1 Montgomery eventually sold some five hundred short stories in Canada and the United States. For collections of Montgomery’s short stories, see The Doctor’s Sweetheart and Other Stories, ed. McLay; and especially the series of volumes being edited by Rea Wilmshurst and published by McClelland and Stewart in Toronto: Akin to Anne (1988), Along the Shore (1989), Among the Shadows (1990).
2 Montgomery’s published journals do not include any mention of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, but there are certainly a remarkable number of similarities between Anne of Green Gables and Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm. See Classen 42–50. But there is also another form of proof for Montgomery’s having read the novel. Montgomery sometimes copied into her journals – and from there into her letters – favourite passages from books she was reading or had read. In a letter to G.B. MacMillan, written on 3 December 1905, Montgomery quotes from Emerson: ‘In the actual – this painful kingdom of time and chance – are Care, Canker and Sorrow: with thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity – the rose of joy; round it all the Muses sing’ (Letters 16). It just so happens that Rebecca hears this very same passage (223), worded exactly this way, though the words ‘Ideal’ and ‘Joy’ are capitalized. What makes this quotation interesting is that in Wiggin and in Montgomery we are reading identical misquotations of the original lines of Emerson. In Irwin Edwin’s edition of Emerson, we find this wording: ‘It is strange how painful is the actual world – the painful kingdom of time and place. There dwells care and canker and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing’ (123). In the Slater, Ferguson, and Carr edition, we find this version: ‘In the actual world – the painful kingdom of time and place – dwell care, and canker, and fear. With thought, with the ideal, is immortal hilarity, the rose of joy. Round it all the muses sing’ (100). It is fair, I believe, to assume that Montgomery had been reminded of Emerson by her reading of Rebecca of Sunny brook Farm and that Miss Maxwell’s misquotation to Rebecca is what came to Montgomery’s mind (and pen) when she was writing to MacMillan.
3 Several sources could have inspired Montgomery’s use of ‘kindred spirit’: perhaps she was inspired by the Bible’s frequent use of ‘kindred’ and ‘kindreds’; or by Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’ – ‘If chance, by lonely contemplation led, / Some kindred spirit shall inquire thy fate,’ (95–6); perhaps by Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm: the old phoney Bonaparte goes to the German’s cabin ‘for an hour of brotherly intercourse with a kindred spirit’ (68); but the most likely immediate prompter for the phrase would have been Elizabeth von Arnim’s Elizabeth and Her German Garden, which Montgomery read (and delighted in) in May 1905 (she began writing Anne of Green Gables in June of 1905): ‘and I go from room to room gazing at the sweetness, and the windows are all flung open so as to join the scent within to the scent without; and the servants gradually discover that there is no party, and wonder why the house should be filled with flowers for one woman by herself, and I long more and more for a kindred spirit – it seems so greedy to have so much loveliness to oneself – but kindred spirits are so very, very rare’ (42).
4 Sometimes, as with Rilla of Ingleside or A Tangled Web, a book may have more than one heroine.
5 Annis Pratt notes: ‘Women’s fiction reflects an experience radically different from men’s because our drive towards growth as persons is thwarted by our society’s prescriptions concerning gender’ (6).
6 It is worth noting that Montgomery frequently uses other children or adults as foils for the heroine and for the heroine’s conception(s) of romance.
7 Perhaps in assessing Montgomery’s heroines and style we should keep in mind what she said in 1899 about her favourite reading: ‘I like realistic and philosophical novels in spells, but for pure, joyous, undiluted delight give me romance. I always revelled in fairy tales’ (Journals 1: 235).
8 In the following chapters, all references to the novels will be given, in parentheses, in the text, using some initials of the title where there is any danger of confusion about which novel is cited. The editions I follow are listed in ‘Works Cited.’
9 Åhmansson, vol. 1. This thesis appeared after I had completed my study on Montgomery. It contains many fascinating points about correspondences between Mont gomery’s life and the writing in Anne of Green Gables and Anne’s House of Dreams. Åhmansson’s section ‘Lady Anne Cordelia Elaine Shirley and the Elusive World of Romance’ (101–14) is of particular interest.
