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How Fair the Realm Literary Allusions Open to the View

Extract from the first edition of ANNE OF AVONLEA, by L.M. Montgomery.
"Splendid," Anne agreed, gray shining eyes looking down into blue shining ones Anne and Paul both knew
"How fair the realm
Imagination opens to the view,"
and both knew the way to that happy land. There the rose of joy bloomed immortal by dale and stream; clouds never darkened the sunny sky; sweet bells never jangled out of tune; and kindred spirits abounded. The knowledge of that land’s geography … “east o’ the sun, west o’ the moon” … is priceless lore, not to be bought in any market place.
Detail from page 167 of the original edition (first impression) of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea,
published by L.C. Page and Company in 1909. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.

Earlier this year, I received a message from a fellow L.M. Montgomery reader asking about an apparent quotation that appears in chapter 15 of Anne of Avonlea: “How fair the realm / Imagination opens to the view.” Some digging revealed that this was one of the quotations that Rea Wilmshurst, in her pioneering 1989 article entitled “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books,” had not been able to identify. And although the quotation also appears, in identical form but without the line break, in an entry in Montgomery’s comic diary written collaboratively with Nora Lefurgey (included in The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery, edited by Irene Gammel) and in a 1927 letter from Montgomery to Ephraim Weber (included in After Green Gables, edited by Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen), the editors of those volumes were unable to identify this source either (see Montgomery to Weber, 16 November 1927, in After Green Gables, 148; Montgomery, 26 January 1903, in Montgomery and Lefurgey, “‘ . . . Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?,” 27).

What I found intriguing is that Montgomery used this quotation, in identical form except for the line break, on three separate occasions, years apart from each other (1903, 1909, and 1927), and yet, the fact that this quotation still hasn’t been identified indicates that either Montgomery quoted the text inaccurately (as she often did, since when dropping quotations into her work she evidently relied on memory, which is rarely exact) or the source in question is incredibly obscure. At the same time, judging by the large number of results from a Google search for the text of this quotation, it’s clear that its text has resonated with Montgomery readers, many of whom, faced with no evidence to the contrary, credit Montgomery herself as the source of the quotation.

Still, as I’ve remarked several times before, the increased digitization of old print materials over the last fifteen years or longer has given researchers opportunities to fill many of the gaps in the work of earlier scholars like Wilmshurst, who had to rely on dictionaries of quotations and sayings and to comb through hard copies of the complete works of innumerable poets and prose writers in order to complete her research, and so it is a testament to Wilmshurst’s determination and skill that she identified as many quotations and allusions as she did. Digitization allows researchers not only access to books, magazines, and newspapers beyond the physical holdings at individual libraries but also the ability to search through electronic texts.

Detail from the title page of the original edition of ANNE OF AVONLEA, published by L.C. Page and Company, in 1909, with text as follows:
"Flowers spring to blossom where she walks / The careful ways of duty, / Our hard, stiff lines of life with her / Are flowing curves of beauty." —Whittier.
Detail from the title page of the original edition (first impression) of L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Avonlea,
published by L.C. Page and Company in 1909. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.

And so, in most cases, a few rounds on Google will solve lingering mysteries or confirm earlier findings quite easily: it takes less than a minute to determine that “east o’ the sun, west o’ the moon,” quoted in that same paragraph in Anne of Avonlea, refers to the title of a Norse fairy tale that appears in translated form under the title “East of the Sun & West of the Moon” in Andrew Lang’s The Blue Fairy Book (1889). It is equally straightforward to determine that the epigraph to Anne of Avonlea—“Flowers spring to blossom where she walks / The careful ways of duty, / Our hard, stiff lines of life with her / Are flowing curves of beauty,” attributed on the title page simply to “Whittier”—is from John Greenleaf Whittier’s long poem “Among the Hills” and to read the extract in the context of the whole poem. And as I pointed out last year when discussing the epigraph to Rilla of Ingleside, the digitization of old print materials can sometimes allow us to determine not only what text but also what version of a text Montgomery is quoting.

After trying multiple combinations of terms from the “imagination opens to the view” quotation, I finally came across a single instance of something that initially looked like a dead end: a poem entitled “Day-Dreams,” attributed to Harriet Trowbridge, which begins with what looks like an epigraph: “How fair the realm / Imagination opes [sic] to view— / Soft emerald fields / And skies of melting blue!” The poem appears in the February 1886 issue of Wide Awake, a Boston periodical, but doesn’t offer a source for the epigraph. I couldn’t find any other hits for this version of the quotation, which disappointed me; while at least I could answer my fellow Montgomery reader’s question and confirm that yes, this is a real quotation, I didn’t seem to be any closer to determining where it was from.

Page from a digitized nineteenth-century magazine, beginning with the following textual items:
DAY-DREAMS
Harriet Trowbridge
“How fair the realm
  Imagination opes to view—
Soft emerald fields
  And skies of melting blue!”
What follows is the first half of a poem, consisting of two-couplet stanzas (beginning with "O tell me, pretty, Alice, tell me, I pray, / Where have you been wand’ring this midsummer day?") and including a drawing of a little girl with frizzy hair accompanied by a caption that reads "Pretty Alice."
Detail from “Day-Dreams,” a poem by Harriet Trowbridge that was published in the
February 1886 issue of Wide Awake, a Boston periodical. Courtesy of Google Books.

Still, figuring this discovery was better than nothing, I sent all of this to my longtime friend Jennifer H. Litster, whose Ph.D. on Montgomery at the University of Edinburgh involved a tremendous amount of work on Montgomery’s literary allusions (and was completed prior to the widespread digitization of older print materials). And I’m glad I did, because her response made me reconsider my initial assumption that I’d hit another dead end.

“She read Wide Awake, didn’t she? So there is of course the possibility that this is the source for her.”

Jenny reminded me that Montgomery had read Wide Awake as a child at some point during the years Wellington and David Nelson had lived with her and her grandparents in Cavendish, something I had forgotten. And so, armed with our respective copies of Montgomery’s journals are both sides of the Atlantic Ocean, we pieced together a possible chronology as best we could using the clues Montgomery had left behind in both her journals and in her celebrity memoir “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career.” The first thing to do was to determine if it was possible that Montgomery had read the February 1886 issue of Wide Awake, given that, as Montgomery mentioned in a journal entry dated 7 January 1910, it was Wellington Nelson who had been sent this monthly magazine (CJLMM, 2: 258). Elsewhere in her journal, she mentioned that the Nelson boys had stayed with her until she was eleven (3 May 1908, in CJLMM, 2: 185) and that they left sometime in the winter (7 January 1910, in CJLMM, 2: 266). Given that Montgomery turned eleven at the end of November 1885, it is plausible that she read that February 1886 issue of Wide Awake before the Nelson boys left. And it’s also plausible that she incorporated the contents of this magazine into her own creative life, given that she mentioned earlier in that 1910 journal entry that as a child she had named her cat Topsy “after a cat in ‘Wide Awake’” (CJLMM, 2: 264).

And if it seems unlikely that Montgomery clipped or copied items she had read in magazines as a child and used them in her own writing as an adult, we do have evidence of her doing just this. In a journal entry dated October 1916 in which she mentioned that she had written “the story of ‘My Literary Career’” for the Toronto magazine Everywoman’s World, she reported that she had selected “The Alpine Path” as a her title, an echo of “a bit of fugitive verse entitled ‘Lines to the Fringed Gentian’ by some forgotten author. The last verse haunted my memory and has been with me all these years as an aspiration” (LMMCJ, 1: 251). When she mentioned this memoir again in an entry dated January 1917, she specified that the poem, entitled “The Fringed Gentian,” had been “published in the old Godey’s Lady’s Book” and referred to it as “the little verse which I wrote in my port-folio” (LMMCJ, 1: 268). In the late 1980s, Carol Gaboury established that this poem had appeared as part of a sixteen-chapter serial entitled “Tam: The Story of a Woman,” by Ella Rodman Church and Augusta de Bubna, published in six instalments between January and June 1884, when Montgomery was nine (see Lefebvre, Headnote, 232).

What Montgomery did not mention in either journal entry is that she also clipped the poem from the pages of Godey’s Lady’s Book and pasted it in what is now known as her Red Scrapbook, on a page that was reproduced in Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s book Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery.

Scan of a yellowed scrapbook clipping from an old periodical, cropped around the full text of a poem called "The Fringed Gentian"; the full text of this poem is in the blog post.
Scan of a clipping from an old periodical, cropped around the full text of a poem called "The Fringed Gentian"; the full text of this poem is in the blog post.
Two clippings of the poem “The Fringed Gentian,” appearing in a fiction serial entitled “Tam:
The Story of a Woman,” by Ella Rodman Church and Augusta de Bubna, published in the March 1884
issue of Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia). On the left is a detail from the page in Godey’s Lady’s Book
(courtesy of the Internet Archive); on the right is a detail from a page in Montgomery’s Red Scrapbook,
appearing in Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s Imagining Anne: L.M. Montgomery’s Island Scrapbooks.

