L.M. Montgomery Research Group

In anticipation of the CTV broadcast of Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning (an exact date has not yet been released), Sullivan Entertainment will release six books in September and October. A novelization of the new movie, written by Kevin Sullivan, will be published by Key Porter Books on 1 October (Amazon.ca listing here). Also on that day, they are publishing through Davenport Press reissues of Montgomery’s novels Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island; an audio CD of Anne of Green Gables, read by Kevin Sullivan; and a new novelization of their first Anne of Green Gables miniseries.

Sullivan Entertainment has also released new trailers of the New Beginning movie, both of which imply that Anne wasn’t really an orphan after all. View them at their official website.

Pre-order listings have appeared on Amazon.ca and Chapters.Indigo.ca for Mary Henley Rubio’s forthcoming biography, The Gift of Wings: The Life of Lucy Maud Montgomery, to be published in October by Doubleday Canada (whose own listing for the book can be found here). More information about this book will be posted here once it becomes available.

We are pleased to present for the first time the cover for Irene Gammel’s upcoming book, Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic, to be published in March 2008 by Key Porter Books (Canada) and St. Martin’s Press (USA). More information about this book will be posted here closer to the publication date.

Links: Publisher’s listing (Key Porter Books); Irene Gammel’s website.

A new collection of essays, titled Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict and edited by Jean Mitchell, will be published by Cambridge Scholars Publishing in 2008. Stay tuned for a release date, but in the meantime here is the table of contents.

List of Images and Figures

Acknowledgements

Abbreviations

Introduction

Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict / Jean Mitchell

Part 1: Narrating Self and Other

L.M. Montgomery: The Darker Side / Margaret Doody

L.M. Montgomery and the Anguish of Mother Loss / Rita Bode

L.M. Montgomery and the Conflictedness of a Woman Writer / Carole Gerson

Part 2: A World of Conflict and Private Sorrows

Women at War: L.M. Montgomery, the Great War, and Canadian Cultural Memory / Andrea McKenzie

“That Abominable War”: The Blythes Are Quoted and Thoughts on L.M. Montgomery’s Late Style / Benjamin Lefebvre

Opposing Pacifism: L.M. Montgomery and the Trouble with Ephraim Weber / Paul Tiessen

Reflections of the Great Depression in L.M. Montgomery’s Life and Her Pat Books / Heidi MacDonald

Part 3: Performing Difference(s)

“Tempest in a Teapot”: Domestic Service and Class Conflict in L.M. Montgomery’s Journals and Fiction / E. Holly Pike

Performing Motherhood: L.M. Montgomery’s Display of Maternal Dissonance / Margaret Steffler

Montgomery’s “Imp”: Conflicting Representations of Illness in L.M. Montgomery’s The Blue Castle / Kylee-Anne Hingston

The Fresh-Air Controversy, Health, and Art in L.M. Montgomery’s Emily Novels / Susan Meyer

Sustainable Dissonance: Becoming-Anne through L.M. Montgomery and Sullivan’s Anne of Green Gables / Pamela Rossi-Keen

Love and Controversy for Over Eighty Years: Anne, Emily, and Finnish Women: An Interview / Suvi Ahola and Satu Koskimies

Part 4: Avoiding, Mediating, and Resolving Conflicts

Out the Open Window: Avoidance as Conflict Resolution in L.M. Montgomery’s Short Fiction / Trinna S. Frever

“You d—d idiot!” What L.M. Montgomery’s Silent Heroines Really Want to Say / Sarah Clair Atkinson

The Conflicted Worlds behind the Letters of L.M. Montgomery and Ephraim Weber / Hildi Froese Tiessen

“Even a Successful Lawsuit Will Be a Worry”: Law and Community Relations in L.M. Montgomery’s Life and Work / Kate Sutherland

Part V: Troubling, Translations and Dissonant Re-readings

“‘Outrageously Sexual’ Anne”: The Media and Montgomery / Laura Robinson

Conflicting Images: Anne of Green Gables in Germany / Martina Seifert

Hanako Muraoka’s Famous and Truncated Translation of Anne of Green Gables: Some Lingering Questions / Danièle Allard

“Bound for Quebec” or “Journey’s End”? Conflicting Stories about the Montgomery Family’s Arrival in Prince Edward Island / Carolyn Strom Collins

How Green is Green Gables?: An Ecofeminist Perspective on L.M. Montgomery / Nancy Holmes

Epilogue

What Occurs: Storm, Dissonance, and Conflict in L.M. Montgomery’s Life and Writing / Jane Ledwell

Contributors

Penguin Canada is launching a new series called Extraordinary Canadians, “a rediscovery of the great figures of Canada’s past by its most brilliant contemporary writers,” with John Ralston Saul as General Editor. Eighteen volumes are planned for publication between 2008 and 2010, along a companion TV documentary series and a website that is not yet online. The first three books in the series—Emily Carr by Lewis DeSoto, Lord Beaverbrook by David Adams Richards, and Nellie McClung by Charlotte Gray—will be published in March 2008.

