By the time of her death in April 1942, L. M. Montgomery had published more than 500 stories, as well as the twenty-two novels that made her one of Canada’s most enduringly popular, not to say beloved, writers. The novels included the wildly successful Anne of Green Gables series, which eventually comprised nine books; the last, The Blythes Are Quoted, only appeared in its entirety in 2009.
Montgomery’s impact – the first Anne book came out in 1908 – is multigenerational, in much the same way that the works of Louisa May Alcott (whose Little Women was published in 1868, six years before Montgomery was born), or Laura Ingalls Wilder’s Little House on the Prairie novels (1932–43), are passed on from parents to children and grandchildren. These are spirited, folksy books in which solitary persistence is rewarded and resilience is built through adversity; perhaps more importantly, they are autobiographical. Through their characters, plots and locations are laid bare the building blocks of how each woman became a writer. The fiction is indivisible from its landscape of origin, too – Alcott’s Concord, Massachusetts, Wilder’s Kansas, Wisconsin and Minnesota, Montgomery’s Prince Edward Island.
In Twice Upon a Time Benjamin Lefebvre has brought together twenty-four of Montgomery’s stories, with an additional story as an “appendix”. In a brief preface and a more extensive afterword he explains that the volume – the third in the L. M. Montgomery Library series of primary and secondary sources published by University of Toronto Press, and the first to feature the author’s short fiction – “offers readers a selection of her short stories that, with a few exceptions, were first published in periodicals between 1898 and 1939, and that consist of early versions of well-known characters, plot points, conversations and settings in her books … [it] seeks not only to add to the canon of known Montgomery texts but also to trouble the notion of a canon, showing the complex relationship Montgomery saw between periodical work … and book publication”.
This idea of “troubling” the “notion of a canon” is an interesting one. Lefebvre makes a robust case in the preface (if a more laboured one in the afterword) for defending Montgomery’s publishing for profit early versions of her works; these are versions, he points out, that “earlier scholars” have rather dismissed as “practice exercise” or “brief periodical warm-ups”. Montgomery herself wrote to a friend: “I am in literature to make a living out of it”. Some of the stories contained in Twice Upon a Time might indeed qualify for the “warm-up” category, but in other cases they satisfy what Lefebvre asserts is “Montgomery’s use of the periodical story as prelude to the novel”. He points out, however, that while Montgomery “acknowledged in her book The Watchman and Other Poems (1916) the several periodicals that had first published some of the poems reprinted therein”, she “did not do likewise to any of her books of fiction … moreover, except for occasional remarks in her surviving life writing, she left no record of her rationale for selecting certain pieces as worthy of repurposing over others, nor did she comment on the timing of those publications”. Writers do not make it easy for those who come after them.
What of the stories themselves? They are typical Montgomery fare: charming, humorous verging on caustic, moral, warm, poignant, regretful. Reading these vignettes of life on Prince Edward Island, Canada’s smallest province, at the turn of the twentieth century is to be reminded of certain of Montgomery’s antecedents and successors – Elizabeth Gaskell’s Cranford (1851–53) or Garrison Keillor’s Lake Wobegon series (1985–). In his afterword to Twice Upon a Time Lefebvre notes her influence on her fellow Canadian writer Alice Munro. Like Keillor in particular, whose tales of small-town life in Minnesota began as a radio show, Montgomery’s stories work best when read aloud. “Miss Marietta’s Jersey” (1899) is the tale of a disobedient Jersey cow and the owner who rues the day she purchased it; it is a fully realized, rich comic drama. There is something pitiful about “Aunt Ethelinda’s Monument” (1904), in which a sarcastic, unloved older woman scrimps and saves to have a grand monument built after her death – not in her memory, but to rival a wealthier, deceased member of the branch of the family of which Aunt Ethelinda is the last survivor. “It’s bigger than Mrs Roderick Clyde’s. I’ll be buried next to her, alongside of mother, and I wouldn’t rest in my grave if her monument was bigger than mine.” It is noted at the narrative’s beginning, by the kind and tolerant Elsbeth, the story’s other main character, that Ethelinda “wasn’t Elsbeth’s aunt at all, or anybody else’s, though everybody in Brookvale called her so”.
