A Name for Herself Page 2
Once again, Montgomery’s scrapbooks have been enormously invaluable to my research, in that they offer a comprehensive – although not quite complete – record of her periodical work. In a set of scrapbooks housed at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown and displayed during the summer months at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Birthplace in New London,6 Montgomery placed and arranged clippings of most of her periodical publications as well as miscellaneous clippings about her career, frequently with annotations and corrections in ink. In Scrapbook 7, which covers the years 1890 to 1898, Montgomery included most of her earliest publications, including many of the pieces in this volume as well as her first published poems and short stories. In Scrapbook 3, which includes clippings from items published between 1901 and 1904, Montgomery arranged all but one instalment of her newspaper column, “Around the Table” (included in full in this volume), as a continuous text, omitting dates of individual columns and obscuring the point at which some instalments end and others begin. These twelve scrapbooks are joined by a five-hundredpage scrapbook of review clippings for most of her books and by several personal scrapbooks that she kept from late adolescence onward.7 But while Montgomery’s scrapbooks have been a major repository of her published work, she evidently did not see the value of hanging on to manuscripts or typescripts of her periodical pieces at any point in her career as she did with those of most of her book-length works.8
Part 1, “Early and Student Publications,” consists of items that originally appeared between 1891 and 1899, including her first prose publications and several items published during her student days at Prince of Wales College and Dalhousie University. These pieces can be claimed as juvenilia only with some difficulty – if we follow Neville Braybrooke’s cut-off age of sixteen in his volume Seeds in the Wind: Juvenilia from W.B. Yeats to Ted Hughes (1989), only her poem “On Cape Le Force,” published in late November 1890, would make the cut by a matter of days9 – but they still serve a concrete function when it comes to understanding Montgomery’s development as an author. As Gillian Beer notes in her introduction to The Juvenilia of Jane Austen and Charlotte Brontë (1986), such texts, although “crude and sometimes childish,”
serve to demonstrate their authors’ originality and freedom of spirit, their delight in the very process of creation, their changing attitudes towards character and style. The youthful work of [Austen and Brontë], taken as a whole, can in fact be seen to reveal a certain winnowing process: some experiments are tried and modified or abandoned, others are pursued and developed, to recur in their later novels. Over time we can see decisions, whether conscious or otherwise, taking form that will lead with astonishing steadiness from the pure fun of their first outpourings towards their artistically and morally mature work. Both sets of juvenilia provide us with an extraordinary opportunity to watch the growth and coalescence of the creative consciousness.10
Granted, in the case of the work collected here, a certain amount of “winnowing” has already occurred, given that these are hardly Montgomery’s earliest attempts at writing and given that they were published (which is not necessarily to say they were professionally edited prior to publication). Still, the level of experimentation here – particularly with form – informs our understanding of her books, particularly her final book, The Blythes Are Quoted (2009), which likewise experiments with form by marrying prose, poetry, and dialogue.
