Announcing The Blythes Are Quoted

I’m pleased to announce that my edition of L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, will be published by Viking Canada (an imprint of Penguin Canada) in October 2009. The edition will include an afterword by me and a foreword by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly.

Synopsis

The Blythes Are Quoted is the last work of fiction by the internationally celebrated author of Anne of Green Gables. Intended by L.M. Montgomery to be the ninth volume in her bestselling series featuring her beloved heroine Anne—and delivered to her publisher on the very day she died—it has never before been published in its entirety.

This rediscovered volume marks the final word of a writer whose work continues to fascinate readers all over the world.

Adultery, illegitimacy, misogyny, revenge, murder, despair, bitterness, hatred, and death—usually not the first terms associated with L.M. Montgomery. But in The Blythes Are Quoted, completed shortly before her death and never before published in its entirety, Montgomery brought these topics to the forefront in what she intended to be the ninth volume in her bestselling series featuring the beloved heroine Anne. Divided into two sections, one set before and one after the Great War of 1914-1918, The Blythes Are Quoted contains fifteen short stories that include an adult Anne and her family. Between these short stories Montgomery inserted sketches featuring Anne and Gilbert Blythe discussing poems by Anne and their middle son, Walter, who dies as a soldier in the war. By blending together poetry, prose, and dialogue, Montgomery was experimenting with storytelling methods in ways she had never attempted before. The Blythes Are Quoted marks L.M. Montgomery’s final contribution to a body of work that continues to fascinate readers all over the world.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in 1874. A prolific writer, she published twenty novels and over a thousand short stories, essays, and poems, but she is best known for Anne of Green Gables and its sequels: Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and Rilla of Ingleside. To this list we can now add The Blythes Are Quoted. Montgomery died in Toronto in 1942 shortly after she completed The Blythes Are Quoted and is buried in her beloved Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

Benjamin Lefebvre, Ph.D., is director of the L.M. Montgomery Research Group and has served as an editor of the journal Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse. He has published widely on Montgomery’s fiction and life writing.

Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Ph.D., is professor emerita of English at the University of Prince Edward Island and the founding chair of the L.M. Montgomery Institute. An internationally recognized scholar, she is the author of numerous articles and books on Montgomery, the most recent being Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery.