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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.

Cover Reveal: The L.M. Montgomery Reader in Paperback!

Cover art for The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print Cover art for The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 2: A Critical Heritage Cover of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 3: A Legacy in Review

I’m very pleased to announce the forthcoming publication, in paperback, of all three volumes of my award-winning critical anthology, The L.M. Montgomery Reader (Volume 1: A Life in Print; Volume 2: A Critical Heritage; Volume 3: A Legacy in Review) from University of Toronto Press. This project took up the bulk of my professional life over a five-year period, so I’m thrilled that all three volumes will be available in paperback soon.

Once again, the best way to order these books is from the University of Toronto Press website. Volume 1, Volume 2, and Volume 3 are also available in hardcover and ebook formats.

The cover art features the covers of the first Canadian editions of Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Chronicles of Avonlea published by the Ryerson Press (Toronto) in 1942 and 1943; these copies are part of my personal collection.

From Proofs to Book

I was thrilled to receive, last Friday afternoon, a padded envelope containing my first author’s copy of my new book, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, published by University of Toronto Press. I’m always rather in awe of the transformation from a PDF of proofs to a physical book, and this time was no different. I’m enormously pleased with how it turned out, and I do look forward to hearing the reactions of those who read it.

What is especially gratifying, of course, is that it’s taken six years to reach the point where I could hold the book in my hands as a tangible object. Between August 2007 and July 2009, I held a postdoctoral fellowship (funded by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, otherwise known as SSHRC) at the University of Alberta while living in my current hometown of Waterloo, Ontario (it’s a long story). My project was entitled “Branding a Life: The Case of L.M. Montgomery™” and my plan was to write a book-length study about Montgomery’s body of work, leading up to her final work, The Blythes Are Quoted, which at the time remained unpublished). Although I did a lot of researching and writing during those two years, I also spent a fair bit of time travelling to libraries and archives in order to track down Montgomery’s short stories, serials, poems, essays, and interviews, including a good number that are not listed in Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Preliminary Bibliography (1986). Initially my plan was to introduce all of this little-known material in the book, but then two things happened: first, Penguin Canada accepted The Blythes Are Quoted in March 2008, and second, I realized that I now had so many essays and interviews for a book of their own. Initially my plan was to put together a volume entitled How I Began: L.M. Montgomery’s Essays and Interviews 1910–1939. But then, somewhat inevitably, I kept finding material that I found just as fascinating—early scholarship, entries in reference works, profiles, and book reviews—and started to think of ways to place all this work in the context of Montgomery’s publishing history within her lifetime and in the seven decades since her death. And soon, the book-length study that I had originally planned got shelved, and the three-volume L.M. Montgomery Reader emerged. Like most big projects, this one has been several years in the making and it has evolved considerably as time went on, but I am very happy with the final shape of each of the three volumes.

Speaking of the three volumes, I’m pleased to announce that Volume 2: A Critical Heritage will be published in May 2014! And who knows? Maybe at some point I’ll be able to resume work on the book-length study that I had originally planned!

[Note: This post originally appeared on Room of Ben’s Own: Homepage for Benjamin Lefebvre.]

L.M. Montgomery YA Novel Set for 2015

Last week, a press release announced that Penguin Canada had acquired a young adult novel based on the adolescent life of L.M. Montgomery. Its author, Melanie J. Fishbane, recently received her MFA in Writing for Children and Young Adults from the Vermont College of Fine Arts. She has also blogged on this site before (and she knows more about YA fiction than anyone else I know!). The novel will be published under Penguin Canada’s Razorbill imprint in 2015, with the support of L.M. Montgomery’s heirs.

