Between 1911 and 1942, L.M. Montgomery’s journals allude to, discuss, quote, or generally reference books, literature, and reading more than three hundred times. These references clearly exhibit Montgomery’s attachment to reading and allusion, but her continued reliance on literature as an autobiographical tool suggests that she is a life writer who is intensely concerned with literary expression and the evocative use of text-within-text. During these years in Ontario, Montgomery also expands and redefines her autobiographical output by recopying her early journals into uniform ledgers, constructing a more formal autobiography in The Alpine Path (1917), and then typing her ledger journals in preparation for their eventual publication.1 Her assertion that the journals “should have a certain literary value” to her descendants and her “literary heirs”2 – which the epilogue to this volume, Kate Macdonald Butler’s “Dear Grandmother Maud on the Road to Heaven,” addresses – and the care with which she copies and types them suggest that she is aware of the journals’ significance to future readers. The sheer volume of her autobiographical efforts during this period is remarkable given her personal struggles and simultaneous literary production. Her Ontario years offer a particularly rich site for an analysis as her reading and life-writing projects shift and change with the transitions and accommodations prompted by life events. Her ability to balance professional writing and life writing while constantly making time to read and record her responses indicates that these textual occupations are not only linked but also foundational to her identity and the subsequent construction of her autobiographical self in the journals. Her records of reading in the Ontario journals provide a suggestive map of the ways in which her encounters with text are spun into self-creation. Separate from and enfolded in her journals, these encounters can be read as an autobiographical act, one facet of her complex, layered self-definition.
Montgomery’s earlier journals also contain evidence of her reading self; her life writing in Prince Edward Island is filled with allusions to her reading habits. In Ontario, however, the entire body of her textual work undergoes significant changes, parallel to those in her life overall. Marriage, children, new professional and personal responsibilities, and a change in geography all left their mark in Montgomery’s journal and on her reading life within it. The first entry in the Selected Journals after her move to Ontario is also the first significant “retrospective” journal entry, marking a major shift in her journaling process. On 28 January 1912, she ends a nine-month break in her journaling to describe the events surrounding the death of her Grandmother Macneill, her wedding and honeymoon, and her move to Leaskdale: “I was so busy I could not keep this journal up in any regular fashion . . . But occasionally through the spring, when I had a little spare time, or when the pain demanded some outward expression, I wrote some stray entries in a notebook.”3 These “stray entries” occupy nearly thirty pages of the published journal and are illustrated with photographs of her trousseau and her honeymoon tour. These entries and photographs imply that her journal and her journaling have altered in direct response to her life’s circumstances.
The frequent integration of allusions and literary references in this section, however, shows that some of her journal processes have not changed: she uses two of Byron’s lines from Don Juan to describe her longing for Prince Edward Island, “that far shore / Beloved and deplored.” The section on her honeymoon reinforces her attachment to the book world in its many entries on literary sites in Scotland and England. As the years pass, she continues to rely on allusion and references to her reading to record the successes and tragedies of her life, as well as the quotidian and the commonplace. Throughout the journals, she can, for example, with biting clarity, use literature to describe a visitor as “‘Mrs Nickleby’ in the flesh.” When she finally writes of her cousin Frederica Campbell’s death in 1919, she quotes Macbeth, using a particular line to help her explain and cope with this devastating experience: “She died. And I live to write it! Frede is dead. ‘After life’s fitful fever she sleeps well.’ But I wake and must face the dreary years without her.”4 In order to describe these people and events fully, Montgomery relies on allusion and literary memory. Perhaps this is not surprising given that the culture of reading to which she belonged both sanctioned and permitted her to read widely and voraciously, and she was herself an author attentive to language and expression. However, as Kate Flint points out in The Woman Reader, 1837–1914, “records of reading after marriage are scarce in autobiographies” of this period, as the authors’ duties presumably shifted to the running of a household, the raising of children, and other domestic responsibilities.5
