The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career is a volume that reproduces the full text of a 25,000-word memoir written by L.M. Montgomery and originally published in six instalments in the Toronto magazine Everywoman’s World in 1917. It was published in book form by Fitzhenry and Whiteside without a copyright date in 1974. A second edition followed in 1997. In 2005, Nimbus Publishing of Halifax published a Green Gables Edition of the text, to be sold exclusively at Green Gables House in Cavendish.
From the Dust Jacket
Lucy Maud Montgomery, the creator of Anne of Green Gables, wrote this charming autobiographical memoir when she was in the middle of her career. It is the most complete account she ever published of her childhood and early years as a writer. It originally appeared as a series of magazine articles in 1917, and this new edition is its first republication in any form.
L.M. Montgomery was born one hundred years ago, on November 30, 1874, in Clifton, Prince Edward Island. Her childhood was spent on the Island and her evocation of rural life there at the end of the 19th Century is extraordinarily attractive, moving and frequently humourous. In describing her family and friends and surroundings she reveals the source of many of the people and places and incidents of her novels, and shows how she came to adapt them.
“The Alpine Path” of the title refers to the long climb she had to achieve success as a writer. She began in childhood, and never wavered in her resolve. Her ambition was to become an accomplished professional writer—she never desired fame or greatness, and the remarkable success that came to her with the publication of Anne of Green Gables (which was rejected many times by publishers) and its sequels, and her other books, was the consequence of many years of hard steady work.
All those who have enjoyed the Anne books will be fascinated by this delightful background story by the author; anyone who knows Prince Edward Island will be delighted by her descriptions of the countryside and its people; no one who reads The Alpine Path can fail to be delighted and impressed by the personal appeal of L.M. Montgomery.
Excerpts
Excerpted in Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism, edited by Laurie Di Mauro, 175–78. Detroit: Gale Research, 1994.
Reviews
Reviews by Alan Dawe, Helen FitzPatrick, Callie Israel, Sandra Martin, and Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray.
Metadata
Paratext: Preface (5–6)
Publisher: Fitzhenry and Whiteside
Date: N.p. [1974]
Format: Jacketed hardcover
Trim: 8 3/8” x 5 3/8”
Pagination: 96 pp.
ISBN: 0-88902-019-1