Author Spotlight: Lucy Maud Montgomery

If you grew up watching the Kevin Sullivan Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Avonlea and dreamed of adventures on PEI with a certain spunky red-headed orphan as your sidekick, this post is for you. Even more so if you eagerly devoured the Anne series and then moved onto some of Lucy Maud Montgomery's other heroines like Emily, Pat, and the Story Girl. I have read a lot of LMM's books and my mother even spent one school year teaching me exclusively through an Anne of Green Gables curriculum (homeschooling perk, am I right?). It was where I first encountered an abundance of literary allusions that stick with me to this day.

In recent years, I have mainly settled for watching the Sullivan shows and the Avonlea spinoff (pining for it on dvd but Amazon has it listed for over $100 if I remember correctly).  It wasn't until I read From Little Houses to Little Women: Revisiting a Literary Childhood by Nancy McCabe that I started to consider what I truly loved about the books, whether their themes and messages stood the test of time, and (for the very first time) if I had ever acknowledged the difference between Anne Shirley and LMM.

In McCabe's book, she travels around the US and Canada to visit landmarks associated with the revered authors of her childhood: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Maud Hart Lovelace, Lucy Maud Montgomery, and Louisa May Alcott. She brings her daughter along and begins to reevaluate how the nostalgia she associates with certain books as she sees them filtered through her own experiences and knowledge as a professor as well as through the eyes of her daughter whom she adopted from China. I highly recommend this book-- I read it after I finished grad school and it was a welcome relief from the thousands of pages I was cramming on a weekly basis. That said, it may spoil some of the nostalgia you hold for childhood books.

For my birthday this year, I requested two books: The Complete Journals of L. M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889-1900 and Pat of Silverbush and Mistress Pat (technically two books but published in one book in the version I requested). I usually only read the texts that I teach during the school year but I managed to carve out time to devour both books within a 2 week period. What struck me most about the journals was LMM's deep love of nature, reading, writing poetry, and her friends. She is at times rapturous much like Anne and cuttingly sarcastic and satirical. She experiences spiritual doubts and fears and real loss. After the unexpected death of Herman Leard (she was deeply in love with him but marriage was not an option due to family objections) and the death of her father, she writes:

        There is so much in the world for us all, if we only have the eyes to see it and the heart to love it and the hand to gather it to ourselves--so much in men and women, so much in art and literature, so much everywhere in even the narrowest, most circumscribed life--so much to enjoy and delight in and be thankful for.

McCabe's assessment of LMM's books-- that they "are about voice--telling stories, talking too much, speaking with one's own voice, loss of voice, helping others find their voices"-- echoes one of the chief themes in LMM's journals (184). She finds her voice in a variety of ways--through her friends and family, her opinions on everything from religion to politics to literature, through her ambition and determination, and through her own writing. And it is through her voice that she brought to life some of the most memorable female characters: Anne, sharp tongued Rachel Lynde, dreamy Pat, the mysterious and frightening Peg Bowen. Characters who anchor deep in the imagination and survive throughout time.

I will acknowledge that I am obviously partial to her books even in my thirties. I want to re-read the Anne series once I find all of my copies. Pat hasn't aged too poorly, although some criticism could be leveled at her lack of a desire for any kind of career outside of being a family caretaker--I say some criticism, only in that I have read comments on to that effect. Re-reading the Pat books during a"stay-at-home" order and global pandemic made me want to settle in and pursue the homey activities described on the page. I re-read The Golden Road last night--it's the sequel to The Story Girl, hence the secondary title of my blog. I had forgotten that it is told from the perspective of Beverly King (a boy) and there are times it veers deeply into the poetic and sentimental but overall it enthralled me enough to read it in under two hours easily.

In closing, I can only say that I love these books deeply, perhaps more so now that I'm an adult and I've read LMM's journals. The authorial mystique has vanished and in its place stands Maud herself, vivacious and daring, sympathetic and loving, proclaiming in her own voice that this (as Dickinson says) is her letter to the world.

First photo found on Wikipedia. Second photo, my own.