by Montgomery.

Even though I’ve taught Anne of Green Gables in a few courses in children’s literature, I’ve found that there’s far more to talk about in Montgomery’s work if it’s discussed outside of that genre. For that reason, I’ve included one of her books in several first-year courses in literary studies over the years: Rilla of Ingleside in Laughter and Tears: Comedy and Tragedy, Anne of Green Gables in Literature Across Borders, and Anne’s House of Dreams in Literature and Love.

This time, I decided to assign Anne of Windy Poplars.

First, I wanted to explore with my students the concept of gender and work. Anne is a high school principal at the age of twenty-two, sometime in the 1890s, but the novel doesn’t depict this as particularly groundbreaking in terms of gender and power. Second, I’ve wanted to take a closer look at how Montgomery in her work critiques—and reinforces—what’s now widely called toxic masculinity, and the many episodes featuring domineering and/or difficult male figures seemed to be a great way to do so. And third, in many ways it’s a really good book!

Contexts

Beyond telling my students that Montgomery had written Windy Poplars out of chronological order, I encouraged them to approach the book as best they could, whether or not they had any prior knowledge of the books or the character.

Then I asked them to read the chapter on Anne of Green Gables in C.E. Gatchalian’s book Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man, precisely so that they could contrast his perspective with their own as they begin reading Windy Poplars.

I wanted my students to understand Gatchalian’s experience as a boy of reading his school library’s copy of that “book for girls” but hiding that from his classmates. And because I try to encourage my students to privilege their individual perspectives when responding to texts, rather than generalize about some kind of generic “the reader,” I wanted them to appreciate how Gatchalian’s perspective as a racialized Canadian queer man of Filipinx ancestry informs his insights about Montgomery’s novel:

There are the obvious reasons why a little brown queer boy would fall in love with Anne Shirley. Anne is an orphan and, consequently, like virtually every queer child, an outsider in every family she ends up with. With her red hair and freckles, she is, in her own way, racialized, given the still-present stigma against redheads in white society. She is a girl in a world that vastly prefers boys, shipped by mistake to a family expecting and wanting a boy. In the face of these challenges she strives, Herculean, towards unadulterated poetry, beauty, transcendence. This she achieves with her most unassailable attribute, her imagination, constructing a divine counterworld to the colonial conservatism of early-twentieth-century Prince Edward Island.⁵

My students and I begin our discussion of Anne of Windy Poplars on Monday, so we’ll see how this goes!

News

Since this year marks the 150th anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth, there have been several new books to read, events to attend, initiatives to participate in, and projects to look forward to (including an exciting new stage adaptation of Anne of Green Gables by Kat Sandler that will be part of the Stratford Festival’s 2025 season). Here are some of the highlights.

Scholarship and Non-Fiction

L.M. Montgomery’s “Emily of New Moon”: A Children’s Classic at 100, a new collection of essays edited by Yan Du and Joe Sutliff Sanders, “offers a fresh point of entrance into a well-loved classic at its one-hundredth anniversary.” Published by University Press of Mississippi as part of the Children’s Literature Association Series, the book features an introduction by the volume editors as well as chapters by Yoshiko Akamatsu, Carol L. Beran, Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clement, Allison McBain Hudson, Kate Lawson, Jessica Wen Hui Lim, Lindsey McMaster, E. Holly Pike, Katharine Slater, Margaret Steffler, and Anastasia Ulanowicz.

McGill-Queen’s University Press has published Alan MacEachern’s Becoming Green Gables: The Diary of Myrtle Webb and Her Famous Farmhouse, which uses selections from Webb’s diary as “springboards to examine topics ranging from the adoption of modern conveniences to the home front hosting of soldiers in wartime and visits from Aunt Maud herself.”

Nimbus Publishing has released The Blue Castle: The Original Manuscript, edited by Carolyn Strom Collins, which transcribes the handwritten manuscript of this favourite novel and offers readers a unique glimpse at Montgomery’s writing and revision process.