I’m not aware that anyone has found a clipping of Harriet Trowbridge’s “Day-Dreams” in Montgomery’s scrapbook, but since the issue of Wide Awake in question didn’t belong to her, perhaps she had to content herself with transcribing it in a notebook (one that, like her “port-folio,” no longer survives).

In a sense, this is one of the reasons I chose to make Montgomery the central focus of my academic research more than twenty years ago: that there’s always some new to investigate and discover, especially as the digitization of older print materials reveals new clues that can be added to the mix. And given that Montgomery was born 148 years ago today, it is worth taking stock of all of the ways that her life, her work, and her legacy continue to fascinate readers all around the world.

Still, when it comes to the literary allusions in Montgomery’s work, for every mystery that’s solved are a dozen more than remain elusive. The opening line of Anne of Avonlea refers to Anne as “a tall, slim girl, ‘half-past sixteen’” (AA, 1), but my attempts to find a source for that quotation have so far led me nowhere, except for Mrs. A.D. Hawkins’s 1879 novel Hannah: The Odd Fellow’s Orphan (where the phrase “half past sixteen” also appears within quotation marks) and various references to 4:30 in the afternoon. But maybe one day, the right print publication will be digitized and made text searchable, and someone will have better luck solving that mystery, too.

Bibliography

Church, Ellen Rodman, and Augusta de Bubna. “Tam: The Story of a Woman” (third instalment). Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia), March 1884, 233–46. https://archive.org/details/sim_godeys-magazine_1884-03_108_645/page/232/.

Epperly, Elizabeth Rollins. Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery. Toronto: Penguin Canada, 2008. 100 Years of Anne.

Hawkins, Mrs. A.D. Hannah: The Odd Fellow’s Orphan. Indianapolis: Douglass & Carlon, 1879. https://archive.org/details/hannahoddfellow00hawkgoog/page/n86/

Lefebvre, Benjamin. Headnote to “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career,” by L.M. Montgomery. In Montgomery, A Name for Herself, 231–35.

Montgomery, L.M. After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941. Edited by Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2006.

—. Anne of Avonlea. Boston: L.C. Page and Company, 1909. https://archive.org/details/anneavonlea00montgoog/.

—. The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911. Edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013.

—. L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917. Edited by Jen Rubio. N.p.: Rock’s Mills Press, 2016.

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

Montgomery, L.M., and Nora Lefurgey. “‘ . . . Where Has My Yellow Garter Gone?’ The Diary of L.M. Montgomery and Nora Lefurgey.” Edited, annotated, and illustrated by Irene Gammel. In The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery, edited by Irene Gammel, 19–87. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2005.

Trowbridge, Harriet. “Day-Dreams.” Wide Awake (Boston), February 1886, 164–65. https://books.google.ca/books?id=ekg_AQAAMAAJ&pg=PA164.

Wilmshurst, Rea. “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books.” Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 56 (1989): 15–45.

Next on Readathon: Anne of Green Gables!

Cover of Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery, a book with a green cloth cover that features the title and the author's name in gold letters below a framed painting showing the profile and shoulders of a red-headed Caucasian woman, facing left.

Today on the L.M. Montgomery Readathon, a Facebook group that Andrea McKenzie and I have curated since the beginning of the pandemic, we start our discussion of our seventh book, Anne of Green Gables—and you’re invited to join us!

Between now and early November, we’ll be reading this favourite book together chapter by chapter. In addition to members taking turns reading each chapter in turn, we’ll post discussion questions, favourite book covers, details about Montgomery’s life and times (including education, fashion, and technology), allusions to previous works of literature, and information about the book’s publishing history. While we may bring up adaptations and supplementary texts (including more than two dozen abridged editions for young children) on occasion, the bulk of the focus will be on L.M. Montgomery’s novel. But all readers are welcomed to join us, whether you are reading the book for the first time or for the hundredth time.

The full schedule is below. I look forward to discussing this book with you!

L.M. Montgomery Readathon

Reading Schedule for Anne of Green Gables

Monday, 4 July 2022: Chapter I. Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Surprised

Thursday, 7 July 2022: Chapter II. Matthew Cuthbert Is Surprised

Monday, 11 July 2022: Chapter III. Marilla Cuthbert Is Surprised

Thursday, 14 July 2022: Chapter IV. Morning at Green Gables

Monday, 18 July 2022: Chapter V. Anne’s History

Thursday, 21 July 2022: Chapter VI. Marilla Makes Up Her Mind

Monday, 25 July 2022: Chapter VII. Anne Says Her Prayers

Thursday, 28 July 2022: Chapter VIII. Anne’s Bringing-Up Is Begun

Monday, 1 August 2022: Chapter IX. Mrs. Rachel Lynde Is Properly Horrified

Thursday, 4 August 2022: Chapter X. Anne’s Apology

Monday, 8 August 2022: Chapter XI. Anne’s Impressions of Sunday-School

Thursday, 11 August 2022: Chapter XII. A Solemn Vow and Promise

Monday, 15 August 2022: Chapter XIII. The Delights of Anticipation

Thursday, 18 August 2022: Chapter XIV. Anne’s Confession

Monday, 22 August 2022: Chapter XV. A Tempest in the School Teapot

Thursday, 25 August 2022: Chapter XVI. Diana Is Invited to Tea with Tragic Results

Monday, 29 August 2022: Chapter XVII. A New Interest in Life

Thursday, 1 September 2022: Chapter XVIII. Anne to the Rescue

Monday, 5 September 2022: Chapter XIX. A Concert, a Catastrophe, and a Confession

Thursday, 8 September 2022: Chapter XX. A Good Imagination Gone Wrong

Monday, 12 September 2022: Chapter XXI. A New Departure in Flavourings

Thursday, 15 September 2022: Chapter XXII. Anne Is Invited Out to Tea

Monday, 19 September 2022: Chapter XXIII. Anne Comes to Grief in an Affair of Honour

Thursday, 22 September 2022: Chapter XXIV. Miss Stacy and Her Pupils Get Up a Concert

Monday, 26 September 2022: Chapter XXV. Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves

Thursday, 29 September 2022: Chapter XXVI. The Story Club Is Formed

Monday, 3 October 2022: Chapter XXVII. Vanity and Vexation of Spirit

Thursday, 6 October 2022: Chapter XXVIII. An Unfortunate Lily Maid

Monday, 10 October 2022: Chapter XXIX. An Epoch in Anne’s Life

Thursday, 13 October 2022: Chapter XXX. The Queen’s Class Is Organized

Monday, 17 October 2022: Chapter XXXI. Where the Brook and River Meet

Thursday, 20 October 2022: Chapter XXXII. The Pass List Is Out

Monday, 24 October 2022: Chapter XXXIII. The Hotel Concert

Thursday, 27 October 2022: Chapter XXXIV. A Queen’s Girl

Monday, 31 October 2022: Chapter XXXV. The Winter at Queen’s

Thursday, 3 November 2022: Chapter XXXVI. The Glory and the Dream

Monday, 7 November 2022: Chapter XXXVII. The Reaper Whose Name Is Death

Thursday, 10 November 2022: Chapter XXXVIII. The Bend in the Road

And Then There Were Three

Cover of A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917
Cover of A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921
Cover art for /Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939/, by L.M. Montgomery, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. The top two-thirds of the cover depict framed images of Anne Shirley, a Caucasian woman with red hair, against a vintage blue wallpaper; the bottom third of the image includes the title, the author's name, and the editor's name against a beige background.
Covers for A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917, A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921, and Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939, the first three volumes in The L.M. Montgomery Library, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Courtesy of University of Toronto Press.

I’m happy to report that Twice upon a Time, the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library and consisting of two dozen short stories (many of which are collected in book form for the first time) from across Montgomery’s career as a short story writer, is now out in the world. As a way to promote this book, I’d like to do a Q&A on this website. So if you have any questions for me about this book, this book series, Montgomery’s periodical career, or any other aspect of Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy, I’d like to hear from you! Please contact me with your questions and I’ll answer as many of them as I can.

To commemorate the publication of this latest book, University of Toronto Press has made all seven of my L.M. Montgomery books—including the three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Readeravailable at a 40% discount. I have no idea how long these books will be available at that price, but this is a great opportunity to get caught up on any titles you’ve missed.

