Heartiest congratulations to David Fox, who played John Blythe in Sullivan Entertainment’s miniseries Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel and Clive Pettibone in the episodic series Road to Avonlea, and to Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, whose numerous contributions to L.M. Montgomery scholarship include seven volumes of Montgomery’s journals, for their recent appointments as Members of the Order of Canada!
The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, published earlier this year by Oxford University Press, has been included in this year’s The Globe 100, which includes “titles reviewers couldn’t put down, couldn’t stop talking about, and insist you stock up on, too.”
The cover art for The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911 is now available! This unabridged volume, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2013.
The next volume of Montgomery’s unabridged journals, The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, will be published by Oxford University Press in March 2013! It is available for pre-order on Amazon.ca and on Chapters.Indigo.ca, and more information can be found on the website for Oxford University Press Canada.
The cover art is now available for The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston and scheduled for publication by Oxford University Press later this year.
The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, will be published by Oxford University Press in September 2012!
From the Oxford University Press website:
The first edition of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery was published in the 1980s, with fifty percent of the material removed to save space, as well as to reflect a quaint, marketable vision of small-town Canada. The editors were instructed to excise anything that was not upbeat or did not “move the story along.” The resulting account of Montgomery’s youthful life in Prince Edward Island depicts a fun-loving, simple country girl. The unabridged journal, however, reveals something quite different.
We now know that Montgomery was anything but simple. She was often anxious, bitter, dark, and political, although always able to see herself and her surroundings with a deep ironic—and often comical—twist. The unabridged version shows her using writing as a means of managing her own mood swings, as well as her increasing dependency on journal keeping, and her ambition as a writer. She was also exceedingly interested in men. We see here a more developed portrait of what she herself described as a “very uncomfortable blend” between “the passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience.” Full details describe the impassioned events during which she describes becoming a “new creature,” “born of sorrow . . . and hopeless longing.”
In addition, this unedited account is a striking visual record, containing hundreds of her own photographs placed as she placed them in her journals, as well as newspaper clippings, postcards, and professional portraits, all with her own original captions. New notes and a new introduction give key context to the history, the people, and the culture in the text. A new preface by Michael Bliss draws some unexpected connections.
The full PEI journals tells a fascinating tale of a young woman coming of age in a bygone rural Canada, a tale far thornier and far more compelling than the first selected edition could disclose.
The book is available for pre-order on Amazon.ca.
Congratulations to Dr. Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, author of Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery (2008) and co-editor of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (1985–2004), who earlier this year was named to the Order of Ontario! For more details, see the University of Guelph’s press release and the website for the Province of Ontario.
Vanessa Brown’s article “L.M. Montgomery: Writer of the World” discusses a recent talk by Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio at the Wolf Performance Hall in London, Ontario:
On September 30, supporters and members of Friends of the Library met at the Wolf Performance Hall to hear a talk by Elizabeth Waterston and Mary Rubio, the world’s foremost experts on Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery.