Now available in paperback, The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles rediscovered primary material on one of Canada's most enduringly popular authors, spanning the entirety of her high-profile career and the years since her death.
Volume Three: A Legacy in Review examines a long overlooked portion of Montgomery's critical reception: reviews of her books. Although Montgomery downplayed the impact that reviews had on her writing career, claiming to be amused and tolerant of reviewers' contradictory opinions about her work, she nevertheless cared enough to keep a large percentage of them in scrapbooks as an archive of her career. This volume presents more than four hundred reviews from eight countries that raise questions about and offer reflections on gender, genre, setting, character, audience, and nationalism, much of which anticipated the scholarship that has thrived in the last four decades.
Each volume in The L.M. Montgomery Reader is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that traces the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and the public Montgomery.
Table of Contents:
Acknowledgments
Abbreviations
Introduction: A Legacy in Review
Benjamin LefebvreA Note on the Text
1. Anne of Green Gables (1908)
2. Anne of Avonlea (1909)
3. Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910)
4. The Story Girl (1911)
5. Chronicles of Avonlea (1912)
6. The Golden Road (1913)
7. Anne of the Island (1915)
8. The Watchman and Other Poems (1916)
9. Anne’s House of Dreams (1917)
10. Rainbow Valley (1919)
11. Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920)
12. Rilla of Ingleside (1921)
13. Emily of New Moon (1923)
14. Emily Climbs (1925)
15. The Blue Castle: A Novel (1926)
16. Emily’s Quest (1927)
17. Magic for Marigold (1929)
18. A Tangled Web/Aunt Becky Began It (1931)
19. Pat of Silver Bush (1933)
20. Courageous Women (1934) (with Marian Keith and Mabel Burns Mckinley)
21. Mistress Pat: A Novel of Silver Bush (1935)
22. Anne of Windy Poplars/Anne of Windy Willows (1936)
23. Jane of Lantern Hill (1937)
24. Anne of Ingleside (1939)
Epilogue: Posthumous Titles, 1960–2013
Benjamin LefebvreSources
Bibliography
About the Author :
Benjamin Lefebvre, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, is director of L.M. Montgomery Online. His publications include an edition of Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, and the three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Reader, which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Literature from the Association of American Publishers. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
Review :
‘Lefebvre’s overall achievement in this Reader series is a masterful compilation of archival adeptness and exquisite editing that addresses, through collation, crucial source materials for specialists in Canadian literature and history.’
- Aoife Assumpta Hart (Canadian Literature issue number 226) ‘Lefebvre’s archival research is thorough and often brilliant, making the Reader an invaluable trove not only for Montgomery scholars but also for those working with the reception history of Canadian writers.’
- Anne Furlong (University of Toronto Quarterly vol 84:03:2015) “Lefebvre has thoroughly mined earlier scholars’ bibliographies and online newspaper archives to find reviews in periodicals from eight different countries, including the Bookman (London), the Globe (Toronto) and Vogue (New York). . . . Collectively, these reviews . . . represent a superb barometer of [Montgomery’s] fluctuating cultural value as a writer.”
- Irene Gammel (The Times Literary Supplement) “Lefebvre has uncovered a cache of new, important material in an already impressive and crowded field of Montgomery scholarship.”
- Laurie Glenn Norris (Saint John Telegraph-Journal)
