The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol. 3: 1921-1929

Lisa Arsenault is a public-school teacher in Ajax, Ontario.

For anyone under the mistaken impression that Montgomery’s novels
represent the pinnacle of her literary output, her journals are a
must-read. Although she edited for posterity, and therefore there are
innuendos and omissions, in the main she reveals to the reader a side of
herself seldom glimpsed in her novels.

In these diaries, which she kept under lock and key, Montgomery
confided her dissatisfaction with married life, her frequent boredom
with the duties and routines of a minister’s wife, her private anguish
over the deaths of beloved friends, her home-sickness for Prince Edward
Island, and her worry over the various law suits she and her husband
were embroiled in, separately and together. A reader who may have gained
the impression from her books that she might be rather too perfect,
good, and wholesome will learn from these diaries that she was
definitely a fallible, down-to-earth woman who was able to function
successfully in an unhappy marriage, leavened with very few “kindred
spirits,” because of her strength of will, her sense of humor, her
sense of duty, and her writing. These journals served as an outlet for
feelings and thoughts that did not conform to the romance formula of her
published works.

Montgomery’s family is based in Leaskdale, Ontario, for the first
two-thirds of this volume, until her husband is called to the ministry
of Norval, Ontario. With the move, the overall tone of the journal
becomes more positive, as Montgomery discovers more congenial company, a
much lovelier physical setting, and a more modern manse than was the
case in Leaskdale. However, the sarcasm and sometimes quite devilish wit
she exercised at the expense of Leaskdale inhabitants are still present
in the last third of the book.

As well as serving as a window into Montgomery’s private life, the
journals are valuable source material for Canadian social history.
Montgomery very graphically described the homes, furnishings,
entertainments (at least those deemed appropriate for a Presbyterian
minister’s wife), current literature, trends, and inventions of her
era. This volume of her journals leaves the reader eagerly anticipating
Vol. 4.