Twice upon a Time: Pre-release Sightings

Screenshot detail of the following text, alongside a cover image that shows two framed images of red-headed women hanging side by side on a wall with vintage blue wallpaper. The text reads as follows:
Hello Benjamin Lefebvre,
Based on your recent activity, we thought you might be interested in this.
Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898-1939
L.M. Montgomery, Benjamin Lefebvre
Price: $29.95
Learn More

A few days ago, I received an automated email from a certain large book retailer suggesting that I might be interested in Twice upon a Time, the upcoming third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library. While this isn’t the first time this particular bookstore chain has sent me an email recommending my own book, I appreciated receiving this email because it reminded me that there have been a couple of updates regarding this book that I’ve been meaning to share with you.

Although the book won’t be released for a few more weeks (likely the end of June for the paperback and early July for the hardcover), there are now a couple of ways that you can preview the book prior to its release. The first is that the ebook version available to institutional libraries is now available, and although users need to access it through a university library’s catalogue, elements at the front of the book—including the book’s preface—are freely available to read. The second is that the book is available on Netgalley for people who are interested in writing an advance review (I’ve seen three so far on Goodreads, which I very much appreciate!). The third is that a selection of interior pages can now be browsed on a number of platforms, including Google Books.

You can purchase this book directly from the publisher, University of Toronto Press, at substantial discounts, in paperback, hardcover, and ebook formats, or from your favourite bookseller.

Shop Local (paperback)
Shop Local (hardcover)
Amazon.ca (Canada) (paperback/hardcover/Kindle)
Amazon.com.au (Australia) (paperback/hardcover/Kindle)
Amazon.com.br (Brazil) (paperback/hardcover/Kindle)
Amazon.co.jp (Japan) (paperback/hardcover/Kindle)
Amazon.co.uk (UK) (paperback/hardcover/Kindle)
Amazon.se (Sweden) (paperback/hardcover)
Angus and Robertson (Australia) (paperback)
Angus and Robertson (Australia) (hardcover)
Barnes and Noble (paperback/hardcover/Nook Book)
Blackwells (UK) (paperback)
Blackwells (UK) (hardcover)
Chapters Indigo (paperback)
Chapters Indigo (hardcover)
Chapters Indigo (kobo)
Google Play (ebook)
Indie Bound (paperback)
Indie Bound (hardcover)
McNally Robinson (paperback)
McNally Robinson (hardcover)
Waterstones (paperback)
Waterstones (hardcover)
Wheelers (New Zealand)

And if you like the books in this series, please consider recommending them to your public or institutional library and contributing a ranking or a review on your favourite book-related website. Your support is much appreciated!

Anne’s Birthday Month

“I was just on my way over to invite you to help me celebrate my birthday on Saturday,” said Anne.

“Your birthday? But your birthday was in March!”

“That wasn’t my fault,” laughed Anne. “If my parents had consulted me it would never have happened then. I should have chosen to be born in spring, of course. It must be delightful to come into the world with the mayflowers and violets. You would always feel that you were their foster sister. But since I didn’t, the next best thing is to celebrate my birthday in the spring.”

Anne of Avonlea, chapter 13: “A Golden Picnic”

Although Anne Shirley never specifies when in March her birthday is held, the fact that today, March 8, is International Women’s Day seems to be a good occasion to begin the celebration of Anne’s birthday month. Accordingly, between now and the end of March I’ll share a selection of Anne book covers from multiple countries and across time through L.M. Montgomery Online’s social media accounts on Facebook, Twitter, Pinterest, and Instagram. If you don’t follow this website on one of these platforms, please do so! At the end of the month, I’ll post all the covers again on this website and invite people to vote on their favourites.

We’ll start with the book cover that accompanied Anne’s first appearance in the book industry—that of the first edition of Anne of Green Gables, published by L.C. Page and Company in 1908.

Cover of Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery, a book with a green cloth cover that features the title and the author's name in gold letters below a framed painting showing the profile and shoulders of a red-headed Caucasian woman, facing left.

Unidentified Clipping in L.M. Montgomery’s Scrapbook: “L.M. Montgomery Is Undecided”

Image of a newspaper clipping of an article entitled “L.M. Montgomery Is Undecided” and consisting of the following text: L.M. Montgomery, whose charming story of love in an elysian Canadian summer, “Blue Castle,” has just been published by Stokes, writes that she is busy now on the third Emily book and a “dreadful time I am having, too, with all her beaux. Her love affairs won’t run straight. Then, too, I’m bombarded with letters from girls who implore me to let her marry Dean, not Teddy. But she is set on Teddy herself so what am I to do? One letter recently was quite unique. All previous letters have implored to write ‘more about Emily, no matter whom she marries,’ but the writer of this begged me not to write another Emily book because she felt sure if I did she would marry Teddy and she (the writer) just couldn’t bear it. . . . So between these contradictory pleas, I’m in a regular mess!”
Unidentified clipping (1926) in L.M. Montgomery’s ”Scrapbook of Reviews,” part of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library

This week on the L.M. Montgomery Readathon (which Andrea McKenzie and I run on Facebook), we are concluding our group discussion of Emily Climbs. As such, I thought this would be a good time to share (both on the Readathon and on this blog) a newspaper clipping I came across several years ago in one of L.M. Montgomery’s scrapbooks, in which she’s quoted talking about the difficulties she’d later face when trying to write the next volume about Emily, which would be published as Emily’s Quest in 1927. The clipping, entitled “L.M. Montgomery Is Undecided,” is unidentified and there’s no indication of to whom she has written these words (let alone if she intended them for publication), but it reads as follows:

L.M. Montgomery, whose charming story of love in an elysian Canadian summer, “Blue Castle,” has just been published by Stokes, writes that she is busy now on the third Emily book and a “dreadful time I am having, too, with all her beaux. Her love affairs won’t run straight. Then, too, I’m bombarded with letters from girls who implore me to let her marry Dean, not Teddy. But she is set on Teddy herself so what am I to do? One letter recently was quite unique. All previous letters have implored me to write ‘more about Emily, no matter whom she marries,’ but the writer of this begged me not to write another Emily book because she felt sure if I did she would marry Teddy and she (the writer) just couldn’t bear it. . . . So between these contradictory pleas, I’m in a regular mess!”

We won’t be reading Emily’s Quest next on the Readathon, but I wanted to bring this up as a way to raise three topics of conversation.

First, the clipping consists of a rare instance of Montgomery revealing that sometimes she feels as though the character truth of her characters and the input she receives from readers sometimes make her lose control of her own material. What does this reveal about Montgomery as a writer, especially as a writer of fiction released in instalments?

Second, it indicates that her readers felt differently (and yet adamantly) about Emily’s choice of husband, although of course there’s no way to indicate how evenly they were divided between Team Teddy and Team Dean. But there’s no indication here of any of the creepy subtext about Dean that many Readathon participants commented on as we read through this book. If our growing awareness of this subtext now is in part a byproduct of the #MeToo movement and of an increased societal awareness of toxic masculinity, what does this suggest about the way people read (or reread) and interpret (or reinterpret) a work of fiction?

Third, the only plot element mentioned in this clipping is Emily’s “beaux,” as though Emily’s sole quest in this novel-in-progress is to find a husband. What do you make of the fact that, at least as far as this article reports, Montgomery’s readers seem to be more interested in reading more about Emily’s love life than about her writing life? (Note that it refers to The Blue Castle as a “charming story of love in an elysian Canadian summer,” which really simplifies this complex novel.) Or is the emphasis here on Emily’s love life simply because her writing career is comparatively much more straightforward to write about?

If you’d like to join the L.M. Montgomery Readathon, we are always looking for new members! Andrea and I will soon announce the next book we’ll be reading together, starting in mid-January 2022.

UPDATE: Thanks to Simon Lloyd, university archivist and special collections librarian at the University of Prince Edward Island Library, this “unidentified” clipping is unidentified no more! He responded to my tweet about this blog post with a scan of a newspaper page that matches the clipping, and it shows that it appeared in the Salt Lake Telegram of Salt Lake City, Utah, on 10 October 1926, p. 4. Quite possibly this story was picked up by a number of other newspapers across the continent, but this particular clipping is most definitely from this newspaper. Thanks so much, Simon!

Next on Conversations: “L.M. Montgomery’s Kindred Spirits: The One in Scotland”

Graphic consisting of a montage of four images (a vintage typewriter and an old book; an envelope addressed to Geo B. McMillan / 34 Castle St. / Alloa, Scotland"; a photograph of Montgomery posing outside in fancy dress and hat; and a street sign that reads "Ch Montgomery Rd"), with the following text: "Conversations about L.M. Montgomery Presents / L.M. Montgomery's Kindred Spirits: The One in Scotland" / "Mary Beth Cavert" / "4 December 2021."

