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

Readers familiar with L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (1999), a collection of essays edited by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, will find the latest collection emanating from a symposium at the University of Prince Edward Island to be familiar in its genesis, format, and ambitions. Just as Gammel and Epperly claimed that they were producing "the first systematic effort to investigate the question of the Canadianness of Montgomery's writing" (5), Gammel asserts in The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery that "[t]he essays collected in the present volume undertake a systematic examination of Montgomery's shaping of her life story by delving into not only her published and unpublished journals, letters, and scrapbooks, but also her photographic self-portraits and fiction" (4). Like the earlier pronouncement, this claim is somewhat overstated. As Gammel herself admits, she has arranged the essays to move from discussions of the young Montgomery to those focusing on her middle age, but they do not adhere to a strict chronology and, more significantly, they do not cover every important phase of Montgomery's life. The "systematic examination," then, amounts to little more than this vaguely chronological arrangement and a grouping of the essays into four sections, each of which contains three essays loosely connected by a theme or topic. As with the earlier volume, the quality of the individual essays, not the book's claim to systematic analysis, ultimately determines its value to scholars and fans of Montgomery's writing. Fortunately, most of the essays share the admirably tight structure of those in the previous volume: they contain a clearly-stated thesis and a conclusion summarizing the arguments and their implications.

What most differentiates this collection from the earlier one is an emphatic theoretical bent. In her introduction, Gammel notes that the essays both "draw upon recent theoretical approaches" and "contribute to theories of life writing" (4). If there is something overly self-conscious in the repetitions throughout this volume about the value of "life writing," it stems from traditional assumptions about the province of art and literature. Gammel thus points out that "[w]omen have traditionally written in the personal forms of letters and diaries, but only recently has this writing been accepted as writing" (4). She argues for the value of studying such writing, noting that, in its various forms, Montgomery's life writing is connected to role-playing and theater. She argues, that is, that Montgomery consciously staged an identity that she wanted readers to accept after her death. Edited with an eye to posthumous publication, Montgomery's journals, in particular, perform a complex task of constructing an identity with both private and public functions. Privately, journal writing was therapeutic, providing the companionship that the lonely Montgomery needed, a sympathetic ear into which she could pour her troubles, observations, and hopes. Gammel claims that Montgomery's journals and other expressive enterprises, ranging from letters to scrapbooks to photographs, enabled her to "achieve a sense of agency for herself" (5). As public documents, texts intended for more than their author's eyes, Montgomery's life writing relied on this achieved sense of agency to project an image of herself as—this point is conveyed by both later essays and the collection as a whole—the suffering but triumphant artist. This image is, of course, as much fictional as it is factual. Because it was created for a public viewing, the journals omit many of the intimate details that might appear in writing intended only for the author's eyes. Adding more complexity is that fact that, even though Montgomery's life writing dramatizes the liberated artist who overcame social and familial limitations, it also, as Gammel notes, "reflects her profound entrapment in social conventions" (5). Liberating and confining to its author, Montgomery's life writing reveals the woman behind the persona only to those scholars willing to explore the gaps and omissions, and to test the staged identity against sometimes little-known facts of Montgomery's life. The...