A Name for Herself Read online

  A Name for Herself

  SELECTED WRITINGS, 1891–1917

  Years before she published her internationally celebrated first novel, Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942) started contributing short works to periodicals across North America. While these works consisted primarily of poems and short stories, she also experimented with a wider range of forms, particularly during the early years of her career, at which point she tested out several authorial identities before settling on the professional moniker “L.M. Montgomery.”

  A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917 is the first in a series of volumes collecting Montgomery’s extensive contributions to periodicals. Leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre discusses these so-called miscellaneous pieces in relation to the works of English-speaking women writers who preceded her and the strategies they used to succeed, including the decision to publish under gender-neutral signatures. Among the highlights of the volume are Montgomery’s contributions to student periodicals, a weekly newspaper column entitled “Around the Table,” a long-lost story narrated first by a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and then by the man she wishes she had married instead, and a new edition of her 1917 celebrity memoir, “The Alpine Path.” Drawing fascinating links to Montgomery’s life writing, career, and fiction, this volume will offer scholars and readers alike an intriguing new look at the work of Canada’s most enduringly popular author.

  (THE L.M. MONTGOMERY LIBRARY)

  BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, is director of L.M. Montgomery Online. His publications include an edition of Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, and the three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Reader, which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Literature from the Association of American Publishers. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.

  THE L.M. MONTGOMERY LIBRARY

  Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre

  A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917

  A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921

  L.M. MONTGOMERY

  A Name for Herself

  SELECTED WRITINGS, 1891–1917

  UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

  Toronto Buffalo London

  © University of Toronto Press 2018

  Toronto Buffalo London

  www.utorontopress.com

  Printed in Canada

  ISBN 978-1-4875-0403-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2308-4 (paper)

  Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper

  with vegetable-based inks.

  “L.M. Montgomery” is a trademark of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc.

  “Anne of Green Gables” and other indicia of “Anne” are trademarks of

  the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc.

  LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

  Montgomery, L.M. (Lucy Maud), 1874−1942

  [Works. Selections]

  A name for herself : selected writings, 1891−1917 / L.M. Montgomery;

  edited by Benjamin Lefebvre.

  (The L.M. Montgomery library; 1)

  Includes bibliographical references and index.

  ISBN 978-1-4875-0403-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2308-4 (paper)

  I. Lefebvre, Benjamin, 1977−, editor. II. Title.

  III. Series: L.M. Montgomery Library; 1

  PS8526.O55A6 2018 C813′.52 C2018-902580-8

  This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

  University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

  Contents

  List of Illustrations

  Acknowledgments

  A Note on the Author

  Abbreviations

  Preface

  A Note on the Text

  PART 1 EARLY AND STUDENT PUBLICATIONS

  The Wreck of the “Marco Polo”

  A Western Eden

  From Prince Albert to P.E. Island

  The Usual Way

  Extracts from the Diary of a Second Class Mouse

  High School Life in Saskatchewan

  Valedictory

  “Portia” – A Study

  “Which Has the Most Patience under the Ordinary Cares

  and Trials of Life – Man or Woman?”

  Crooked Answers

  The Bad Boy of Blanktown School

  James Henry, Truant

  A Girl’s Place at Dalhousie College

  To the Editor

  PART 2 MAUD MONTGOMERY, NEWSPAPER WOMAN

  A Half-Hour in an Old Cemetery

  Around the Table

  Half an Hour with Canadian Mothers

  Christmas Shopping in Halifax Stores

  Many Admiring Glances Bestowed upon Graduates

  Netted Doily

  Innocent Irreverence

  PART 3 THE UPWARD CLIMB TO HEIGHTS SUBLIME

  Two Sides of a Life Story

  The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career

  Afterword

  Notes

  Bibliography

  Index

  List of Illustrations

  FIGURES

  1 L.M. Montgomery in Everywoman’s World

  2 First prose publication, the Montreal Daily Witness

  3 The Halifax Daily Echo and the Morning Chronicle

  4 Visual heading for “Around the Table”

  5 Advertisement for “Around the Table”

  6 L.M. Montgomery’s netted doily

  7 L.M. Montgomery, ca. 1916

  8 “Two Sides of a Life Story,” by “J.C. Neville”

