Edited by Jean Mitchell
Newcastle, UK: Cambridge Scholars Publishing, 2008
This collection of essays explores the darker side of L.M. Montgomery’s fiction and life writing. An international best-selling novelist, Montgomery’s many novels, particularly Anne of Green Gables, have enchanted readers for over a century. However, Montgomery’s own disenchantment made evident with the posthumous publication of her private journals, ruptured the easy conflation of Montgomery as author and person. The tension between public enchantment and private discontent informs Montgomery’s work and life. By exploring the more transgressive aspects of Montgomery’s writing, these essays provide new insights into the complexity of her work and life. Montgomery’s gentle landscapes and optimistic stories, as the authors suggest, often contain undercurrents of anger, malice, obsession, loss and violence. As one contributor, Margaret Doody, argues “destructiveness plays around the edges of all of her fiction.” Essays explore the anguish of mother loss, her ambivalent depictions of the maternal, the experiences War and the Great Depression as well as a range of issues related to gender, class, nature and social and cultural change. Attention to the dissonance and conflict as these essays demonstrates, provides compelling and new space for theoretical readings of Montgomery’s work.
Contents
List of Images and Figures (xi–xii)
Acknowledgements (xii–xiv)
List of Abbreviations (xv)
Introduction: Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict / Jean Mitchell (1–21)
Part I: Narrating Self and Other
1. L.M. Montgomery: The Darker Side / Margaret Doody (25–49)
2. L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss / Rita Bode (50–66)
3. L.M. Montgomery and the Conflictedness of a Woman Writer / Carole Gerson (67–80)
Part II: A World of Conflict and Private Sorrows
4. Women at War: L.M. Montgomery, the Great War, and Canadian Cultural Memory / Andrea McKenzie (83–108)
5. “That Abominable War”: The Blythes Are Quoted and Thoughts on L.M. Montgomery’s Late Style / Benjamin Lefebvre (109–30)
6. Opposing Pacifism: L.M. Montgomery and the Trouble with Ephraim Weber / Paul Tiessen (131–41)
7. Reflections of the Great Depression in L.M. Montgomery’s Life and Her Pat Books / Heidi MacDonald (142–58)
Part III: Performing Difference(s)
8. “Tempest in a Teapot”: Domestic Service and Class Conflict in L.M. Montgomery’s Journals and Fiction / E. Holly Pike (161–77)
9. Performing Motherhood: L.M. Montgomery’s Display of Maternal Dissonance / Margaret Steffler (178–93)
10. Montgomery’s “Imp”: Conflicting Representations of Illness in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle / Kylee-Anne Hingston (194–208)
11. The Fresh-Air Controversy, Health, and Art in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Novels / Susan Meyer (209–20)
12. Sustainable Dissonance: Becoming-Anne through L.M. Montgomery’s and Kevin Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables / Pamela Rossi-Keen (221–37)
13. Love and Controversy for Over Eighty Years: Anne, Emily, and Finnish Women: An Interview / Suvi Ahola and Satu Koskimies (238–44)
Part IV: Avoiding, Mediating, and Resolving Conflicts
14. Out the Open Window: Avoidance as Conflict Resolution in L.M. Montgomery’s Short Fiction / Trinna S. Frever (247–62)
15. “You d—d idiot!” What L.M. Montgomery’s Silent Heroines Really Want to Say / Sarah Clair Atkinson (263–77)
16. The Conflicted Worlds Behind the Letters of L.M. Montgomery and Ephraim Weber / Hildi Froese Tiessen (278–94)
17. “Even a Successful Lawsuit Will be a Worry”: Law and Community Relations in L.M. Montgomery’s Life and Work / Kate Sutherland (295–307)
Part V: Troubling Translations and Dissonant Re-readings
18. “‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne”: The Media and Montgomery / Laura Robinson (311–27)
19. Conflicting Images: Anne of Green Gables in Germany / Martina Seifert (328–43)
20. Hanako Muraoka’s Famous and Truncated Translation of Anne of Green Gables: Some Lingering Questions / Danièle Allard (344–62)
21. “Bound for Quebec” or “Journey’s End”? Conflicting Stories About the Montgomery Family’s Arrival in Prince Edward Island / Carolyn Strom Collins (363–72)
22. How Green Is Green Gables?: An Ecofeminist Perspective on L.M. Montgomery / Nancy Holmes (373–90)
Epilogue
What Occurs: Storm, Dissonance, and Conflict in L.M. Montgomery’s Life and Writing / Jane Ledwell (391–3)
Contributors (394–8)
Index (399–415)
Reviews
Reviews by Ann F. Howey and Sean Somers.