Part 2, “Maud Montgomery, Newspaper Woman,” collects for the first time the complete run of Montgomery’s newspaper column, “Around the Table,” which she published in the Halifax Daily Echo under the signature “Cynthia” over a nine-month period between September 1901 and May 1902, along with several rediscovered non-fiction pieces from that period. As Montgomery noted in her journals (excerpts of which appear in “The Alpine Path”), when she was hired as “proof-reader and general handyman” at the Echo in September 1901,11 she soon discovered that her weekly salary of five dollars covered only her basic living expenses. To supplement this income, Carole Gerson explains, Montgomery “returned to the practice of her school-teaching years, doing her own writing early in the mornings and in the limited spare minutes squeezed between other tasks. Not only did she thrive … but she also gained practice in writing under pressure, a skill that would serve her well after she married.”12 Given that she had been hired as a proofreader, it is unclear how her weekly column came about or whether the responsibility of writing it allowed for a supplement to that weekly salary. Having published the first instalment under the title “Over the Tea-Cups” on 28 September 1901 – a week after the appearance of the first instalment of Laurie Lansfeldt’s serial “Her Bid for Love,” whose first chapter is also entitled “Over the Tea-Cups” – she would go on to write thirty-four additional instalments under the header “Around the Table.” Although the appearance of that column for the entire duration of Montgomery’s time at the Halifax Daily Echo is proof enough of its success with readers, I have not been able to find any mention of it in the paper outside the column itself. In other words, I cannot say whether the column was unambiguously presented to readers as fiction, especially given that the characters in the column occasionally break the fourth wall, so to speak, and draw attention to their awareness that Cynthia is writing about their lives in a public forum.13 And although the newspaper did not include a masthead and most of its contributions were unsigned, when Montgomery published the poem “Harbor Sunset” in Ainslee’s Magazine in January 1902, the Echo republished the poem – under the title “Sunset on Halifax Harbor” – and claimed its author, L.M. Montgomery, as “one of the staff of this paper.”14
“Around the Table” is a bit of an anomaly, since it is not journalism per se (in the sense that “Cynthia” rarely reports on local or world events) and does not appear as part of a separate “women’s page” common to so many newspapers. In a monograph focusing on the work of Irish Canadian journalist Kathleen “Kit” Coleman (1856–1915), whose work included overseeing the “Woman’s Kingdom” page of the Saturday edition of Toronto’s Daily Mail, Barbara M. Freeman notes that, appearing by the last decade of the nineteenth century, “women’s pages” in newspapers “were not invented to improve the status of women, but to draw advertisers and readers. Despite the advances of the time, women were still seen as being primarily concerned with hearth and home and newspaper editors hired female journalists, who were a decided minority in their field, to write ‘light’ articles on domestic issues, fashion notes and household items.” Promoting a dominant ideology in the nineteenth century that “women’s most crucial role was mothering the nation,” many newspaper editors “refused to believe that their female audiences were interested in weightier matters and discouraged coverage of political and social issues, unless they had a bearing on women’s domestic roles.”15 Montgomery escaped these constraints to an extent simply due to the fact that the Halifax Daily Echo, which printed eight to twelve pages daily except for Sundays, did not have a “women’s page.” And while much of the “action” of the “Around the Table” columns takes place within the home, it is only occasionally concerned with domestic issues of any kind, focusing instead on the idiosyncrasies of the characters who live in the home.
Part 3, “The Upward Climb to Heights Sublime,” charts Montgomery’s “arrival” as bestselling author L.M. Montgomery. It consists of the undated short piece “Two Sides of a Life Story,” published under the signature “J.C. Neville,” and a new edition of her 25,000-word celebrity memoir, “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career,” which appeared in six instalments in the Toronto magazine Everywoman’s World between June and November 1917. First appearing in book form in 1974, more than a decade prior to the publication of the first volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, this memoir has since been taken up either as a piece of life writing that contrasts sharply with the text and tone of Montgomery’s journals or as her most sustained articulation in print of her personal brand.
This new edition of “The
Alpine Path” returns to the original magazine text and restores the twenty photographs and firstperson captions that Montgomery included in that text but were dropped from the 1974 book version; these “change how we read the text and how we understand its role in affirming and crafting Montgomery’s public image,” according to Katja Lee.16 Moreover, although William V. Thompson notes that some of the anecdotes in “The Alpine Path” are lifted out of a journal entry dated January 1910,17 my research has revealed that her borrowings are far more extensive than that, drawing from numerous entries dated 1892 to 1912.18 In my notes, I identify both overlaps with and departures from the journal text as a way to showcase the choices Montgomery made in transforming a private record into a highly controlled public one. In fact, although much has been made of Montgomery’s stated decision, in the winter of 1919, to transcribe the text of her journals into uniform ledgers for eventual posthumous publication,19 it seems more likely now, given how much of her journal text was woven into “The Alpine Path,” that she realized the value of her journals as a public record of her life earlier than she claimed.
