Benjamin LefebvreMy review of Nancy Drew and Her Sister Sleuths: Essays on the Fiction of Girl Detectives, an excellent collection of essays edited by Michael G. Cornelius and Melanie E. Gregg, appears in the latest issue of Children’s Literature, available now. The issue also includes two reviews of recent scholarship on L.M. Montgomery.
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The publication of The Blythes Are Quoted has been selected as one of the “10 biggest publishing stories of 2009” on a CBC.ca news story:
Fans of the precocious, freckle-faced redhead from P.E.I. had reason to rejoice this year when an amended version of the final Anne Shirley stories was released under a new title, The Blythes Are Quoted. But the book’s additional 100 pages revealed a darker story – complete with references to adultery and suicide. Novelist Jane Urquhart ably provided a context for these bleak scenes in her comprehensive, unflinching biography of Anne’s author, Lucy Maud Montgomery. Anne’s banner year ended with a triumphant Sotheby’s auction – proof that great CanLit never goes out of fashion.
See “The Year in Books” for the full story.
I will be interviewed on Ontario Today on Monday, 14 December 2009, sometime between 12:00 and 12:30, on CBC Radio One:
L.M. Montgomery’s last manuscript, The Blythes are Quoted, has just been published for the first time in its entirety. The manuscript was submitted to Montgomery’s publisher the day she died. It’s the ninth volume in the Anne series. The editor who re-discovered the typescript will be our guest on Ontario Today. And of course Ed Lawrence will join us as well.
UPDATED 15 DECEMBER 2009: The interview can be streamed from the Ontario Today website for the next thirty days.
I’ll be signing copies of The Blythes Are Quoted at the Lucy Maud Montgomery Museum located at Crawford’s Village Bakeshop in Norval, Ontario, on 12 December 2009 from 1:30 to 3:30 PM (more info), and also at the Kitchener Public Library in Kitchener, Ontario, on 16 December 2009 beginning at 6:30 PM (more info).
Aritha van Herk’s review of L.M. Montgomery’s The Blythes Are Quoted, titled “Blythe Spirits,” appeared in last Saturday’s Globe and Mail.
Announcing Anne’s World: A New Century of Anne of Green Gables, a collection of essays edited by Irene Gammel and Benjamin Lefebvre, to be published by University of Toronto Press in spring–summer 2010.
I’m pleased to announce that my edition of L.M. Montgomery’s rediscovered last book, The Blythes Are Quoted, is now available from Viking Canada.
UPDATED 24 OCTOBER: For more on this book, see the following links:
“Waterloo-based academic finds L.M. Montgomery’s last ‘darker’ work” (Kitchener-Waterloo Record, 24 October 2009)
“A different Anne and Gilbert” (The Globe and Mail, 23 October 2009)
“Green Gables tale darkens in final book” (CBC News, 23 October 2009)
UPDATED 26 OCTOBER: See also my essay “The Dark Side of L.M. Montgomery,” published in The Mark.
The short story “Some Fools and a Saint” is now available for download from Penguin Canada’s website.
UPDATED 20 NOVEMBER: “The Dark Side of L.M. Montgomery” now includes a podcast of me reading extracts from Anne of Windy Willows.
The Blythes Are Quoted is mentioned in a Winnipeg Free Press article by Morley Walker titled “Book world slowly grasping value of sequels to classic tales,” which is primarily about the publication of a new Winnie-the-Pooh sequel, available today:
Here in Canada, the estate of L.M. Montgomery has got into the act. On Oct. 27, Penguin will release The Blythes are Quoted, an unabridged version of the stories Montgomery intended as the ninth volume in her Anne of Green Gables series.
Montgomery supposedly submitted the manuscript to her publisher the day she died in 1947 [sic].
She did, although she died in 1942.
The following is a call for papers for a member-organized panel to be held at the ACCUTE Congress at Concordia University (Montreal) in May 2010.
I invite proposals for papers that focus on questions of cultural inheritance in Canadian texts, particularly as they come up against the binary nature/nurture. To what extent are cultural traditions (including ancestry, ritual, festival, language, religion, food, clothing, etc.) expressed or experienced as either “natural” components of the body or as acts and behaviours nurtured by cultural citizens? In the process of inheriting culture, are nature and nurture complementary or contradictory processes? How dotexts published in or about Canada negotiate this binary, and what visions of the nation do these tensions produce?
Proposals about texts from all regions, communities, and periods are welcome, as are all critical/theoretical approaches and methods. Possible topics include: the performance of cultural inheritance; racialized, gendered, classed, regionalized, and politicized bodies, families, and communities; trans-, hybridized, queer, questioning, two-spirited and/vs. heteronormative identities and inheritances; adulthood and/vs. childhood; the production, reproduction, and counterproduction of cultural memory.
Following the instructions on the ACCUTE website (under Conference), send your 700 word proposal (or 8-10 page double-spaced paper), a 100 word abstract, a 50 word biographical statement, and the submitter information form, to ben@roomofbensown.net by November 15th.
Note: You must be a current ACCUTE member to submit to this session.
Due to an unexpected technological difficulty, Jean Mitchell and I would like to offer a five-day extension to everyone interested in submitting a proposal to the L.M. Montgomery and the Matter of Nature conference, to be hosted by the L.M. Montgomery Institute and held at the University of Prince Edward Island. Please send your abstracts and full contact information in the body of an e-mail to lmmi@upei.ca by Monday, 21 September at the very latest.
The call for papers can be found here.