Lo! a ripe sheaf of many golden days Gleaned by the year in autumn’s harvest ways, With here and there, blood-tinted as an ember, Some crimson poppy of a late delight Atoning in its splendour for the flight Of summer blooms and joys – This is September.
“Harvest is ended and summer is gone,” Anne Shirley declares at the start of Anne of the Island (1915) – a statement that, as Rea Wilmshurst notes in her 1989 article “L.M. Montgomery’s Use of Quotations and Allusions in the ‘Anne’ Books,” is in fact a misquotation of Jeremiah 8:20 (“The harvest is past, the summer is ended”). For me as an academic, September also means the start of a new school year after a summer busy with research and writing projects – which this year included steady work on the next four volumes in The L.M. Montgomery Library. It doesn’t always make sense to work on four books at once, but in this case I became like the little boy in Anne of the Island (and originally in one of Montgomery’s “Around the Table” columns) who went to see a biograph: “I have to look for what’s coming next before I know what went last.”
In order to make this website more manageable, I decided to eliminate individual pages for periodicals except for those in which Montgomery published her hundreds of short stories, poems, and miscellaneous pieces between 1890 and 1942. As more and more newspapers have been digitized and made text searchable, I’ve noticed some of these items being reprinted again and again, sometimes anonymously. Her 1898 poem “Irrevocable,” for instance, appeared in The Congregationalist, a Boston periodical, before being reprinted in several newspapers between 1899 and 1901, including once, without Montgomery’s signature and under the title “Beyond Recall,” in the Brown County World of Hiawatha, Kansas. I haven’t yet found any more publications of that poem in the few years after that, but another burst of citations of this poem as “Beyond Recall” starts in 1905, usually unsigned, and sometimes attributed to Ewing Herbert, who owned the Brown County World. I’ve decided to list all these newspaper reprints but not create pages for each periodical given that Montgomery in all likelihood had no knowledge of how widely her work was recirculating, and given that more and more newspapers are being digitized all the time, there will always be more instances of reprinting to discover.
I’ve also created a page for the alternate signatures Montgomery used, particularly early in her career, including “Maud Cavendish,” “Joyce Cavendish,” “Cynthia,” and “J.C. Neville” – a form of authorship that I talk about in my afterword to A Name for Herself.
September is meaningful for another reason, too: the critically acclaimed television series Anne with an “E” is returning on CBC starting on Sunday night for a third season of ten episodes (it will appear on Netflix around the world, except Canada, on 3 January 2020). As I wrote in a blog post last year, the titles of all first-season episodes are quotations from Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whereas the titles of all second-season episodes are quotations from George Eliot’s Middlemarch. Brontë and Eliot were prominent models of nineteenth-century women’s authorship for Montgomery, so it was fitting that the episode titles for the first two seasons referred to their work. For the third season, the episode titles that I’ve seen so far all allude to another prominent book by a British woman – Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, which I find quite intriguing. And based on what I’ve read about the storylines for this season, I do look forward to seeing what lies ahead for Anne, her friends, and the community of Avonlea in this most recent incarnation of Montgomery’s story.
Although many Canadian viewers were disappointed to learn that the second season of Anne with an “E” would drop on Netflix months before it would air in Canada, tonight that wait is over, since the first episode of the second season, “Youth Is the Season of Hope,” airs tonight on the CBC, with the remaining nine episodes airing throughout the fall on Sunday nights. As I mentioned in a blog post last year, adaptations of Montgomery’s books have been a Sunday-night tradition for the CBC, since it was on Sunday evenings that the CBC aired the first halves of Sullivan Entertainment’s Anne of Green Gables (1985) and Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel (1987) as well as nearly the entire run of the episodic series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996) and Emily of New Moon (1998–1999, 2002–2003).
By coincidence, the third Anne movie from Breakthrough Entertainment, L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables: Fire and Dew, which aired on YTV on 1 July 2017 and which was released on DVD just this week, has its U.S. premiere on PBS this evening. So it looks as though both American and Canadian viewers finally get the chance to see a much-anticipated follow-up production that their neighbours across the border have already been talking about!
Yesterday, I took a hard copy of the proofs of my afterword to A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917 with me when I went to get an oil change, because when a deadline looms, every spare minute counts. Because the goal of the volumes in The L.M. Montgomery Library is not simply to reprint Montgomery’s work but also to provide some original content that’ll place that work within its historical and literary contexts, the afterword of this first volume discusses Montgomery’s career and her choice of an androgynous signature (“L.M. Montgomery”) in the context of British women writers who preceded her, especially Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot. There are numerous parallels between these three authors, particularly between Montgomery and Brontë, to the point that Carole Gerson, in her contribution to Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict (2006), declares that “at one level, Montgomery is always rewriting Jane Eyre.” I’m going a bit further with this, speculating that Montgomery may have named her two major book protagonists Anne and Emily after two of the Brontë sisters but refrained from naming a third one Charlotte in order to make the point of connection less definite. (Not to mention that Charlotte Brontë’s second novel is entitled Shirley.)
Then I remembered that the second season of Anne with an “E” was released that day on Netflix everywhere in the world (except Canada, meaning that I’ll have to wait until late September, when it starts airing on the CBC, to watch it), so I posted on Facebook a request from my non-Canadian friends with access to Netflix to share the episode titles from the second season, to see if they, too, were quotations from Jane Eyre.
