Book Reviews

L.M. Montgomery Studies

Aïda Hudson (Editor)
Windows and Words: A Look at Canadian Children’s Literature in English. University of Ottawa Press
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L.M. Montgomery (Author) and Cecily Devereux (Editor)
Anne of Green Gables. Broadview Press
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Irene Gammel (Author)
The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery. University of Toronto Press
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Reviewed by Benjamin Lefebvre

Given the increasing proliferation of scholarly interest in the life and work of L.M. Montgomery, it is hardly surprising to find three book-length studies that attest to the wide range of critical approaches that Montgomery’s legacy prompts. But while these books have unique concerns and goals, they all point to a set of new critical directions that will affect future scholarship on this vast and endlessly fascinating body of work. They also, perhaps more subtly, point to the same ambivalences about this work, particularly in terms of its intended audience(s).

Although not meant to focus exclusively on Montgomery, Aïda Hudson and Susan-Ann Cooper’s collection of essays, Windows and Words (part of the “Reappraisals: Canadian Writers” series), ends up bumping into her at every turn in their purported survey of the larger field of Canadian children’s literature. The volume’s stated central premise—that “Canadians have a national literature for the young that is indeed literature,” an idea that apparently was “rediscovered” at the 1999 children’s literature symposium at the University of Ottawa, where these papers were first presented—is hardly novel, given that the journal Canadian Children’s Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, which recently moved to the University of Winnipeg, has been tracing the development of this literature since 1975. The volume contains some worthwhile work that will be useful to scholars who want to get a sense of the field—Judith Saltman’s useful overview of children’s publishing in Canada, Beverley Haun’s thoughtful framing discussion of the development of an Aboriginal literature for children, Gregory Maillet’s contextualizing of the overall project of “multiculturalism” as it pertains specifically to Saskatchewan—but while it is difficult to negotiate scope and consistency in a collection of conference proceedings, the overall volume nevertheless lacks a clear direction. Formal papers are mixed in with unrevised “commentaries” (with greetings to fellow panelists left extant in the text) about various aspects of book production in the field of Canadian children’s literature, such as design and illustration, an area of inquiry that would be of sufficient importance to merit its own book. Further, although chapters by Cecily Devereux, Irene Gammel, Helen Siourbas, John R. Sorfleet, Margaret Steffler, and Virginia Careless offer some groundbreaking work on Montgomery’s fiction, none of these chapters seem particularly concerned with the complexities of child readers. In other words, they take for granted that Montgomery’s fiction is self-evidently “children’s literature,” but neglect to incorporate into their discussion how these texts might attract and inculcate actual child readers.

Devereux’s critical edition of Montgomery’s best-known novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), is a welcome addition to Montgomery studies, providing for the first time a version of the text that will appeal to scholars and general readers while at the same time prove ideal for the undergraduate classroom. Devereux’s introduction and choice of supplementary materials help contextualize the novel’s ambivalent feminism (particularly its negotiation of the figure of the New Woman) and address questions of British imperialism, but without overwhelming readers with an excess of materials, as did the gargantuan The Annotated Anne of Green Gables, which Oxford University Press published in 1997. Using the first edition of the novel as her copytext (including a reproduction of the original illustrations by M.A. and W.A.J. Claus), Devereux provides detailed information about the book’s publishing history (in the US, Canada, and Britain), about variants between these three major editions, and about the original manuscript, housed at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown. In a series of appendices, Devereux includes a bibliography of further scholarly sources, eight early reviews of the novel in the popular press, four of Montgomery’s early short stories that she reworked into chapters of the novel, extracts from three of Isabella Macdonald Alden’s Pansy novels, as well as essays and interviews that indicate Montgomery’s public stances on writing and on gender roles for girls and women. None of these materials indicate that Anne of Green Gables was intended for children or initially received as such; when Montgomery rewrites her own short stories or the didactic Pansy novels, she excises the moral normally found in the resolution, suggesting that she is parodying, rather than replicating, these types of stories for a more mature audience.

Finally, Irene Gammel’s latest collection of essays, The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery, draws from a range of critical and theoretical approaches to broaden our appreciation of “Canada’s most enigmatic writer” and her complex use of a wide variety of forms of life writing, including journals, correspondence, and scrapbooks. Following the critical success of Gammel’s two previous collections, Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (2002) and, co-edited with Elizabeth Epperly, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (1999), the book features ten papers that tease out gaps and contradictions in Montgomery’s “official” records of romance, depression, and passionate female friendships; for example, Gammel’s own historical research persuasively counters some of the details of Montgomery’s “private” confession of her wild (yet apparently chaste) romance with Herman Leard. The essays by such Montgomery heavyweights as Cecily Devereux, Elizabeth Epperly, Janice Fiamengo, Jennifer Litster, Mary McDonald-Rissanen, Hildi Froese Tiessen, and Paul Gerard Tiessen culminate in a lively colloquy between Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, editors of Montgomery’s Selected Journals, on Montgomery’s later fiction and life writing. The highlight of the collection is the complete text of a collaborative diary written by Montgomery and her friend Nora Lefurgey, who boarded with Montgomery for six months in 1903. The hilarious diary, edited and annotated by Gammel and accompanied by an analytical chapter by Litster, shows the two women using hyperbolic language, banter, jesting, and mutual teasing in their descriptions of their own (and each other’s) schemes to win the romantic attention of a number of local men. The tone of this diary provides a stark contrast with Montgomery’s published journal entries for this same time period, adding more substance to the claim that her gloomy journals tell only part of her life story. Gammel’s notes help readers keep track of the motley characters that appear throughout the diary; the numerous parodies of well-known poems and popular songs, which form a new strand of Montgomery’s rich use of intertextual allusion in her fiction, are unfortunately not annotated for the most part.

In short, these volumes indicate that there remains much to be explored in Montgomery’s fiction and life writing; just when you think you’ve read it all, an elusive new thread will be discovered and will prompt her readers to reconsider their assumptions about her work and find new aspects and approaches to contemplate.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #189 (Summer 2006), The Literature of Atlantic Canada. (pg. 158 - 160)

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