If, as Flint claims, reading is “an assertion and organization of private space,”6 then Montgomery took this organizing principle seriously enough to maintain her reading/allusive habits and preserve them in her journal, itself a theoretically private space for expression and reflection. The nature of this reading-writing relationship then exposes the text-based layers of Montgomery’s identity and self-construction. Mary Kelley, studying women readers from 1500 to 1800, explains that many readers used reading to produce “pluralities of meanings” of and for themselves; readers then “relied on those meanings as they fashioned subjectivities as autonomous and communicative thinking women.”7 Reading is thus part of the autobiographical process, serving as inspiration for the journaling and reflection that define a diarist’s life. Flint supports this notion of reading as a means of identity construction in that “autobiography . . . involves self-fashioning through selectivity and arrangement” that is influenced by reading itself.8 Although she does not mention specific titles in the entry, in December 1919, Montgomery neatly illustrates this principle: “But my givings-up never last very long. When I get rested and cheered up by a bit of a dip into some interesting book – or even by a dose of confession in this, my diary – I rise up again and resolve to endure to the end. This little outburst here has quite refreshed me.”9 On one hand, she is journaling and recording a typical expression of her current feelings; on the other, she is fusing the reflective work of journaling with the meaning-making of reading. Montgomery is a thoughtful reader-writer whose “organization of private space” is indicative of her relationship with text.
Her reading record, moreover, is remarkable not only for its thoroughness or for its powerful presence in her journals but also for the way in which both her Ontario reading and journaling are informed by her attentiveness to the future value of her self-constructions. When, in 1919, she writes that she has been copying her collection of “blank books” into uniform ledgers and illustrating them with photographs,10 she implies that the journal has its own textual and personal importance. As Lynn Z. Bloom emphasizes, many life writers are attuned to questions of audience despite the supposed privacy of the journal space. Bloom maintains that “it is the audience hovering at the edge of the page that for the sophisticated diarist facilitates the work’s ultimate focus, providing the impetus either for the initial writing or for transforming what might have been casual, fragmented jottings into a more carefully crafted, contextually coherent work.”11 When Montgomery edits her journals and considers that they “should have a certain literary value” for others, she indicates that a future audience will not only read them but value their contents.12 As a result, this project requires her to reread all of her earlier autobiographical selves while simultaneously keeping up with her contemporary journaling and maintaining her current reading/writing regimens.
Subsequently, she uses her past journals as she does literary texts: as a reason for journaling, a way to describe her current feelings, and a way to reflect on her life and work. She admits that “when I am copying these old journals I feel as if I had gone back into the past and were living again the events and emotions of which I write. It is very delightful and a little sad.”13 This short reflection functions much the same way as her allusions to literature. Her old journals provide the impetus for the current entry just as any text she has read inspires her autobiographical writing. What defines her Ontario reading and self-fashioning is the intersection of her new and old reading, reading that calls for both literary and self-study. By analyzing the recursivity of Montgomery’s reading-writing work in her journal, we can read this text as a site of dialogue as well as autobiographical narrative. Both reading and autobiography are largely concerned with communication and interaction (often with oneself); in combining the two acts, Montgomery reveals the textually preoccupied part of herself that is perhaps hidden in other parts of her journal. Her Ontario journaling/reading is thus shaped by her past and present writing/reading projects, compelling her to layer self and text. In chapter 3, Margaret Steffler observes a similar layering of reading/writing selves in Montgomery’s Leaskdale journals and religious thought. Layering, and the need to “write out and write over”14 her experiences, permeates and defines her journals. This reading-inspired layering goes through three distinct phases as Montgomery reads both books and herself in Ontario.