Returning to this work now, after the publication so far of eleven volumes of Montgomery’s journals and three volumes of her letters,20 allows us to consider two versions of her evolution as an author: one that we can see through the pieces in this volume and a more intentional one she offered the readers of Everywoman’s World a century ago. In the items appearing in both this volume and in the collections of poems and stories that will follow, we can appreciate fully for the first time the wide reach of Montgomery’s pen as she engaged with audiences of readers – sometimes local, in the case of student publications and work published in newspapers of a single city, and sometimes national, in the case of items published in wide-reaching magazines. For while her work in many ways seems timeless now, in reality she was never writing in a vacuum. In a sense, and as the volumes in this series will show, Montgomery’s awareness of her audience shaped the narratives she wanted to tell.
BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE
NOTES
1 The Heritage Minute film, directed by Stephen Dunn, features Meghan Greeley as Montgomery and Nadia Tonen as Anne.
2 See Russell, Russell, and Wilmshurst, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 125–27.
3 Montgomery published twenty-four books over her career. Anne of Green Gables was followed by 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, in the UK and Australia as Anne of Windy Willows), and Anne of Ingleside (1939); The Blythes Are Quoted, which I edited, was published in its entirety in 2009. Montgomery also published The Story Girl (1911), followed by The Golden Road (1913); Emily of New Moon (1923), followed by Emily Climbs (1925) and Emily’s Quest (1927); Pat of Silver Bush (1933), followed by Mistress Pat: A Novel of Silver Bush (1935); and the standalone novels Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), The Blue Castle (1926), Magic for Marigold (1929), A Tangled Web (1931, in the UK as Aunt Becky Began It), and Jane of Lantern Hill (1937). She also published The Watchman and Other Poems (1916) and collaborated with Marian Keith and Mabel Burns McKinley on the volume of biographical essays Courageous Women (1934), but neither of these two books remained in print for long; her contributions to the latter volume appear in Volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader.
4 Previous posthumous collections of Montgomery’s short stories and poems, organized mostly by theme rather than chronology, include The Road to Yesterday (1974), a truncated version of The Blythes Are Quoted; The Doctor’s Sweetheart and Other Stories (1979), selected by Catherine McLay; The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery (1987), selected by John Ferns and Kevin McCabe; Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans (1988), Along the Shore: Tales by the Sea (1989), Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side (1990), After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed (1991), Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement (1993), At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales (1994), Across the Miles: Tales of Correspondence (1995), and Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories (1995), all edited by Rea Wilmshurst; and After Many Years (2017), edited by Carolyn Strom Collins and Christy Woster.
5 Although this volume consists mainly of non-fiction, it does not reproduce any of the more than two dozen essays by Montgomery that originally appeared between 1911 and 1939 and that were collected in Volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader.
6 Bound photocopies are available to researchers at the University of Prince Edward Island and University of Guelph libraries. These copies were numbered Scrapbooks 1 to 12 without respect to chronology.
7 The locations of Montgomery’s scrapbooks are listed in the bibliography. For more on Montgomery’s scrapbooks, see the work of Carolyn Strom Collins and Elizabeth Rollins Epperly.
8 The Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown holds partial or complete manuscripts for the following novels by Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables, The Golden Road, Anne of the Island (“Anne of Redmond”), Anne’s House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley, Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, The Blue Castle, Emily’s Quest, Magic for Marigold, A Tangled Web, Pat of Silver Bush, Mistress Pat (“The Girls of Silver Bush”), Anne of Windy Poplars, Jane of Lantern Hill, and Anne of Ingleside. The L.M. Montgomery Collection, part of Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph Library, holds the manuscript for Rilla of Ingleside, a transcript of which was prepared by Elizabeth Waterston and Kate Waterston and published as Readying Rilla (2016), as well as three typescripts for The Blythes Are Quoted, the last of which formed the basis of the published edition.