Janet Wilson has published Maud of Green Gables: How L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Enchanted the World, whose text is accompanied by her own artwork. This short book “explores the intertwined legacies of Anne Shirley’s world and Montgomery’s life, tracing the story of Anne of Green Gables from conception to the 1908 publication, and through its meteoric rise to becoming a beloved classic in Canada and around the world.” Visit Janet Wilson’s website to order a copy of the book as well as greeting cards featuring some of the artwork that appears in it.

New Fiction Titles

The ANNEthology: A Collection of Kindred Spirits Inspired by the Canadian Icon, published by Acorn Press in Charlottetown, is an anthology of stories that reimagine Anne for contemporary readers (with familiar titles such as “Anne of the Silver Trail” and “Matthew Insists on Ripped Jeans”). Compiled by Judith Graves and edited by Robin Sutherland, the book consists of short stories by Paul Coccia, Hope Dalvay, Matthew Dawkins, Natasha Deen, Judith Graves, Shari Green, Mere Joyce, Deirdre Kessler, Susie Moloney, and Susan White. According to Inderjit Deogun’s profile of the book for Quill and Quire,

“Graves’s pitch was simple: the character had to be named Anne; there had to be a reference to red hair; the character had to be adopted, but that could be the backstory; and the story had to tie back to themes in the original Anne of Green Gables, of home, belonging, and displacement. From there, contributors could take Anne anywhere they wanted.”⁷

Rock’s Mills Press, publishers of five volumes so far of L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals, has released John Passfield’s novel L.M. Montgomery: I Gave You Life, which dramatizes Montgomery in 1938, writing Anne of Ingleside, which would be the last book she published in her lifetime.

In terms of books for younger readers, Tundra Books has released Kallie George’s Anne Dreams, the sixth book in her series of abridgements of Anne of Green Gables, as well as a paperback edition of the fifth book, Anne Dares. Two more single-volume abridgements of the novel have appeared in the last few months: one by Katherine Woodfine for Nosy Crow (London) and one in French by Laureen Bouyssou for Larousse Jeunesse (Paris). Moreover, Plumleaf Press has recently released Catherine Little’s picture book, Anne of the Library-on-the-Hill.

Rey Terciero’s Dan in Green Gables: A Graphic Novel, illustrated by Claudia Aguirre and referred to as “a modern reimagining of Anne of Green Gables,” will be published by Penguin Workshop (New York) in June 2025.

For more recent works, please see the bibliography’s latest items page.

Exhibits and Events

L.M. Montgomery and the Politics of Home (University of Prince Edward Island, 19–23 June 2024)

Co-chaired by Caroline E. Jones and Laura M. Robinson, this conference consisted of pre-conference workshops by Julie A. Sellers and Andrea McKenzie, a bus tour of key tourist sites in Prince Edward Island, and papers from presenters from sixteen countries. Highlights included keynote addresses by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Caroline E. Jones, and Ebony Elizabeth Thomas.

When confronting the timeless questions “Who am I?” and “Where do I belong?”, we must reckon with those two inarguable forces: politics and home. These forces inform who we are and how we are in the world. L.M. Montgomery was no exception—she was formed by the cultural and domestic politics of her time and place, and she engaged those politics in her work, alongside the ubiquitous motif of home. The year 2024 marks the 150th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth, and we will especially engage the specificity of the homes that shaped her as author, diarist, and public and private citizen.

See the event page at the L.M. Montgomery Institute website for more information.

Maud’s World: Celebrating 150 Years of Lucy Maud Montgomery (Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books, Toronto Public Library, 9 September–1 December 2024)

Celebrate Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 150th birthday with the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books. From first editions of her classic novels to original letters penned by Montgomery herself, this exhibition explores the author’s fascinating life and timeless stories. Best known for Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery was a Canadian icon in her own right, publishing 20 novels and countless short stories during her long career.

See the event page at the Toronto Public Library website for more information.

