The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol. 5: 1935–1942

Virginia Gillham is university librarian and archivist at Wilfrid
Laurier University library. She is also a judge of national and
international figure skating competions.

Lucy Maud Montgomery began to keep a journal at the age of nine, and she
did so for the rest of her life. At some point after she began to
achieve literary success, she realized that her innermost thoughts might
be of wider interest some day, and so set about recopying the journals
for her two sons, Chester and Stuart.

In the early 1980s, Mary Rubio of the University of Guelph was
instrumental in encouraging Dr. Stuart MacDonald to make his mother’s
original, handwritten journals available to the Archives and Special
Collections department of the Library of the University of Guelph. The
deposit agreement allowed Rubio and her colleague, Elizabeth Waterston,
exclusive access to the documents for 10 years, during which time they
edited and published three of the ultimate five volumes, covering
Montgomery’s life through 1929, to the age of 55.

The figure who emerges from these superbly edited diaries bears almost
no resemblance to her fictional heroines. Montgomery led a tortured
life. She and her husband both suffered from recurring periods of deep
depression and her life was filled with tragedies largely beyond her
control. At the same time, Montgomery was an extremely negative and
critical person who must accept at least some responsibility for her own
unhappiness.

Volume 5, completed in late 2004, is the last of the series, covering
the period to Montgomery’s death in 1942. Some mysteries remain
unrevealed by the diaries, as there are increasingly lengthy periods
without entries in the final years of her life, sometimes because of her
ill health, but frequently because the circumstances of her family life
were so painful to her that she chose not to record them.

The scholarly work represented by these five volumes is an incalculable
contribution to Canadian literary history. All five volumes are a
must-read for anyone with an interest in Montgomery, Anne Shirley, or
Canadian literature.