The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 1 1889-1910

Darlene Money was a writer in Mississauga, Ontario.

From the age of nine, L.M. Montgomery kept a journal (though at fourteen she burned her early effort: “it was so silly I was ashamed of it... also very dull”). Volume I of The Selected Journals represents the first two of Montgomery’s ten handwritten volumes and covers her life to age 36. Included are many flashbacks to childhood, even infant, memories. Some early events are retold in occasional longer accounts; one such personal stocktaking and analysis of her life story is the 24-page reminiscence at the end of the book.

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s mother died when she was 21 months old, and soon after, her father moved to Saskatchewan and remarried. Raised in rural Prince Edward Island by her strict, elderly maternal grandparents, Maud (as she preferred to be called) learned to repress her emotional nature, and much of her ebullience expresses itself in her diary. The sensitivity, intelligence, and imagination possessed by the internationally beloved heroines of Montgomery’s novels are revealed by the author in her personal narratives. Spells of melancholy and depression, increasing in frequency as she advanced in her thirties, and the pattern of her relationships with men — friendships full of fun, failing when the men claimed more than friendship — show the toll exacted by parental abandonment, grandparental repression, and isolation and insecurity later as she cared for her widowed grandmother in a house owned by a callous uncle.

Just as interesting as the revelation of personality in these journals is the development of a professional writer, almost entirely self-taught and lacking any encouragement or understanding from those close to her. Hard work and determination, as well as talent, won publication of her stories and poems in a growing number of periodicals, and the success (after several rejections) of her first and most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables.

Numerous photographs, a detailed index, and helpful notes are included, although several times when I would have welcomed an explanatory note there was none. An uncomfortable too-tight binding and excessive wear on the lower corners of front and back covers (worn through after one reading) are unfortunate defects in the first volume of a set that will be appreciated by admirers of the author’s work and students of Canadian literature.