This is a very exciting project. Although Montgomery’s fiction has been reimagined, extended, and transformed in innumerable ways—prequels, adaptations for stage and screen, parodies, and abridgements—her own life is far less known to most readers of her books. Yet many readers of her journals and letters find her own life story just as fascinating and compelling—if not more so—as her fiction. In fact, so far her life story has been dramatized solely for the stage: Don Hannah’s The Wooden Hill (1994), Anne Kathleen McLaughlin’s Maud of Cavendish (2004), Leo Marchildon and Adam-Michael James’s The Nine Lives of L.M. Montgomery (2008), and Maud of Leaskdale (2012). This will be the first time that Montgomery’s own life story is tackled in print outside the genre of biography, and it will also be the first such project to focus exclusively on Montgomery’s young life as an adolescent.

I’m very much looking forward to this exciting project, which will introduce a new take of Montgomery’s life to an audience of readers who will likely discover, as have readers of her life writing already, that she is just as compelling a protagonist as her best-known characters.

Announcing The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1

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

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

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

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

Rilla in Paperback!

I received my copies this week of the paperback version of the edition of L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside that I edited jointly with Andrea McKenzie and that was published in hardcover last October. The official street date is next Tuesday, 1 November 2011, but it’s already available for order at Amazon.ca and for purchase at bookstores. Order or buy your copy today!

Rilla of Ingleside—originally written as the final sequel to Anne of Green Gables—focuses on Rilla Blythe, the pretty and high-spirited youngest daughter of Anne Shirley. The novel paints a vivid and compelling picture of the women who battled to keep the home fires burning throughout the tumultuous years of the First World War. Using her own wartime experience, Montgomery recreates the laughter and grief, poignancy and suspense, struggles and courage of Canadian women at war. This special gift edition includes Montgomery’s complete, restored, and unabridged original text, as well as a thoughtful introduction from the editors, a detailed glossary, maps of Europe during the war, and war poems by L.M. Montgomery and her contemporary Virna Sheard.

“A tried-and-true wartime novel. . . . Poignant, funny, sentimental, ironic, suspenseful, and heartbreaking.”
Toronto Star

“An essential purchase for all libraries, a wonderful read for adults and youth aged twelve and up, and a great resource for students of World War I. Highly recommended.”
CM Magazine

Rilla Chosen as “Favourite YA Fiction from 2010”

The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside has been chosen as “Favourite YA Fiction from 2010” by Melanie Fishbane:

Perhaps by saying that this is a new book, we can begin to see it in a new way. Even as possibly one of the first YA novels in Canada?

Read the full post. Visit the book’s official website. Visit the book’s official Facebook page.

Rilla in Record and Mercury

The new edition of Rilla of Ingleside is also mentioned in today’s Kitchener–Waterloo Record as well as in today’s Guelph Mercury as a suggested gift book for the holiday season.

This is a new “gift edition” of a novel first published in 1921. It’s the novel that Lucy Maude [sic] Montgomery then expected would be the final sequel to Anne of Green Gables. The story concerns Rilla Blythe, the youngest daughter of Anne Shirley, and is set during the First World War. Editions of this novel published in 1976 and 1985 removed about four per cent of the original text, which has now been restored in this volume. Editors of the book are Benjamin Lefebvre, a Waterloo literary scholar, and Andrea McKenzie, a University of Waterloo graduate who is now a director of writing at New York University.

Join the discussion on Facebook and order your copy today!

Year in Review: 2009

This past year has been decidedly more low key compared to last year’s worldwide celebration of the centenary of Anne of Green Gables, but it’s been a milestone year for me, particularly because this year, Penguin Canada published my edition of L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted.

The Blythes Are Quoted (Viking Canada, 2009)

The never-before-published complete and unabridged last work of L.M. Montgomery

Adultery, illegitimacy, misogyny, revenge, murder, despair, bitterness, hatred, and death—usually not the first terms associated with L.M. Montgomery. But in The Blythes Are Quoted, completed shortly before her death and never before published in its entirety, Montgomery brought these topics to the forefront in what she intended to be the ninth volume in her bestselling series featuring the beloved heroine Anne. Divided into two sections, one set before and one after the Great War of 1914-1918, The Blythes Are Quoted contains fifteen short stories that include an adult Anne and her family. Between these short stories Montgomery inserted sketches featuring Anne and Gilbert Blythe discussing poems by Anne and their middle son, Walter, who dies as a soldier in the war. By blending together poetry, prose, and dialogue, Montgomery was experimenting with storytelling methods in ways she had never attempted before. The Blythes Are Quoted marks L.M. Montgomery’s final contribution to a body of work that continues to fascinate readers all over the world.

