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Another favorite image that Montgomery preserved in her scrapbooks was
the cat.
She was enthralled with cats, taking their pictures, clipping bits of
their fur to preserve in the scrapbook, cutting out pages of photographs
of them from magazines. She and George Boyd MacMillan in Scotland shared
this fascination for cats, exchanging anecdotes throughout their thirty-nine-year
correspondence. In her journals and letters Montgomery talked most often
of Daffy and Lucky.
She had Daffy shipped up from the Island after she and her new husband
settled into Leaskdale, Ontario. Daffy appeared on the scrapbook page
that described her wedding. Lucky became her companion and friend, and
she dedicated Jane
of Lantern Hill to his memory. In the scrapbooks we find pages
of images that tell their own stories. Many of the novels have cats, prowling,
being mysterious, charming the characters of the stories.
 Montgomery
cut out articles about cats and pasted those, too, into the scrapbooks.
One such piece shows an engraving of Madame Ronner's cat Banjo. Did Montgomery
have this image in mind when she revised her manuscript of The Blue
Castle and changed one of Barney's cats from the name "Jiggle Squeak"
to "Banjo"?  It
is fitting, perhaps, that the very last entry in the scrapbooks, in 1937,
is a comic article about a cat. Mr. MacMillan, no doubt, had sent her
the British clipping about a huge, ex-movie-star, whiskey-drinking cat
named Matthew of Greengables, who answered to the name of Marilla! Cats
were so beloved by Montgomery that she even added a black cat to her signature.
[for more information on Montgomery's visual imagination,
please see Dr. Elizabeth R. Epperly's chapter "L.M. Montgomery's Visual
Imagination" in the University of Toronto Press (2002) publication Making
Avonlea: L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture, edited by Dr. Irene
Gammel. For more details about book covers see Andrea McKenzie's chapter
in the same book. For more information about Montgomery and photography,
please see The Bend in the Road, CD-ROM, available through lmmontgomery.ca]
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