This second volume of Lucy Maud Montgomery's journals covers the period from 1910 to 1921, a time of great upheaval, both in her life, and in the world around her. When she wrote the first entry she was already a world-famous author, having published Anne of Green Gables in 1908. She recordsher thoughts and feelings about the death of her grandmother, who had controlled her life so strictly; her marriage; and the move from her beloved Prince Edward Island to a small Ontario town. She describes the rewards and difficulties of being a successful author, her troubled married life, and herresponses to the possibility, the actuality, and the aftermath of a World War.
Elizabeth Waterston is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. The final volume of the immensely successful The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery covers the years 1935 to 1942, the year of Montgomery's death. No longer dwelling in a farm community or a small rural village, Lucy Maud Montgomery explored life in downtown Toronto. Here she experienced the cultural riches the city had to offer while finding friendship and neighbourliness in the suburb of Swansea. The journal chronicles her hopes and satisfaction with her new home and neighbourhood, but also her struggles with her own and her husband's recurring bouts of depression, her worries about her sons' academic performance, and her thoughts on the world events during these years. The final volume in the series offers an intimate eyewitness account of life in a growing city, a friendly neighbourhood, a changing world, and of a troubling family dynamic from 1935 to 1942, all recorded with Lucy Maud Montgomery's sharp eye and characteristic wit.
These journals record great change and upheaval in society as well as in Montgomery's life. She tells of her wedding and honeymoon, her departure from Prince Edward Island to an Ontario village, the joys of motherhood, and the traumas of a disturbed marriage.
Best-known as the author of the children's classic Anne of Green Gables, Lucy Maud Montgomery's professional and private lives became increasingly complex during the 1920s. In this third selection from her journals, she describes how she managed to juggle the demands of motherhood and herhusband's parish, numerous personal crises, and a bitter lawsuit with her unscrupulous publisher, and still found time to write. A remarkable portrait of a complex, sensitive, and surprisingly contemporary author, the journals also reveal a very different side of the decade commonly known as the'Jazz Age'.
Now available in paperback, The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles rediscovered primary material on one of Canada’s most enduringly popular authors, spanning the entirety of her high-profile career and the years since her death. Volume Three: A Legacy in Review examines a long overlooked portion of Montgomery’s critical reception: reviews of her books. Although Montgomery downplayed the impact that reviews had on her writing career, claiming to be amused and tolerant of reviewers’ contradictory opinions about her work, she nevertheless cared enough to keep a large percentage of them in scrapbooks as an archive of her career. This volume presents more than four hundred reviews from eight countries that raise questions about and offer reflections on gender, genre, setting, character, audience, and nationalism, much of which anticipated the scholarship that has thrived in the last four decades. Each volume in The L.M. Montgomery Reader is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that traces the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and the public Montgomery.
As knowledge of the private life of L.M. Montgomery has grown, readers have become aware that she is a far more complex woman than previously thought, with many hidden corners in her personality. She was previously seen as "just" a children's author; the first edition of her journals reflected this view. Much that was not "upbeat" or fast-moving was removed to save space. But the unabridged journals reveal dark moments, anxieties, deep passions, and above all a drive to write, to shape the ebb and flow of her psychological intensities into the material of narrative. They also reveal her visual imagination, illustrated with some 500 of her own photographs, newspaper clippings, and postcards. The full PEI journal deepens our understanding of L.M. Montgomery, as well as the bygone rural part of maritime Canada she loved so intensely. New notes and a new introduction provide fresh and fascinating context. And a new preface by Michael Bliss draws some unexpected connections.
Who ultimately is L.M. Montgomery, and why was there such an obsession with secrecy, hiding, and encoding in her life and fiction? Delving into the hidden life of Canada's most enigmatic writer, The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery answers these questions. The eleven essays illuminate Montgomery's personal writings and photographic self-portraits and probe the ways in which she actively shaped her life as a work of art. This is the first book to investigate Montgomery's personal writings, which filled thousands of pages in journals and a memoir, correspondence, scrapbooks, and photography. Using theories of autobiography and life writing, the essays probe the author's flair for the dramatic and her exuberance in costuming, while also exploring the personal facts behind some of her fiction, including the beloved Anne of Green Gables. Focussing on topics such as sexuality, depression, marriage, aging, illness, and writing, the essays strip away the layers of art and artifice that disguised Montgomery's most intensely guarded secrets, including details of her affair with Herman Leard, her marriage with Ewen Macdonald, and her friendships with Nora Lefurgey and Isabel Anderson. The book also includes rare photographs taken by Montgomery and others, many of which have not previously appeared in print. One of the highlights of The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery is the inclusion of a secret diary that Montgomery wrote with Lefurgey in 1903. This hilarious document is a rare find, for Montgomery's teasing banter presents us with a new voice that is distinct from the sombre tone of her journals. Published here for the first time, more than 100 years after its composition, this diary is virtually unknown to readers and scholars and is a welcome addition to the literature on this important figure. This volume fills in many of the blanks surrounding Montgomery's personal life. Engaging and erudite, it is a boon for scholars and Montgomery fans alike.
