Public Readings

From the time Montgomery was in her teens, she had been a popular and able reciter of poetry in public. She had the experience at nineteen of reading her essay on Shakespeare's Portia at the convocation exercises for Prince of Wales College in June of 1894. The Prince Edward Island scrapbooks have clippings noting many recitations. In Ontario she became a frequent reader in public and also began to give speeches on Canadian writing and the importance of supporting the Canadian publishing industry.

Montgomery read for such groups as the Canadian Authors Association, the Toronto Women's Teachers Association and Teachers' Federation, the Women's Canadian Club, the Toronto Women's Press Club, and the Imperial Order of the Daughters of the Empire. She worked with other authors to celebrate Book Week(s) in Canada and to raise awareness of Canadian authors. She read at schools. She read to audiences of hundreds and even thousands, and gathered clippings and wrote some of them up in her journal. In 1928, in Convocation Hall at the University of Toronto, Montgomery and Dr. Charles Roberts and two others shared a platform to celebrate Canadian Book Week. According to Montgomery's journal, some two thousand were in the audience and a further one thousand had tried unsuccessfully to get tickets (SJ,III,380). Montgomery's scrapbooks show that she continued to be a popular speaker and reader well into the 1930's, for at least as long as she kept the scrapbooks themselves.