Patterns and Puffed Sleeves: Costume Design Through Anne of Green Gables (Toronto Reference Library, 5 October 2024–12 January 2025)

In celebration of the 150th birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery we are taking a look into our arts collections to share some of the costume designs from various Anne of Green Gables productions. Lucy Maud’s legacy in literature and beyond has been embodied in the phenomenal success of the Anne of Green Gables series.

With a focus on costume designs from four Anne of Green Gables productions, including the collection from Martha Mann, costume designer for the now iconic Anne of Green Gables CBC mini-series), this exhibit is a new way to dive into the world of Anne. Exhibit runs to January 12.

See the event page at the Toronto Public Library website for more information.

A Nod to Maud: Celebrating 150 Years of L.M. Montgomery (Leaskdale Manse and Blue Heron Studio, 5 October 2024)

The Lucy Maud Montgomery Society of Ontario is hosting a celebration for Montgomery at the Leaskdale Manse National Historic Site. See the event page on the Culture Days website for more information.

Blue Heron Studio in Uxbridge will hold a book launch for Janet Wilson’s Maud of Green Gables and Catherine Little’s Anne of the Library-on-the-Hill, part of the Book Drunkard Festival. See the event page on the Book Drunkard Festival website for more information.

The Literature and Libraries of L.M. Montgomery (University of Guelph, 24 October 2024)

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) published 20 novels and many short stories in her lifetime, most notably, the Anne of Green Gables series. To celebrate and to mark the occasion of the 150th anniversary of the birth of L.M. Montgomery, the McLaughlin Library at the University of Guelph is contributing digital images from the author’s private library to The Lucy Maud Montgomery Bookshelf, a project based at the University of Prince Edward Island’s L.M. Montgomery Institute.

Please join us as Dr. Emily Woster from the College of St. Scholastica and curator of The L.M. Montgomery Bookshelf Project speaks about L.M. Montgomery as a lifelong reader, re-reader, bibliophile, and a self-professed “book drunkard.” Dr. Woster will discuss the wealth of evidence Montgomery left of her reading—in journals, scrapbooks, letters, and in her fiction—reflecting both her tastes as a reader and her place in literary history. 

Ashley Shifflett McBrayne from the University of Guelph’s Archival & Special Collections will also speak about the state of the L.M. Montgomery Collection at Guelph, and about working with L.M. Montgomery’s private library, elaborating on what we know about the library, what we don’t know, and some of the interesting physical characteristics of these books including their annotations, inscriptions, and inserted materials.

This hybrid event is open to everyone and was made possible with a grant from the Bibliographical Society of America.

See the event page at the University of Guelph Library website for more information.

Call for Papers

Carole Gerson sent me this notice for an upcoming virtual conference on domestic cats in literary texts. Given the recurring role of cats in Montgomery’s work and life writing, Carole thought some Montgomery scholars might be interested in proposing a paper, so I’m passing that information along.

Date: March 13, 2025 – March 15, 2025

Subject Fields: Literature, Animal Studies, Cultural History / Studies, Humanities, Popular Culture Studies

Submissions are invited for a scholarly conference on domestic cats in literature to be hosted online 13–15 March 2025 by the Troy University Department of English.  

Papers may address any aspect of the subject, including—but not limited to—the following:

• Cats as characters, symbols, companions, pets, inspiration, environmental pests, guides, thieves, mystical creatures, gods
• Cats and mystery, aesthetics, creativity, abstraction, contemplation, parody, comedy, modernism, myth, the supernatural
• Cats in science fiction, comics, film, young-adult literature, children’s literature
• Cats in the works of specific authors like T. S. Eliot, J. K. Rowling, Lewis Carroll, Edgar Poe, Rudyard Kipling, Mikhail Bulgakov, Stephen King, and others.

Academics at all levels—including undergraduates—are welcome to submit proposals (a 250-word abstract) to Ben P. Robertson (Department of English, Troy University) by 1 February 2025. Email: bprobertson[at]troy[dot]edu.

