Announcing The L.M. Montgomery Library

 
I am enormously pleased to announce an exciting new series forthcoming from University of Toronto Press: The L.M. Montgomery Library, which will collect Montgomery’s extensive periodical output of short stories, poems, essays, columns, and miscellaneous pieces, first published between 1890 and 1942. Most of this material has never been collected in book form, so these volumes will add tremendously to our understanding and appreciation of Montgomery’s evolution as a professional writer.

The first two volumes will be published in fall 2018:

A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917—This volume contains the full text of Montgomery’s so-called “miscellaneous pieces”: personal and travel essays, a playlet, contributions to student magazines, as well as texts that blur the lines between fiction and non-fiction. It includes for the first time the full text of Montgomery’s “Around the Table” column that she published in the Halifax Daily Echo over a nine-month period in 1901–1902 as well as a new edition of her celebrity memoir, “The Alpine Path.” (This volume was previously announced as Becoming L.M. Montgomery.)

A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921—This volume contains a new selection of fifty poems published between 1894 and 1921, focusing on landscape, lamentation, death, war, and love. It was designed to be a companion to Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, since most of the forty-one poems in that book were published between 1919 and 1942.

Each volume contains a preface, an afterword, and annotations that provide context for all readers: the afterword to A Name for Herself discusses Montgomery’s use of gender-neutral double initials (“L.M.”) as well as a range of other pseudonyms (including “Maud Cavendish” and “Belinda Bluegrass”) within the context of strategies used by English-speaking women writers of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, whereas the afterword to A World of Songs identifies points of connection between Montgomery’s poetry and her book-length fiction and places the work within post-Confederation poetry in Canada.

Additional volumes showcasing Montgomery’s short stories and poems in chronological order are in progress.

I will post details about cover art, pre-ordering information, launches, and readings once they’ve been finalized, as well as sneak previews, so please subscribe to this blog (at the very bottom of the page) to ensure you get every update.

I’ve been gathering copies of this material for over a decade with the ambition of making this work available in book form to Montgomery’s international community of readers, so it’s humbling and gratifying to see this series finally going ahead. I look forward to continuing the discussion with you all in the years to come.