The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery (review)

"Intimate friend, obsessive lover, sufferer of depressions, control freak, and ageing woman." This is how the editor of this volume, Irene Gammel, describes the subject under scrutiny in these eleven essays devoted to the private writings of L.M. Montgomery. As the pessimistic tenor of Gammel's list suggests, the authors contributing to this volume have been deeply affected by their readings of Montgomery's journals, published in five volumes between 1985 and 2004, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, for these writings brought the darker side of the author—her obsessions, anxieties, and deep depressions—into plain view. However, as several of the essays make clear, the journals, diaries, and letters under discussion in The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery are, in Mary Rubio's words, "life writing of a guarded sort," much of it undertaken, like a good deal of life writing, with the possibility of some form of publicity hovering in the background.

Prefacing these essays is a never-before-published collaborative diary kept by the twenty-eight-year-old Montgomery and her close friend, schoolteacher Nora Lefurgey. It is a teasing diary, full of inside jokes and railleries, mainly about the two women's various crushes on local young men. At moments, in the collection, rather grand claims are made about the significance of this text, here published for the first time; editor Gammel calls it "the pièce de resistance of this book" and contributor Jennifer H. Litster compares its high-spirited exchanges to those of Shakespeare's Beatrice and Benedick. Both claims seem forced; scholars of Montgomery need not resort to such strained comparisons and rhetoric to signal the significance of such a document. As a piece of collaborative textual friendship/rivalry, the diary has its own claims to make upon the attention of scholars of women's textual, social, and cultural history. That it is a shared text is itself of interest in terms of the long history of women's collaborative authorship. More particularly, this diary offers us a glimpse of prevailing attitudes of the time. At one point, for instance, Montgomery notes that Nora has been "poking fun" at her for reading an "expurgated edition" of George Eliot's Adam Bede. Tongue planted firmly in cheek, Montgomery responds that "when one is pure-minded one should endeavour to remain so and not risk their soul reading such dreadful books as ADAM BEDE in the original!!!" Here was a woman destined to be a miserable wife of a small-town Presbyterian minister.

The journal does, indeed, show Montgomery and Lefurgey playing fast and loose with the pieties of their day, but also knowing, cannily, where to draw the line. There are occasional displays of wit that reach beyond simply personal giddiness; witness, for instance, Montgomery's comic resolution of her competition with Lefurgey for the affections of a local swain: "I am to take one end of his moustache, Nora the other, and tug hard. To the victor will belong the spoils." We are also afforded glimpses into the ethnically and religiously directed nature of the two young women's wit; when one heartthrob begins to look winsome, Montgomery observes, "it is enough to make one turn Mohammedan or Mormon." In the essay immediately following the diary, Jennifer Litster offers some helpful contextualizations of the document; she notes, for instance, that a yellow garter, one of the main props in a particular piece of tomfoolery described in the diary, was a good luck symbol that "worn constantly from Easter Monday would ensure marriage within the year." Such information reinforces Litster's reading of the diary as the two young women writing "themselves into a position of power" through sexuality and marriage at a time when women of their class were rendered signally powerless by and dependent on marriage.

One of the strengths of this volume is its attention to a wide range of writings that can be considered under the banner of "life...