New Anne Coin from the Royal Canadian Mint

On 26 June 2024 at Green Gables Heritage Place in Prince Edward Island, the Royal Canadian Mint unveiled a new $1 commemorative coin in honour of L.M. Montgomery. The artwork for the coin was created by PEI artist Brenda Jones.

L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942), one of Canada’s most enduringly popular authors, has influenced culture and literature internationally. Publishing hundreds of short stories and poems in addition to 20 novels, she achieved lasting fame through the creation of one of the world’s unforgettable characters: a plucky, talkative orphan girl with red braids, big feelings and imagination, and the same deep love for Prince Edward Island as her creator.

The 2024 $1 commemorative circulation coin pays tribute to L. M. Montgomery, a Canadian literary icon whose writing is treasured by millions worldwide. On the 150th anniversary of her birth, the creator of Anne of Green Gables is the first author to be featured on a Canadian circulation coin, and, fittingly, its design celebrates her creativity. Each Colourized Special Wrap Roll contains 25 selectively coloured commemorative coins; the reverse of each coin offers a colourful view of the Prince Edward Island landscape that inspired so many of Montgomery’s stories, and through her, the world.⁹

Behind the Design: L.M. Montgomery Commemorative $1 Circulation Coin (Royal Canadian Mint)

2024 $1 150th Anniversary of the Birth of L.M. Montgomery Colourized Special Wrap Roll (Royal Canadian Mint)

Recent Articles

Coming Up Next

The beginning of October is usually when the “I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers” memes start circulating again. But it’s hardly the only time Montgomery ever wrote about October—nor is it the first.

A few months ago I came across an old newspaper article that reported on literary work that had appeared in several prominent magazines that month. Luckily for me, this one included a concrete clue about a certain short story of Montgomery’s that, to the best of my knowledge, no one has been able to find. The interlibrary loan department of my university library couldn’t find a library who had the issue I needed, which attests to how rare it is. But I then found the magazine on eBay, and it should arrive in a few weeks. The eBay listing did not mention Montgomery, so I won’t know for sure if this is the right issue until it gets here. I’ll keep you posted!

In the meantime, if you have any news to share or questions to ask, please contact me.

Notes

1. L.M. Montgomery, “The Watchman” and Other Poems (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1916), 70.

2. Rea Wilmshurst, “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books,” Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 55 (1989): 22.

3. Montgomery, 21 September 1889, in The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013), 3.

4. Montgomery, Pat of Silver Bush (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1933), 182.

5. C.E. Gatchalian, Double Melancholy: Art, Beauty, and the Making of a Brown Queer Man (Vancouver: Arsenal Pulp Press, 2019), 23–24.

6. Montgomery, “The Woods in Autumn,” part of “[Seasons in the Woods],” in The L.M. Montgomery Reader, volume 1: A Life in Print, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013), 85.

7. Inderjit Deogun, “‘A Seed Was Planted That Anne Could Be Anybody,’ Recalls Judith Graves,” Quill and Quire, June 2024. https://quillandquire.com/authors/a-seed-was-planted-that-anne-could-be-anybody-recalls-judith-graves/.

8. “New $1 Coin Honours Author of Anne of Green Gables,” Canadian Coin News, 27 June 2024. https://canadiancoinnews.com/new-1-coin-honours-author-of-anne-of-green-gables/.

9. Montgomery, Anne’s House of Dreams (Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1917), 223–24.

Image Credits

Detail from the cover of Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery, published by Bantam Books (New York) in 1976 and by Seal Books (Toronto) in 1981. Cover artist unidentified. This image is a scan of one of my personal copies of this edition.

Cover of the original edition of Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery, published by the Page Company (Boston) in 1915. Illustration by George Gibbs. Courtesy of the Ryrie-Campbell Collection, L.M. Montgomery Institute, and Robertson Library, University of Prince Edward Island.

Detail from a photograph of fourteen-year-old Maud Montgomery, ca. 1889. Courtesy of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.

Photo of the 2024 $1 coin honouring L.M. Montgomery. Artwork by Brenda Jones. Courtesy of Canadian Coin News.

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