1 For a recent compilation of materials on Anne of Green Gables, see Garner and Harker.
2 It is easy to see from looking at the manuscript for the novel (owned by the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island) that Montgomery wrote the opening with ease and speed. There are only slight local adjustments to this lengthy sentence, and later additions of two phrases (CM 67.5.1).
3 Montgomery used Tennyson’s poem ‘Lancelot and Elaine’ as a central device in a 1901 short story about a suicide, “The Waking of Helen’ (Along the Shore 243–53).
4 Note that, in explaining the appeal of the ‘green-world archetype,’ Annis Pratt says, ‘nature for the young hero remains a refuge throughout life’ (17).
5 For helpful insights on the powers of literary allusion, see the article by Ben-Porat, and also the one by Perri.
6 Annis Pratt says of women: ‘Our quests for being are thwarted on every side by what we are told to be and to do, which is different from what men are told to be and to do: when we seek an identity based on human personhood rather than on gender, we stumble about in a landscape whose signposts indicate retreats from, rather than ways to, adulthood’ (6).
7 For a comparison of Montgomery with some other leading writers from whom she learned, see MacLulich, ‘L.M. Montgomery and the Literary Heroine.’
8 See chapter six of Janice Radway’s Reading the Romance (186–208). At the end of the chapter we find this chilling reminder of closure: ‘even as the narrative conveys its overt message that all women are different and their destinies fundamentally open, the romance also reveals that such differences are illusory and short-lived because they are submerged or sacrificed inevitably to the demands of that necessary and always identical romantic ending’ (208).
1 This use of the child is one of the eight strategies Mary Rubio also describes in the unpublished speech I refer to in the introduction of this study.
2 As Rea Wilmshurst tells us (21), Montgomery is using ‘the vision and the faculty divine’ from Wordsworth’s The Excursion, 1.78, and also ‘Apparelled in celestial light’ from stanza one of ‘Ode: Intimations of Immortality.’
3 Wilmshurst (20) identifies ‘east o’ the sun, west o’ the moon’ from Norse fairy tale, but she is not, nor am I, able to identify the quotation. In the rest of the passage, we surely hear Emerson’s ‘rose of joy,’ from his essay ‘Love,’ and numerous biblical echoes in ‘market place’ and the ‘priceless lore.’ The phraseology itself suggests biblical paraphrase.
4 Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston give a positive assessment of the several plot lines of Anne of Avonlea. See their Afterword (277–82).
5 Lavendar Lewis tells Anne: ‘I don’t care what people think about me if they don’t let me see it’ (250); she plays with Shakespeare’s use of ‘great’ and ‘greatness’ (Wilmshurst notes [21] that the passage is from Twelfth Night, II.v.) when she says ‘Some are born old maids, some achieve old maidenhood, and some have old maidenhood thrust upon them’ (265); she tells the romantic Anne that a broken heart is very like a toothache (267); she tells Charlotta the Fourth, alluding to Micah 4:4, that ‘I never want to stray from my own vine and fig-tree again’ (327).
6 The ‘gay knight riding down’ here is probably the Lancelot of ‘The Lady of Shalott’ as much as the one from ‘Lancelot and Elaine.’ Notice in part three of the short poem the emphasis on Lancelot’s riding down to Camelot. Here are a few lines: ‘The gemmy bridle glittered free, / Like to some branch of stars we see / Hung in the golden Galaxy. / The bridle bells rang merrily / As he rode down to Camelot’ (82–6).
1 She says: ‘My forte is in writing humor. Only childhood and elderly people can be treated humorously in books. Young women in the bloom of youth and romance should be sacred from humor’ (Journals 2: 133).
2 Philippa borrows from hymns, the Bible, Shakespeare, Ben Jonson, Burns, Dickens, Tom Taylor, and Henri Benjamin Constant (Wilmshurst 22–6).
3 The piece reads like a short story and, since Mrs Skinner calls herself ‘Amelia’ in one place and ‘Sarah’ in another, I suspect that Montgomery had written this piece earlier and had forgotten to change the name throughout when she was copying from the short story to the manuscript for the novel.
