An overview of L.M. Montgomery-related events and publications from 2020, a year of multiple anniversaries worth commemorating.
Contents
Preamble
Looking Back
Anniversaries
Featured Content
The L.M. Montgomery Readathon
Conversations About L.M. Montgomery
Screen
Events
In Memoriam
Coming Up in 2021
Looking Ahead
Image Credit
Preamble
This morning, while on our way to a socially distant walk in the woods with a few family members, my partner and I drove past a small grocery store whose outside sign read “Don’t worry. 2020 is almost over!”
That may certainly capture a larger societal feeling about the year that’s drawing to a close in less than an hour (at least in my time zone), and it may explain why I’ve been seeing fewer “best of” retrospective lists this month than I have in previous years (or maybe I’m just less inclined to notice them). Still, although 2020 has undeniably been difficult in so many ways, it’s worth looking back on this year in terms of new publications on L.M. Montgomery (including paperback editions of my three-volume critical anthology, The L.M. Montgomery Reader) as well as looking ahead to projects already announced for 2021. It’s also worth considering what anniversaries occurred this year and what they can remind us about the past, the present, and the future of Montgomery scholarship.
Looking Back
In looking back on this year, I recall the (somewhat tongue-in-cheek) comments Montgomery made as her alter ego, “Cynthia,” in the 30 December 1901 instalment of “Around the Table,” the newspaper column she published over a nine-month period in the Halifax Daily Echo (and whose text appears in its entirety for the first time in A Name for Herself).
The end of the year is, as a general thing, somewhat given over to retrospection. We like to overhaul our memories as well as our consciences, on New Year’s eve, as we sit before a dying fire—it must always be dying to be properly romantic—watching the Old Year out. We grow dreamy and sad and a wee bit sentimental. We recall the loves and hatreds, the pleasures and sorrows, the successes and failures of the past twelve months. We think of our flirtations, and wonder where the Toms, Dicks and Harrys are now, and if they have forgotten. We sigh softly, and quote scraps of poetry that occur to us as appropriate. In short, we get out Memory’s treasure-box and rummage among its motley contents. We have the vague regret that everyone experiences at the turning of a life page. Good or bad, earnest or frivolous, it is written and filed away in the archives of Eternity. We will never have a chance to correct its mistakes. Old Father Time has no proof-readers.
Then the clock strikes twelve and we open the door to let the Old Year go limping out and the New Year come joyously in. “The King is dead. Long live the King!” (NH, 122)
This past month, I read through several items of scholarship that made good use of the extensive Alice Munro papers at the University of Calgary. I appreciated the attempts of scholars to use surviving drafts, fragments, and correspondence in order to piece together Munro’s process of writing and revision, especially in terms of her collaboration with her agent and with various editors with whom she worked. I have to admit feeling envious of those scholars given the numerous gaps in Montgomery’s papers, especially pertaining to her short stories, poems, and miscellaneous pieces, which have been of particular interest to me over the last several years. Still, I’m very grateful for the Montgomery materials that do survive, including journals, letters, some manuscripts and typescripts, and scrapbooks.
Anniversaries
The Green Gables Letters
This year marks the sixtieth anniversary of the publication of The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909 (released in 1960) and the fortieth anniversary of the publication of My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery (released in 1980). Along with the first reprinting in book form of her celebrity memoir “The Alpine Path” in 1974, these two volumes showed readers for the first time that Montgomery’s life writing was just as fascinating as her fiction. This has certainly been proven true with the publication of five volumes of Montgomery’s selected journals starting in 1985 and seven volumes to date of her unabridged journals starting in 2012.
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
This year also marks one hundred years since the publication of Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), an anniversary that highlights the importance of placing Montgomery’s work in its historical and literary (as well as biographical) context. While the vast amount of surviving life writing makes biographical readings of the primary work so tempting, it’s also worth paying attention to some of the broader external circumstances that shaped the words appearing on the page, at least as far as these can be pieced together through surviving documents.
