As an extremely popular writer, Montgomery captures and reflects expectations and dreams of her culture – especially those of girls and women. Montgomery’s novels are really fictional biographies, stories that show the patterns of many women’s lives, then and now. When we recognize how the boundaries of the novel and of biography are similar, we can understand the importance of the patterns Montgomery repeated. Carolyn Heilbrun, in Writing a Woman’s Life, says: ‘Roland Barthes has called biography “a novel that dare not speak its name,” and the understanding that biographies are fictions, constructions by the biographer of the story she or he had to tell, has become clear’ (28). The story Montgomery had to tell, in a variety of forms in her fictional biographies, involves romance. Consciously and unconsciously using the life scripts available to her, those formed by her reading and by her surrounding culture, Montgomery shows us how respectable but also imaginative and strong girls and women depart from and ultimately conform to cultural expectations.
Each fictional biography shows how the heroine challenges social boundaries, liberating us by the glimmer of possibilities, and then how each heroine conforms to role and gender prescriptions, usually in marriage or in the romantic disposition to courtship and to marriage. Montgomery’s liberating contribution to the conventional romance story – having the friend become the lover – is as far as she dared/chose openly to stretch the pattern of love relationships between men and women. And yet, subtly, insistently, another picture emerges. We find in reading and rereading Montgomery’s fictional biographies that the lasting romance is often between a conscious, socially responsible self and nature/beauty/home/honour, and not just between a woman and a man. Perhaps in privileging the individual’s perception of beauty and belonging, Montgomery meant to reveal a special freedom within the predictable life patterns she (re)created for her heroines. Perhaps Montgomery believed that conscious romance with nature/beauty/home/honour could transform the culturally conforming (auto)biography into a story of individual, private liberation. Perhaps she offered her readers forms of freedom she herself had struggled to achieve.
In Montgomery’s many positive forms of romance, the self has an inner, confident voice as well as public articulation; the conscious self honours faith and trust and bravery; the belonging self enjoys a private home and a sense of community; beauty is all around to the loving ‘eye’ and kindred spirit; love is a partnership where friends share values and vision. Montgomery’s heroines find that romance, like the fragrance of sweet-grass on the sand hills, offers them imaginative refreshment on their various journeys. As readers of the heroines, perhaps we can separate Montgomery’s confinements by genre and expectations from her liberations of imagination and perception to see how romance is, ultimately, the power we give to the visions we endorse. We may not accept all the forms of romance that the heroines endure or explore, but we may understand from examining them how Montgomery has encouraged generations of readers to enjoy a love affair with the life she describes.