4 The speaker in the poem sets apart the wonderful days of love from the rest of his lament, with these lines: ‘Love took up the glass of Time, and turned it in his glowing hands; / Every moment, lightly shaken, ran itself in golden sands’ (31–2).
1 A recent edition of Montgomery’s poetry offers a better selection, and arrangement, of poems: The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, ed. Ferns and McCabe.
2 The short story, where parts of this description and numerous other passages from the novel also appear, was published in February 1917 in Canadian Magazine under the title ‘Abel and His Great Adventure,’ and republished in 1979 in Catherine McLay’s edited collection of Montgomery short stories, The Doctor’s Sweetheart and Other Stories (124–39). I do not know which was written first, the novel or the story, but from evidence in the manuscript, I would guess that the story was written first and then borrowed from for the novel. In the short story old Abel is talking to a schoolmaster, whom he refers to as ‘master.’ At one point he tells him the story about thoughtless city people adopting cats for the summer and then leaving them to starve. Old Abel says: ‘Master, I cried. Then I swore’ (Doctor’s 129). In the novel, Captain Jim is telling exactly the same story to Anne and Gilbert, and when he gets to this part, he says: ‘Master, I cried. Then I swore’ (AHD 74). The manuscript for the novel (CM 67.5.2: 139) shows a page of flawlessly written script with the word ‘Master’ in it. Given Montgomery’s habit of copying from other pieces into the actual manuscript of a novel, and given that the word ‘master’ really makes no sense with Gilbert (much less Anne), it is fair to guess that the short story came first. Why Montgomery would publish this short story – in Canada – when her novel was in the works is a mystery. At any rate, in the short story we find this somewhat shorter version of the description quoted in my text: ‘The early sunset glow of rose and flame had faded out of the sky; the water was silvery and mirror-like; dim sails drifted along by the darkening shore. A bell was ringing in a small Catholic chapel across the harbour. Mellowly and dreamily sweet the chime floated through the dusk, blent with the moan of the sea. The great revolving light at the channel trembled and flashed against the opal sky and far out, beyond the golden sand-dunes of the bar, was the crinkled gray ribbon of a passing steamer’s smoke’ (Doctor’s 126). The passage I have quoted from the novel continues: ‘A few dim sails drifted along the darkening, fir-clad harbour shores. A bell was ringing from the tower of a little white church on the far side; mellowly and dreamily sweet, the chime floated across the water blent with the moan of the sea. The great revolving light on the cliff at the channel flashed warm and golden against the clear northern sky, a trembling, quivering star of good hope. Far out along the horizon was the crinkled gray ribbon of a passing steamer’s smoke’ (AHD 29–30). It is interesting to see what Montgomery edited as she copied.
3 ‘Will all great Neptune’s ocean wash this blood / Clean from my hand? No, this my hand will rather / The multitudinous seas incarnadine, / Making the green one red (Macbeth II. ii.59–62). Jerry Rubio first pointed out this echo to me after I had delivered a talk on Anne’s House of Dreams in 1985.
4 Montgomery herself said (Journals 2: 222) that she modelled Captain Jim on the character in her own early short story ‘The Life-Book of Uncle Jesse,’ first published in Housekeeping in 1909. It has been reprinted in Along the Shore 33–47.
5 For a fiery contemporary demand for women’s suffrage, see Nellie McClung’s, In Times Like These. See also Prentice et al. 174–88. It is interesting to note that Montgomery had the vote because of the service of her half-brother, Carl (Journals 2: 230).
1 For an interesting assessment of the importance of gossip in lives and literature, see Patricia Meyer Spacks’s, Gossip.
2 For a fascinating picture of Canadian women before and during the war, see Prentice et al. 107–211.
3 For a helpful summary of the differences in expectations for boys and girls, men and women, that shape our conceptions of romance, see Kreps’s chapter ‘The Prince’ 14–38.