This collection of linked short stories is particularly fascinating as evidence of a battle of wills between Montgomery and her first publisher. L.C. Page manipulated her into agreeing to its publication but ended up violating some of the terms of that agreement in ways that she felt did damage to her literary reputation. As a result, she fought him in court for eight years until the firm withdrew the book from circulation.
Further Chronicles formed part of the basis of the ever-popular television series Road to Avonlea (1990–1996), which celebrates its thirtieth anniversary this year, an anniversary that reminds us of Montgomery’s status as an enduringly popular author whose fan base includes consumers of adaptations in addition to readers of her books.
Featured Content
From the Archive
New Reviews (1919–1922) (9 October 2020)
Conversations About L.M. Montgomery
Round Table on The Blue Castle (17 October 2020)
Round Table on Rilla of Ingleside (21 November 2020)
Trivia Contest (12 December 2020)
News and Updates
Cover Reveal: The L.M. Montgomery Reader in Paperback! (7 April 2020)
Texts and Contexts
Happy October from L.M. Montgomery! (1 October 2020)
A Note on John Foster’s Thistle Harvest (29 September 2020)
The L.M. Montgomery Readathon
On 28 March 2020, I posted the following announcement, entitled “A Rilla of Ingleside Readathon”:
Recognizing the many ways that L.M. Montgomery’s books have brought people together over time, and mindful that the current global pandemic means we need to be creative about staying in touch with people, Andrea McKenzie and I have started a Rilla of Ingleside readathon on Facebook. Starting Monday, March 30, we will read together three chapters a week from Montgomery’s Great War novel, supplementing our conversation about the text with book covers, reviews, ads, literary allusions, and historical context. Please join us!
Six months later, on 21 September, I posted the following update about the group:
Last March, shortly after the start of the COVID-19 restrictions, Andrea McKenzie asked me to collaborate with her on a new initiative designed to help bring L.M. Montgomery’s readers together during this uncertain time. She suggested a Rilla of Ingleside Readathon as a way for us to connect with Montgomery’s worldwide readership through Facebook and as an opportunity for us to revisit some of the contextual work we had put together a decade ago in our restored and annotated edition of the novel, published by Penguin Canada. In a series of Facebook posts, we read the book within the context of Montgomery’s life and times, discussing historical context, gender, nationalism, fashion, technology, allusions to previous works of literature, book covers, translations, and the controversial 1970s abridgement of the text (which, it turns out, happened even earlier than I’d thought!) that continues to be reprinted today.
Andrea and I so enjoyed the opportunity to discuss the novel with so many people around the world that once we were done, we decided to keep the party going, so to speak, and ended up doing the same thing with Jane of Lantern Hill, which we read over the summer. By this point the focus of the group had shifted away from Rilla of Ingleside specifically to more of Montgomery’s work, and so we decided to change the name of the group to the L.M. Montgomery Readathon.
Starting today, we turn to a third Montgomery novel, The Blue Castle, which is a favourite of many Montgomery readers. The only Montgomery book to be set entirely outside Prince Edward Island, The Blue Castle was seen as a major departure for Montgomery when it was first published in 1926. As the Calgary Herald stated in its review of the book, “Admirers of [Anne of Green Gables] have followed [Montgomery] loyally and patiently in the hope that one day she would give them a story which would equal or surpass Anne in theme and reader interest. That day has arrived, and The Blue Castle is the story.” As the New York Times Book Review noted, “although perhaps a little more mature in its spirit than the earlier books,” this book “is unmistakably from first page to last an L.M. Montgomery novel, compact of sentiment, rosily trimmed with romance, peopled with beings drawn solely out of the imagination, but telling a well-made story with humor and pathos.”
The L.M. Montgomery Readathon is open to all readers of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction, including those who are reading The Blue Castle for the first time. Please join us!