The first period of this autobiographical and literary work occurs between 1911 and 1918, before Montgomery began the task of rereading and copying her journals. In these early years in Leaskdale, she reminisces about Prince Edward Island, her childhood and adolescence, revelling in the nostalgia of rereading favourite texts. Reading an “old paper on ‘Kipling’s verse’” to the Guild in Leaskdale, a paper she first gave to the Cavendish Literary Society, makes her “homesick”: “My soul ached when I lay awake in the darkness afterwards . . . [thinking] over the old days.”15 Rereading Friedrich de la Motte Fouqué’s Undine prompts a recollection of a childhood dream: in a curious blend of text and memory, Montgomery remembers dreaming “as vividly as if it were yesterday” about a tunnel through an “Enchanted Forest” with a hero barred from her path by a “hideous head and face.” In December 1914, she rereads Mrs Felicia Hemans’s poems, a “source of great pleasure” in her childhood. She admits that “I love them yet, partly for their own sake, partly because of the old associations connected with them.” On one hand, this text is an artifact from Montgomery’s former life and from her youth; on the other, it is a contemporary inspiration for her journaling and reminiscing. “I think Mrs Hemans has been hardly dealt with by our hurrying, feverish, get-rich-quick age,” she writes. “Surely sweetness and charm of sentiment have their place in literature.”16 This comment is as much a statement about Montgomery’s feelings for her old life as it is about her opinions of the changes in literary movements. She suggests that her childhood reading and her childhood home still preoccupy her present. The preoccupation is, in essence, channelled through her literary activities. Certainly, most readers experience a similar connection between past reading and present selves, but for Montgomery the power of these moments is particularly poignant given the significant changes in her life and her tendency to journal about them.
In August 1916, Montgomery purchased for her sons four volumes of the children’s magazine Wide Awake, which she had read occasionally in her Cavendish days. She writes, “It is impossible to tell how much I have enjoyed re-reading them and what delight they gave me – a strange, eerie pleasure as of a journey back into the past. It was not only that their contents had still a literary relish even for my mature taste; but as I read I seemed to be back again in the surroundings of the days in which I read them first. I was back in the old home in Cavendish. Grandfather and grandmother, and Dave and Well were there . . . I went again to the white washed school on the crest of the hill; the stars were in their right places in the heavens . . . a world utterly passed away was my universe once more. I felt curiously homesick and strange, every time I shut the book and came back to this one.”17 The pages of Wide Awake serve as a conduit into her own past and to her past self, with the power to elicit homesickness and the feeling of having been somewhere else. Her journaling about this feeling serves as yet another layer of text over this already intertextual autobiographical moment. Later that year, she describes the way the First World War widens the gulf between her past (reading) self and the present: “I re-read Kipling’s ‘Kim’ tonight . . . And yet how strangely far away everything written before the war seems now. I felt as if I were perusing some classic as ancient as the Iliad.”18 The implication that there is “homesickness,” distance or text-inspired time travel inherent in the act of rereading – an act that then leads to new journaling activities – exposes the layered nature of her first period of Ontario reading.
After marriage and the births of her children, Montgomery’s reading seems to turn backwards, and thus so does her journaling. Patricia Meyer Spacks argues that, for many women writers, marriage serves as an “implied relative loss of self.”19 Flint expands this statement in differentiating the more formal, and traditionally male, autobiography from women’s private diaries. This loss of self is then accentuated in “those autobiographies which present childhood and adolescence by way of an act of reminiscence, and which attempt to assert or create the permanence and significance of some of the most private and transitory moments which have gone into the formation of their subjects’ sense of self.”20 Montgomery’s nostalgic turn reveals that her early reading was so deeply influential as to inspire entries in her journal decades later. Significantly, it is reading that inspires this nostalgia. She is devoted to text as a means of remembering and recording experience.