  9 Birthplace in Clifton (now New London)

  10 Aunt Mary Lawson

  11 Macneill Homestead in Cavendish

  12 Clifton Presbyterian Church

  13 L.M. Montgomery, age six

  14 Cavendish school

  15 The old orchard at Cavendish

  16 Macneill Homestead from a distance

  17 The White Lady

  18 Cape Leforce

  19 L.M. Montgomery, age ten

  20 L.M. Montgomery, age fourteen

  21 L.M. Montgomery, age sixteen

  22 L.M. Montgomery, age nineteen

  23 Lover’s Lane

  24 L.M. Montgomery in her thirties

  25 Campbell farm in Park Corner

  26 Chester Macdonald, age three years

  27 Stuart Macdonald, age eight months

  TABLES

  1 Work published as “Lucy Maud Montgomery,” 1890–1899

  2 Early work published as “L.M. Montgomery,” 1891–1897

  3 L.M. Montgomery’s pseudonyms, 1895–1906

  4 Poems in The New York Family Story Paper, 1898–1906

  5 Work published under multiple signatures

  Acknowledgments

  As with all large-scale editorial projects, this one has incurred many debts. I am grateful to Vanessa Brown, Cecily Devereux, Jason Dickson, Kelly Norah Drukker, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Melanie J. Fishbane, Irene Gammel, Carole Gerson, Caroline E. Jones, Katja Lee, Jennifer H. Litster, Andrea McKenzie, Laura M. Robinson, Mary Henley Rubio, Kate Sutherland, Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, Emily Woster, and Lorraine York for their encouragement and conversation over several years of research. I am equally grateful to E. Holly Pike, who generously provided me with digital files containing the majority of Montgomery’s “Around the Table” columns from the pages of the Halifax Daily Echo. This volume builds on the pioneering research of the late Francis W.
P. Bolger and the late Rea Wilmshurst, which I also gratefully acknowledge.

  For research and editorial help, I am grateful to Donna J. Campbell, Mary Beth Cavert, Carolyn Strom Collins, Katharine MacDonald, Carrie Martens, Rachel McMillan, Melissa Myers, Tamara Shantz, Naava Smolash, Meg Taylor, and Janice Weaver. I am also grateful to colleagues at several institutions: Kathryn Harvey, Heather Callaghan, Ashley Shifflett McBrayne, and Darlene Wiltsie, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library; Simon Lloyd, University of Prince Edward Island Library; Kathleen Mackinnon and Paige Matthie, Confederation Centre Art Gallery; Karen Smith, Dalhousie University Library; the interlibrary loan staff at Wilfrid Laurier University Library; and the staff at Library and Archives Canada, where I did research on some of the items in this book in 2008, 2014, and 2015. I would also like to thank Mark Thompson, Frances Mundy, Ani Deyirmenjian, Sandra Friesen, Val Cooke, and their colleagues at University of Toronto Press for their expertise and sound advice at all stages of this book’s development and production, as well as two anonymous assessors who read this book in manuscript and provided generous and astute feedback. I gratefully acknowledge travel funding in the form of the Marie Tremaine Fellowship, awarded by the Bibliographical Society of Canada / La Société bibliographique du Canada in 2013. Once again, special thanks are to members of my family, particularly my mother, Claire Pelland Lefebvre, and my partner, Jacob Letkemann.

  Finally, I would like to acknowledge my debt to the late Christy Woster (1955–2016), to whose memory I dedicate this book. Christy was an indefatigable researcher whose generosity with her knowledge and her materials has enriched the study of Montgomery’s works immeasurably. She is missed by so many.

  B.L.

  A Note on the Author

  L.M. Montgomery is now widely recognized as a major twentieth-century author, one whose bestselling books remain hugely popular and influential all over the world more than three-quarters of a century after her death. Born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in 1874, into a family whose ancestors had immigrated to Canada from Scotland and England, she was raised in nearby Cavendish by her maternal grandparents following the death of her mother and spent a year during her adolescence with her father and his new family in Saskatchewan. Raised in a household that distrusted novels but prized poetry and oral storytelling, she began to write during childhood, although few examples of her juvenilia survive. She received a teaching certificate from Prince of Wales College (Charlottetown) and, after one year of teaching school, took undergraduate courses in English literature for a year at Dalhousie University (Halifax), but she did not have the financial resources to complete her degree. During this time, she began publishing essays, short fiction, and poems in North American periodicals. In 1898, after two more years of teaching school, she returned to Cavendish to take care of her widowed grandmother and to write full-time, soon earning more from her pen than she had teaching school. With the exception of a nine-month stint on the staff of the Halifax Daily Echo, where her duties included writing a weekly column entitled “Around the Table,” Montgomery remained in Cavendish until 1911, when the death of her grandmother freed her to marry a Presbyterian minister. After a honeymoon in England and Scotland, she and her husband moved to southern Ontario, where she divided her time between writing, motherhood, and the responsibilities that came with her position as a minister’s wife.

  Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), the benchmark against which her remaining body of work is measured, was followed by twenty-three additional books, including ten featuring Anne Shirley: Anne of Avonlea (1909), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), Rilla of Ingleside (1921), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), Anne of Ingleside (1939), and The Blythes Are Quoted, completed shortly before her death but not published in its entirety until 2009. During her distinguished career, she was made a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts, was named one of the twelve greatest women in Canada by the Toronto Star, and became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. When she died in 1942, apparently by her own hand, her obituary in the Globe and Mail declared that her body of work “showed no lessening of that freshness and simplicity of style that characterized Anne of Green Gables.” Since her death, several collections of her periodical pieces have been published, as have more than a dozen volumes of her journals, letters, essays, and scrapbooks. Ontario and Prince Edward Island are home to many tourist sites and archival collections devoted to her, and her books continue to be adapted for stage and screen.