Our next Conversations about L.M. Montgomery event will be held over Zoom on Saturday, December 4, at 2:00 p.m. (EST). It will feature Mary Beth Cavert, whose extensive contributions to L.M. Montgomery studies include co-editing The Shining Scroll (the newsletter of the L.M. Montgomery Literary Society of Minnesota) and researching the family members and friends to whom Montgomery dedicated her books.

Beth’s presentation is entitled “L.M. Montgomery’s Kindred Spirits: The One in Scotland,” and in it she will share parts of her most recent project, which involves preparing a complete edition of Montgomery’s forty-year correspondence with G.B. MacMillan of Alloa, Scotland.

Registration is required; all interested persons are welcome to join us for this presentation, and a video of the presentation will be posted on YouTube at a later date. If you have any questions about the event, please contact me. Hope to see you there!

A Note on the Epigraph to Rilla of Ingleside

Cover of the original edition of L.M. Montgomery's Rilla of Ingleside, published in 1921. In the centre is a painted image of a young Caucasian woman wearing a white dress and a red jacket clutching a letter and sitting on the ground, with trees behind her and poppies scattered at her feet. The image is surrounded by a design elements that indicate the author's name and the book title against a navy-blue background.

Today came the official announcement of the signing of the armistice! The Great War is over—the world’s agony has ended. What has been born? The next generation may be able to answer that. We can never know fully.

—L.M. Montgomery, journal entry dated 11 November 1918

Given that not only is today Remembrance Day but also this year marks the one-hundredth anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s Great War novel Rilla of Ingleside, I thought this might be a good opportunity to share with you some findings about an aspect of Montgomery’s work that I’ve long found fascinating, since it has to do with her attempts to engage with the work of fellow Canadian writers.

As her journals and letters show, Montgomery’s reading interests overall were quite broad, but she had a particular fondness for the work of canonical nineteenth-century poets (mostly male) who were located in England, Scotland, and the United States. And so, since her books are filled with allusions to and quotations from a vast array of literary works, it’s not surprising that the same names recur several times.

If we look specifically at her books’ epigraphs—short quotations that appear near the beginning of a book as a way to offer readers a hint about its contents (particularly for readers who recognize the quotation and can place it in the context of the overall work)—we can see a clear pattern in terms of what texts and what authors Montgomery chose to highlight. Of the ten books by Montgomery that begin with an epigraph from someone else’s work, all but one quote the work of a male poet from outside Canada: Robert Browning (Anne of Green Gables), John Greenleaf Whittier (Anne of Avonlea and Chronicles of Avonlea), James Hogg (Kilmeny of the Orchard), George Gordon, Lord Byron (The Story Girl), Alfred, Lord Tennyson (Anne of the Island), Rupert Brooke (Anne’s House of Dreams), Henry Wadsworth Longfellow (Rainbow Valley), and Rudyard Kipling (Pat of Silver Bush).

Title page of the original edition of Rilla of Ingleside, with the following text elements: RILLA OF INGLESIDE / by / L.M. Montgomery // Author of “Anne of Green Gables,” “Anne of the Island,” “Anne’s House of Dreams,” “Rainbow Valley,” “The Story Girl,” “The Watchman,” etc. // "Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendour gave their youth away.” / —Sheard / With frontispiece in colour by / M.L. Kirk // Toronto / McClelland and Stewart, Limited / Publishers

The epigraph to Rilla of Ingleside is thus unique in two particular ways: first, its author, Virna Sheard, is the only Canadian as well as the only woman whose work appears in one of Montgomery’s epigraphs; and second, Sheard is so relatively unknown that when Rea Wilmshurst published her list of literary allusions in the Anne books in Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse in 1989, she was unable to identify the poem by Sheard in question. In the years then, as more and more print materials have been digitized and made text searchable, it’s been far easier to determine that these lines are from Sheard’s poem “The Young Knights,” which appeared in her 1917 collection Carry On! and which was reprinted in John W. Garvin’s anthology Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918). Montgomery’s poem “Our Women” also appears in that anthology, so it would seem plausible that she had come across Sheard’s poem in that anthology and used it when she started writing Rilla of Ingleside in mid-March 1919.

The problem, though, is that the lines from Sheard’s poem as they appear on the title page of Rilla of Ingleside don’t quite match the way they appear in Carry On! or in Canadian Poems of the Great War. Here is a detail from the title page of Rilla of Ingleside.

Detail from the title page of the first edition of /Rilla of Ingleside/, with text as follows: "'Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendour gave their / youth away.” / —Sheard

Note the preference here for the Canadian spelling of “splendour” and the line break just before “youth away.” In the versions appearing in Sheard’s and Garvin’s books, these elements appear slightly differently:

Detail from /Carry On!/, by Virna Sheard, with text as follows: “’The Young Knights’ // Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendor gave their you away; / Perpetual Spring is their inheritance, / Though they have lived in Flanders and in France / A round of years, in one remembered day.
Detail from /Canadian Poems of the Great War/, edited by John W. Garvin, with text as follows: “’The Young Knights’ // Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendor gave their you away; / Perpetual Spring is their inheritance, / Though they have lived in Flanders and in France / A round of years, in one remembered day.

In Carry On!, the first of the two images, the text opts for the American spelling of “splendor,” and in both versions there’s no line break before “youth away” as there is on the title page of Rilla of Ingleside. There seemed to be a mystery here and I knew it would continue to bug me until I figured it out.

And so, when Andrea McKenzie and I started discussing Rilla of Ingleside at the beginning of the COVID-19 pandemic on the L.M. Montgomery Readathon, I decided to take another look at the surviving files. I found a digital copy of Carry On! on the website of the Canadiana digital project, so I combed through the rest of the book and noticed that Sheard mentions in the acknowledgements section that “The Young Knights” was one of several poems in the collection that was first published in the Toronto Globe (now the Globe and Mail). Lo and behold, a quick search through the digital archives of the Globe showed that the poem appeared in that newspaper on 23 May 1916:

Detail from “The Young Knights” by Virna Sheard, published in the Toronto Globe on 23 May 1916, with text as follows: “’The Young Knights’ // Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendor gave their / youth away; / Perpetual Spring is their inheritance, / Though they have lived in Flanders / and in France / A round of years, in one remembered / day.

Because this poem appeared in a newspaper with narrow columns, longer lines of poetry needed to broken in two and indented, as happens three times in this stanza. So even though this Globe version uses the U.S. spelling of “splendor,” it seems more likely that Montgomery drew on this newspaper version when writing her book. Not to mention that, on the title of her handwritten manuscript, she writes “splendor” instead of “splendour,” so presumably the change to Canadian spelling was made at the typescript stage or at the typesetting stage.

Detail from the title page of the handwritten manuscript of /Rilla of Ingleside/, with text as follows: ”’Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendor gave their / youth away.’ —Sheard.”

These are obviously minor differences between texts, and devoting an entire blog post to them may seem somewhat excessive. To close, then, here is the full text of Virna Sheard’s poem “The Young Knights,” as it appeared in her book Carry On!, published in 1917:

Now they remain to us forever young
      Who with such splendor gave their youth away;
Perpetual Spring is their inheritance,
      Though they have lived in Flanders and in France
A round of years, in one remembered day.

They drained life’s goblet as a joyous draught
      And left within the cup no bitter lees.
Sweetly they answered to the King’s behest,
      And gallantly fared forth upon a quest,
Beset by foes on land and on the seas.

So in the ancient world hath bloomed again
      The rose of old romance—red as of yore;
The flower of high emprise hath whitely blown
      Above the graves of those we call our own,
And we will know its fragrance evermore.

Now if their deeds were written with the stars,
      In golden letters on the midnight sky
They would not care. They were so young, and dear,
      They loved the best the things that were most near,
And gave no thought to glory far and high.

They need no shafts of marble pure and cold—
      No painted windows radiantly bright;
Across our hearts their names are carven deep—
      In waking dreams, and in the dreams of sleep,
They bring us still ineffable delight.

Methinks heaven’s gates swing open very wide
      To welcome in a host so fair and strong;
Perchance the unharmed angels as they sing,
      May envy these the battle-scars they bring,
And sigh e’er they take up the triumph song!

Image Credits

  1. Cover of the original edition of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside, published by McClelland and Stewart (Toronto) and Frederick A. Stokes Company (New York) in 1921. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.
  2. Title page of the original edition of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1921. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.
  3. Detail from the title page of the original edition of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside, published by McClelland and Stewart in 1921. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.
  4. Detail from Virna Sheard’s poem “The Young Knights,” appearing in her book Carry On!, published by Warwick Bros. & Rutter in 1917. Courtesy of Canadiana.
  5. Detail from Virna Sheard’s poem “The Young Knights,” appearing in Canadian Poems of the Great War, edited by John W. Garvin and published by McClelland and Stewart in 1918. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.
  6. Detail from Virna Sheard’s poem “The Young Knights,” appearing in the Globe (Toronto) on 23 May 1916. Courtesy of the Globe and Mail digital archives.
  7. Detail from the title page of the handwritten manuscript of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside, written in 1919 and 1920. Courtesy of Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.