In a chapter titled “Woman’s Story and the Engenderings of Self-Representation,” Sidonie Smith contends that “autobiography simultaneously involves a realization that the adventure is informed continually by shifting considerations of the present moment.” A life writer may have to “rely on a trace of something from the past, a memory” that is itself a story. “As a result, autobiography becomes both the process and the product of assigning meaning to a series of experiences . . . by means of emphasis, juxtaposition, omission.”21 Montgomery’s use of published stories (whether novels, poetry, or otherwise) to emphasize, juxtapose, and even mask her life story gives multiple layers of autobiographical/textual meaning to these recollective reading experiences. Much of her reading allows her to (re)live and write in a space of near-constant homesickness and longing, even while there is plenty of “new” reading and casual allusion in the journal. As Natalie Forest points out in the next chapter, Montgomery’s fiction also undergoes a similarly gradual shift in focus as she engages with various manifestations of gothic and romantic aesthetics. Her records of that reading allow her to return to old places and times and, most remarkably, prolong the act of reading itself. In referencing works that she read years before, she strives to characterize herself and the changes she has undergone. Rereading the poems of Mrs Hemans in 1914, she admits “I love them yet,” despite how she has changed. Kipling’s Kim, which she “cared little for” when she first read it, she now finds “charming.”22 She uses these examples better to paint a picture of herself as an individual in her own journal. She is thus an individual who used to read, just as much as one who re reads. The journal as a space for her reading record allows her to prolong her reminiscing. When she rereads Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni in 1924, she claims that “I seemed to open a magic door and step at once into a world of enchantment.”23 In her extended discussion of the book’s effect on her childhood when she used to play at living out different parts of the book – another result of a bout of reading – Montgomery’s past and present selves converge.
Between 1919 and 1930, her nostalgia eventually gives way to more direct self-confrontation and self-construction through reading. She still spends time rereading favourite texts and responding to them, but she more consciously documents her present rather than past through the textual occupations of the moment. By 1921, she has finished copying her old journals, effectively “catching up” with her autobiographical self, perhaps influencing her active presence in the journals themselves and the connection to reading and literature that they record. In an eerie parallel to the nostalgic rereading she did previously, she writes, “Last night I copied a lot of my old diary. It is like living over the past again and I always come back to the present with a little sense of unreality. Some of those old entries hurt me too.” She goes on to record some details from the most recently copied entry, and she fills in the changes from that particular past moment to the one in which she writes. This time, her reading-inspired journaling is a reading of herself, her journal self, whom she faces just as she once faced the child-Montgomery. When she finishes recopying the Cavendish years of her journals, she reports that she has “come to ‘modern history’” in her life: “I have lived over those old years in this writing them over – relived them more vividly and intensely than I have ever done in reading them. I am a little sorry that I have finished with them.”24 Earlier, it was novels and a children’s magazine that brought her past rushing back; now it is a textual encounter with her previous (and previously constructed) self.
This middle period of Montgomery’s Ontario reading and journaling is thus shaped by her rereading of her past autobiographical work. In Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English, Helen Buss discusses what she calls “serial autobiography,” suggesting that it “seems to be a useful mode by which women overcome limitations in their identity patterns and facilitate their self growth.”25 Buss refers to women who write more than one autobiography or who write multiple volumes of autobiographical work over time, but Montgomery’s multiple revisions of her journals seem to denote the same impulse. She had already written The Alpine Path, and here she returns to “rewriting” her earlier journals. She is continually concerned with her autobiographical constructions, as she confronts and rewrites them frequently. This rewriting, predicated on both reading and writing her life, then influences other textual choices within it. If her earlier reading indicates her nostalgia for the pleasure of past reading, this middle period seems to be about confronting and (re)reading her journal voice, revealing a new “identity pattern” in the journal that is informed as much by literature and text as it is by her own past.
At the same time, many of her discussions of literature seem to take a more straightforward turn as she lets go of her intense nostalgia for Cavendish in favour of a more general literary wistfulness. She wonders about May Sinclair’s The Romantic (1920), comparing it to older works: “It is hard to see just why anybody should have written it or wanted to write it – unless it is to show the difference – the unfathomable gulf – between the heroines of the Victorian age and the ‘heroines’ of today.” About Walter Scott’s The Betrothed (1825), she declares, “It is one of his poorest novels. But I was struck by his immeasurable superiority to the novel-writers of today – even those who are acclaimed as the strongest and most virile.” And she compares another reread book to the novels of the present: “Today I wrote a poem, canned six jars of tomatoes, and re-read Trilby. One never hears Trilby mentioned now. It made the most tremendous sensation twenty years ago . . . Yet beside some of the heroines of today’s novels Trilby was chaste as ice and pure as snow.”26 Rather than recalling all the previous selves that read these texts, Montgomery’s new reading inspires her to discuss a larger picture of her literary tastes. In essence, these textual exercises depict a Montgomery who is no longer layering text in the same personal way as she did upon her arrival in Ontario; she is focusing more broadly on literature as a whole rather than on her specific memories of it.