I published several blog posts published in the months leading up to this book’s publication in late October.

On 8 April, I announced that the book’s forthcoming publication and shared the first version of the synopsis (see above).

In early July, I reported that the book had has been included in the Canadian fiction section of Quill & Quire’s fall preview, compiled by Steven W. Beattie and included in the July-August 2009 issue:

Benjamin Lefebvre edits The Blythes Are Quoted (Penguin Canada, $25 cl., Oct.), a posthumous novel from L.M. Montgomery that features the author’s usual themes: adultery, misogyny, revenge, and murder.

On July 10, an article about The Blythes Are Quoted by Alison Flood appeared in the Guardian:

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s last work, featuring surprising experiments with poetry and prose, to be published in full

Penguin Canada is due to publish Lucy Maud Montgomery’s final book in its entirety, casting a new shadow over the author of Anne of Green Gables. . . .

Despite the darker elements to The Blythes Are Quoted, Penguin is hoping to reach children as well as adults, aiming for the readers who bought Budge Wilson’s prequel to Anne’s story, Before Green Gables, last spring.

This story was subsequently picked up by the Wall Street Journal and included in its Morning Roundup blog:

Anne Returns, Again: Someone who wasn’t afraid of sequels is Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of the “Anne of Green Gables” books. Penguin Canada is going to publish the ninth volume of the series in full. “The Blythes Are Quoted” follows freckle-faced heroine Anne Shirley through the First World War.

This story was then picked up again by The Examiner in an article by Peter Franklin entitled “A Scandalous Week”:

Lastly, it was revealed just today that Penguin Canada is set to publish an unabridged version of the final book of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables series. Entitled The Blythes Are Quoted, the novel is said to include “adultery, illegitimacy, misogyny, revenge, murder, despair, bitterness, hatred, and death,” as well as an experimentation with storytelling not seen in the other volumes.

This development adds to the growing pall around Montgomery’s public perception; her granddaughter admitted last year that the children’s author had died of a drug overdose.

However, most shocking here is Penguin’s plan to market The Blythes Are Quoted in all of its murder and misogyny to kids. Alison Flood writes: “Penguin is hoping to reach children as well as adults, aiming for the readers who bought Budge Wilson’s prequel to Anne’s story, Before Green Gables, last spring.”

On September 3, I shared the cover art for the hardcover edition.

On October 3, the book was mentioned in a Winnipeg Free Press article by Morley Walker entitled “Book World Slowly Grasping Value of Sequels to Classic Tales,” which is primarily about the publication of a new Winnie-the-Pooh sequel that had been published that day:

Here in Canada, the estate of L.M. Montgomery has got into the act. On Oct. 27, Penguin will release The Blythes Are Quoted, an unabridged version of the stories Montgomery intended as the ninth volume in her Anne of Green Gables series.

Montgomery supposedly submitted the manuscript to her publisher the day she died in 1947 [sic].

She did (supposedly), although she died in 1942.

On October 23, the day after the book’s official publication by Viking Canada (Toronto), Elizabeth Renzetti’s article “A Different Anne and Gilbert” appeared in the Globe and Mail and an article entitled “Green Gables Tale Darkens in Final Book” appeared on the CBC News website. A news story also aired on CBC’s The National.

On October 24, Barbara Aggerholm’s article “Waterloo-Based Academic Finds L.M. Montgomery’s Last ‘Darker’ Work” appeared in the Kitchener-Waterloo Record.

