The L.M. Montgomery Reader. Volume 1: A Life in Print ed. by Benjamin Lefebvre (review)

As Benjamin Lefebvre points out in his excellent introduction to The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume 1: A Life in Print, shifts in academic culture have provided fresh opportunities to scrutinize L.M. Montgomery’s place in literary history. Montgomery studies either vindicate her appeal or use her works as invaluable cultural documents; the Reader attempts both. The critical apparatus of the book is exemplary, its partisanship is evident, and its value to Canadian studies is undeniable. What is less apparent is whether Montgomery’s work can sustain such intense scrutiny beyond its circle of enthusiasts except as a lens into Canadian cultural history.

This is the question Lefebvre aims to answer with the Reader, repudiating the prevailing notion that Montgomery, never a critical darling, was systematically disregarded in the last twenty years of her life, despite her productivity and commercial viability. The publication of the Journals in the mid-1980s revealed a woman completely at odds with her public persona; scholars returned to her fiction, discovering traces of the “introspective, critical, irritable and sometimes vindictive figure” in her work. Thus, so the story goes, the institutional success of Montgomery studies represents a latter-day triumph over long neglect. Lefebvre believes otherwise, and the Reader provides compelling support for his case: over ninety articles of varying length and discernment arranged chronologically from 1908 – the year of Anne’s publication – to the notices accompanying her death in 1942, concluding with a posthumous appraisal of the seminal work two years later, in 1944. Clearly, Montgomery has always attracted critical and scholarly consideration.

However, given that it was the revision of her public persona that stimulated the reconsideration of her writing, it is revealing that most early commenters overwrite her life onto her fiction. Montgomery is one of the band of “women writers … comparatively unknown beyond their own tea tables” who as a girl got “literary notions” that expressed themselves in verse that editors “called poetry.” Her “simple little tale(s),” “instinct with pure human passion and fine ideal,” whose details are elaborated “in a twilight walk,” reflect “her own fine, pure instincts.” Interviewers remark on the “almost childishly small” woman, on her “retiring manner and untouched simplicity” “entirely unspoiled by her unexpected stroke of fame and fortune.” As late as 1940, a notice of her address to a group in Aurora, Ontario, identifies her as “Mrs Ewan Macdonald.” Virtually every piece springboards from a biographical account. Partial responsibility for this overidentification lies with Montgomery, who ruthlessly managed her public character for more than three decades. Still, the cloying sweetness of most of the pieces included here – not excepting those by Montgomery herself – do little to dispel the unfortunate tendency among readers and scholars alike to judge her fiction, at least in part, in light of the character of the woman who wrote it. The specifics may have altered, but the framework has not.

Lefebvre’s archival research is thorough and often brilliant, making the Reader an invaluable trove not only for Montgomery scholars but also for those working with the reception history of Canadian writers, especially women before Laurence, Munro, and Atwood. For Montgomery completists, the Reader is irresistible. For those engaged in Montgomery studies or Canadian literature more generally, it is invaluable. As a documentary sample of one stratum of Canadian culture in the first part of the twentieth century, it has inherent though possibly not vital interest. Beyond these circles, there may be little call for it. But as Montgomery attracts new readers, and Montgomery scholarship widens, perhaps that is more than enough.