Book Reviews

The Performance Anxiety of L.M. Montgomery

Hildi Froese Tiessen (Editor) and Paul Gerard Tiessen (Editor)
After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916-1941. University of Toronto Press
Buy this book from Amazon.ca

Reviewed by Benjamin Lefebvre

This edition of Montgomery’s letters to one of her two longstanding correspondents is a major contribution to Montgomery studies, a book that complements and complicates the poetics of self-representation established in her published journals. The editors have painstakingly transcribed, edited, annotated, and introduced twenty-four letters and notes covering a twenty-five-year period. Their volume becomes a sequel to The Green Gables Letters (1960), a collection of fifteen letters from the period surrounding the composition, submission, publication, and reception of her best-known novel (their remaining correspondence, including Weber’s side, appears to be lost). The introduction and the notes address readers familiar with the scholarly debates surrounding Montgomery’s fiction and life writing, but the volume will also appeal to those academic and non-academic readers interested in narratives of Montgomery’s everyday life more broadly.

These letters give voice to a highly literate person who knew how to articulate her anxieties about social change. By 1916, Montgomery was juggling pressures and responsibilities of a mother, a minister’s wife, and a popular writer, all under the shadow of the Great War. As the war’s aftermath led to a period of change and growth throughout the 1920s, Montgomery frequently expressed her nostalgia for the relative leisure of their relationship’s earlier days instead of having to write letters in fits and starts: “It is ‘here a little and there a little’ with me.” They discuss modern fiction (most of which she hated), the evils of free verse, the gradual irrelevance of organized religion, changes in fashion and technology, universal education (which she opposed on the grounds that those who did not want an education were wasting their time), and the “melting pot”—the model of Canadianness that she preferred. The letters reveal some of the blind spots of her time, such as when she unselfconsciously referred to a hotel employee in Kentucky as “a delightful darky.” One topic on which they staunchly disagreed was the war itself: Montgomery, who supported “the war to end all wars,” could hardly tolerate Weber’s pacifism, and got even with him by paraphrasing a sentence she found particularly vexing—“It is a commercial war and utterly unworthy of one drop of Canadian blood being spilt for it”—and attributing it to “a stranger from the shore hotel” in her novel Rilla of Ingleside.

The editors’ lively introduction provides a generous portrait of the obscure Weber, tying these two figures together by discussing the ways that Montgomery shaped her narrative voice to fit a person she would not meet in the flesh until 1928. Whereas Montgomery revised her journals for posthumous publication, her uncensored letters to Weber contain a distinctive narrative voice, even when she self-consciously mined her journal for anecdotes. The editors suggest that the “complicated performance” found in these narratives pertains to the ways in which Montgomery simultaneously wrote for and against Weber. And as the letters keep showing, Montgomery felt a certain amount of performance anxiety in her attempts to maintain the safe boundaries of their dialogue.

In their notes, the editors identify overlaps with Montgomery’s autobiography, published journals, as well as published and unpublished portions of Montgomery’s correspondence with G.B. MacMillan, all of which reveal moments when she sacrificed chronology and continuity to maintain a cohesive narrative. The notes also identify literary allusions, historical personages, cultural practices, and ephemera that may not be readily obvious to a reader of the twenty-first century. There are a few omissions, such as quotations from Robert Loveman, Arthur Stringer, E.O. Laughlin, and Albert Einstein that are unidentified. The quotation “here a little and there a little,” cited above, is from Isaiah 28:10. Montgomery’s poem “I Wish You” is identified as the source of the stanza quoted in April 1929, but this stanza does not appear in the poem itself. The book refers frequently to the final volume of Montgomery’s journals as still forthcoming, although it appeared a year and a half before this volume’s release.

These few quibbles should hardly take away from the impressive scope of the critical apparatus surrounding the letters; the detailed introduction and notes are as highly readable as the letters themselves. Thanks to the editors’ careful work, this edition saves Weber from obscurity and restores his long-overlooked involvement in the shaping of Montgomery’s distinctive narrative voice.

This review originally appeared in Canadian Literature #197 (Summer 2008), Predators and Gardens. (pg. 190 - 192)

***Please note that the articles and reviews from the Canadian Literature website (www.canlit.ca) may not be the final versions as they are printed in the journal, as additional editing sometimes takes place between the two versions. If you are quoting from the website, please indicate the date accessed when citing the web version of reviews and articles.