Subtle connections between the work of Charlotte Brontë, L.M. Montgomery, and George Eliot are made apparent in Anne with an “E.”
Contents
Montgomery and Brontë
Brontë and Anne with an “E”
Bibliography
Image Credit
Montgomery and Brontë
Yesterday, I took a hard copy of the proofs of my afterword to A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917 with me when I went to get an oil change, because when a deadline looms, every spare minute counts.
The goal of the volumes in The L.M. Montgomery Library is not simply to reprint Montgomery’s work but also to provide some original content that’ll place that work within its historical and literary contexts. Accordingly, the afterword to this first volume discusses Montgomery’s career and her choice of an androgynous signature (“L.M. Montgomery”) in the context of British women writers who preceded her, especially Charlotte Brontë and George Eliot.
There are numerous parallels between these three authors, particularly between Montgomery and Brontë, to the point that Carole Gerson, in her contribution to Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict (2008), declares that “at one level, Montgomery is always rewriting Jane Eyre” (68). I’m going a bit further with this, speculating that Montgomery may have named her two major book protagonists Anne and Emily after two of the Brontë sisters but refrained from naming a third one Charlotte in order to make the point of connection less definite. (Not to mention that Charlotte Brontë’s second novel is entitled Shirley.)
Brontë and Anne with an “E”
Although I was somewhat distracted from my proofreading by the soccer game between Brazil and Belgium, I reached the endnote in which I mentioned another point of connection between Montgomery and Brontë—the fact that the titles of all seven episodes of the first season of the CBC/Netflix series Anne with an “E” are quotations from Jane Eyre:
S1E01: Your Will Shall Decide Your Destiny
S1E02: I Am No Bird, and No Net Ensnares Me
S1E03: But What Is So Headstrong as Youth?
S1E04: An Inward Treasure Born
S1E05: Tightly Knotted to a Similar String
S1E06: Remorse Is the Poison of Life
S1E07: Wherever You Are Is My Home
Then I remembered that the second season of Anne with an “E” was released that day on Netflix everywhere in the world (except Canada, meaning that I’ll have to wait until late September, when it starts airing on the CBC, to watch it), so I posted on Facebook a request from my non-Canadian friends with access to Netflix to share the episode titles from the second season, to see if they, too, were quotations from Jane Eyre.
A friend who’s on holiday outside Canada posted the list shortly thereafter:
S2E01: Youth Is the Season of Hope
S2E02: Signs Are Small Measurable Things, but Interpretations Are Illimitable
S2E03: The True Seeing Is Within
S2E04: The Painful Eagerness of Unfed Hope
S2E05: The Determining Acts of Her Life
S2E06: I Protest Against Any Absolute Conclusion
S2E07: Memory Has as Many Moods as the Temper
S2E08: Struggling Against the Perception of Facts
S2E09: What We Have Been Makes Us What We Are
S2E10: The Growing Good of the World
They sound familiar, right? But they’re not from Jane Eyre. They’re from Middlemarch. By George Eliot.
Looks like I’m going to need another endnote. And maybe I should make the time to read Middlemarch before the new season of Anne with an “E” starts on the CBC.
Bibliography
Gerson, Carole. “L.M. Montgomery and the Conflictedness of a Woman Writer.” In Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict, edited by Jean Mitchell, 67–80. Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008.
Lefebvre, Benjamin. Afterword to Montgomery, A Name for Herself, 313–40.
Montgomery, L.M. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. The L.M. Montgomery Library.
Image Credit
Detail from the title page of volume 1 of the original edition of Jane Eyre: An Autobiography, edited by Currer Bell (pseudonym of Charlotte Brontë) and published by Smith, Elder and Company (London), in 1847. Courtesy of the Internet Archive.
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