Category: L.M. Montgomery

In honour of Remembrance Day, two recent blog entries have appeared discussing L.M. Montgomery’s depiction of the Great War in Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythes Are Quoted. First, Christine Chettle discusses Walter Blythe’s poems “The Piper” and “The Aftermath” on the website for the Centre for Canadian Studies at the University of Leeds:

Most famous for her tale of cheerful red-headed orphan Anne of Green Gables, L.M. Montgomery offers a more complicated view of the Canadian war experience. Like many of her contemporaries, the fiercely patriotic Montgomery viewed World War I as a struggle for liberty against a threat of evil from Kaiser’s Germany.

Next, Melanie Fishbane talks about Montgomery’s experience during the war in her fiction and her life writing on the Indigo website:

It is hard for us to imagine that one hundred years ago, the boys we grew up with, the men we may have worked with and our brothers, husbands and partners would have joined in the wake of that strong call to arms in the belief that Canada, as an English colony, was in real danger.  It is also hard to imagine, that many of those same men never came home.  If we consider Montgomery’s fictional world of Ingleside, as a representation of the different townships across Canada, than I think we will begin to understand the magnitude WWI (and subsequent wars) had on our nation’s history.

In a journal entry dated March 1910, Montgomery mentioned that she had recently received a copy of the Swedish translation of Anne of Green Gables, which she found “interesting as a curiosity,” not because of the translated text but because of the bizarre cover image and design. Today I had a somewhat similar experience after receiving my copies of Ania z Wyspy Ksiecia Edwarda, the Polish translation of The Blythes Are Quoted, which was published a few months ago in both hardcover and paperback by Wydawnictwo Literackie in Crakow. For me, the “curiosity” was not the cover image, since the Polish edition simply duplicated the cover of the original hardcover edition, but the advertising copy used to entice readers to buy the book.

Although Montgomery wasn’t able to comment on the translation of the Swedish translation of Anne of Green Gables because she spoke no Swedish, a reader today has fewer obstacles in this regard, thanks to Google Translate. So it’s remarkably easy to figure out that the title of the Polish edition is Anne of Prince Edward Island, which I actually prefer to the title of the Finnish edition, Anne’s Farewell. In contrast to the deliberately provocative first line of the jacket copy of the English-language edition—“Adultery, illegitimacy, revenge, murder, and death—these are not the first terms we associate with L.M. Montgomery”—the Polish edition takes a remarkably different tack.

The tag on the front cover translates as “Previously unpublished final volume of adventures / Anne of Green Gables,” which is fairly similar to “The rediscovered last work of L.M. Montgomery.” On the back cover, they add an almost identical tag (“Last, never previously published volume of adventures / Anne of Green Gables”) followed by the following blurb:

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s wishes were to close the book series about the most famous red-haired heroine of all time. The text provided to the publisher just before the death of the author had never appeared in its entirety. Its premiere in Canada in 2009 created a sensation in the publishing market and delighted readers.

And then, right below this, in a larger font: “Get to know the fate of Ani, Gilbert and their loved ones!”

Is this a better marketing tack? I really don’t know, but I notice that if you type in “Ania z Wyspy Ksi?cia Edwarda” into Google, there are 810,000 hits, compared to 125,000 hits for “The Blythes Are Quoted.” What this indicates, however, is anybody’s guess.

Also, I’ve just been informed that the Kindle version of The Blythes Are Quoted is available again, but on Amazon.com only. I’m not sure why it’s available only there, but at least it can be ordered by Kindle readers all over the world. It’s also available as an e-book directly from Penguin Canada.

Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables has received a glowing review in Canadian Literature: titled “Anne Shirley’s New Reach,” this review by Sean M. Saunders appeared on the Canadian Literature website earlier this week:

I took great pleasure in reading Anne’s World, a collection of compelling essays which situates the culturally familiar Anne Shirley within a range of perhaps unfamiliar and, at times, unexpected disciplinary and theoretical contexts. Engaging Anne’s status as a “classic” and an international “brand,” these contexts include fashion theory, early childhood education, clinical psychology and bibliotherapy, feminist ethics, cultural geography, and globalization studies. Linking such diverse critical perspectives is the volume’s focus on the “expansion of [Anne’s] world,” both during the last century (into realms such as film and television, tourism, and post-war colonialism) and in the present, as Anne’s expanding world carries her into new spheres of critical inquiry, and new digital markets and media.

The Polish translation of The Blythes Are Quoted, entitled Ania z Wyspy Ksiecia Edwarda (literally, Anne of Prince Edward Island), will be published in June 2011 by Wydawnictwo Literackie!

The Online College website has published a post called “50 Iconic Writers Who Were Repeatedly Rejected,” with links to detailed reports of the early struggles of a number of writers ranging from J.K. Rowling to Dr. Seuss to Stephen King. To this list I’d add L.M. Montgomery, whose first book Anne of Green Gables was rejected by four or five publishers (the exact number depends on which version of the story you read) before being published to great acclaim by L.C. Page & Company in 1908. While the success of Anne of Green Gables and its successors certainly opened up a lot of doors to her, she continued to face rejection throughout her career. She reported in her journal that her poem “I Wish You” was rejected twenty-three times before it was published in Good Housekeeping in January 1936. This poem appeared again in The Blythes Are Quoted, which includes several short stories that Montgomery had tried unsuccessfully to publish in magazines before reworking them for her final book.