This new autobiographical focus on her present connection with books and literature is also evident in her confession that books serve as important companions. While she makes such a declaration in regards to her childhood in Cavendish, where books were a “faithful old key to the gates of fairyland,”27 books now serve as important tools for communication and intellectual companionship. In 1922 she writes, “Today my reading Tennyson’s life filled me with a sort of envy of that intercourse with congenial souls that was always his – going and coming. That is so wholly lacking in my life. But if Ewan only keeps well I will be content – I will not complain of what is lacking. After all, books are wonderful companions.”28 Books have become companions that can serve as interlocutors in her journal and connect her to worlds and lives beyond Ontario in addition to serving as imaginative escape. While she cannot have the fulfilment that Tennyson’s companions provided him, she can use the space of her journal to respond to his texts (themselves her companions), speak to his ideas, and, in essence, construct herself as a woman within a greater intellectual community than her circles in Leaskdale, Norval, and even Toronto provide. This constant communication with and through her reading has been preserved in other ways as well.
The 180 books from Montgomery’s personal library, housed at the Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph, reveal fascinating additional evidence of her reading habits. Many of them are full of markings, underlines, punctuation marks and arrows, relevant (and sometimes irrelevant) clippings pasted inside their covers or inserted into the book, as Lesley Clement discusses in chapter 13 regarding Montgomery’s copy of G.B. Shaw’s Saint Joan. Some books contain greeting cards and notes sent to her over the years. Nearly all the books are inscribed with her signature (some with her maiden name only) and the date of their purchase or receipt. The clippings alone, like her scrapbooks, could be mined for even more of her reading tendencies, but it is the annotations and marginalia that are particularly significant here.29 In writing on and in these texts (effectively speaking to the texts themselves), Montgomery attempts to communicate with her reading and her reading self. Her copy of H.G. Wells’s The Outline of History (1919), received in 1922, is filled with annotations. In the chapter on “The Beginnings of Christianity,” Wells recounts the death of Jesus and records his last words: “My God! My God! Why hast thou forsaken me?” In the margin, Montgomery has written, “The most tragic utterance of all history.”30 Her volumes of poetry are filled with small underlines and arrows setting off lines and stanzas. Books she owned or received during the Cavendish period tend to be marked with pen and contain fewer comments than the books from the Leaskdale years and after, when she seems to have read with a pencil in hand and was more inclined to leave notes in order to speak to what she was reading. This interactive approach to reading, especially if cross-referenced with thoughts in the journals, suffuses her life writing with literary and autobiographical meaning.
One of the most evocative examples of this autobiographical meaning, of the new Montgomery of the journal who uses texts to inspire present self-creation, occurs after she reads An Autobiography (1920) by Margot Asquith, countess of Oxford and Asquith. After reading another woman’s autobiography, Montgomery very literally constructs herself in her journal. She begins by cataloguing her own appearance in great detail and then shifts focus to explore what she sees in her own general temperament. She ends with a catalogue of her faults and graces: “I will begin with myself physically. I am of medium height – about five feet five inches, but somehow usually impress people as being small – probably because I am delicate featured.” She describes her hands, her shoe size, and her “pretty, well-turned delicately made wrists.” She talks about her hair and her complexion, all the features of her face, and even comments that her “enemies accuse [her] of being ‘fond of dress.’” She describes her temperament and her humour, her tendency to “worry too much over certain things,” and her many contradictory opinions about when to speak and when to listen, when change is good and when conventions are needed. She quotes an Emily Brontë poem – “I’ll walk where my nature would be leading: / It vexes me to choose another guide” – before describing more details of her feelings.31 In this entry, she writes a character sketch of herself, an oddly specific creation that exists only in her journal.32 Her self-reconstruction on the page, inspired by reading another autobiographical text, is a wholly different kind of textual layering than the nostalgic rereading she relied on earlier. Her intellectual work and compulsion to read have, in her middle age, inspired her to create a franker portrait of her journal self. This period reveals a new, literature-inspired, autobiographically confident Montgomery who, although she continues to reread and reminisce, is compelled to assert her journal identity after finishing copying the old one. The reading of her youth is still powerfully present and meaningful to her, but she now devotes time to interacting with texts and meeting the autobiographical “I” she has created in Ontario.
