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HUMANITIES 243 L.M. Montgomery. At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales. Edited by Rea Wilmshurst McClelland and Stewart. xvii, 248. $24.99 cloth Just how many short stories did Lucy Maud Montgomery write? Two collections of short stories appeared in Montgomery's lifetime and two others in the 1970s. Six new volumes have appeared in the last six years. By anyone's count, Montgomery was prolific, turning out as many as forty-four short stories in one year (1905) before she became a full-time novelist, with twenty novels eventually to her credit. Even when she turned to novel writing and had less time for stories, she sometimes published chapters of novels in serial form or, as in the case with that late edition to the Anne series, Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), took older short stories and carefully stitched them together as a novel. It could be argued that several of her novels are series of short stories artfully joined. At the Altar is the sixth volume of short stories collected and arranged by Rea Wilmshurst to appear since 1988. Wilmshurst says she hopes to publish two or three more collections, and even at that she will be reproducing far less than half of the stories Montgomery published in her lifetime. Wilmshurst 'discovered' the stories when she visited the L.M. Montgomery Birthplace in New London, Prince Edward Island, in the 1970s. Maud Montgomery, always a faithful chronicler and recordkeeper , pasted into scrapbooks copies of her printed poems and short stories. Thinking she had read everything Montgomery had published, Wilmshurst was amazed to find in the scrapbooks hundreds of stories she had never seen. Of the 506 recorded in one of Montgomery's ledgers, Wilmshurst has now located - through the scrapbooks themselves or through painstaking searches through archives - some 400. From these she has selected and grouped stories by theme, publishing Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans (1988), Along the Shore: Tales by the Sea (1989), Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side (1990), After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed (1991), and Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement (1993). In the latest collection, all eighteen stories offer happy resolutions to variously complicated courtships. Often it is good luck that brings couples together or back together; frequently a jealous or tyrannical guardian attempts to obstruct a marriage. Six of the heroines would have been called at the time 'old maids' and an even higher number of heroes are middle-aged. Some of the stories, for example 'Jessamine,' are so predictable and undeveloped that you wonder how Montgomery would feel about having them unearthed. Others have a few of the characteristic phrases or insights that have kept Montgomery a best-selling author for almost ninety years. General readers who love the optimism in Montgomery's stories will enjoy this pleasant blend of familiar devices and character types. The put- 244 LETTERS IN CANADA 1994 upon female, ranging from eighteen to forty years, always has her moment of independence or triumph, and a surprising number of independent women find a congenial partner who is a delightful addition to, but perhaps not a necessity in, her life. Montgomery was writing for the popular periodical market, for Redbook, Chatelaine, and Maclean's, as well as for such publications as Household Dealer and American Young People. As in the earlier five volumes Rea Wilmshurst has edited, At the Altar has stories, in no apparent order, that appeared as early as 1899 and as late as 1935. Much can be learned about audience expectations and Montgomery's own changes by comparing the stories within one volume and from volume to volume. Readers thoroughly familiar with Montgomery's writing may even be able to guess the approximate time of publication of a short story because of an echo from a novel. Montgomery sometimes published short stories while she was writing a novel and reproduced in the novel (sometimes) verbatim descriptions, character sketches, or situations from the short story. From earlier collections of short stories we now know, for example, that lovable old Captain Jim from Anne's House ofDreams (1917) first appeared as Uncle Jesse in a short story entitled 'The Life-Book of Uncle...

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