Writing a Life: LM Montgomery

Elisabeth Anne MacDonald-Murray is an assistant professor of English at
the University of Western Ontario.

Working out of the L.M. Montgomery Project at the University of Guelph,
Rubio and Waterston, the editors of The Selected Journals of L.M.
Montgomery and other critical works, bring a wealth of knowledge to this
slender but revealing portrait of the ever-popular creator of Anne of
Green Gables. Their examination of Montgomery’s private journals
exposes the darker aspects of the novelist’s life. Set against the
public persona—well-known author and minister’s wife, perpetual
optimist—is the private figure revealed in the journals: a woman beset
by frustration, chronic depression, and near-despair. At the same time
as she was writing uplifting stories for public consumption, Montgomery
was recording in her journals the emotional impact of her restrictive
and lonely childhood, and of her troubled marriage to an unsympathetic
and increasingly mentally unstable husband.

This slim volume, a precursor of Rubio’s forthcoming authorized
biography of Montgomery, provides an intriguing glimpse into the life of
this much-read but little-understood Canadian writer.