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Introduction
to Montgomery's Works
L.M. Montgomery published twenty novels in her lifetime. Eight are Anne novels, two deal with the King children and relatives or friends, three are Emily books, two are Pat books, and the rest are individual stories which she may or may not have intended to extend into sequels. Seventeen are set wholly on Prince Edward Island; one is set in PEI and Nova Scotia (Anne of the Island); one is set half on PEI and half in Toronto (Jane of Lantern Hill); one is set in the picturesque lake-and-cottage country of Ontario called Muskoka that charmed her so in 1922 (The Blue Castle). At her death she was working on another Anne book, which was much altered and published by her son as a collection of short stories called The Road to Yesterday (1974). She produced some one million words in her private journals, between 1889 and 1942, and requested in her will that these journals be preserved and published. Four (of a total of five) volumes of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, co-edited by Drs. Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, had been published when this exhibition was launched in 2002 (1985, 1987, 1992, 1998). Three collections of her letters to George Boyd MacMillan of Scotland and to Ephraim Weber of Alberta have appeared since her death.
Montgomery also published a collection of short stories called Chronicles of Avonlea (1912). A second collection, called Further Chronicles of Avonlea, was published without her consent in 1920 and became the subject of an international lawsuit against her original publishers, the L.C. Page Company of Boston. (See book cover).
Montgomery published only one volume of collected poems, The Watchman and Other Poems, in 1916. She also produced three of the miniature biographies in a volume called Courageous Women (1934).
During her career, Montgomery published one long autobiographical essay for Everywoman's World in 1917 entitled "The Alpine Path," which was not separately published until 1975.
All through her career, Montgomery was publishing essays--many now uncollected. The clipping scrapbooks suggest she published in periodicals of her day some five hundred short stories and five hundred poems. Some of these stories and poems have been republished in recent years.
The books and
related materials used to illustrate this section of the exhibition are
drawn from the Ronald I. Cohen Lucy Maud Montgomery Collection of the
National Library of Canada.
