Announcing Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913

Announcing Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913, which will be published by University of Toronto Press in November 2025.

I’m pleased to announce the forthcoming publication of Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913, the fourth volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, which will be published by University of Toronto Press in November 2025.

This book contains six multi-chapter fiction serials that Montgomery published over a decade, including “The Bitterness in the Cup,” which appeared in revised form in 1916 as “Schooled with Briars.” The cover art, from an unidentified artist, is from an issue of Everywoman’s World that contained an instalment of this serial.

For the book’s contents and ordering information, please see the main page for this book.

Synopsis

Out of the roughly five hundred shorter works of fiction that L.M. Montgomery published in periodicals between 1895 and 1940, about a dozen consisted of multi-chapter serials. As a form of print storytelling, fiction serials offered more complexity than short stories by virtue of their relatively longer word count, but since they appeared in instalments, they had to be structured for readers who had to wait to find out what happened next.

Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913, the fourth volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, reprints Montgomery’s six surviving fiction serials published over a ten-year period. Benjamin Lefebvre offers an in-depth analysis of these serials and what they reveal, sometimes problematically, about normative gender roles (including the figure of the “ideal woman”), whiteness and otherness, terminology and ableism, and the ways that her characters’ ability to earn a living is often constrained by complex attitudes about gender and class. He also traces fascinating parallels between this material and her novels, including the iconic Anne of Green Gables. This volume offers readers fresh insights into Montgomery’s career as a contributor to a competitive, metropolitan literary marketplace.

Benjamin Lefebvre, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, is director of L.M. Montgomery Online. His previous books include the novel In the Key of Dale, an edition of Montgomery’s The Blythes Are Quoted, and the three-volume critical anthologyThe L.M. Montgomery Reader. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.