Each story is accompanied by a short introductory paragraph from Lefebvre, describing its link to the wider Montgomery oeuvre, plus some enticing snippets of backstory. In “Our Uncle Wheeler” (1898), for example, a bright, larkish tale of boyish enthusiasms and a grumpy elderly relative, Lefebvre explains that it “precedes by a decade the episode in Anne of Green Gables in which Anne Shirley and Diana Barry, overly excited after attending a concert hosted by Avonlea’s Debating Club on Diana’s twelfth birthday, race to the Barry’s spare room and jump onto the bed – only to discover, to their horror, that Diana’s elderly great aunt Josephine is already asleep in it”. In “Our Uncle Wheeler” the genders are altered so that both the hapless miscreants and their relative are male. Likewise, the protagonist of “Aunt Ethelinda’s Monument” may be familiar to readers as another of Diana Barry’s kin: the formidable Aunt Atossa. “The Hurrying of Ludovic”, a story that would be reworked as part of Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), initially emerged in 1905. In this gem of timing and pace, a recalcitrant suitor, ironically named Ludovic Speed, takes too long – years, in fact – to state his intentions and has to be tricked into making a definitive move before he loses his now middle-aged object of desire for good.
Montgomery’s penchant for thwarted romance and a hint of gothic also shines in this selection. “The Old Chest at Wyther Grange” (1903), while wobbling a bit on the side of sentimentality, quickly settles into a textual darkness as a mysterious blue chest in a dusty attic, unopened for forty years, is revealed to contain, like a shroud, the faded wedding dress and trousseau of a young woman who was jilted by her mercenary fiancé just before their wedding. It’s a cautionary, Miss Havisham-like tale that another young woman, the one who eventually lifts the lid of the chest, receives as a warning. Apparently this gloomy story was based on a real event, one that had been turned over and passed down the Montgomery family. The name “Wyther Grange” was later used for the home of Nancy Priest in the novel Emily of New Moon (1923), the first in a trilogy, featuring the aspiring writer Emily Byrd Starr, that the author regarded as her most personal.
Known as Lucy Maud or Maudie as a child, and Maud as an adult, Montgomery was no stranger to life’s vicissitudes. She was born and raised in rural Prince Edward Island, and her home town, Cavendish, would become the recognizable setting for Avonlea in the Anne of Green Gables books. But she was an only child, just twenty months old when her mother died of tuberculosis. Brought up mainly by her maternal grandparents, she did not get on with the stepmother her father married in 1887, when she was thirteen. That happens to be the year in which Montgomery first submitted a poem for publication. She trained as a teacher, writing stories after her teaching day was done; a fashionable young woman, she had at this point many friends and several romances, the most intense, if brief, of which was with Herman Leard, whom she met in 1897–8. Despite breaking it off – Montgomery was a strict Presbyterian, and both she and Leard were committed elsewhere – she was devastated when he died of influenza shortly afterwards.
After years spent caring for her grandmother, it was not until 1911 that Montgomery got married, at the age of thirty-six, to a minister, Ewen Macdonald, three years after Anne of Green Gables was published. The couple relocated to Leaksdale, Ontario, and had three sons, one of whom was stillborn. The marriage was dogged by Macdonald’s “religious melancholia” and unpredictable tempers; Montgomery herself was prone to depression. Yet her literary output was steady. She achieved huge worldwide fame, and was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935. She died at the age of sixty-seven, allegedly of an overdose of prescription drugs, though no autopsy was performed. This fact (heart failure had been given as the cause at the time) was not revealed publicly by her family until 2008, when the centenary of Anne of Green Gables was marked. Beneath the resolute veneer of Montgomery’s work there seems to lurk an incipient sorrow: overlooked children, lonely adults.
Catherine Taylor’s memoir, The Stirrings, will be published later this year
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