In September 2009, they will publish L.M. Montgomery by Jane Urquhart. We will post further updates about this book once it becomes available.

Amazon.ca and Chapters.Indigo.ca are taking pre-orders for Montgomery studies that will appear in 2008!

Elizabeth Epperly’s Imagining Anne (scheduled for release in hardcover on 29 January 2008): Amazon.ca: 37% off!; Chapters/Indigo: 34% off!

Penguin Canada’s centennial anniversary edition of Anne of Green Gables (scheduled for release in hardcover on 29 January 2008) Amazon.ca: 37% off!; Chapters/Indigo.ca: 34% off!

Budge Wilson’s prequel Before Green Gables (scheduled for release in hardcover on 29 January 2008): Amazon.ca: 37% off!; Chapters/Indigo: 34% off!

Irene Gammel’s Looking for Anne: The Life and Times of Anne of Green Gables (scheduled for release in hardcover on 1 May 2008): Amazon.ca: 37% off!; Chapters/Indigo: 34% off!

Gammel’s book will also be published in the United States by St. Martin’s Press in summer 2008. Cover art for all these books will be posted here when it becomes available.

Fitzhenry & Whiteside will publish The Anne of Green Gables Puzzle Book! Written by Marion Hoffman and illustrated by Muriel Wood, the book will be published in August 2007. For more information, click here.

Elizabeth MacLeod, author of L.M. Montgomery: A Writer’s Life, a biography for eight- to twelve-year-olds, has announced that her new biography for beginning readers, Lucy Maud Montgomery (illustrated by John Mantha), will be published in 2008 by Kids Can Press.

We will post further information about this new book as it becomes available.

The following announcement is from the Quill and Quire website:

Key Porter Books publisher Jordan Fenn has acquired Irene Gammel’s non-fiction work Looking for Anne: The Life and Times of Anne of Green Gables. Gammel will show how the international classic came to be written, and what the feisty heroine’s character reveals about author L.M. Montgomery. Publication is scheduled for spring 2008, to coincide with the centenary of Anne’s publication. Hilary McMahon of Westwood Creative Artists arranged the deal.

Orca Books has just published a new picture book titled The Summer of the Marco Polo, based on an event that Montgomery describes in her journals and that also was the subject of two of her earliest publications: an essay, “The wreck of the ‘Marco-Polo,” published in Montreal Witness in February 1891; and a poem, “The Wreck of the ‘Marco-Polo’–1883,” published in the Daily Patriot in 1892.

The Summer of the Marco Polo, written by Lynn Manuel and illustrated by Kasia Charko, tells the story from young Maud’s perspective. The official website description follows. Read more about it here.

In the summer of 1883 a famous clipper ship ran aground off the coast of Prince Edward Island near the home of a young girl named Lucy Maud Montgomery. Lucy Maud, who became one of Canada’s most beloved writers, wrote about the grand adventure in her journals and reflected on it years later in her notebooks. The town of Cavendish was transformed by the presence of the crew, and the ship’s captain stayed with Lucy Maud and her strait-laced grandparents. Lynn Manuel has taken Lucy Maud’s memories and shaped them into a story that will transfix and enchant readers.

Lynn Manuel is a full-time writer and the author of more than a dozen books, including Lucy Maud and the Cavendish Cat and Camels Always Do. She majored in history at university and now finds some of her story ideas in the study of the past. When asked what information she would like to share about herself, Lynn says, “I am a grandmother. And I’ve seen Paris.” Lynn lives in White Rock, British Columbia.

Working in watercolor and colored pencil, Kasia Charko has created detailed inviting paintings that bring to life Prince Edward Island, a very special ship and the ocean’s many moods. Coincidentally, a number of years ago she received a visit from several of L.M. Montgomery’s great-grandchildren. Kasia lives in Alton Village, Caledon, Ontario, a short distance from Norval, where Montgomery lived for many years.