L. M. Montgomery - A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917 (The L.M. Montgomery Library)

A Name for Herself

SELECTED WRITINGS, 18911917

Years before she published her internationally celebrated first novel, Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery (18741942) started contributing short works to periodicals across North America. While these works consisted primarily of poems and short stories, she also experimented with a wider range of forms, particularly during the early years of her career, at which point she tested out several authorial identities before settling on the professional moniker L.M. Montgomery.

A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 18911917 is the first in a series of volumes collecting Montgomerys extensive contributions to periodicals. Leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre discusses these so-called miscellaneous pieces in relation to the works of English-speaking women writers who preceded her and the strategies they used to succeed, including the decision to publish under gender-neutral signatures. Among the highlights of the volume are Montgomerys contributions to student periodicals, a weekly newspaper column entitled Around the Table, a long-lost story narrated first by a woman trapped in an unhappy marriage and then by the man she wishes she had married instead, and a new edition of her 1917 celebrity memoir, The Alpine Path. Drawing fascinating links to Montgomerys life writing, career, and fiction, this volume will offer scholars and readers alike an intriguing new look at the work of Canadas most enduringly popular author.

(THE L.M. MONTGOMERY LIBRARY)

BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, is director of L.M. Montgomery Online. His publications include an edition of Montgomerys 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.

THE L.M. MONTGOMERY LIBRARY

Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre

A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 18911917
A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 18941921

L.M. MONTGOMERY

SELECTED WRITINGS, 18911917

UNIVERSITY OF TORONTO PRESS

Toronto Buffalo London

University of Toronto Press 2018

Toronto Buffalo London

www.utorontopress.com

Printed in Canada

ISBN 978-1-4875-0403-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2308-4 (paper)

Printed on acid-free, 100% post-consumer recycled paper
with vegetable-based inks.

L.M. Montgomery is a trademark of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc.
Anne of Green Gables and other indicia of Anne are trademarks of
the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc.

LIBRARY AND ARCHIVES CANADA CATALOGUING IN PUBLICATION

Montgomery, L.M. (Lucy Maud), 18741942
[Works. Selections]
A name for herself : selected writings, 18911917 / L.M. Montgomery;
edited by Benjamin Lefebvre.

(The L.M. Montgomery library; 1)

Includes bibliographical references and index.
ISBN 978-1-4875-0403-8 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-2308-4 (paper)

I. Lefebvre, Benjamin, 1977, editor. II. Title.
III. Series: L.M. Montgomery Library; 1

PS8526.O55A6 2018 C813.52 C2018-902580-8

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.

University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial assistance to its publishing program of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario.

Which Has the Most Patience under the Ordinary Cares
and Trials of Life Man or Woman?

FIGURES

TABLES

As with all large-scale editorial projects, this one has incurred many debts. I am grateful to Vanessa Brown, Cecily Devereux, Jason Dickson, Kelly Norah Drukker, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Melanie J. Fishbane, Irene Gammel, Carole Gerson, Caroline E. Jones, Katja Lee, Jennifer H. Litster, Andrea McKenzie, Laura M. Robinson, Mary Henley Rubio, Kate Sutherland, Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, Emily Woster, and Lorraine York for their encouragement and conversation over several years of research. I am equally grateful to E. Holly Pike, who generously provided me with digital files containing the majority of Montgomerys Around the Table columns from the pages of the Halifax Daily Echo. This volume builds on the pioneering research of the late Francis W.P. Bolger and the late Rea Wilmshurst, which I also gratefully acknowledge.

For research and editorial help, I am grateful to Donna J. Campbell, Mary Beth Cavert, Carolyn Strom Collins, Katharine MacDonald, Carrie Martens, Rachel McMillan, Melissa Myers, Tamara Shantz, Naava Smolash, Meg Taylor, and Janice Weaver. I am also grateful to colleagues at several institutions: Kathryn Harvey, Heather Callaghan, Ashley Shifflett McBrayne, and Darlene Wiltsie, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library; Simon Lloyd, University of Prince Edward Island Library; Kathleen Mackinnon and Paige Matthie, Confederation Centre Art Gallery; Karen Smith, Dalhousie University Library; the interlibrary loan staff at Wilfrid Laurier University Library; and the staff at Library and Archives Canada, where I did research on some of the items in this book in 2008, 2014, and 2015. I would also like to thank Mark Thompson, Frances Mundy, Ani Deyirmenjian, Sandra Friesen, Val Cooke, and their colleagues at University of Toronto Press for their expertise and sound advice at all stages of this books development and production, as well as two anonymous assessors who read this book in manuscript and provided generous and astute feedback. I gratefully acknowledge travel funding in the form of the Marie Tremaine Fellowship, awarded by the Bibliographical Society of Canada / La Socit bibliographique du Canada in 2013. Once again, special thanks are to members of my family, particularly my mother, Claire Pelland Lefebvre, and my partner, Jacob Letkemann.

Finally, I would like to acknowledge my debt to the late Christy Woster (19552016), to whose memory I dedicate this book. Christy was an indefatigable researcher whose generosity with her knowledge and her materials has enriched the study of Montgomerys works immeasurably. She is missed by so many.

B.L.

L.M. Montgomery is now widely recognized as a major twentieth-century author, one whose bestselling books remain hugely popular and influential all over the world more than three-quarters of a century after her death. Born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in 1874, into a family whose ancestors had immigrated to Canada from Scotland and England, she was raised in nearby Cavendish by her maternal grandparents following the death of her mother and spent a year during her adolescence with her father and his new family in Saskatchewan. Raised in a household that distrusted novels but prized poetry and oral storytelling, she began to write during childhood, although few examples of her juvenilia survive. She received a teaching certificate from Prince of Wales College (Charlottetown) and, after one year of teaching school, took undergraduate courses in English literature for a year at Dalhousie University (Halifax), but she did not have the financial resources to complete her degree. During this time, she began publishing essays, short fiction, and poems in North American periodicals. In 1898, after two more years of teaching school, she returned to Cavendish to take care of her widowed grandmother and to write full-time, soon earning more from her pen than she had teaching school. With the exception of a nine-month stint on the staff of the