Basements and Attics, Closets and Cyberspace: Explorations in Canadian Women’s Archives

Archival Adventures with L. M. Montgomery; or, “As Long as the Leaves Hold Together”

Archival Adventures with L. M. Montgomery; or, “As Long as the Leaves Hold Together” Vanessa Brown and Benjamin Lefebvre In her introduction to the collection of essays Working in Women’s Archives (2001), Helen M. Buss considers how each contributor to the volume has been working at “the tentative beginnings of what we now see as the fortuitous coming together of feminist theory, the breaking of traditional limitations set by the idea of a literary ‘canon’ of great writers and the increased use of archives to rescue a female tradition in writing” (1). In the case of L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942), the trajectory of her critical reputation in many ways mimics the dominant pattern tracked by the contributors to this current volume: she has long been (and in many ways remains) marginalized by the expanded canon of Canadian literature as a result of her gender, popular appeal, and misrepresentation, generalization, and devaluation as a children’s writer. That said, she remains a unique case study as a result of the fact that all her books—including her most popular , Anne of Green Gables (1908) and Emily of New Moon (1923), and their sequels—remain in print in the twenty-first century; in fact, most of them have never been out of print.1 2 3 3 2 3 4 V a n e s s a B r o W n a n d B e n J a M i n L e F e B V r e In addition to her continued popularity, the academic field of L. M. Montgomery Studies was significantly stimulated by the simultaneous appearance in late 1985 of the first volume of The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, published by Oxford University Press, and Kevin Sullivan’s adaptation of Anne of Green Gables as a television miniseries. Although the Sullivan production and its sequels renewed Montgomery’s popularity by introducing her and her characters to the mass medium of television, the publication of the journals by an established university press had an unprecedented effect on Montgomery’s status within and beyond the academy. As Cecily Devereux notes in her review of the fourth volume, published in 1998, [t]hese journals, the handwritten originals of which are held at the McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph, are extraordinary documents, not only in terms of the information they provide about living, writing, and being a woman in English Canada in the first half of the twentieth century , but also because they have radically complicated our understanding of Montgomery. (“The Continuing Story” 180) Although the continued availability of primary Montgomery texts makes her an anomaly in relation to the recovery of women’s writing in Canada, what has not been adequately documented is the central role that the archive has played in the recuperation of Montgomery as a subject worthy of study. The detailed work of researchers who have combed the Montgomery archives for crucial new information about the author and her work, and the publication of a number of posthumous Montgomery texts since 1960—including diaries, letters, photographs, scrapbooks, periodical pieces, and rediscovered typescripts, in addition to the five-volume Selected Journals—has led to a series of reconsiderations about her primary work and its significance.2 Moreover, the “rescue” that Buss mentions above has, at times, been literal: as Mollie Gillen explains in her account of tracking down the nephew of one of Montgomery’s correspondents just as he had decided to burn forty years of her letters, “I was just in time” (“The Rescue of the Montgomery–MacMillan Letters” 484).3 In what follows, two researchers with vastly different professional backgrounds discuss their respective approaches to and discoveries in the L. M. Montgomery archives, each drawn, personally and professionally, to the puzzle about the end of Montgomery’s life in 1942. Vanessa Brown is an antiquarian book cataloguer in London, Ontario, who was a prize winner in the Bibliographical Society of Canada’s 2009 National Book Collecting Contest for her collection of rare editions and ephemera related to Montgomery . Benjamin Lefebvre, an academic with a background in Canadian literature and cultural studies, edited Montgomery’s rediscovered final a r c h i V a L a d V e n t u r e s W i t h L . M . M o n t g o M e r Y 2 3 5 book, The Blythes Are Quoted (2009...