The Anne-Girl and Her Critics

As Mavis Reimer notes in her introduction to Such a Simple Little Tale, the concept of collecting a series of essays on L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables arose when the publications committee of the Children's Literature Association realized that over a period of years the editors of prominent children's literature publications had published more articles about Anne than about any other single book. Of the thirteen essays included in this collection, eight originally appeared in Children's Literature Association publications—five in the Quarterly, two in the published proceedings of conferences, and one in the first volume of the Touchstones series edited by Perry Nodelman. The remaining five essays, drawn from Canadian Children's Literature, Studies in Canadian Literature, English Studies in Canada, and the Journal of American Culture, place Montgomery's first novel in her Anne series in diverse and provocative contexts. In all, the collection is a welcome development in Montgomery studies. In conjunction with Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston's publication of the third volume of Montgomery's journals, The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery (Oxford University Press, 1992), the essays that appear in Such a Simple Little Tale call attention to Montgomery's artistic merit and affirm her important position within the children's literature canon.

Reimer has organized the collection chronologically, beginning with Muriel A. Whitaker's "'Queer Children': L. M. Montgomery's Heroines" (1975) and leading to the final essay, Temma F. Berg's "Anne of Green Gables: A Girl's Reading" (1988). Many of the essays appeared in or after 1985, products of the critical and popular attention generated by the publication of the first volume of Montgomery's journals and Kevin Sullivan's Canadian Broadcasting Company production of Anne of Green Gables (televised in America on Wonderworks for the Public Broadcasting System) the same year.

The chronological organization indicates the trends in critical approaches. In the essays provided here, individual authors move from the formalist strategies of Nodelman or Marilyn Solt to the feminist-informed approaches of Nancy Huse or Eva Kornfeld and Susan Jackson—demonstrating the broader impact of feminist criticism on children's literature. Berg draws on Lacan, but, as Reimer notes, "much more work could be done in reading Anne by the light of recent theories of culture, language, and subjectivity" (188). Although Reimer identifies many scholars' seeming unfamiliarity with and infrequent references to other Montgomery criticism, several of the authors included in this volume do incorporate and build on the work of earlier commentators. Berg's essay in particular neatly rounds out the collection with its references to the work of several of the preceding authors, among them Janet Weiss-Townsend, Susan Drain, and Carol Gay, whose essays originally appeared in the special Montgomery issue of the Children's Literature Association Quarterly in 1986.

The chronological approach also has disadvantages. It entails movement between essays in which Montgomery's work is considered in strikingly different contexts and between essays in which Montgomery is the primary focus and those in which her work is only marginally discussed. Particularly rough transitions occur between Nodelman's "Progressive Utopias," in which he constructs an archetypal girls' story, and Catherine Ross's "Ghost of the Old-Time Heroine," in which she analyzes the modes of romance and realism as they are utilized by several Canadian writers, including Margaret Atwood, Alice Munro, Sara Jeanette Duncan, and Margaret Laurence, as well as Montgomery. Nodelman treats Anne of Green Gables as children's literature; Ross places Montgomery's novel squarely within a distinctly adult tradition in Canadian literature. A different kind of disjunction occurs between Huse's excellent "Journeys of the Mother in the World of Green Gables" and Kornfeld and Jackson's "Female Bildungsroman in Nineteenth-Century America." Although neither essay focuses exclusively on Anne, Montgomery's work is central to Huse's comparison of the mother experiences of three important female characters in...