On December 12, I signed copies of The Blythes Are Quoted at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Museum, located at Crawford’s Village Bakeshop in Norval, Ontario, where Montgomery and her family lived between 1926 and 1935.

On December 14, I was interviewed on Ontario Today on CBC Radio One:

L.M. Montgomery’s last manuscript, The Blythes Are Quoted, has just been published for the first time in its entirety. The manuscript was submitted to Montgomery’s publisher the day she died. It’s the ninth volume in the Anne series. The editor who re-discovered the typescript will be our guest on Ontario Today. And of course Ed Lawrence will join us as well.

Also on 14 November, two reviews appeared in the Globe and Mail: Aritha van Herk’s “Blythe Spirits,” a review of The Blythes Are Quoted, and Irene Gammel’s “The Daughters of Lucy Maud,” a review of Jane Urquhart’s L.M. Montgomery.

On 16 November, I did a book signing at the Kitchener Public Library.

And on 28 December, a CBC News story announced that The Blythes Are Quoted had been selected as one of “10 biggest publishing stories of 2009”:

Fans of the precocious, freckle-faced redhead from P.E.I. had reason to rejoice this year when an amended version of the final Anne Shirley stories was released under a new title, The Blythes Are Quoted. But the book’s additional 100 pages revealed a darker story—complete with references to adultery and suicide. Novelist Jane Urquhart ably provided a context for these bleak scenes in her comprehensive, unflinching biography of Anne’s author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne’s banner year ended with a triumphant Sotheby’s auction—proof that great CanLit never goes out of fashion.

New Books, New Editions, New Projects

Of course, The Blythes Are Quoted was hardly the only new Montgomery book to appear this year.

In April, 100 Years of Anne with an “e”: The Centennial Study of Anne of Green Gables, a collection of essays edited by Holly Blackford, was published by University of Calgary Press. The book contains an introduction by Blackford as well as chapters by Joy Alexander, Hilary Emmett, Irene Gammel, Monika Hilder, Melissa Mullins, Eleanor Hersey Nickel, Sharyn Pearce, E. Holly Pike, Cornelia Rémi, Laura M. Robinson, Christiana R. Salah, and Theodore Sheckels.

In August, McClelland and Stewart published New Canadian Library reissues of Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest (following similar reissues of Emily of New Moon in 2007 and Anne of Green Gables in 2008), with the original afterwords by Jane Urquhart and P.K. Page, respectively. In the UK, Puffin Classics reissued Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, each with an introduction by Budge Wilson, joining their reissue last year of Anne of Green Gables with an introduction by Lauren Child.

Cover art for Jane Urquhart's biography /L.M. Montgomery/, published as part of the Extraordinary Canadians series by Penguin Canada.

Jane Urquhart’s L.M. Montgomery, part of the Extraordinary Canadians series, was published by Penguin Canada on 22 September 2009. That same month, St. Martin’s Press published a paperback edition of Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L.M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic, while Davenport Press published the paperback edition of Kevin Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning.

A Collector's Guide to L.M. Montgomery Firsts (2009)

In December, a notice appeared on the website of the L.M. Montgomery Institute concerning Frank and Juanita Lechowick’s new book, A Collector’s Guide to L.M. Montgomery Firsts:

In the course of research in libraries and used book stores from Charlottetown to Victoria, the authors have discovered the points of Montgomery’s original editions, from Anne of Green Gables (1908) to Anne of Ingleside (1939). A Collector’s Guide to L.M. Montgomery Firsts presents their findings systematically, with photographs and descriptions of each of the 39 first editions.

Conferences and Calls for Papers

L.M. Montgomery—Writer of the World (University of Uppsala, 20–23 August 2009)

In June, I shared a press release for L.M. Montgomery—Writer of the World, which was hosted by the University of Uppsala (established in 1477) and which was billed as “the first international conference on L.M. Montgomery outside Canada”:

Uppsala, Sweden, will be the venue for an international conference entitled L.M. Montgomery—Writer of the World, 20-23 August 2009. The conference commemorates the first translation of Anne of Green Gables, the Swedish Anne på Grönkulla which appeared in 1909. Conference organisers are Gabriella Åhmansson, University of Gävle  and Åsa Warnqvist, Uppsala University.

