This exhibition explores L.M. Montgomery's fascination with images and their explicit and implied stories by arranging and commenting on digital pictures made from five Canadian archival and museum collections. For the first time, viewers may see in one place a sample of the images Montgomery collected, created, and inspired, including souvenirs, photographs, and cover art. Her public and private works show Canadian culture as she reflected and imagined it; the book covers suggest how some of her imaginings were interpreted and marketed.

For hundreds of thousands of people around the world, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) is Canada. Famous for Anne of Green Gables and the Emily books, she was also a gifted diarist, letter writer, photographer, newspaper woman, maker of scrapbooks, gardener, cook, and needlewoman. Her powerfully visual imagination has inspired others to see. All her life she reveled in words and also in colors, textures, and shapes. She created mixed-media collage and collected personal memorabilia to augment her written records.

In the scrapbooks she captured daily life, pasting in pressed flowers, her favorite cats' fur, literary programs, fashion cuttings, swatches of material, news clippings, and her own photographs. The cover images of her books were inspired by her written descriptions, but they tell their own stories about the cultures that produced them: how was and is Montgomery perceived by those who market her works?