Conversations About L.M. Montgomery
On 8 October 2020, I posted an announcement about a new online initiative:
When Andrea McKenzie told me last March about her idea to start a Rilla of Ingleside Readathon, she mentioned that she wanted to find new ways to connect with fellow L.M. Montgomery readers using the tools of the digital age (in this case, Facebook). After all, it’s been well documented that Montgomery’s novels have the power to bring people together, and Andrea thought it would be worthwhile for a group of people to read (or reread) Rilla of Ingleside together, partly as a distraction from the pandemic, partly because there’s such rich cultural and literary context to explore in that novel, and partly because it depicts a community of people working together to get through a different kind of global crisis (in this case, four years of war). The level of response from readers all over the world surpassed our expectations completely, and the group—now called L.M. Montgomery Readathon—recently started discussing a third Montgomery book, The Blue Castle.
In light of the level of enthusiasm that the Readathon has received, Andrea and I soon started talking about additional ways we would connect virtually with fellow Montgomery readers around the world. To that end, I am pleased to announce Conversations About L.M. Montgomery, a series of virtual conversations and activities that will be hosted over Zoom and archived on a YouTube page. For this initiative, we reached out to Melanie J. Fishbane, Sarah Goff, Daniela Janes, Caroline E. Jones, Yuka Kajihara, and Kate Sutherland, and together the eight of us form the steering committee.
In figuring out a format for a series of virtual events, we were motivated by the wide range of workshops, conferences, events, meetings, and conversations that have happened on Zoom, but we were also mindful of the well-documented phenomenon known as “Zoom fatigue.” And so, instead of an all-day or a multi-day virtual conference, we’ve opted for a series of short events (round tables, formal papers, workshops, informal conversations, and readings), scattered throughout the year, for which any Montgomery reader who downloads the Zoom app can join us.
We ended up holding three Conversations About L.M. Montgomery events this year: a round table on The Blue Castle (17 October), a round table on Rilla of Ingleside (21 November), and a trivia contest (12 December 2020). More events will occur in 2021. Hope to see you there!
In terms of publications, 2020 began and ended with The Shining Scroll, the annual newsletter of the L.M. Montgomery Literary Society of Minnesota that’s edited by Mary Beth Cavert and Carolyn Strom Collins, two longtime contributors to the field of Montgomery studies. Its 2019 edition, released in January, and its 2020 edition, released just a few days ago, are filled with news items and original research. Topics include the centenary of the 1919 silent film adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, the handwritten manuscript of Anne, heritage and tourist sites in Prince Edward Island, and some newly discovered postcards that Montgomery sent to her Scottish pen pal, G.B. MacMillan.
Discussions of Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy appear in several book-length studies devoted to a wide range of topics and authors, including Anne Stiles’s Children’s Literature and the Rise of “Mind Cure”: Positive Thinking and Pseudo-Science at the Fin de Siècle (Cambridge University Press), Ann F. Howey’s Afterlives of the Lady of Shalott and Elaine of Astolat (Palgrave Macmillan) Penney Clark and Alan Sears’s The Arts and the Teaching of History: Historical F(r)ictions (Palgrave Macmillan), Gabrielle Owen’s A Queer History of Adolescence: Developmental Pasts, Relational Futures (University of Georgia Press), and Katja Lee’s Limelight: Canadian Women and the Rise of Celebrity Autobiography (Wilfrid Laurier University Press).
Additional Print Texts
This year also saw the publication of a number of trade books, including Kallie George’s picture book If I Couldn’t Be Anne (which follows Goodnight, Anne, released in 2018), Crystal S. Chan’s manga adaptation of Anne of Green Gables for Manga Classics, Josée Ouimet’s biography of Montgomery (one of the only secondary sources about Montgomery to appear in French) for the Bonjour l’histoire series from Éditions de L’Isatis, Tiffany Schmidt’s novel Bookish Boyfriends: Talk Nerdy to Me (Amulet Books), and Rachel Dodge’s The Anne of Green Gables Devotional: A Chapter-by-Chapter Companion for Kindred Spirits (Barbour Books).
