Andrea McKenzie - L.M. Montgomery and War

L.M. MONTGOMERY AND WAR

L.M. MONTGOMERY AND WAR

Edited by
Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell

McGill-Queens University Press

Montreal & Kingston London Chicago

McGill-Queens University Press 2017

ISBN 978-0-7735-4980-7 (cloth)

ISBN 978-0-7735-4981-4 (paper)

ISBN 978-0-7735-4982-1 (ePDF)

ISBN 978-0-7735-4983-8 (ePUB)

Legal deposit second quarter 2017

Bibliothque nationale du Qubec

Printed in Canada on acid-free paper

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian 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. Funding was also received from the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island, through a SSHRC Connection grant.

McGill-Queens University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Canada Book Fund for our publishing activities.

Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

L.M. Montgomery and war / edited by Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

Issued in print and electronic formats.

ISBN 978-0-7735-4980-7 (cloth). ISBN 978-0-7735-4981-4 (paper). ISBN 978-0-7735-4982-1 (ePDF). ISBN 978-0-7735-4983-8 (ePUB)

1. Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud), 18741942 Criticism and interpretation. 2. War and literature Canada. I. McKenzie, Andrea, author, editor II. Ledwell, Jane, 1972, editor

PS8526.055Z757 2017C813'.52

C2016-907733-0

C2016-907734-9

Contents

ANDREA MCKENZIE AND JANE LEDWELL

JONATHAN F. VANCE

IRENE GAMMEL

E. HOLLY PIKE

SUSAN FISHER

LAURA M. ROBINSON

SARAH GLASSFORD

MAUREEN O. GALLAGHER

CAROLINE E. JONES

ANDREA MCKENZIE

ELIZABETH EPPERLY

Figures

Acknowledgments

We are grateful to the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for assisting with the publication of this book through a Connections grant. We are equally grateful to York University and the University of Prince Edward Island for additional funding for research assistants. We would also like to thank the L.M. Montgomery Institute for funding a Visiting Scholarship for 201315, which greatly aided in our collaboration.

The journey through L.M. Montgomerys war has been challenging. We would like to thank the L.M. Montgomery Institute for its whole-hearted support of our work, including the chairs of the LMMI Committee, Mark Leggott and Philip Smith, LMMI founder Elizabeth Epperly, who encouraged us throughout the process, 2014 conference co-chair Benjamin Lefebvre, and conference coordinator Elizabeth DeBlois. We are also grateful to the Heirs of L.M. Montgomery and to their representative, Sally Keefe Cohen, for their support. The staff of the Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island was always helpful, including Simon Lloyd in Special Collections and Pauline MacPherson, administrator extraordinaire. Our research assistants, Anastasiya Ivanova at York University and Mark John Cousins at the University of Prince Edward Island, performed excellent work, and we are grateful for their dedication.

Our colleagues in the L.M. Montgomery world have contributed greatly to the final work. We would like to thank the contributors to this volume for their collaboration. Among other colleagues, we are grateful to Benjamin Lefebvre for contributing his outstanding knowledge of Montgomerys works, scholarship, and resources; Carolyn Strom Collins for her expertise on Montgomerys publications during the war; and Sarah Glassford for deepening our knowledge of Montgomerys war work as a ministers wife and head of womens organizations.

This book would not have come to fruition without acquisitions editor Mark Abley at McGill-Queens University Press, whose expertise helped at every stage of the process. We are grateful to the competent and professional team at the press.

In the personal world, Andrea would like to thank her partner in all things, Ro Sheffe, for his constant, unflagging support; he, too, has journeyed through the war and lived to tell the tale. And thanks, too, to her mom, who has quietly contributed many books to Andreas collection of L.M. Montgomerys early editions across the decades, and whose ideas are invariably fruitful.

Jane would like to thank her partner, Stephen B. MacInnis, and their children, Anna and Sam, for their patience. She is grateful to her colleagues at the PEI Advisory Council on the Status of Women and to friends at the University of Prince Edward Island, particularly to Montgomery co-conspirator Jean Mitchell, and to Laurie Brinklow and Joan Sinclair, colleagues at Island Studies Press, for deepening understanding of island(s) history and culture.

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon, The Story Girl, and Blue Castle are trademarks of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc. Anne of Green Gables and other indicia of Anne are trademarks and/or Canadian official marks of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc.

L.M. MONTGOMERY AND WAR

Introduction

Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell

In March 1885, when Mtis under Louis Riel clashed with the North-West Mounted Police and volunteer militia in the territory that would become Saskatchewan, nine of the volunteer soldiers from the nearby town of Prince Albert were killed.

The young girl was L.M. Montgomery, and the North-West Resistance, organized to try to obtain rights for the Mtis people from the Canadian government, was her first encounter with war and conflict. At eleven years of age, Montgomery experienced the suspense of not knowing whether her soldier father, Hugh John Montgomery, was alive or dead in battle. Many years later she would parlay that emotion into her best-known novel about war, Rilla of Ingleside, in which its teenaged heroine, Rilla Blythe, her mother, Anne Shirley Blythe, and other characters suffer the agony of suspense about the fate of family members and friends fighting overseas during the First World War.

Although Montgomery is usually linked with the First World War through her published writing, she experienced four major conflicts during her lifetime. Born in 1874, she lived during the North-West Resistance (1885), the South African War (18991902), the First World

In 1899, the twenty-five-year-old Montgomery regarded the South African War, then known as the Boer War, very differently from the North-West Resistance. She was spared the personal suspense she suffered throughout the resistance, because no one close to her was involved. She wrote about the South African War as stirring and exciting and tingling, causing red-hot excitement across Canada, even in this quiet little Island thousands of miles from the seat of war.

But the South African War was a distant combat that affected Canada only because it sent its first contingents overseas to fight, including its first twelve military nurses (one of them from Prince Edward Island). Montgomerys change in perspective was not caused by grief at relatives or friends being killed, but by maturity and motherhood. The years between 1899 and 1914 saw great changes in Montgomerys circumstances. By 1914, war was no longer the exciting adventure that it was to Brittain, but a conflict that would bring heartbreak, death, and change, especially to the women who watched their sons, brothers, fathers, and sweethearts go overseas.