L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1926–1929 is an unabridged and annotated edition of L.M. Montgomery’s journals that she kept from ages fifty-one to fifty-five, while living in Leaskdale and Norval, Ontario. Edited and introduced by Jen Rubio, the book was published by Rock’s Mills Press as a trade paperback in May 2017. It is the fifth volume of Montgomery’s unabridged journals, preceded by The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900 (2012) and The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911 (2013), edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, as well as L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917 (2016) and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1918–1921 (2017), and followed by L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1922–1925 (2018) and L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1930–1933 (2019). This book supplements The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 3: 1921–1929 (1992) and The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 4: 1929–1935 (1998), also edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, who at the time were directed to abridge Montgomery’s journal text.
From the Back Cover
“I love Norval as I have loved no other place since Cavendish.” –from the Journals, May 26, 1927
L.M. Montgomery’s relocation in 1926 to Norval, Ontario—a village of striking natural beauty located on the Credit River—furnished her life with a bright new texture. She had lived 15 years in the small farming community of Leaskdale, Ontario, where she experienced her full share of highs and lows.
Although Montgomery remained busy in Norval, working almost incessantly as an author, mother, and minister’s wife, she found that her new home had its own special, and often very pleasing, flavour. Her connection to the “spirit of place” enabled her to record moments of peace and reflection in the “Garden of the Wild Gods,” as she described it—as well as the occasional “bark at the moon.”
Aware that the world was changing and that her own style of writing was not always sufficiently “edgy,” Montgomery’s commentary on the transformations of the world around her is infused with her characteristic wit and insight (“The mills of the gods grind slowly but they do pulverize,” she notes wryly in a journal entry of May 3, 1929). As social history of a rapidly changing post-war Canada, this new edition of Montgomery’s journals offers fascinating insights. Montgomery’s personal life is also intriguing. This new edition contains over 200 of Montgomery’s own photographs, many never before published. Editor Jen Rubio ha provided hundreds of notes original to this edition as well as a new introduction.
Contents
Introduction / Jen Rubio (v–x)
1926 (3–102)
1927 (103–95)
1928 (196–245)
1929 (246–316)
Acknowledgements (317)
Index (318–22)
Index of Photographs (323–33)
Metadata
Editor: Jen Rubio
Paratext: Introduction and notes by Jen Rubio
Country: Canada
Publisher: Rock’s Mills Press (n.p.)
Date: 2017
Format: Trade paperback
Trim: 6 x 9”
Pagination: x + 333 pp.
ISBN: 978-1-77244-080-5