The final period of Montgomery’s Ontario reading and journaling, from 1926 to 1942, is marked by her awareness of the passing of time and the ways in which her own age serves as a barrier to her former selves. Even her reading reflects her attempts to close off her previous connections with text. Flint suggests that autobiographers who include reading in their work betray their “literary self-awareness.”33 If this is true, then the final period of Montgomery’s reading is concerned with coming to terms with her life and her life of reading, with remembering her past and her vibrant relationship with literature, while fostering a new interaction with it. She still spends time rereading, taking perhaps more time with old books than with new ones, but she records a different sort of memory and connection to them. When she picks up Undine again in 1927, she asks, “What is there in books like this that never grows old or stale? Yet it is the simplest tale. And a fairy tale at that, which the modern world sneers at. But we all need some kind of fairy tale else we cannot live. What a strange belief that old persistent belief in the land of faery was. It is found everywhere in some guise and lasted for thousands of years – nay, lasts yet in some lands. Verily, there are moments when I cannot believe that it had no foundation whatever.”34 Her concern with fairyland and the literary/folkloric worlds it suggests seems to have broadened from a connection to the book to a more general sadness that the world can no longer support the romantic and imaginative world of Undine and tales like it. She also makes this assertion in The Alpine Path. As William Thompson argues in chapter 6, Montgomery “casts [her] childhood [and her former connection to ‘Fairyland’] into a particular light, unself-conscious and coloured by imaginative bliss.”35 Her continued emphasis on fairyland/tales as part of her/the past suggests that she can no longer sustain the sort of autobiographical and literary energy of the previous years. She is not inspired to write a lengthy memory of her first reading of Undine, nor an angry reflection on the present state of fairies; instead, she settles for a sort of literary resignation.
This late period of reading reflects a different kind of homesickness from her previous uses of the term. In 1929 she declares: “I have been re-reading The Sentimental Garden. The pictures in it drive me wild with envy – and homesickness. Homesickness for an old dream that will never be fulfilled. For that is the garden I have always wanted and can never have.”36 Literary homesickness is no longer a pining for her youthful days of reading or of Cavendish; it is not even for a lost literary age but for a time in which there was room for her dreams. Again, there is a sense that Montgomery has resigned herself to the failed potential of the new world in which she lives, a resignation that takes its toll on her psyche, as chapter 13 in this collection discusses more fully. When she rereads Washington Irving’s Alhambra in 1936, she again resigns herself to a loss. “An old book but still full of charm,” she writes. “It used to be one of my dreams, to see the Alhambra. It will never be fulfilled – but I can still dream of it.”37 She can still imagine the place, her opinion of it entirely informed by her continued rereading of Irving’s text, but in her journal she admits that the time for some of her dreams might just be past.
