In 1911, the Toronto Star Weekly published a profile of L.M. Montgomery that linked her work to the development of Canadian literature.
Contents
Preamble
A Talented Authoress
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credit
Preamble
On 8 July 1911, the Toronto Star Weekly published a profile of L.M. Montgomery entitled “A Talented Authoress.” This profile appeared a few days after Montgomery had married Ewan Macdonald after a five-year engagement. Although the profile erroneously claimed that she was still teaching school by the time she published Anne of Green Gables, it used this detail as a way to place her alongside several more women writers whose works were being celebrated as major contributions to Canadian literature.
A Talented Authoress
Toronto Star Weekly, 8 July 1911, 3. https://www.newspapers.com/image/991153957.
A few years ago L.C. Page & Co., the Boston publishers, issued a pretty story called “Anne of Green Gables,” by L.M. Montgomery. It was such a refreshing story, so simple and yet so full of human feeling and insight, that American critics, not knowing whether L.M. Montgomery was a man or a woman, an American or a Canadian, praised it highly. Then we found that the author was Miss Lucy Maud Montgomery, a young school teacher of Prince Edward Island. This week she became Mrs. Ewen McDonald, wife of a Presbyterian minister at Leaskdale, Ont. But it is to be hoped that her active, skillful, pen will not be laid aside.
Miss Montgomery has written a great deal—a mass of short stories and verse previous to the appearance of “Anne of Green Gables” and several other novels since, including “Anne of Avonlea,” “Kilmeny of the Orchard,” and “The Story Girl.” None of the latter are marked by just the airy touch given to her first long tale, but they are all spontaneous, unpretentious, and charming. For Miss Montgomery, unlike so many of our native writers, has written, not from the shallow pool of ink in which she dipped her pen, but from the deeper fountain of the heart. Her style is not remarkable, her stories are quite unsurprising in plot, but they are absolutely natural, and therefore rarely effective. If more of our Canadian writers would, after acquiring an easy style, turn their energies toward simple, moving stories about the districts—city or country—with which they are really familiar, we might soon have a literature worth while in this country.
And it is remarkable that of late years our women authors have outclassed our men writers in this respect. Strangely enough, too, they have nearly all been schoolteachers—a class which the critics are disposed to despise as literary workers. This group includes Miss Agnes Deans Cameron, Mrs. Nellie McClung, and “Marion Keith” of Orillia, who also, by the way, recently married a Presbyterian minister. All these women, these bright Canadian schoolteachers, have, like Miss Montgomery, written from the heart about real phases of Canadian life which they know thoroughly. Our men writers, like Ralph Connor, who have done the same, have also been largely successful. So here’s a hint for our rising authors.
And here’s wishing that Miss Montgomery, now that she has married and come to Ontario, will some day give us an Ontario novel, informed with real knowledge and full of the delicate charm with which she can always invest a tale.
Notes
A few years ago. L.C. Page and Company had published Anne of Green Gables in June 1908.
a young school teacher. Montgomery had completed three teaching contracts in small P.E.I. settlements, but she had not taught school since 1898. At that time, the death of her maternal grandfather had prompted her to return to Cavendish to live with her grandmother and to devote all her energies to writing.
Mrs. Ewen McDonald. Montgomery’s married surname was Macdonald, but several misspellings appear in the press. While Montgomery tended to spell her husband‘s name as “Ewan,” archival records suggest that he spelled it “Ewen,” and both spellings appear on their shared tombstone in Cavendish. For more on the spelling of Ewan Macdonald’s name, see Mary Beth Cavert’s article “Ew*n M*donald: Ewen with an E, Macdonald with an A.”
Leaskdale, Ont. A settlement north-east of Toronto where Ewan Macdonald had been called as a Presbyterian minister a year before he and Montgomery married in July 1911. The couple moved there after a honeymoon to England and Scotland (described in her journals and in “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career,” included in A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917) and lived in that community until 1926.
a mass of short stories and verse. Montgomery’s shorter works prior to the publication of Anne of Green Gables consisted of roughly 350 short stories, 320 poems, and sixty-seven miscellaneous pieces.
Miss Agnes Deans Cameron. Agnes Deans Cameron (1863–1912), an educator and travel writer whose bestselling book The New North: Being Some Account of a Woman’s Journey Through Canada to the Arctic had been published in 1909. For more information, see Linda L. Hale’s entry on Cameron in Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
Mrs. Nellie McClung. Nellie McClung (1873–1951), a writer and social activist whose first novel, Sowing Seeds with Danny, had appeared in 1908. For more information, see Michelle Swann and Veronica Strong-Boag’s entry on McClung in Dictionary of Canadian Biography.
“Marion Keith” of Orillia. Marian Keith, pseudonym of Mary Esther MacGregor (1872–1961), a writer and teacher whose first novel, Duncan Polite: The Watchman of Glenoro had appeared in 1906.
Ralph Connor. Pseudonym of Charles W. Gordon (1860–1937), Presbyterian minister and author of several bestselling novels, including Glengarry School Days (1902). For more information, see Terrence Craig’s entry on Connor in The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Bibliography
Cavert, Mary Beth. “Ew*n M*donald: Ewen with an E, Macdonald with an A.” The Shining Scroll, 2023, 2–12. https://lmmontgomeryliterarysociety.weebly.com/uploads/2/2/6/5/226525/theshiningscroll2023.pdf.
Craig, Terrence. “Ralph Connor (Charles William Gordon).” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 21 March 2014. https://thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/charles-william-gordon.
Hale, Linda L. “Cameron, Agnes Deans.” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 14, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/cameron_agnes_deans_14E.html.
Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. Boston: L.C. Page and Company, 1908.
—. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2017. The L.M. Montgomery Library.
Swann, Michelle, and Veronica Strong-Boag. “Mooney, Helen Letitia (McClung).” In Dictionary of Canadian Biography, vol. 18, University of Toronto/Université Laval, 2003–. https://www.biographi.ca/en/bio/mooney_helen_letitia_18E.html.
Image Credit
Detail from an interior illustration, by George Gibbs, in the original edition of L.M. Montgomery’s Kilmeny of the Orchard, published by L.C. Page and Company in 1910. From the site owner’s personal collection.
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