Bibliography

Montgomery, L.M. L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1918–1921. Edited by Jen Rubio. N.p.: Rock’s Mills Press, 2017.

—. “Rilla of Ingleside.” MS. XZ5 MS A004, L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.

—. Rilla of Ingleside. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1921. https://archive.org/details/rillaofingleside00mont_0/.

—. Rilla of Ingleside. New York: Frederick A. Stokes Company, 1921. https://archive.org/details/rillaingleside00montgoog.

Sheard, Virna. Carry On!, Toronto: Warwick Bros. & Rutter, 1917. https://www.canadiana.ca/view/oocihm.76272/8?r=0&s=1.

—. “The Young Knights.” Globe (Toronto), 23 May 1916, 4.

—. “The Young Knights.” In Canadian Poems of the Great War, edited by John W. Garvin, 219–20. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1918. https://archive.org/details/canadianpoemsofg00garv/page/218/mode/2up.

Wilmshurst, Rea. “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books.” Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse 56 (1989): 15–45. https://ccl-lcj.ca/index.php/ccl-lcj/article/view/2413.

Next on Conversations: Round Table on Ontario Heritage Sites

Black-and-white image of a vintage typewriter, a polaroid photograph of a woman posing outside in a fancy dress, and three hardcover books stacked on top of each other. The text reads "Conversations about L.M. Montgomery," at at the bottom of the image is a URL for the project website.

I’m pleased to announce that our next Conversations about L.M. Montgomery event will be held this Saturday, November 6, at 2:00 p.m. (EST): a round table on three Ontario locations that were central to L.M. Montgomery’s life and writing and that are now heritage sites of significant historical significance. Joining us will be Kathy Wasylenky of Leaskdale (where Montgomery lived between 1911 and 1926), Linda Jackson-Hutton and Jack Hutton of Bala (where Montgomery vacationed in 1922), and Kathy Gastle of Norval (where Montgomery lived between 1926 and 1935), all of whom have devoted their time and their energy to preserving these places for the benefit of their communities and of Montgomery’s worldwide readership.

This event will occur live over Zoom (registration is required) and will be archived on YouTube. This event is free, and all readers of Montgomery’s books are warmly invited to join us. Hope to see you there!

UPDATE: The video for this event is now available on YouTube!

Cover Reveal: Twice upon a Time

It is with great pleasure that I share with you today the cover of Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939, which will be published in spring 2022 as the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library. Because the book collects twenty-five stories that include early incarnations of well-known characters, storylines, conversations, and settings from Montgomery’s novels, I am thrilled that the cover art repurposes details from the first-edition covers of Anne of Avonlea and Chronicles of Avonlea (both of which were drawn by George Gibbs, whose work is featured on the cover of the original edition of Anne of Green Gables as well), especially since the placement of the framed images gives the impression that the Anne on the left is looking over her shoulder at the Anne on the right.

Twice upon a Time can now be pre-ordered from a number of vendors, including at a substantial discount from University of Toronto Press, or from your favourite bookseller.

Announcing The Blythes Are Quoted in Italian!

Cover art depicting a boy and two girls holding hands and standing in a lush field while dressed in period clothing, in a bucolic setting that consists of a pink house, a white picket fence, and a large tree in the background. Textual elements (in Italian) are as follows: Anna dai capelli rossi / Racconti dall’isola / Prima della guerra / Lucy Maud Montgomery / traduzione di Angela Ricci / Anna chiamatemi, ora una serie Netflix / Gallucci.
Cover art depicting a man and a woman embracing in a lush field while dressed in period clothing. Textual elements (in Italian) are as follows: Anna dai capelli rossi / Racconti dall’isola / Dopo la guerra / Lucy Maud Montgomery / a cura di Benjamin Lefebvre / traduzione di Angela Ricci / Anna chiamatemi, ora una serie Netflix / Gallucci.

I’m thrilled to share with you the news that my edition of The Blythes Are Quoted, L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered final sequel to Anne of Green Gables (first published in 2009), is now available in a two-volume Italian translation entitled Racconti dall’isola (literally “Stories from the Island”), translated by Angela Ricci and published by Gallucci Editore, located in Rome. The subtitles of each volume reflect the way Montgomery divided the book into two parts: Prima della guerra (literally “Before the War”) and Dopo la guerra (literally “After the War”). This press has already published Italian translations of the eight earlier Anne books and Emily of New Moon, and I hope it will go on to translate Montgomery’s remaining books as well.

This is the fifth translation of The Blythes Are Quoted. It has appeared already in Finnish (Annan jäähyväiset, meaning “Anne’s Farewell”), translated by Marja Helanen-Ahtola; Polish (Ania z Wyspy Księcia Edwarda, meaning “Anne of Prince Edward Island”), translated by Paweł Ciemniewski; Japanese (An no Omoide no Hibi, meaning “Anne’s Days of Remembrance”), translated in two volumes by Mie Muraoka; and Brazilian Portuguese (Os Contos dos Blythes, meaning “The Tales of the Blythes,” and Os Poemas dos Blythes, meaning “The Poems of the Blythes”), translated in three volumes by Thalita Uba.

Because The Blythes Are Quoted was published after L.M. Montgomery’s death, the published edition is still protected by international copyright, and world rights (including translation rights) are controlled by Penguin Random House Canada. For any inquiries about translation rights to this title, please contact me.

Happy Thanksgiving from Cynthia!

Visual heading for L.M. Montgomery’s column “Around the Table,” signed Cynthia and appearing in thirty-five instalments in the Halifax Daily Echo between September 1901 and May 1902. From a microfilm housed at Library and Archives Canada.

Since today is Thanksgiving here in Canada, I wanted to take this opportunity not only to wish everyone a Happy Thanksgiving but also to share the words of L.M. Montgomery’s alter ego Cynthia, who wrote the following in the 23 November 1901 instalment of Montgomery’s “Around the Table” column in the Halifax Daily Echo:

Thanksgiving comes next week, so if I want to do any moralizing about it now is my chance. Yesterday Polly said in a dismal voice that she really didn’t know what she had to be thankful for. But she has lots of things, and so we all have, if we would only count them up. The trouble is, we would rather count up our troubles and groan and growl about them. That is human nature! 

Thanksgiving ought to be celebrated royally, not only in the letter, but in the spirit. At least, as some historic character has remarked, we can all be thankful “that things ain’t no wuss.”

Thanksgiving can, of course, be well and truly celebrated everywhere, but I think the Thanksgiving par excellence is one that is held in an old homestead. Thanksgiving in a new or rented house can’t have the same flavor as it has in a home where the very walls are permeated with the joys and sorrows of three or four generations. When the grown-up children come home to spend the day under the old roof, with perhaps a vacant chair to remind them of one who has gone to “a far country”—too far to even turn his footsteps back for that reunion—Thanksgiving is or ought to be all that its name implies. 

Aunt Janet is making mince meat for Thanksgiving up at our house already. Mince meat needs to be mellowed by age, you know. What would Thanksgiving be without mince pie? This is not a conundrum, but a serious, sober question. Well, it wouldn’t be Thanksgiving, that’s all. When folks leave mince pie out of the day it will be time for the Government to interfere.

In case you’re wondering why Cynthia is writing about Thanksgiving in late November given that Canada celebrates this holiday the second Monday in October, that’s because the holiday was celebrated in Canada at different points in October and November until 1957. For more information about the history of this holiday in Canada, see the entry on “Thanksgiving in Canada” by David Mills, Laura Neilson Bonikowsky, and Andrew McIntosh in The Canadian Encyclopedia.

Montgomery’s “Around the Table” column appears in its entirety in A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917, the first volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, which is available from University of Toronto Press or from your favourite bookseller.

Next on Conversations: Round Table on Emily of New Moon

Two images against a black background: one of Green Gables House in Cavendish, PE, and one of L.M. Montgomery, in her thirties, posing outside.

I’m pleased to announce that Conversations about L.M. Montgomery will be returning for several events this fall! Coming up first on Saturday, September 25 at 2:00 p.m. (EST) is a round table on Montgomery’s 1923 novel Emily of New Moon: Brenton Dickieson, E. Holly Pike, and Kate Sutherland will discuss aspects of this celebrated book as a way to generate discussion among participants. This event will occur live over Zoom (registration is required) and will be archived on YouTube. This event is free, and all readers of Montgomery’s books are warmly invited to join us. Hope to see you there!

Next on Readathon: Emily Climbs

I am pleased to report that our discussion of L.M. Montgomery’s novel Emily of New Moon on the L.M. Montgomery Readathon concluded a few weeks ago and was a great success. Once again, Andrea McKenzie and I have been blown away by the level of enthusiasm and engagement from participants and by the number of new Montgomery friends we’ve made since we started this project in the early weeks of the pandemic. When Andrea and I talked about which book we’d like to cover next, we were immediately in agreement that we wanted to carry on with this book’s sequel, Emily Climbs. This we’ll begin tomorrow, September 20, discussing two chapters a week until the middle of December. In addition to discussion questions for each chapter, posts will cover historical context, links to Montgomery’s life and body of work, differences between editions, book covers, and the way the book was advertised and reviewed when it was published in 1925, and participants will take turns reading chapters aloud. All L.M. Montgomery readers are welcome to join us, including those who are reading this book for the first time.

Announcing Twice upon a Time

Placeholder cover for Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939

I’m very proud to announce the forthcoming publication, in spring 2022, of Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939, the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, a collection of L.M. Montgomery’s short stories that reveals how she revised her periodical fiction for her books, including Anne of Green Gables and its ever-popular sequels.

Although L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942) is best remembered for the twenty-two book-length works of fiction that she published in her lifetime, from Anne of Green Gables (1908) to Anne of Ingleside (1939), she also contributed some five hundred short stories and serials to a wide range of North American and British periodicals from 1895 to 1940. While most of these stories demonstrate her ability to produce material that would fit the mainstream periodical fiction market as it evolved across almost half a century, many of them also contain early incarnations of characters, storylines, conversations, and settings that she would rework for inclusion in her novels and collections of linked short stories.

In Twice upon a Time, the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, Benjamin Lefebvre collects and discusses over two dozen stories from across Montgomery’s career as a short fiction writer, many of them available in book form for the first time. The volume offers a rare glimpse into Montgomery’s creative process in adapting her periodical work for her books, which continue to fascinate readers all over the world.

Twice upon a Time is preceded by A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917 and A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921, the first two volumes in this series, which you can order from your favourite bookseller or at a substantial discount from the University of Toronto Press website. This book has been in the works for several years, so it is with great anticipation on my part that it will be available soon to Montgomery’s worldwide readership. If you’d like to receive more information about this book as it becomes available—including the cover, preordering information, and some sneak previews—please subscribe to this blog by entering your email address in the box below and follow this website on Facebook and on Twitter.

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Next on Readathon: Emily of New Moon

Frontispiece by M.L. Kirk in the original edition of Emily of New Moon (1923); courtesy of the Internet Archive

Andrea McKenzie and I are pleased to announce that starting on Monday, June 14, we will begin our next discussion on the L.M. Montgomery Readathon. When we launched this discussion group on Facebook in March 2020, near the beginning of the pandemic, we hoped that we might reach a few dozen interested participants readers, but as our discussion of our first book, Rilla of Ingleside, began to take shape, we were stunned when the amount of interested readers who wanted to join the group kept growing. Once we finished Rilla of Ingleside last June, we decided to keep the conversation going, first with Jane of Lantern Hill (July–September 2020) and later with The Blue Castle (September 2020–February 2021) and Chronicles of Avonlea (March–May 2021).

With the group now consisting of almost eight hundred members, we have selected Emily of New Moon as our fifth Readathon book, and starting Monday, we will work our way through each chapter week by week until the end of August. Once again, recordings of each chapter by group participants will be available on YouTube, and each chapter will be accompanied by discussion questions as well as posts about literary allusions, textual variants between the first edition and a widely circulated recent edition, book covers from around the world, as well as background information about fashion, technology, education, the natural world, and Montgomery’s life.

Emily of New Moon was published in 1923, fifteen years after the appearance of Anne of Green Gables, and it appeared two years after Rilla of Ingleside, which Montgomery had vowed would be the last book about Anne. The book reflects Montgomery’s renewed creative energy as she wrote it, not only because this was her first non-Anne book-length work of fiction in a decade but also because she had been wanting to write about this character for quite some time. And as a book focusing on a child writer, Emily of New Moon is a somewhat more autobiographical work than the Anne series. As Montgomery wrote to her penpal Ephraim Weber in 1921, “People were never right in saying I was ‘Anne’ but, in some respects, they will be right if they write me down as Emily.”

Along with its two sequels, Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, Emily of New Moon has been celebrated not only as a work of fiction of superior literary merit but also as a work of fiction that has inspired subsequent generations of writers. Alice Munro, Jane Urquhart, and P.K. Page wrote afterwords to New Canadian Library editions of the three books that appeared in 1989, and the three books are featured prominently in Arlene Perly Rae’s book Everybody’s Favourites: Canadians Talk about Books That Changed Their Lives (1997). Moreover, a television series based on Emily of New Moon and its sequels aired starting in the late 1990s and ran for four seasons, all of which can now be viewed on YouTube.

All readers who are interested in learning more about this fascinating book are welcome to join the conversation on Facebook. Hope to see you there!

Next on Conversations: L.M. Montgomery’s Bookshelf

Two images against a black background: one of Green Gables House in Cavendish, PE, and one of L.M. Montgomery, in her thirties, posing outside.

After a hiatus of a few months, we are pleased to return for our third Conversations about L.M. Montgomery event for 2021: Yuka Kajihara, a special collections librarian and a long-time contributor to L.M. Montgomery studies, will share with us many of the reading materials that had an impact on Montgomery’s early life and literary imagination, with a particular focus on items that are part of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books at the Toronto Public Library.

This event will be held live on Zoom on Saturday, 22 May 2021, at 2:00 p.m. (EST). Registration is required; all interested persons are welcome to join us for this presentation and for discussion afterward, and a video of the presentation will be posted on YouTube at a later date. Hope to see you there!

Next on Readathon: Chronicles of Avonlea

This week the L.M. Montgomery Readathon—an interactive group that Andrea McKenzie and I curate on Facebook—began its discussion of our fourth Montgomery book, Chronicles of Avonlea, a volume of linked short stories. We have just surpassed 700 participants, people from all over the world who are rediscovering L.M. Montgomery’s works and seeking community during this time of global uncertainty. If you haven’t yet joined the conversation, please do!

Published in summer 1912, Chronicles of Avonlea is L.M. Montgomery’s fifth book, preceded by Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), and The Story Girl (1911). All four of these books were bestsellers in Canada and the U.S., although Anne of Green Gables continued to be the strongest seller. Somewhat understandingly from his point of view, Montgomery’s publisher, L.C. Page, was keen to publish more Montgomery books, particularly ones that were linked to Anne and might approximate or even surpass the sales success of Montgomery’s first book.

Because Montgomery couldn’t write books fast enough to please her publisher and because she was reluctant to write a third Anne book because she wanted to resist the inevitable romantic conclusion, Page—who had already suggested that she postpone The Story Girl and expand a nine-chapter serial entitled “Una of the Garden” as the basis for Kilmeny of the Orchard—asked her to compile a volume of linked short stories set in the same geographical environment as Anne of Green Gables and to feature Anne whenever possible, thinking that such a volume would be seen as the next best thing to a new novel about Anne. By this point Montgomery had published hundreds of short stories in North American periodicals, so she looked through her scrapbooks to see which stories could be revised for this project and ended up sending close to thirty revised stories for Page for consideration.

The twelve stories that made the final cut were first published in a range of North American periodicals between 1904 and 1912 (only “Old Lady Lloyd” has not yet been found in its original incarnation). Here they are, in chronological order:

“Little Joscelyn.” The Christian Endeavor World (Boston), 1 September 1904, 988–89.

“The Hurrying of Ludovic.” The Canadian Magazine (Toronto), May 1905, 67–71.

“Aunt Olivia’s Beau.” The Designer (New York), June 1905, 196–200.

“Ol’ Man Reeves’ Girl.” The Farm and Fireside (Springfield, OH), 15 June 1905, 14–15. (Revised as “Old Man Shaw’s Girl.”)

“A Case of Atavism.” The Reader Magazine (Indianapolis), November 1905, 658–66. (Revised as “The Winning of Lucinda.”)

“Pa Rudge’s Purchase.” The Christian Endeavor World (Boston), 22 February 1906, 421–22. (Revised as “Pa Sloane’s Purchase.”)

“The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s.” Everybody’s Magazine (New York), April 1907, 495–503.

“The End of a Quarrel.” American Agriculturist (New York), 20 July 1907, 56, 58–59.

“The Courting of Prissy Strong.” The Housewife (New York), July 1909, 12–13.

