This page lists all known shorter works (poems, short stories, and miscellaneous pieces) that L.M. Montgomery published in 1890. All items appeared under the signature “L.M. Montgomery,” unless stated otherwise.
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Overview
In 1890, merely days before her sixteenth birthday, L.M. Montgomery saw the appearance of her first published poem, “On Cape Le Force,” which she had submitted to the Charlottetown Daily Patriot while living with her father and his second family in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan.
In a 1921 memoir entitled “Blank Verse? ‘Very Blank,’ Said Father,” Montgomery looked back on her experience of submitting “a yard—just about—of rhyme, written on one of the tragic legends of the old north shore.” As she commented on the experience of seeing her work in print for the first time, “Never, before or since, have I felt as happy and triumphant and uplifted as I felt when I opened that paper and saw my poem in it. It does not at all diminish my feelings of gratitude towards the Patriot to remember that there were some fearful printers’ mistakes and omissions in it, such as made the flesh creep on my bones. I was as a mother, gazing adoringly at her first-born and finding it all lovely, even if some of its fingers and a piece of its nose have been snipped off!”
Despite these printing errors, Montgomery referred to this as “indisputably the greatest moment of my life!”
On Cape Le Force (poem)
By Lucy Maud Montgomery. Daily Patriot (Charlottetown), 26 November 1890, 1. Scrapbook 7 (“Written partly in P.E.I. and partly in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. The cape where the incident took place is on the sea-shore of Cavendish[,] Prince Edward Island”).
First line: “One evening, when the sun was low.”
Collected
The Years before “Anne,” by Francis W.P. Bolger (n.p.: The Prince Edward Island Heritage Foundation, 1974), 28–32.
The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, selected by John Ferns and Kevin McCabe (Markham, ON: Fitzhenry and Whiteside, 1987), 135–39.
Notes
the greatest moment of my life! Montgomery, “Blank Verse? ‘Very Blank,’ Said Father,” 181. For similar accounts of this first publication, see also “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career” (NH, 280) and Montgomery, “An Autobiographical Sketch,” 256.
Bibliography
Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Montgomery, L.M. “An Autobiographical Sketch.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1: 254–59.
—. “Blank Verse? ‘Very Blank,’ Said Father.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1: 180–81.
—. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. The L.M. Montgomery Library.
Cite This Page
“Shorter Works: 1890.” L.M. Montgomery Online, https://lmmonline.org/shorter-works/shorter-works-1890/.