I particularly enjoyed “My Pen Shall Heal, Not Hurt”: Writing as Therapy in Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted by Melanie J. Fishbane (who is writing a YA novel about Montgomery’s life)!, Old Years and Old Books: Montgomery’s Ontario Reading and Self-Fashioning by Emily Woster, and Advocating for Authors and Battling Critics in Toronto: Montgomery and the Canadian Authors Association by Kate Sutherland.
I think this bit from Woster’s essay is particularly interesting:
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 . . . 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. (169)
I have recently gotten back into using my Kobo, which I love dearly for many reasons, not least of which convenience. But it does make me a little sad that I will probably never have a collection like this to leave behind.
Very interesting, I thought, were a couple passages written by Kate Macdonald Butler, Montgomery’s granddaughter, in her essay Dear Grandmother Maud on the Road to Heaven:
I hope you will be proud that your hidden talent as a photographer has also been acknowledged publicly with your keen eye for your subjects, be they places of natural beauty, people, or your beloved pets. In the 1890s, you took many snaps (as you called them) and were experimenting with developing glass-plate negatives and films. I think of the fun you might have had with a digital camera and the ability to upload your personal pictures onto a social networking site, a phenomenon that has taken over the world now. So much of what you wrote in your journals was about the daily happenings of your life, your family, and your trips to Prince Edward Island, and I truly can envisage that you would have gotten a kick out of electronic media, Facebook, Instagram, and today’s challenging multi-media world. Of course, it is so difficult to presume to know your inner thoughts...someone who kept so much of her interior life private. Maybe you would have disapproved of Facebook for the same reasons I am uncomfortable with the lack of privacy in general on these social networking sites.
Just think, if Anne of Green Gables were first published in 2008 and if you lived in today’s plugged-in world...would you be on Facebook, have a Twitter account, possibly your own website and blog? Would you have thousands of virtual friends, pen pals, and kindred spirits? I think it is a pretty safe bet that you would since you were interested in what the public thought about your writing and you kept detailed scrapbooks of your life, including book reviews and items of interest, both on the personal and world fronts.
Isn’t it so much fun to imagine what historical figures would have made of our modern world? I’m inclined to agree with Butler here.
Check this out if you’re a fan of L.M. Montgomery, but be warned that this is academic writing—that is to say, it’s very dense and considers specific scholarly issues in relation to her work.