Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913 is a collection of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction serials edited by Benjamin Lefebvre.
Contents
Overview
Synopsis
Volume Contents
Purchase
Overview
Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913 is a collection of short fiction by L.M. Montgomery that was edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. It includes the full text of six multi-chapter fiction serials that Montgomery published in Canadian and American periodicals between 1903 and 1913. One of these serials formed the basis for Montgomery’s third novel, Kilmeny of the Orchard, and Montgomery published revised versions of three more stories between 1916 and 1939.
The book will published by University of Toronto Press as a trade paperback and an unjacketed hardcover later in 2025. It is the fourth volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, preceded by A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917, A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921, and Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939, with several more volumes in progress.
- Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913 at University of Toronto Press
- Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913 at Benjamin Lefebvre’s website
- The L.M. Montgomery Library at University of Toronto Press
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.
Volume Contents
A Note on the Author
Abbreviations
Preface
A Note on the Text
The Running Away of Chester
The Bitterness in the Cup
Four Winds
By Way of the Brick Oven
Una of the Garden
How We Went to the Wedding
Appendix: Revised Scenes
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography