The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery: Volume 2, 1910-1921

Virginia Gillham is Associate Librarian in the Public Service Library at
the University of Guelph.

This second edited volume of the journals of Lucy Maud Montgomery covers the period 1911 to 1921, the first years of her marriage to the Rev. Ewan MacDonald. During those years, she had three children, one of them stillborn, and assumed the frequently overwhelming combined responsibilities of an early twentieth-century housewife and country minister’s wife. In addition, she continued to write and to gain fame and material success as an author.

Lucy Maud Montgomery had no close friends within her daily environment, and does not appear to have enjoyed a confiding relationship with her husband. As a result, her journals were her only intimate outlet, and the reader is party to many of her most personal observations and emotions. Love for her children comes through strongly, as does contempt for a significant percentage of her husband’s parishioners, and insecurity about certain aspects of her writing career. Curiously, her husband remains one-dimensional on the page, alluded to in passing as circumstances require but seldom described or analyzed until his illness begins to disrupt their established lifestyle.

Montgomery herself appears to have presented a supremely controlled facade but to have been, internally, a turbulently emotional woman. Her reactions to some events in her life and the world around her can be described as bordering on the extreme.

As did the first volume of this proposed trilogy, volume two leaves the reader anxious for the next. A superb job of editing by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston has created a fascinating and eminently readable portrait of rural Ontario life in the early twentieth century in general, and of one of Canada’s best known authors in particular.