A friend who’s on holiday outside Canada posted the list shortly thereafter:
S2E10: The Growing Good of the World
S2E09: What We Have Been Makes Us What We Are
S2E08: Struggling against the Perception of Facts
S2E07: Memory Has as Many Moods as the Temper
S2E06: I Protest against Any Absolute Conclusion
S2E05: The Determining Acts of Her Life
S2E04: The Painful Eagerness of Unfed Hope
S2E03: The True Seeing Is Within
S2E02: Signs Are Small Measurable Things, but Interpretations Are Illimitable
S2E01: Youth Is the Season of Hope
They sound familiar, right? But they’re not from Jane Eyre. They’re from Middlemarch. By George Eliot.
Looks like I’m going to need another endnote. And maybe I should make the time to read Middlemarch before the new season of Anne with an “E” starts on the CBC.
CBC and Netflix released today nearly identical trailers for the second season of Anne with an “E” (now apparently called Anne with an “E” on CBC as well). Differences between them? Besides the background music, the release date: in a reverse of the first season, which aired weekly on the CBC in March and April 2017 before being released the rest of the world on Netflix that May (it then appeared on Netflix in Canada this past January), the second season of ten episodes will appear on Netflix on July 6 but won’t be available in Canada until the CBC begins airing them starting on September 23.
The Academy of Canadian Cinema and Television announced today the nominees for the 2018 Canadian Screen Awards. The CBC television series Anne with an “E” (which airs everywhere else in the world as Anne with an “E”) leads with thirteen nominations, and L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables: Fire & Dew, the last of three Anne movies from Breakthrough Entertainment, is up for four awards.
When news broke earlier this month that the CBC television series Anne with an “E” (broadcast everywhere else in the world on Netflix as Anne with an “E”) had been renewed for a second season of ten episodes, to be broadcast in 2018, it reminded me that I was still curious about possible differences between the two versions. Like many fellow viewers, I had been mystified by the last-minute title change for Netflix, not to mention unimpressed with the obvious doctoring of a promotional image of lead performer Amybeth McNulty. Would they simply change the title, or would they even go so far as to replace the Tragically Hip theme song with something more universally recognizable (in other words, less Canadian)? After all, when Road to Avonlea was broadcast twenty-five years ago, it aired in slightly different form (mainly in terms of additional scenes) on the Disney Channel as Avonlea.
Given that the CBC’s Anne version is the only one I’ve seen on entertainment platforms in Canada, there seemed to be no way to satisfy my curiosity. Recently, however, someone posted to YouTube the opening credits for the Netflix version of the series, which reveals some slight differences between the two versions.
In each version, the initial title card follows current practice, which is to begin an episode with an explicit statement about the network on which it airs. Note that “A CBC Original” and “A Netflix Original Series” aren’t parallel to each other, but each phrase mirrors similar statements made on other CBC or Netflix shows.
The second title card claims ownership of the series in terms of the production company. And yet, while on the Netflix version this card reads “A Northwood Entertainment Production in Association with CBC,” the CBC version simply states “A Northwood Entertainment Production,” with no mention of Netflix. In fact, I couldn’t find any mention of Netflix at all when I read through the opening and ending credits of the episodes that aired on CBC.
The cast and crew credits are otherwise unchanged from one version to the next, except for this list of executive producers. In the CBC version, Sally Catto (General Manager, Programming at CBC English Television) is given billing above Elizabeth Bradley (VP of Content at Netflix) and Alex Sapot, whereas in the Netflix version, Bradley and Sapot appear above Catto. Road to Avonlea did likewise when it list CBC and Disney Channel executives attached to the series: the CBC broadcast listed the CBC executive(s) first, whereas the Disney Channel listed the Disney Channel executive first.
Finally, the main title card, which evidently had to be redone for the Netflix title but obviously is made to look almost identical.
The first season of Northwood Entertainment’s series Anne with an “E”, which had successful run on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation in March and April, launches today in the rest of the world on Netflix under the title Anne with an E.
Fittingly, Anne has made the news numerous times in anticipation of its worldwide release. Here are some highlights:
Today, Netflix released its own official trailer for Anne with an “E”, the episodic series whose first three episodes have already aired on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation. Netflix will make the series available everywhere else in the world starting 12 May 2017.
During the broadcast of the first episode of Anne with an “E” last Sunday evening on the Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, several commercials announced what had to be a bold move for the broadcaster: while the CBC announced plans to air the first episode of another new show, Canada: The Story of Us, the following week (March 26), Anne would return on Sunday, April 2, with a rebroadcast of the first two-hour episode (“Your Will Shall Decide Your Destiny”) immediately preceding the initial broadcast of the second episode (“I Am No Bird, and No Net Ensnares Me”). This in spite of the fact that the first episode can now be watched on the CBC website (at least within Canada) and can be downloaded for free on iTunes.
Just yesterday morning, I came across the following tweet from the show’s official Twitter account:
Why wait two weeks? CANADA LOVES ANNE so much, we're bringing an all-new episode THIS Sunday 8/8:30NT! pic.twitter.com/66X67DVLVi
Now, according to my PVR machine this morning, here is what’s scheduled to happen next: this Sunday, March 26, CBC will air episode two, “I Am No Bird, and No Net Ensnares Me,” in the series regular time slot of 8:00 p.m. (8:30 in Newfoundland). And then on Sunday, April 2, CBC will rebroadcast, in a four-hour block, the two-hour-long episode one and episode two, followed by the initial broadcast of episode three, “But What Is So Headstrong as Youth?”
Check your local listings for updates: who knows how this schedule might change again!
Benjamin Lefebvre