9 Braybrooke, Introduction, 14. It is also worth noting that only fifteen of the sixty authors whose early work is included in Braybrooke’s volume were women.
10 Beer, Introduction, 8–9. See also the chapters in Christine Alexander and Juliet McMaster’s collection of essays The Child Writer from Austen to Woolf (2005).
11 Montgomery, 13 November 1901, in CJLMM, 2: 22.
12 Gerson, “L.M. Montgomery,” 69.
13 This is not to say that no other item ever mentioned the “Around the Table” column. The only known copy of the Halifax Daily Echo is on a microfilm housed at Library and Archives Canada, so my search through the newspaper for additional mentions of the column was limited by time constraints during short trips in 2015 and 2016. Perhaps, if or when that newspaper is digitized and made text searchable, future researchers will be able to uncover additional materials pertaining to Montgomery.
14 Halifax Daily Echo, “The Beachcomber,” 4.
15 Freeman, Kit’s Kingdom, 2, 8. For comprehensive coverage of journalism by Canadian women between 1880 and 1945, see Lang, Women Who Made the News.
16 Lee, “Protecting Her Brand,” 195.
17 Thompson, “The Shadow on the House of Dreams,” 116.
18 While these borrowings from Montgomery’s journals are extensive, they do not mark the last time she mined her journals for her published non-fiction. Her commentary on the diary of her neighbour and distant relative Charles Macneill, recorded in her journal in 1925 along with a transcription of Macneill’s diary, formed the basis of her 1936 article “Come Back with Me to Prince Edward Island,” whereas her 1924 journal entry on her family trip to Mammoth Cave in Kentucky became a starting point for an article entitled “A Trip to Mammoth Cave,” whose publication details are not confirmed but whose manuscript is now housed at the University of Prince Edward Island Library. See Montgomery, 17 August 1924, in LMMCJ, 3: 274–80; Montgomery, 1 March 1925, in LMMCJ, 3: 326, 329–50; Montgomery, in DCMF, 83–104; Montgomery, 16 February 1936, in SJLMM, 5: 58; Montgomery, 9 April 1936, in SJLMM, 5: 60. For a recent study of Montgomery’s creative engagement with the Macneill diary, see Litster, “The Scotsman.”
19 See Brown and Lefebvre, “Archival Adventures with L.M. Montgomery,” 375–76, 381–83.
20 The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, appeared in five volumes betwe
en 1985 and 2004. In 2012, Rubio and Waterston published The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900, with a second volume covering the years 1901 to 1911 appearing in 2013. Since 2016, Jen Rubio has continued this project, publishing L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917, followed by three additional volumes covering the years 1918 to 1929 and further volumes in preparation. Francis W.P. Bolger and Elizabeth R. Epperly’s My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery (1980) and Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen’s After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941 (2006) were likewise published after the book version of “The Alpine Path,” which was preceded by The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909 (1960), edited by Wilfrid Eggleston.
A Note on the Text
The items included in this volume were first published in a wide range of North American periodicals across a span of more than twenty-five years. They supplement the non-fiction pieces that Montgomery published after the publication of Anne of Green Gables and that are included in Volume 1 of my threevolume critical anthology, The L.M. Montgomery Reader. Some of these items have been collected in book form before; these include some of Montgomery’s first publications in Francis W.P. Bolger’s The Years Before “Anne” in 1974, the same year that “The Alpine Path” was published as a stand-alone book, as well as a handful of extracts from Montgomery’s “Around the Table” column in Kevin McCabe’s collection of essays The Lucy Maud Montgomery Album (1999) and one in Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s Through Lover’s Lane: L.M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagination (2007). In all cases, I have relied on the original publications as my copy-texts, collating them against the copies found in Montgomery’s scrapbooks. I have treated her handwritten corrections as authoritative and mention them in the notes.