The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (review)

Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly edited L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (1999); then Gammel produced Making Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (2002). Her third volume is devoted to Montgomery's life writings, that is, her journals, letters, and diaries. Irene Gammel has brought a fine book into being in The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery. The collection, pleasingly symmetrical, comprises four sections, each consisting of three essays, written by the most respected and influential of Montgomery scholars as well as by relative newcomers. Montgomery fans (academic and otherwise) will be overjoyed to find here the first publication of a coauthored diary (edited, annotated, and illustrated by Gammel) that Montgomery wrote with her friend Nora Lefurgey from January to June 1903. Its sixty-eight pages include wonderful photographs of the people the diarists talk about and the young men they tease each other about. Jennifer Litster's essay 'The "Secret" Diary,' which introduced Gammel to its existence, provides a sensitive analysis of the making of the diary, the intellectual and literary interests it reveals, and the playful Montgomery that rarely appeared in later writings. Mary Beth Cavert in 'Nora, Maud, and Isabel: Summoning Voices in Diaries and Memories' focuses on the young women's relationship and social life, especially recognizing the sad passion Isabel developed for Maude ('Maud' is Nora's consistent spelling).

Part 2, 'Confessions and Body Writing,' contains Gammel's absorbing analysis of Montgomery's erotic life, '... Confessions of Desire'; a comparison of the contemporaneous diaries of Montgomery and the grandmother of the author, Mary McDonald-Rissanen; and Janice Fiamengo's reading of Montgomery's depressive illness. Each of these pieces gives careful attention to the idiom of the times, to the precise edges of silence that women skirted when speaking of body and of mind, and, in Montgomery's journal, her struggle to 'craft a language' to express her mental suffering. In part 3, 'Writing for an Intimate Audience,' Elizabeth Epperly brings her formidable knowledge of Montgomery to her reading of the scrapbooks, which Epperly calls 'an intimate form of autobiography' that leaves clues, perhaps intentionally, for the for the mystery-loving reader. Joy Alexander's essay tracks the 'soundings' – dialogues, puns, voices of all sorts – that appear in Montgomery's life writings, and Paul Tiessen and Hildi Froese Tiessen analyse the correspondence Montgomery carried on with Ephraim Weber for forty years, looking to the performative and projective elements of her letters as well as to Montgomery's effect on this earnest intellectual man.

The fourth section of the volume, 'Where Life Writing Meets Fiction,' contains Cecily Devereux's detailed discussion of the reader's expectations (using her own experience as model) when Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston's edition of the journals was published, particularly regarding the writing of Anne, and how these expectations were frustrated and gratified. Melissa Prycer's essay on 'The Fiction and Reality of Consumption' in Montgomery's life is a subtly layered historical and literary treatment of Montgomery's shift from using consumption as a conventional literary device to presenting it realistically from her own experience in her novels. The final chapter will no doubt be the favourite of many readers. Here the editors of Montgomery's journals, Rubio and Waterston, appear in a 'dialogue-structure' presenting their new findings as they collaborate in the editing of the later journals (1929–39). This is not a 'dialogue' of casual conversation, but rather an effectively shaped, fully formed essay in two lively, personable, independent voices. Each adds to the other's perspective or informative assertion, with a modification ('But ... ' or 'Yet ...' begins many of the paragraphs of dialogue) as they tease out the connections between the journals, the life, and the fiction. Analysis, fact, and conjecture all weave this splendid discursive web.

As readers of Gammel's earlier work might expect, the introduction and her brief remarks on each chapter are sharply insightful, informing and guiding readers' attention and approach. The essays are varied...