This later Montgomery, still writing about and inspired by text, is now prepared to accept the possibility that fairyland is not reachable, even in her beloved books. In 1937, she copies out two lines of one of Nathaniel Benson’s poems: “Life isn’t worth the lovely songs / The lying poets sing about it.” She observes, “Up to four years ago, in spite of everything, I would not have agreed with that. In youth ‘When I saw immortal visions / And knew a god’s delight’ I would have hooted at it,” but “now I have no hope and Benson is right. There are some things no one can bear – and that no one should have to bear.”38 Although all these examples read as bitter and reflective, they also suggest the assurance of someone who has a very different awareness of herself, her identity, and even her relationship with books and reading from her earlier self. These experiences with literature are not the reminiscent travels of someone who has just left home, nor are they only the studied responses of a lifelong reader. The journal entries now paint a particular portrait of a woman whose life, including her reading life, has changed drastically.
The final journal entry to include a discussion of books and reading, from 17 June 1939, recounts yet another bout of rereading. “I have been re-reading an old book tonight, The House with the Green Shutters [1901]. Such a sad book – such a bitter book . . . But it is very powerful and everything is etched bitingly – and it made me feel as dreary as itself.” She says that it “was written in the reaction to the Kailyard School. But the people in the Bonnie Brier Bush are nearer to real people as I have found them, after all for every ‘Mrs Thompson’ there are a dozen decent loyal souls. I know that. Only tonight I cannot feel it. I am putting here an old card Laura once sent me on an olden Christmas. I want to preserve it. I want to keep every bit of her I can. I came across it today in the Green Shutters where I had put it as a bookmark. It does not belong there.”39 In removing an old friend’s card from the book – the card being physical evidence that she once thought it belonged inside Green Shutters – Montgomery confronts a past self. In reassessing the text and spending time with her journal to record her present feelings, she confronts her present self. While the card does not belong in the book now, it is an artifact of Montgomery’s previous engagement with it. That she records this act while discussing the book in her journal reveals yet again the layers of memory and text and self present in her journal space. Here, she bridges some of the connections between her “real” self, the narrating “I” of her present journals, and the narrated “I” of whom she speaks.40 Later-life reading uncovers Montgomery’s new methods for incorporating text and identity.
Montgomery’s Ontario reading is thus an arc that both reflects and reveals other aspects of her life and its changes – an arc not unlike the aesthetic shift in Montgomery’s fiction addressed by Natalie Forest in the next chapter. Montgomery is a product of many textual and literary influences. As a result, her autobiographical tasks inspire their own bouts of reading and rereading, reflection and creation. Her struggles and successes lead to extended engagements with text, making her journal, with all its varied contents, even more central to her writing and sense of self. Her use of reading as a means of nostalgic escape and self-reflection is exemplified in her pronouncement that “an old book has something for me which no new book can ever have – for at every reading the memories and atmosphere of other readings come back and I am reading old years as well as an old book.”41 She desires to (re)read the “old years” along with her books. Her constant cycling through and recycling of texts and references, her rereading of her own journal, and her need to reread herself and her books make her journal an intricately textured site for a blending of text and memory. If she rereads her past in her books, she continues the cycle and prolongs the experience by writing about it in her various modes of autobiography. She interfiles text and life and writing in an individual and meaningful way. That one of Montgomery’s most powerful autobiographical tools is textual, not just experiential or cultural or historical, is a significant statement about her reading and autobiographical lives and how she records and presents them.
Margaret E. Turner contends that “we read [Montgomery] as she reads herself. Her journalizing, as she called it, is enabled, allowed, and caused by her repeated re-reading of her earlier records: her simultaneous roles of writer and reader are layered upon each other and are, perhaps, ultimately indistinguishable.”42 Turner refers to Montgomery’s tendency to write about rereading her old journals, but the idea that she is an expert at reading and layering different texts over one another is apt here. Reading is often understood as a way for women to enter discourse communities beyond their reach, and this is certainly true of Montgomery’s reading. However, her rereading, nostalgia, and simultaneous rereading of her own autobiographical work imply that she is also entering into discourse with past selves. As she confronts her autobiographical constructions and their textual lives, her reading and life-writing identities shift between 1911 and 1942. Her “reading autobiography” in the Ontario years is a unique, text-based performance of self that parallels, outlines, and reflects her layering of auto-, bio-, and -graphy: self, life, and writing.