“Miracle at Mayfield.” The Christian Endeavor World (Boston), 28 October 1909, 69–70. (Revised as “The Miracle at Carmody.”)

“Each in His Own Tongue.” The Delineator (New York), October 1910, 247, 324–28.

Still, although there’s no record of the process of selecting and arranging the stories in this volume (most of the remaining stories would appear in Further Chronicles of Avonlea in 1920, but that’s a story for another day), there are some clues in the first published edition that indicate that Page and/or Montgomery considered a few arrangements before they finalized the contents of the book.

Title page of 1912 edition of Chronicles of Avonlea
Title page of 1912 edition of Chronicles of Avonlea, published by L.C. Page and Company. Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

First, although the title on the cover appears simply as Chronicles of Avonlea, the title page adds an explanatory subtitle that tries to solidify the connection between this book and the character for whom Montgomery was best known:

In which Anne Shirley of Green Gables and Avonlea plays some part, and which have to do with other personalities and events, including The Hurrying of Ludovic, Old Lady Lloyd, The Training of Felix, Little Joscelyn, The Winning of Lucinda, Old Man Shaw’s Girl, Aunt Olivia’s Beau, The Quarantine at Alexander Abraham’s, Pa Sloane’s Purchase, The Courting of Prissy Strong, The Miracle at Carmody, and finally The End of a Quarrel.

The order of the stories here is the same as what appears in the book, and the only difference is that “Each in His Own Tongue” is renamed “The Training of Felix”—perhaps this was Page’s suggestion, given that the story had originally been published as “Each in His Own Tongue.” But an ad for the book at the end of this edition reads quite differently, with many of the titles referring to stories that ultimately appeared in Further Chronicles:

In which Anne Shirley of Green Gables and Avonlea plays some part, and which have to do with other personalities and events, including The Purchase of Sloane, The Baby Which Came to Jane, The Mystery of Her Father’s Daughter and of Tannis of the Flats, The Promise of Lucy Ellen, The Beau and Aunt Olivia, The Deferment of Hester, and finally of The Hurrying of Ludovic.

Back matter ad for Chronicles of Avonlea
Back matter ad for Chronicles of Avonlea, appearing in the 1912 edition published by L.C. Page and Company. Courtesy of Hathi Trust Digital Library.

Although we don’t know how involved Montgomery was in making this selection and arrangement, the final, published version was certainly a hit with reviewers and a strong seller with the general public. Although some reviewers still yearned for another novel with Anne as the protagonist, most of the reviews had high praise for Montgomery’s skill as a short story writer. Here are some representative samples from reviews of the time, all of which are included or excerpted in Volume 3 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader.

“In this volume the author establishes her right to be considered one of the best short story writers in our country.”
Oakland Tribune

“All the insight and charm of the Anne books, with the added grace of a more finished craftsmanship, render this an exceptional collection; and a few of the chapters will take very high rank in the short-story domain.”
Christian Science Monitor

“To say that one sketch was better than another would be to insinuate that the latter was not just as good as it possibly could be. Which would be insinuating something utterly untrue.”
Mail and Empire (Toronto)

“Avonlea might be any one of those home towns to which wandering sons and daughters hurry back for their summer holiday; a village where every little white house has its grass plot, flower beds and vegetable garden; where the air is sweet with rose odors in June and apples in September; an out-of-the way spot where quaint characters develop idiosyncrasies.”
The Publishers’ Weekly

“The charm of the author’s style was never more in evidence. The stories ‘tell themselves’ with a readiness and naturalness which is the perfection of literary skill. . . . These ‘Chronicles of Avonlea’ demonstrate anew the truth that simple, quiet lives may be full of romance and of tragedy, even if the latter be bloodless.”
Boston Times

“The author shows a wonderful knowledge of humanity, great insight and warm-heartedness in the manner in which some of the scenes are treated, and the sympathetic way the gentle peculiarities of the characters are brought out.”
Boston Globe

“Instinctively one feels that the men and women, the boys and girls, the very cats and dogs of her stories are human and real; and they remain not creatures of the imagination but actual friends whose pleasures we have shared, whose griefs we have borne, and whose good fortunes we rejoice over. The authoress, too, is not without a saving sense of humor that lends the quaint charm to her stories that mark their individuality.”
Saint John Globe

“The author has won a fine reputation as a depictor of child life, but it is a mistake to consider that she is limited to that life. Indeed her finest work is to be found wherein she gives us the relation of the child and the adult.”
Brooklyn Daily Eagle

“These chronicles are of the best work that Miss Montgomery has done. The characters are real, living people, full of human weaknesses and homely virtues.”
The Canadian Magazine

Chronicles of Avonlea was part of the basis for the ever-popular television series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996), and it also showcases Montgomery’s strengths as a short-story writer. As such, it’s a collection that’s certainly worth revisiting. Please join the conversation on the L.M. Montgomery Readathon!

Next on Conversations: L.M. Montgomery’s Character Pairs

For our next Conversations about L.M. Montgomery event on Saturday, 13 February 2021 (the day before Valentine’s Day), we invite readers of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction to consider their favourite character pairs in her work: a romantic couple, a pair of friends, an adult and a young person, a pair of siblings, or two people in conflict. What is it about these relationships that are mutually supportive and enriching—or not? What is the secret to their bond, whether or not they are kindred spirits? And what motivates some characters to sacrifice personal relationships for the sake of something else, like higher education or an artistic practice?

We invite readers of Montgomery’s books to join us over Zoom for some informal discussion, beginning at 2:00 p.m. EST. Participants will be invite to share their ideas, read a key quotation, and reflect on the choices Montgomery made—and didn’t make—as she wrote her books. The event is free to all Montgomery readers, and advance registration is required. Please join us!

Next on Conversations: L.M. Montgomery’s Scrapbooks and Other Records

Two images against a black background: one of Green Gables House in Cavendish, PE, and one of L.M. Montgomery, in her thirties, posing outside.

I’m pleased to let you all know that the first Conversations about L.M. Montgomery event for 2021 will be entitled “An Archive of Her Own: L.M. Montgomery’s Scrapbooks and Other Records” and will be held live over Zoom on Saturday, 30 January 2021, at 2:00 p.m. (EST). Carolyn Strom Collins, editor most recently of Anne of Green Gables: The Original Manuscript (2019), will discuss L.M. Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island scrapbooks, in which Montgomery preserved text and images from periodicals. As a form of personal archive, these scrapbooks offer us a fascinating window into the visual imagination that created works of fiction that continue to engage readers decades after their publication.

This event is open to everyone interested in Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy and will be followed by friendly discussion among participants.

UPDATE: The video from this event has now been posted to YouTube.

Twenty Twenty in Review

This morning, while on our way to a socially distant walk in the woods with a few family members, my partner and I drove past a small grocery store whose outside sign read “Don’t worry. 2020 is almost over!”

That may certainly capture a larger societal feeling about the year that’s drawing to a close in less than an hour (at least in my time zone), and it may explain why I’ve been seeing fewer “best of” retrospective lists this month than I have in previous years (or maybe I’m just less inclined to notice them). Still, although 2020 has undeniably been difficult in so many ways, it’s worth looking back on this year in terms of new publications on L.M. Montgomery as well as looking ahead to projects that have already been announced for 2021. It’s also worth considering what anniversaries occurred this year and what they can remind us about the past, the present, and the future of Montgomery scholarship.

In looking back on this year, I’m reminded of the (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) comments Montgomery made as her alter ego, “Cynthia,” in the 30 December 1901 instalment of “Around the Table,” the newspaper column she published over a nine-month period in the Halifax Daily Echo (and whose text appears in its entirety for the first time in A Name for Herself).

The end of the year is, as a general thing, somewhat given over to retrospection. We like to overhaul our memories as well as our consciences, on New Year’s eve, as we sit before a dying fire—it must always be dying to be properly romantic—watching the Old Year out. We grow dreamy and sad and a wee bit sentimental. We recall the loves and hatreds, the pleasures and sorrows, the successes and failures of the past twelve months. We think of our flirtations, and wonder where the Toms, Dicks and Harrys are now, and if they have forgotten. We sigh softly, and quote scraps of poetry that occur to us as appropriate. In short, we get out Memory’s treasure-box and rummage among its motley contents. We have the vague regret that everyone experiences at the turning of a life page. Good or bad, earnest or frivolous, it is written and filed away in the archives of Eternity. We will never have a chance to correct its mistakes. Old Father Time has no proof-readers.

Then the clock strikes twelve and we open the door to let the Old Year go limping out and the New Year come joyously in. “The King is dead. Long live the King!”