4 Tennyson’s popular ‘The Lady of Shalott’ was well known to Montgomery’s contemporaries. In it the Lady weaves at a magic loom until Lancelot comes and breaks the spell. She becomes dissatisfied with her life of dreams and shadows and eventually dies for love. The stanza Montgomery probably echoes here describes the Lady’s dawning discontent:
But in her web she still delights
To weave the mirror’s magic sights,
For often through the silent nights
A funeral, with plumes and lights
And music, went to Camelot:
Or when the moon was overhead,
Came two young lovers lately wed;
‘I am half sick of shadows,’ said
The Lady of Shalott (64–72)
5 If we look at the manuscript for the novel (CM 78.5.2), we find that Montgomery takes considerable pains with parts of their story. Some of Montgomery’s early trial paragraphs are preserved at the back of the manuscript, on the reverse side of the typescript for Anne of the Island. We find among these notes several passages from the Rosemary-John romance, among them (ms notes 29), the interesting description of the trees at night and the surprise of rejuvenation that life holds for us (RV 135–6).
1 Parts of this chapter and the chapter on Jane of Lantern Hill were from my lecture ‘L.M. Montgomery: The Other Heroines.’
2 Montgomery herself wrote a poem entitled “The Piper’ because so many people asked her about Walter’s poem. Her poem was published posthumously in Saturday Night on 2 May 1942. See Ferns, 39.
1 Montgomery refers to this same passage of Tennyson’s Idylls in one of her early letters (1 Apr. 1907) to MacMillan discussing love. She says: ‘When I was a schoolgirl I very much admired and believed a line in his poem “Lancelot and Guinevere.” “We needs must love the highest when we see it.” I don’t believe it now. It is not true. We must admire the highest but love is an entirely different matter and is quite as likely to leave the best and go to the worst’ (Letters 30).
1 As T.D. MacLulich says, ‘In building the Emily series around Emily’s artistic development, Montgomery drew on virtually all of her thoughts about writers and writing, so that Emily’s story contains the most complete exposition she ever provided of her own ideas about literature’ (‘L.M. Montgomery’s Portraits’ 468).
2 See especially these passages: Journals 1: 208–28, 240–41, 255, 294, 325; 2: 68, 101, 287–306, 369–70.
3 Alice Munro says that Dean Priest ‘may be the nearest that L.M. Montgomery ever got to creating a plausible lover.’ She believes that, ‘In Jarback’s scenes with Emily, there is from the beginning … a true sexual tension’ (358, 359).
4 Confederation Centre CM 67.5.8: 357 (renumbered in red ink as 337)
1 One of Montgomery’s overdone descriptions of a sunset is found in an early story ‘A Strayed Allegiance,’ originally published in 1897 and reproduced in Along the Shore 221–40. The offending description (228–9) is also noted by Wilmshurst in her introduction (8).
2 A small comic echo is even found between the dissimilar serving women of the two novels. Ellen Greene tells Emily, ‘I’ve always threaped at your father to send you to school’ (ENM 22); Hannah tells Jane that the Rivers sisters ‘never fell out nor “threaped”’ (Brontë 302). Readers may also want to look at Montgomery’s hectic Gothic short story ‘The Red Room,’ published in 1898 and found now in Among the Shadows (181–98).
1 Montgomery describes in her journal the surprise and jealousy with which her success was greeted. She was invited to meet Earl Grey, governor general of Canada, in September of 1910. See Journals 2: 10–17.
2 P.K. Page quotes from Emily Climbs to comment on Montgomery. Emily says: ‘I shall always end my stories happily. I don’t care whether it’s “true to life” or not. It’s true to life as it should be and that’s a better truth than the other.’ Page says: ‘It may even be a truer truth. And I think L.M. Montgomery knew it’ (Afterword, 241–2).
1 The description of Emily’s inspiration echoes the description of Waldo’s final understanding of Universal Unity and rest in The Story of an African Farm. The narrator describes Waldo’s feelings (a passage I quote at greater length later in this chapter): ‘Beauty is God’s wine, with which he recompenses the souls that love Him; He makes them drunk’ (Schreiner 285).
2 Mary Rubio suggests that Montgomery ‘hates to marry Emily off to anyone’ and turns the novel’s ending into farce (‘Canada’s’ 5).
3 Elizabeth Barrett Browning was ‘annoyed’ by connections made between Aurora Leigh and Jane Eyre, but the connections have continued to be made (Forster 316).
