L.M. Montgomery Research Group

Irene Gammel’s review of Mary Henley Rubio’s Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, titled “The fatal disappointments of Lucy Maud,” appears in today’s Globe and Mail, p. D4.

The following announcement has been made concerning the L.M. Montgomery Christmas in Norval, Ontario. A whole day of activities have been scheduled for Saturday, November 29, 2008:

10:00 am - 2:00 pm: Visit country church bazaars and lunches at the Norval Presbyterian Church, Norval United Church and St. Paul’s Anglican Church

1:00 pm - 3:00 pm: Meet Dr. Mary Rubio, author of Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings at the L.M. Montgomery Museum at Crawford’s Village Bakeshop

3:00 pm: Watch a re-creation of the 1919 Anne of Green Gables movie at St. Paul’s Parish Hall, cost: $2

7:00 pm: Enjoy an evening at the Norval Presbyterian Church featuring L.M. Montgomery scholars:

• Dr. Benjamin Lefebvre, University of Alberta
• Dr. Irene Gammel, Professor, Ryerson University
• Dr. Edith Smith, Professor Emerita, McMaster University

Music by Jack Hutton, ragtime pianist.

Tickets at the door or in advance, contact kgastle@norvalontario.com,
905-877-7059, cost: $10

News from Yuka Kajihara, who heard from Korean LMM reader “MS, Kang” that Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables has been translated into Korean, using the original English version, and not the Japanese translation, as the source.

Here is the cover image:

The Toronto Public Library will host a Literary Lunch on “All about Anne and Lucy Maud Montgomery” on Thursday, 20 November 2008, between 12:30 and 2:00 PM:

Dr. Irene Gammel introduces her book Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. Dr. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly discusses Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery. Q&A. Bring your own lunch. Coffee and tea will be provided.

For more information, see the TPL announcement.

The L.M. Montgomery Research Centre at the University of Guelph has launched their searchable digital collection of L.M. Montgomery’s photographs. Although the images are available through the Our Ontario portal, the collection can also be searched through the LMMRC website directly.

Sullivan Entertainment has announced on its Anne of Green Gables website that its latest film, Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning, will air on CTV on 14 December 2008, at 7:00 PM. They include a detailed synopsis:

It is 1945 and Anne Shirley (Academy-award nominee and Golden Globe winner, Barbara Hershey) now a successful, middle-aged writer has returned to Prince Edward Island for an extended visit. On a whim, she agrees to write a play for a theatre producer. The play, she reasons, will keep her busy—at least busy enough to not go out of her mind with worry about her only son who has yet to return from the war overseas. But a long-hidden secret in the form of a letter from her errant father, discovered under the floorboards at Green Gables, provides a distraction of its own. As Anne struggles to complete the play, she delves into long-buried memories, reliving the troubled years before she arrived as an orphan at the Green Gables farmhouse. She is forced to confront the fact that she made up stories about her life; after her mother died and when her father deserted his young daughter. During that time, Young Anne (newcomer Hannah Endicott-Douglas), is taken into the care of a wealthy matriarch, Amelia Thomas (Academy-award winner Shirley MacLaine) and her daughter-in-law, Louisa (Rachel Blanchard), which changes her life forever.

Over the course of one remarkable summer, Anne Shirley discovers the astonishing truth about her father, the origins of her quest for “kindred spirits” and the roots of her brilliant, magical imagination.

A new trailer for the telefilm is now available at Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables website. While there is not yet any news about broadcast dates outside of Canada, they have also announced that the film will be released on DVD shortly.

The following panel will occur on Monday, 29 December 2008, between 8:30 and 9:45 a.m., at Hilton San Francisco, as part of the 2008 MLA Convention in San Francisco. The panel is titled “Return to Prince Edward Island: Anne of Green Gables at 100” and is arranged by the Division on Children’s Literature.

Presiding: Michele Ann Abate, Hollins University

1. “The Creation of the Family in Anne of Green Gables: Making Twenty-First Century Readers at Home in the Victorian.” Kathleen A. Miller, University of Delaware, Newark.
2. “A Return to the Wild; or, Long-Lasting, Mystical ‘Lunacy’ in Anne of Green Gables.” Val Czerny, Florida Atlantic University.
3. “The Problem Novel Then and Now: Using Anne of Green Gables in the Contemporary Young-Adult Literature Class.” Fiona Paton, State University of New York, New Paltz.
4. “From Formula Fiction to Girls’ Classic: Anne of Green Gables, Fashion Magazines, and Sunday School Writing.” Irene Gammel, Ryerson University.

Mary Henley Rubio’s long-anticipated biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings has been released ahead of schedule by Doubleday Canada!

This comprehensive and penetrating account of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life, all set in rich social context, and featuring previously unseen photographs, is sure to take its place as the definitive biography of this literary icon.

The book can be ordered online at a discount through Amazon.ca or Chapters.Indigo.ca or at your local bookstore.

I just the following article on the CBC.ca website:

Writers challenged to update Wind in the Willows on its 100th birthday

The 100th anniversary of Kenneth Grahame’s Wind in the Willows will be celebrated with a competition to write a modern version of the children’s classic.

The River & Rowing Museum in Henley-on-Thames, Oxfordshire, in Britain has launched a writing competition that challenges authors to put a modern take on Grahame’s themes.

“Kenneth Grahame knew all about the power of the river on the imagination, and on our real lives,” museum representative Paul Mainds told BBC.

“This competition gives authors the opportunity to re-animate these themes and make them more relevant for today’s young readers, especially in light of the environmental issues that now affect our rivers and the wildlife that lives in and around them.”

Writers are challenged to pen a “river-related” short story “for our times.”

The museum, on the river Thames, has a permanent exhibition dedicated to Wind in the Willows.

Grahame’s tale of the adventures of Toad, Mole, Ratty and Badger was published Oct. 8, 1908, four months after he left his job at the Bank of England….

The news of this competition made me wonder about Anne of Green Gables, which was published less than four months before Wind in the Willows. If there were a competition to write a modern version of this novel, how would it be done? What would need to be updated, changed, altered, or reemphasized?

Here are extracts from a press release for a conference called “Green Gables to Globalization: Crossover, Canada and Children’s Books”:

iBbY Ireland announces a one-day conference to be held on Saturday October 18th 2008 in The Church of Ireland College of Education, Upper Rathmines Road, Dublin 6.

The main theme of the conference will examine ways in which children’s literature transcend boundaries of all kinds, focusing in particular on crossover fiction and a sense of belonging in books from Canada, a post-colonial, multiethnic society.

Irene Gammel of Ryerson University will be speaking on “Looking for Anne of Green Gables: A Literary Icon at 100,” as part of the conference. For more information and for the complete program, visit the iBby Ireland website.