The main theme for the conference is reading response and it has attracted 28 speakers from 10 different countries, including major Montgomery scholars such as Elizabeth Waterston, Mary H. Rubio, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly and Irene Gammel. The last day of the conference, Sunday August 23, is open to the general public, a tribute to one hundred years of devoted Montgomery readers in Sweden.

Special issue of The Lion and the Unicorn

On 16 April, I shared the news that The Lion and the Unicorn, a peer-reviewed academic journal about children’s literature published by Johns Hopkins University Press, was inviting essay submissions for a special issue on L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, to be guest-edited by Michelle Ann Abate (Hollins University):

Possible topics include but are not limited to:

• the past place, present status and future importance of Anne in children’s literature
• Anne and (de)construction of gender and girlhood
• the pastoral tradition and literary romanticism in Anne
• Anne and/as adolescent literature
• Anne and Canadian identity, literature, nationalism and culture
• cinematic, theatrical and television adaptations of the Anne story
• Anne in American, British and Canadian popular and material culture
• Anne and/in the evolution of the “girls’ book”
• L.M. Montgomery as Anne author and icon
• Anne as a reflection and/or revision of the orphan story
• female friendship in Anne; the novel as both homosocial and possibly homoerotic/queer
• re-reading Anne in light of recent news about Montgomery’s battle with depression and her death by suicide
• centenary celebrations of the publication of Anne; Montgomery’s classic at 100

L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature (University of Prince Edward Island, 23–27 June 2010)

I published on this blog two versions of the call for papers for this, the ninth international conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute, with a deadline of 15 September.

The initial version, on 8 May:

In 2010 we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of nature her descriptions were complex as she wrote both of and for nature. What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in the fiction of Montgomery, and in that of other writers of literature (especially for children and youth)? How do her narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures? How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture and class? What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work? In recent years, the matter of “nature” itself has been the subject of much-contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. Nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional. These include nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; male and female; reason and emotion; mind and body; modern and traditional; raw and cooked; domestic and wild; urban and rural─among others. How might any of these formulations be examined and challenged (or not) in the context of Montgomery’s work? What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)? What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?

The revised version, on 18 July:

At the ninth biennial conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute (University of Prince Edward Island), we invite you to consider L.M. Montgomery and the matter of nature. In recent years, the matter of nature has been the subject of much contested debate and theoretical innovation across disciplines. While multiple romanticisms have informed L.M. Montgomery’s passionate views of the natural world, her complex descriptions show her writing both of and for nature. This complexity extends as well to the depiction of cultural and gendered mores (domesticity, friendship, faith, community, biological determinism) as both natural and cultural. In all its forms, nature situates binary relationships that are often represented as hierarchical and oppositional: nature and culture; child and adult; animal and human; female and male; emotion and reason; body and mind; traditional and modern; raw and cooked; wild and domestic; rural and urban.

We invite the submission of abstracts that consider these issues in relation to Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, life writing, photographs, and scrapbooks, as well as the range of adapted texts in the areas of film, television, theatre, tourism, and online communities. Possible questions include:

  • What are the effects of the representations and images of nature that are crafted and circulated in Montgomery’s work?
  • How do Montgomery’s narrations of nature shape children and adults within and across cultures?
  • How do particular constructions of nature work in fiction, across such differences as gender, race, culture, and class?
  • What are the cultural and historical contingencies surrounding nature in Montgomery’s work?
  • What does it mean to consider Montgomery as a “green” writer (Doody) or as a proto-ecofeminist (Holmes)?
  • What do Montgomery’s provocative readings of nature offer us at a time of environmental crises and ecological preoccupations?
  • How does the notion of “nature” impact some of the most central preoccupations in Montgomery’s fiction, poetry, and life writing (the nature of war, of mental illness, of cultural inheritance, of conflict, of same-sex friendships and of heterosexual marriage, of cultural memory, of national ideologies)?