  Abbreviations

  PUBLISHED WORK BY L.M. MONTGOMERY

  AA Anne of Avonlea

  AGG Anne of Green Gables

  AHD Anne’s House of Dreams

  AIn Anne of Ingleside

  AIs Anne of the Island

  AP The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career

  CJLMM, 1 The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900

  CJLMM, 2 The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911

  DCMF The Diary of Charles Macneill, Farmer, 1892–1896 (jointly with Charles Macneill)

  EC Emily Climbs

  ENM Emily of New Moon

  EQ Emily’s Quest

  GGL The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909

  GR The Golden Road

  JLH Jane of Lantern Hill

  LMMCJ, 1 L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917

  LMMCJ, 2 L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1918–1921

  LMMCJ, 3 L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1922–1925

  LMMCJ, 4 L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1926–1929

  MDMM My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery

  MP Mistress Pat: A Novel of Silver Bush

  RI Rilla of Ingleside

  RV Rainbow Valley

  SG The Story Girl

  SJLMM The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery,

  Volume 1: 1889–1910; Volume 2: 1910–1921; Volume 3: 1921–1929; Volume 4: 1929–1935; Volume 5: 1935–1942

  TW A Tangled Web

  WOP The Watchman and Other Poems

  SECONDARY SOURCES

  KJV The Bible: Authorized King James Version

  OED Oxford English Dictionary

  Preface

  IN MARCH 2018, HISTORICA CANADA RELEASED A Heritage Minute film on L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942), who, according to Adrienne Clarkson’s voiceover, “battled depression, rejection, and sexism, to become known around the world for Anne of Green Gables and nineteen other novels.”1 The fact that this first novel is the only one of Montgomery’s works mentioned in the film is not surprising, since it remains, more than a century after its publication in 1908, the standard against which all of her remaining work is measured. Still, while the continued popularity of this novel has led to the publication of numerous editions across the children’s, adult trade, and scholarly markets, the attention given to it and to her book-length fiction more broadly obscures the more than one thousand items that Montgomery published in periodicals over a period of half a century, from 1890 to her death in 1942: these include five hundred short stories, five hundred poems, and a range of texts that the compilers of Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Preliminary Bibliography (1986) refer to as “Miscellaneous Pieces.”2 And so, while the Heritage Minute rightly claims Montgomery as “a part of our heritage,” a significant proportion of her literary output remains largely unknown.

  The L.M. Montgomery Library is a set of volumes that collects this periodical work for Montgomery’s sizeable readership around the world. As a complement to her twenty-two booklength works of fiction,3 which have been translated into at least three dozen languages, her periodical work is important because of her unique position as an author whose writing is the subject of an ever-growing body of scholarship while st
ill being read by the general public more than seven decades after her death.4 More crucially still, this work offers us today the opportunity to see what editors of a wide range of periodicals from the late nineteenth to the mid-twentieth centuries believed would connect with large readerships, and it also gives us the chance to trace shifting attitudes about gender, race, class, childhood, marriage, and nationhood that circulated in the mainstream print media during a period of significant cultural and social change. As she started to make a living as a freelance writer, Montgomery taught herself to shape her work for the demands of periodical editors, many of whom prioritized sales potential over literary innovation, whether these periodicals targeted women, children, rural readers, faith-based readers, or the public at large. Moreover, this extensive training would give her the ability to write a first novel that would appeal to readers of all ages, genders, backgrounds, and locations and that remains today as popular as ever.

  Whereas my three-volume critical anthology, The L.M. Montgomery Reader (2013–2015), collected non-fiction texts by a slew of authors (many of them unidentified) and traced the evolution of Montgomery’s career and legacy beginning with the publication of Anne of Green Gables, this first volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, A Name for Herself, gathers a selection of materials that she published between 1891 and 1917, first of all, to demonstrate a facet of her development as an author, and second of all, to take a new look at her major retrospective account of that development.5 Although her career as a published author would solidify around the poem (starting in 1890), the short story (starting in 1895), and the novel (starting in 1908), supplemented by occasional essays and multichapter fiction serials, her earliest publications show a greater experimentation with form and genre: the playlet, the travel narrative, the animal story, the personal essay, the newspaper column, and even the advertisement. Moreover, while she began signing her work “L.M. Montgomery” as early as 1891, she also tested out a wide range of authorial identities in the early years of her career. So, rather than call this first book Not Short Stories and Not Poems, I have organized these materials around Montgomery’s creation of a name for herself as an author who earned a living selling work to mainstream periodicals across North America.