Abridged editions published this year included Brooke Jorden’s abridgement of Anne of Green Gables for the Lit for Little Hands series published by Familius, Sandra A. Jay’s Anne’s Arrival (Kindred Spirits Publishing of PEI), and Saviour Pirotta’s retelling of Anne of Green Gables for Starry Forest Books’ Classic Stories series.
Gail Newman’s collection of poems Blood Memory (Marsh Hawk Press) includes a Montgomery-related poem entitled “My Mother Remembers.”
Several more contributions appeared throughout 2020, including dissertations/theses, book chapters, journal articles, shorter extensions, paratexts, magazine items, and reviews, as well as the newsletter Cordially Yours.
Four Days of Free Shipping from UTP
On 26 November, I mentioned that I’d received an email notification from University of Toronto Press:
University of Toronto Press is offering free shipping, in Canada and the United States, on all its orders between now and the end of this Sunday, November 29. Since UTP has published a number of books by or about L.M. Montgomery over the years, and given that these books are substantially discounted on their website, this is the perfect time for readers to complete their collections!
Among the books available are the first two volumes of The L.M. Montgomery Library and the three volumes of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, which are still available in hardcover as well as the paperback editions released earlier this year. I was also pleased to see that paperback copies of Mary Quayle Innis’s The Clear Spirit: Twenty Canadian Women and Their Times (1966), which includes Elizabeth Waterston’s chapter on Montgomery that is widely acknowledged as the starting point of L.M. Montgomery studies, are still available.
After providing a list of Montgomery-related scholarship and life writing available from this publisher, I added my own plans as a consumer:
I decided to take advantage of this sale myself, and I ordered two books that will certainly come in handy as I continue my work of preparing all of L.M. Montgomery’s short stories and poems for book publication: T.K. Pratt’s Dictionary of Prince Edward Island English (1996) and T.K. Pratt and Scott Burke’s Prince Edward Island Sayings (1998). I look forward to reading these!
Screen
On 18 February, I posted a note congratulating the cast and crew of Anne with an “E” (2017–2019), whose third and final season had been nominated for seventeen Canadian Screen Awards.
- Best Drama Series
- Best Lead Actress, Drama Series: Amybeth McNulty
- Best Guest Performance, Drama Series: Dalmar Abuzeid
- Best Direction, Drama Series: Anne Wheeler
- Best Direction, Drama Series: Amanda Tapping
- Best Writing, Drama Series: Moira Walley-Beckett
- Best Writing, Drama Series: Jane Maggs
- Best Photography, Drama: Catherine Lutes
- Best Picture Editing, Drama: Gillian Truster
- Best Picture Editing, Drama: Lisa Grootenboer
- Best Sound, Fiction: Alan deGraaf, Scott Shepherd, John Elliot, Tyler Whitham, Danielle McBride, Joe Bracciale, Joe Mancuso, Zenon Waschuk
- Best Production Design or Art Direction, Fiction: Jean-François Campeau, Michele Brady, Elliott Carew
- Best Costume Design: Alexander Reda
- Best Achievement in Make-up: Diane Mazur
- Best Achievement in Hair: Zinka Tuminski
- Best Original Music, Fiction: Amin Bhatia and Ari Posner
- Best Achievement in Casting: Stephanie Gorin
The series ended up winning five of these awards: for best guest performance, drama series; best photography, drama; best production design or art direction, fiction; best costume design; and best original music, fiction.
Events
L.M. Montgomery and Vision
University of Prince Edward Island, 25–28 June 2020
Lesley Clement and Emily Woster, conference co-chairs
L.M. Montgomery and Vision, the fourteenth biennial international conference hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute, was co-chaired by Lesley Clement and Emily Woster.
The 2020 conference will discuss research pertaining to L.M. Montgomery’s life, writings, and/or scholarship through the lens of vision. Montgomery found inspiration in what she saw around her, and she spent a lifetime translating what she saw into her writing and other creative works. The word vision derives from the Latin videre, “to see,” but as Montgomery knew, there is never a direct or straight line between the observing eye and the object that is seen (or not seen). Beyond topics relating to “visuality,” “vision” might also suggest, among other topics, (in)visibility, prescience, dreams, wisdom, imaginary or supernatural phenomena, apparitions. It could also be the visioning and re-visioning of material—including Montgomery’s own life—for which she is renowned.