Abstracts should clearly articulate the paper’s argument and demonstrate familiarity with current scholarship in the field (please see for an updated bibliography). For more information, please contact the conference co-chairs directly: Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre and Dr. Jean Mitchell. All proposals will be vetted blind and should therefore contain no identifying information.

Screen

Sullivan Entertainment’s telefilm Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, released late in 2008, was nominated for two Director’s Guild of Canada awards (one for best television movie/miniseries and one for Ray Lorenz for best production design in a television movie/miniseries) and for three Gemini Awards: for best costume design (Martha Mann), for best achievement in make-up (Lynda McCormack and Madeleine Russell), and for best performance by an actress in a featured supporting role in a dramatic program or miniseries (Barbara Hershey).

On June 16, I shared the sad news that world-renowned filmmaker Allan King (1930–2009), whose extensive filmography included thirteen episodes of Road to Avonlea (1990-1996), had died the day before, in Toronto, at the age of 79.

On 3 September, I mentioned that there was now a website for the Anime version of Before Green Gables, which had been airing on Japanese television as Konnichiwa Anne since April 2009. The series is directed by Katsuyoshi Yatabe and is produced by Nippon Animation, which produced the 1979 Akage no An anime. See also the entry on Konnichiwa Anne on the Anime News Network. Thanks to Yuka for bringing this to my attention.

On 20 October, Sullivan Entertainment released restored, high-definition DVD sets of the first two seasons of Road to Avonlea, whereas the second season of Emily of New Moon was released on DVD by Echo Bridge Home Entertainment on 29 December.

In the News

On 8 January, an article by Sandra Martin in the Globe and Mail shared the news that Mollie Gillen, author of The Wheel of Things: The Life of L.M. Montgomery, had died in Toronto on 3 January 2009, at the age of 100.

Congratulations to Vanessa Brown of London, Ontario, who, in July, won the second prize in Canada’s First National Book Collecting Contest for best book collectors under the age of thirty, sponsored by the Bibliographical Society of Canada (BSC), the Antiquarian Booksellers of Association of Canada (ABAC), and the Alcuin Society. Vanessa won for her collection, “The L.M. Montgomery Collection in the Forest City.” She was interviewed by Mark Medley on the National Post’s book blog, “The Afterword”:

I remember the first time I bought a book about Lucy Maud Montgomery that wasn’t by her but about her. I was at a shop here in town called Portobello Road, which is no longer there. It was a great shop. There was a publisher’s proof of a biography by Harry Bruce. It was exciting to read about her, to find out there was so much more to learn. Then, of course, I bought the journals. And the obsession grew.

On 1 December, a news story by Randy Boswell commented on how a first-edition copy of Anne of Green Gables was expected to set an auction record:

One of the books most coveted by collectors of Canadian literary history—a first edition copy of Anne of Green Gables—is to be sold at auction next week in New York for what could be a record price.

The vintage edition of the classic novel by P.E.I.-born author Lucy Maud Montgomery, first printed in April 1908 by the Boston publishing house L.C. Page, is expected to fetch up to $25,000 U.S. at Sotheby’s Dec. 11 sale of rare books and manuscripts.

A top hammer price would just surpass the $24,000 record set in 2005 for another inaugural copy of the famous work.

A follow-up article by James Adams, appearing in the Globe and Mail on 12 December, reported that this copy had sold at auction for $37,500:

A first-edition copy of the Canadian classic Anne of Green Gables was sold by Sotheby’s New York Friday afternoon for $37,500 (U.S.)—a live auction record for the famous debut novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery that originally retailed for $1.50.

Another busy year for L.M. Montgomery’s legacy! What will 2010 bring? Stay tuned!