Roads to Yesterday: New Readings of L. M. Montgomery

The Annotated Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery, in addition to providing an excellent text, bears a striking resemblance to Montgomery's own scrapbooks, so carefully assembled, and brim-full of marginalia, photographs, and interesting tidbits about the material and popular culture of her day. It is the touchstone work among five recent studies of Canadian children's literature and its cultural contexts. The Annotated Anne, Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L. M. Montgomery, Kindling Spirit: L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables, Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery, and Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture: Essays on Childhood address key issues: links between Anne's and Montgomery's social and cultural milieus; how decisions by and for her fictional characters are affected by a sense of community expectations; and the paradoxes, ironies, and subversive tactics Montgomery employs in mapping the construction of selfhood in her life-writing and fiction.

Many of these issues are contextualized historically in essays treating the rights of the child in eastern Canada, collected in Hilary Thompson's Children's Voices in Atlantic Literature and Culture. The "real" experiences of children encountered in these essays enable readers to access new layers of meaning in Montgomery's fiction. Philip Girard's "Children, Church, Migration and Money: Three Tales of Child Custody in Nova Scotia," for example, uses legal documents to investigate how orphans were treated at different periods, while Sharon Myers's "Revenge and Revolt: the Boys' Industrial Home of East Saint John in the Inter-War Period" documents the successful rebellion of inmates at an industrial school in Saint John, New Brunswick, who took matters into their own hands rather than passively suffering the negligence of the supervisor and the tyranny of a few older boys. Myers's findings endorse the view that often children are not "passive, non-politicized victims," but "active agents and instigators, capable of managing and manipulating their history" (111).

The literary essays in this collection treat regional differences in the portrayal of childhood. John Stockdale in "The Suitable Child: Norman Duncan's Literary Children" describes what it meant to be a suitable child in a Newfoundland fishing community, and Muriel Whitaker probes the tragic consequences for the child whose father is missing in maritime novels by Montgomery, Hugh MacLennan, and Kevin Major. Finally, David Creelman argues that MacLennan's Barometer Rising (1941) makes a persuasive transition from its depiction of regional uncertainty to its portrayal of national confidence" (70).

The sense of place and the feeling for community so prominent in Atlantic literature as explored in Thompson's collection appear also in the materials assembled in the Annotated Anne and the studies of the life and writing of Montgomery to be considered here. These examinations of Montgomery and her world offer divergent opinions on both the Christian religion and the church as an institution. Patricia Santelmann in Harvesting Thistles observes that Anne "makes distinctions between faith and façade, between 'saying prayers' and praying'" (66). But Montgomery's own faith, as well as her doubts about her beliefs, need fuller explanation than these studies give. Gavin White's fragmented and somewhat disorganized musings in "The Religious Thought of L. M. Montgomery" (Harvesting Thistles) leave too much for the reader to surmise. In discussing predestination, White acknowledges in an aside that Montgomery was reading Bliss Carman by...