4 After describing what he calls the Cinderella formula and then the Pamela formula, John G. Cawelti says: ‘Another more contemporary formula is that of the career girl who rejects love in favor of wealth or fame, only to discover that love alone is fully satisfying’ (42).
5 In her wholehearted endorsement of Carpenter’s view of idealized realism, perhaps Montgomery forgot that she had already used the pinewoods-pigsty contrast in the words of Emily in Emily Climbs. Emily is comparing three books that Dean has lent her: ‘One was like a rose garden – very pleasant, but just a little too sweet. And one was like a pine wood on a mountain – full of balsam and tang – I loved it, and yet it filled me with a sort of despair. It was written so beautifully – I can never write like that, I feel sure. And one – it was just like a pig-sty. Dean gave me that one by mistake. He was very angry with himself when he found it out – angry and distressed’ (EC 29).
6 Montgomery’s own assessment of contemporary literature and realism is recorded in a letter to MacMillan (10 Feb. 1929) in which she remarks on his gift-book to her,The Key above the Door. ‘There is a wonderful freshness as of wind in heathery fields about it quite out of the common rut of modern fiction with its reeking atmospheres of brothel and latrine’ (Letters 138).
1 Mollie Gillen notes that with the Depression and her own thoughts, the 1930s were gloomy for Montgomery: ‘Her own generation had seen wrenched from its pedestal and hurled to ruins everything that had been believed immovable’ (168).
2 The episode with Mrs Merridew (MP 104–11) is distressing to read. Montgomery’s unexamined weight prejudice, probably as common then as now, makes the intended humour sound cruel to the ear attuned to this prejudice.
3 The hills with ‘their arms around each other’ is reminiscent of the wonderful trance-scene description in Tennyson’s In Memoriam, where ‘the trees / Laid their dark arms about the field’ (95.15–16, 51–2).
4 The original for Silver Bush is the Campbell homestead, now called Silver Bush, in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island. It not only still stands, but also houses the Anne of Green Gables Museum and is open to visitors during the summer and fall. It is from Silver Bush that the L.M. Montgomery newsletter, Kindred Spirits of P.E.I., is published four times a year (first started in spring 1990).
1 It is interesting to find in Montgomery’s scrapbooks, owned by the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, P.E.I., some of the original magazine and newspaper clippings from which Montgomery later drew stories for The Story Girl and The Golden Road. In the scrapbook for 1890–1900 (CM 67.5.15), for example, we find a three-column story by Lauron Hooper called ‘When Kissing Came into the World,’ clearly the original for Sara Stanley’s ‘How Kissing was Discovered’ (SG 1 85–90).
2 For months after a Canadian journalist noted the similarities between The Blue Castle and The Ladies of Missalonghi, the controversy and speculation about possible borrowing by McCullough from Montgomery enlivened news in Canada, Britain, and Australia. McCullough said that she had read The Blue Castle and admitted that there were echoes of it in her book. The controversy died down, but The Blue Castle came back into print and remains there.
3 It is interesting to note that very little is added or changed in the manuscript for this Chidley Corners experience (CM 67.5.9: 218).
4 Many of the descriptive passages were added later to the manuscript. For example, at the beginning of chapter thirty-one, dealing with Valancy’s and Barney’s autumn and winter on Mistawis, we find almost continuous description. By comparing the manuscript and the printed text, we find that of the (approximately) 930 words of the first twelve printed paragraphs, 545 words were added in revisions (CM 67.5.9: 341). (The numbering of the manuscript at this point becomes chaotic, and much of the lyrical chapter thirty-one is heavily marked in red ink.)
5 The whole story of Big Sam and Little Sam is irksome, but their squabble over a naked statue will offend many readers of the 1990s. Big Sam thinks the statue is obscene and Little Sam keeps it, even though Big Sam moves out. As a conciliatory move, Little Sam finally paints it bronze. Big Sam’s comments are the final words of the novel: ‘“Then you can scrape it off again,” said Big Sam firmly. “Think I’m going to have an unclothed nigger sitting up there? If I’ve gotter be looking at a naked woman day in and day out, I want a white one for decency’s sake”’ (TW 324).