Scheduled to be held at the University of Prince Edward Island on 25–28 June 2010, the conference was cancelled due to the COVID-19 pandemic. In its place, Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies published a “Vision Forum” edited by Lesley Clement and Kate Scarth that included articles by Lesley D. Clement, Meriel Dhanowa, Laura Leden, and Mary McDonald-Rissanen alongside notes, blog posts, welcome letters, audio/visual art, and news.
“L.M. Montgomery and Vision,” edited by Lesley D. Clement and Tara K. Parmiter, has been published as a special collection of Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies since 2021.
For more information about this conference, see the event page on the L.M. Montgomery Institute website.
In Memoriam
Zoe Caldwell (1933–2020)
Australian-born actor and director Zoe Caldwell died on 16 February at the age of eighty-six. Her innumerable stage and screen credits include the movie Lantern Hill (in which she played Mrs. Kennedy) and a first-season episode of Road to Avonlea. For more information about her life and her career, see Claire Seringhaus and Patrick B. O’neill’s article on Zoe Caldwell in The Canadian Encyclopedia.
Coming Up in 2021
What’s been announced for 2021? So far, quite a bit!
Two new print adaptations will be released in the spring: Brina Starler’s Anne of Manhattan (William Morrow), which is billed as “a romantic, charming, and hilarious modern adaptation” of Anne of Green Gables that depicts Anne’s experiences as a graduate student in present-day New York City, and Louise Michalos’s Marilla before Anne (Nimbus Publishing), which focuses on eighteen-year-old Marilla’s coming of age, set in Avonlea and Halifax.
Nimbus Publishing will also release Eri Muraoka’s Anne’s Cradle: The Life and Works of Hanako Muraoka, Japanese Translator of Anne of Green Gables, translated by Cathy Hirano, this spring, which promises to add considerably to our understanding of the international circulation of Montgomery’s work. In addition to Kallie George’s third Anne picture book, Merry Christmas, Anne, Tundra Books will release Anne’s School Days, the third of George’s abridgements of Anne of Green Gables, following Anne Arrives (2018) and Anne’s Kindred Spirits (2019).
And speaking of abridgements, New York’s Starry Forest Books plans to release three abridgements of Anne of Green Gables this spring, each part of a separate series of abridgements of classic works of literature and targeting a specific age range: a Baby’s Classics abridgement by Alex Fabrizio (24 pp.), a Classic Stories abridgement by Saviour Pirotta (40 pp.), and a Classic Adventures abridgement by Jacqueline Dembar Greene (64 pp.). Each of these series will place Anne alongside new abridgements of many other classic works of literature by authors ranging from Alcott and Baum to Shakespeare and the Brothers Grimm.
Looking Ahead
I’d like to end by recalling the words of Captain Jim in Anne’s House of Dreams, after he and his guests, as Cynthia describes in “Around the Table,” open the lighthouse door to welcome in the new year as the clock strikes twelve. “I wish you all the best year of your lives, mates. I reckon that whatever the New Year brings us will be the best the Great Captain has for us—and somehow or other we’ll all make port in a good harbour” (151).
There’s a lot of uncertainty about what the world will experience in 2021, but, like Captain Jim, I remain hopeful that “somehow or other we’ll all make port in a good harbour.” And in the meantime, there is always something new to discover about L.M. Montgomery.
Bibliography
Calgary Herald. Review of The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery. 23 October 1926, 11.
Montgomery, L.M. Anne’s House of Dreams. Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1917.
—. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. The L.M. Montgomery Library.
New York Times. “Canadian Romance.” Review of The Blue Castle, by L.M. Montgomery. 26 September 1926, Book Review section, 33.
Image Credit
Frontispiece from the first UK edition of L.M. Montgomery’s Further Chronicles of Avonlea, published by George G. Harrap and Company, in 1925. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.
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