Mary Rubio

Mary Henley Rubio has spent over two decades researching Montgomery’s life, and has put together a comprehensive and penetrating picture of this Canadian literary icon, all set in rich social context. Extensive interviews with people who knew Montgomery – her son, maids, friends, relatives, all now deceased – are only part of the material gathered in a journey to understand Montgomery that took Rubio to Poland and the highlands of Scotland. From Montgomery’s apparently idyllic childhood in Prince Edward Island to her passion-filled adolescence and young adulthood, to her legal fights as world-famous author, to her shattering experiences with motherhood and as wife to a deeply troubled man, this fascinating, intimate narrative of her life will engage and delight.

The Gift of Wings

Lucy Maud Montgomery

Elizabeth Waterston

Elizabeth Waterston is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. Beginning when Lucy Maud Montgomery is fourteen, this first volume takes her to 1910, the year before her marriage, when she left Prince Edward Island. It recounts her schooldays in Cavendish, redolent with incidents, impressions, and romantic "crushes" that found their way into her fiction; a year spent in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with her father and stepmother; a year of study at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, where she trained to be a teacher, and another at Dalhousie University; her teaching years; a powerful infatuation with the son of a family she lived with; a long and mostly unhappy period of keeping house for her grandmother; and the publication of Anne of Green Gables. The autobiographical content will fascinate every devoted reader of the Anne books. But the Montgomery journals are especially interesting because they provide a unique social history and the privilege of viewing closely the life of a remarkable woman. Comprising perhaps the most vivid and detailed memoir in Canadian letters, the journals will join Anne of Green Gables in ensuring Montgomery's lasting place in Canadian literature. This volume is a rich and engrossing prelude to the whole.

1889-1910

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume I

The diaries of the author of Anne of Green Gables and other novels for children describe her life and her experiences in school and as a teacher

1921-1929

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume III

1910-1921

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume II

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born with the storyteller's gift. Throughout her life she would use this talent to tangle and reinforce the intersecting threads of her experience: her Scots heritage, her early years in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island, her teacher training at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, her unhappy marriage to a Presbyterian minister, and her powerful, tormenting ambition. With the creation of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery quickly became Canada's most enduring and celebrated author. Yet this biography presents the Montgomery legend with a darker cast. Rubio and Waterston reveal Montgomery to be a subversive writer, who interjected messages of resistance into her superficially pleasant stories. The authors pay attention to Montgomery's private journals, which pulse with open resentment at the structures of daily life that caught her ambition in cobwebs. Trapped in her marriage, confined by motherhood, and bound by the need to present a smiling face of domestic and feminine amiability in accord with the romantic tales she was producing, Montgomery's journals testify to her struggles with emotional depression and her self-destructive dependence on her increasing popularity. Before long, she became caught by her very facility in creating narratives, unconsciously adapting her life to suit her writerly needs.

L.M. Montgomery

Writing a Life

Elizabeth Waterston is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada. The final volume of the immensely successful The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery covers the years 1935 to 1942, the year of Montgomery's death. No longer dwelling in a farm community or a small rural village, Lucy Maud Montgomery explored life in downtown Toronto. Here she experienced the cultural riches the city had to offer while finding friendship and neighbourliness in the suburb of Swansea. 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, her worries about her sons' academic performance, and her thoughts on the world events during these years. The final volume in the series offers an intimate eyewitness account of life in a growing city, a friendly neighbourhood, a changing world, and of a troubling family dynamic from 1935 to 1942, all recorded with Lucy Maud Montgomery's sharp eye and characteristic wit.

Mary Rubio

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