The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery’s Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly (review)

202 LEITERS IN CANADA 1992 published in Canadian Literature in 1986, could reinforce the status that Silence Made Visible appropriately claims for both Tay John and O'Hagan. (LESLIE MONKMAN) Elizabeth Rollins Epperly. The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L.M. Montgomery's Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance University of Toronto Press. 275. $35.00 If I were to describe this work in one word, it would be 'comprehensive.' This first book-length critical study ofL.M. Montgomery's works surveys, at length, Anne of Green Gables and the other seven Anne novels; Emily of New Moon and the other two Emily novels; and, less fully, the remaining nine novels written by Montgomery. Montgomery's short stories do not feature in this study, but are mentioned in some detail. There is no doubt that Epperly's work will be valued as a reference for Montgomery scholars and teachers of Canadian literature and children's literature. It could certainly be used by scholars and teachers of women's writing: Epperly does not adopt an overtly feminist stance but often incorporates feminist readings or alludes to feminist critiques. Epperly's main critical approach is a formal and structural close reading of the fiction. What it gives her readers is a sense of the novels' subjects, plots, narrative strategies, and interconnections and a good idea of the scope of literary criticism on Montgomery, which Epperly knows thoroughly and incorporates. In her discussion of the Anne books, Epperly looks closely at the interplay of character and narrator and Montgomery's construction of character and setting ('nature'), while the Emily section - focusing on Montgomery's serial kzmstlerroman - tracks the development of Emily's and Montgomery 's voice as a woman writer. Epperly has clearly chosen not to take a biographical approach to Montgomery's writings (although she frequently weaves Montgomeryfs journals into her readings). She is more interested in situating Montgomery 's texts within the literary context of Montgomery's own reading, indicated by the allusions she makes to Romantic and Victorian literature within her fiction. Epperly's analysis of Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily's Quest makes illuminating intertextual connections with three core books for Montgomery: Charlotte Bronte's Jane Eyre, Elizabeth Barrett Browning's Aurora Leigh, and (most surprisingly) Olive Schreiner's The Story of an African Farm. Generally missing from Epperly's analysis, and missed, by this reader, is the development of a historical and sociocultural context for Montgomery's work. Epperly does analyse three of the Anne books - Anne's House of Dreams (1917)" Rainbow Valley (1919), and Rilla of Ingleside (1920) - within the context of the First World War, suggesting that Anne's House of Dreams, though set twenty years earlier, is Montgomery's direct response to the war, ~a passionate celebration of HUMANITIES 203 home and love,' in which home symbolizes hope and renewal in the face of 'the ravages of war.' In Rilla of Ingleside, Epperly posits, Montgomery constructs a female war heroine on the home front (not without humour, since her main character begins the novel as a self-centred teenager) in what Epperly terms as 'an authentic wa! novel, Canada's only contemporary fictionalized woman's account of the First World War.' I found myself wishing for more of this kind of context in Epperly's handling of the earlier 'Anne books, in which fasdnating issues are raised and then left unexplored - issues such as the relationship of Montgomery's construction of nature to a domesticated culture and the reception of romance by women readers of Montgomery's time (and in the present). Nor does she place Montgomery's writing in relation to that of other women writers of popular girls' romance of her period. The framework that Epperly does choose for her analysis, the relationship of Montgomery's writings to romance, can lead to frustration for the reader, partly because of Epperly's concentration on the Montgomery texts in isolation. Epperly elaborates in some detail how Montgomery both recreates and undermines popular romance in her fiction, yet the analysis itself is undermined by a lack of definition of the popular girls' romance or formula romance of Montgomery's time and its relationship...