L. M. Montgomery's Complete Journals: The Ontario Years 1911–1917 ed. by Jen Rubio (review)

L. M. Montgomery's Complete Journals: The Ontario Years 1911–1917. Edited by Jen Rubio. Toronto: Rock's Mills, 2016.

Readers of the five volumes of L. M. Montgomery's Selected Journals have long been curious about what had been left out by joint editors Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Complying with Montgomery's wishes to publish her complete journals seemed out of the question in 1985. To claim, however, as the blurb on the back cover of this third volume of the Complete Journals does, that "The original publication of Montgomery's journals in 1987 contained only a selection of her entries" is misleading. The first two installments of The Complete Journals published by Oxford University Press, The PEI Years, 1889–1900 (2012), and The PEI Years, 1901–1911 (2013), reveal, as does this volume, the restrictions imposed on the editors of The Selected Journals.

According to L. M. Montgomery Online, the editors of The Selected Journals "were directed to abridge Montgomery's journal text by fifty percent." The back cover of volume 1 of The Complete Journals asserts that "To save space and present an easily digestible, fast-moving narrative, passages describing Lucy Maud Montgomery's darker, more reflective moods and her religious and philosophical speculations were cut." This statement, however, is misleading since many of Montgomery's "reflective moods" and her "religious and philosophical speculations" were well represented in those volumes. Indeed, scholars perusing The Selected Journals discerned Montgomery's habit of copying verbatim passages from her journals into her correspondence with her pen pals Ephraim Weber and G. B. MacMillan. Furthermore, many of these passages addressed her religious beliefs and discussed philosophical matters. This is particularly true of her correspondence with Weber. The Selected Journals did fulfill Oxford University Press's stipulation that the editors cut the material by fifty percent, but Rubio and Waterston struggled to decide what to include and what to exclude, trying hard to make the half representative of the whole.

Just what material was edited out? Rubio and Waterston faithfully indicated where ellipses in the text occurred (…), but one discovers how many complete journal entries were cut by consulting the list entitled Omissions (1: 416; 2: 435). For example, in volume 1 of The Selected Journals 1889 is complete; 1890 is missing eleven entries, and 1891 is missing eighteen entries, plus two ellipses in included entries; 1894, however, is missing seventy-seven complete entries.

How do the old and the new compare? The passages omitted from volume 2 of The Selected Journals are really our main concern here. Did Montgomery have more to say about the 1917 Halifax explosion than the reaction that appeared in this volume? Were there further references to the Lusitania disaster that the editors omitted? Were extensive passages about Montgomery's religious faith and doubt unavailable to readers of The Selected Journals? In The Ontario Years one discovers that Rubio and Waterston had indeed included Montgomery's complete accounts of and reactions to both the Halifax explosion and the sinking of the Lusitania. The Selected Journals will continue to satisfy many readers. They are still widely advertised on the Web; Indigo Chapters carries all five volumes online ($25.00 Canadian each). I discovered this when someone asked me whether his copy of The Selected Journals would now become obsolete.

Access to the Complete Journals does, however, offer readers many benefits. Situating notes at the bottom of each page, an editorial practice that Rubio and Waterston adopted in the first two volumes published by Oxford University Press, is an improvement over The Selected Journals, in which they appeared as paragraphs of runon notes organized by year and date. Jen Rubio, the editor of L. M. Montgomery's Complete Journals: The Ontario Years 1911–1917, leaves no stone unturned in identifying places, people, world events, and, most especially in this volume, the battles of the Great War, the variety of recruiting efforts, and aspects of daily life on the home front during those turbulent years. Her comprehensive identifying and defining of items...