This past month, I read through several items of scholarship that made good use of the extensive Alice Munro papers at the University of Calgary, and I was fascinated by the attempts of scholars to use surviving drafts, fragments, and correspondence in order to piece together Munro’s process of writing and revision, especially in terms of her collaboration with her agent and with various editors with whom she worked. I have to admit feeling envious of those scholars given the numerous gaps in Montgomery’s papers, especially pertaining to her short stories, poems, and miscellaneous pieces, which have been of particular interest to me over the last several years. Still, I’m very grateful for the Montgomery materials that do survive, including journals, letters, some manuscripts and typescripts, and scrapbooks. This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909 (released in 1960) and the fortieth anniversary of the publication of My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery (released in 1980), two volumes that, along with the first reprinting in book form of her celebrity memoir “The Alpine Path” in 1974, showed readers for the first time that Montgomery’s life writing was just as fascinating as her fiction, and this has certainly been proven true with the publication of five volumes of Montgomery’s selected journals starting in 1985 and seven volumes to date of her unabridged journals starting in 2012.

This year also marks one hundred years since the publication of Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), an anniversary that highlights the importance of placing Montgomery’s work in its historical and literary (as well as biographical) context. While the vast amount of surviving life writing makes biographical readings of the primary work so tempting, it’s also worth paying attention to some of the broader external circumstances that shaped the words appearing on the page, at least as far as these can be pieced together through surviving documents. This collection of linked short stories is particularly fascinating as evidence of a battle of wills between Montgomery and her first publisher, L.C. Page, given that Page manipulated her into agreeing to its publication but ended up violating some of the terms of that agreement in ways that she felt did damage to her literary reputation, prompting her to fight him in court for eight years until the book was withdrawn from circulation. Further Chronicles formed part of the basis of the ever-popular television series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996), which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, an anniversary that reminds us of Montgomery’s status as an enduringly popular author whose fan base includes consumers of adaptations in addition to readers of her books.

In terms of publications, 2020 began and ended with The Shining Scroll, the annual newsletter of the L.M. Montgomery Literary Society of Minnesota that’s edited by Mary Beth Cavert and Carolyn Strom Collins, two longtime contributors to the field of Montgomery studies. Its 2019 edition, released in January, and its 2020 edition, released just a few days ago, are filled with news items and original research on topics as varied as the centenary of the 1919 silent film adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, the handwritten manuscript of Anne, heritage and tourist sites in Prince Edward Island, and some newly discovered postcards that Montgomery sent to her Scottish pen pal, G.B. MacMillan.

This year also saw the publication of a number of trade books, including Kallie George’s picture book If I Couldn’t Be Anne (which follows Goodnight, Anne, released in 2018), Brooke Jorden’s abridgement of Anne of Green Gables for the Lit for Little Hands series published by Familius, Crystal S. Chan’s manga adaptation of Anne of Green Gables for Manga Classics, Josée Ouimet’s biography of Montgomery (one of the only secondary sources about Montgomery to appear in French) for the Bonjour l’histoire series, and Rachel Dodge’s The Anne of Green Gables Devotional: A Chapter-by-Chapter Companion for Kindred Spirits.

Book-length scholarship this year included Katja Lee’s Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography, which places Montgomery in conversation with fellow Canadian women including Nellie L. McClung, Margaret Trudeau, and Shania Twain, and a new paperback edition of my three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Reader, with Volume 1 consisting of essays by and interviews with Montgomery along with commentary on her work throughout her career as a novelist, Volume 2 narrating her critical reputation in the decades since her death, and Volume 3 turning to the book review as a largely overlooked repository of critical discussion.

In addition, this year saw the publication of a wide number of book chapters, journal articles, and reviews focusing on topics such as environmental history, correspondence, spirituality, adaptation, the archive, translations, and fan fiction, including some work dated 2019 but that was released or that I came across this past year:

What’s been announced for 2021? So far, quite a bit! Two new print adaptations will be released in the spring: Brina Starler’s Anne of Manhattan (William Morrow), which is billed as “a romantic, charming, and hilarious modern adaptation” of Anne of Green Gables that depicts Anne’s experiences as a graduate student in present-day New York City, and Louise Michalos’s Marilla before Anne (Nimbus Publishing), which focuses on eighteen-year-old Marilla’s coming of age, set in Avonlea and Halifax. Nimbus Publishing will also release Eri Muraoka’s Anne’s Cradle: The Life and Works of Hanako Muraoka, Japanese Translator of Anne of Green Gables, translated by Cathy Hirano, this spring, which promises to add considerably to our understanding of the international circulation of Montgomery’s work. In addition to Kallie George’s third Anne picture book, Merry Christmas, Anne, Tundra Books will release Anne’s School Days, the third of George’s abridgements of Anne of Green Gables, following Anne Arrives (2018) and Anne’s Kindred Spirits (2019).

And speaking of abridgements, New York’s Starry Forest Books plans to release three abridgements of Anne of Green Gables this spring, each part of a separate series of abridgements of classic works of literature and targeting a specific age range: a Baby’s Classics abridgement by Alex Fabrizio (24 pp.), a Classic Stories abridgement by Saviour Pirotta (40 pp.), and a Classic Adventures abridgement by Jacqueline Dembar Greene (64 pp.). Each of these series will place Anne alongside new abridgements of many other classic works of literature by authors ranging from Alcott and Baum to Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm.

I’d like to end this post by recalling the words of Captain Jim in Anne’s House of Dreams, after he and his guests, as Cynthia describes in “Around the Table,” open the lighthouse door to welcome in the new year as the clock strikes twelve. “I wish you all the best year of your lives, mates. I reckon that whatever the New Year brings us will be the best the Great Captain has for us—and somehow or other we’ll all make port in a good harbour.”

There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the world will experience in 2021, but, like Captain Jim, I remain hopeful that “somehow or other we’ll all make port in a good harbour.” And in the meantime, there is always something new to discover about L.M. Montgomery.

Trivia Contest: Final Round Today!

So far 96 people have written our new L.M. Montgomery trivia contest, which is far more than we were expecting, so thank you all for playing! Just a reminder that at this afternoon’s Conversations about L.M. Montgomery event (at 2:00 p.m. EST on Zoom) we will reveal the answers to the quiz and have a bonus round for four finalists. This is our final event for 2020, but we are planning several more events for 2021. Please join us if you can! Registration is required.

Next on Conversations: Trivia Contest!

Thanks to all of you who joined us for our second instalment in our Conversations about L.M. Montgomery initiative, a round table discussion of Rilla of Ingleside, on Zoom earlier this month. That conversation has now been archived on YouTube. I’m pleased to announce our third and final instalment for 2020, which is a trivia contest that opens today, coinciding with the anniversary of L.M. Montgomery’s birth. Participants are invited to complete the quiz on their own time and to join us over Zoom on Saturday, December 12, at 2:00 p.m. (EST) to find out the answers and to watch a bonus round for attendees with the highest scores. Break a leg!

Four Days of Free Shipping from UTP!

I just received a notification email telling me that University of Toronto Press is offering free shipping, in Canada and the United States, on all its orders between now and the end of this Sunday, November 29. Since UTP has published a number of books by or about L.M. Montgomery over the years, and given that these books are substantially discounted on their website, this is the perfect time for readers to complete their collections!

Among the books available are the first two volumes of The L.M. Montgomery Library and the three volumes of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, which are still available in hardcover as well as the paperback editions released earlier this year. I was also pleased to see that paperback copies of Mary Quayle Innis’s The Clear Spirit: Twenty Canadian Women and Their Times (1966), which includes Elizabeth Waterston’s chapter on Montgomery that is widely acknowledged as the starting point of L.M. Montgomery studies, are still available.

A full list of titles is as follows:

I decided to take advantage of this sale myself, and I ordered two books that will certainly come in handy as I continue my work of preparing all of L.M. Montgomery’s short stories and poems for book publication: T.K. Pratt’s Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English (1996) and T.K. Pratt and Scott Burke’s Prince Edward Island Sayings (1998). I look forward to reading these!

Rilla Round Table This Afternoon!

Don’t forget that our Rilla of Ingleside round table, the second instalment in our Conversations about L.M. Montgomery initiative, is happening this afternoon (2 p.m. EST) on Zoom! Three speakers will be discussing key aspects of this book, followed by open discussion among participants. Please register in advance and join us if you can! A recording will be posted on YouTube later on.

Host
Kate Sutherland (York University)

Moderator
Caroline E. Jones (Austin)

Chat Moderator
Sarah Goff (Albany)

Speakers
Maureen O. Gallagher (Australian National University), L.M. Montgomery’s Reframing of the Great War through Women’s Homefront Experiences
Sarah Glassford (University of Windsor), L.M. Montgomery’s Representations of Women’s War Work
Andrea McKenzie (York University), L.M. Montgomery’s Subversions of Cultural War Myths