The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942 (2004)
Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston
Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004
Synopsis
The final volume of the immensely successful Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery covers the years from 1935 to 1942, the year of Montgomery’s death. It completes the story of a gifted creative writer who was also wife, mother, community leader, and public figure.
No longer dwelling in a farm community or a small rural village, Lucy Maud Montgomery explored life in downtown Toronto and turned her journals into the unprecedented diary of a suburban housewife. Here she experienced the cultural riches the city had to offer while finding friendship and neighbourliness in the suburb of Swansea, where she and her husband settled when he retired. The journal chronicles her hopes and satisfaction with her new home and neighbourhood, but also her struggles with her own and her husband’s recurring bouts of depression. It also reflects a growing friction between generations as tensions between herself and her sons, Chester and Stuart, began to dominate her later years. Family life could boil up in disturbing ways, resulting in gaps and evasions in the journals.
In spite of all her private anxieties, however, she continued to record public events. The years 1935 to 1942 were troubled indeed. The Great Depression deepened; the abdication of King Edward VIII shook both the security of the monarchy and social assumptions about marriage and divorce; Italy’s invasion of Ethiopia, the Sino-Japanese War and the apparent inability of the League of Nations to deter Hitler all intensified political uncertainty as the world moved inexorably toward the breakout of a second world war.
This final volume in the series offers an intimate eye-witness account of life in a growing city, a friendly neighbourhood, a changing world, and a troubling family, all recorded with Lucy Maud Montgomery’s sharp eye and characteristic wit. Like the earlier journals, this volume offers the counterpoint of dark realism and tragic irony, as well as insight and humour. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery are intelligently polished works, gems in the genre of life-writing.
Contents
Illustrations (iv-v)
Acknowledgements (vi-viii)
Introduction (ix-xxix)
1935 (1-53)
1936 (54-119)
1937 (120-225)
1938 (226-299)
1939 (300-347)
1940 (348)
1941 (349)
1942 (350)
Notes (351-399)
List of deletions (400)
Mistakes in Montgomery’s date-headings (401)
Index (403-410)
Reviews
Gammel, Irene. Review of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston; Anne of Green Gables, by L.M. Montgomery, edited by Cecily Devereux. University of Toronto Quarterly 75, no. 1 (Winter 2006): 325-28.
Gillham, Virginia. Review of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. In Canadian Book Review Annual 2004, edited by Joyce M. Wilson, 79. Toronto: CBRA, 2005.
Murray, Heather. Review of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Canadian Historical Review 87, no. 1 (March 2006): 143-44.
Robinson, Laura M. “Tragedy of Everyday Life.” Review of Marian Engel: A Life in Letters, edited by Christl Verduyn and Kathleen Garay; The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Canadian Literature 189 (Summer 2006): 145-46.
