Waifs and Strays: L. M. Montgomery
Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) became a household name in 1908 with the publication of her first and best-known novel, Anne of Green Gables. Set in late 19th-century Prince Edward Island, the book describes the adolescence of Anne Shirley, an orphan girl sent by mistake to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, middle-aged siblings who had intended to adopt a boy to help with farmwork. As the fictional town of Avonlea comes to accept Anne, she falls in love with the Island’s rolling green hills, red sand beaches, and sapphire blue waters. Given Montgomery’s love of cats (she owned some 20 in her lifetime), animals are curiously absent from this landscape. Anne has no pets, the Cuthberts’ dairy cows are mentioned only in passing, and the Island’s wild animals seem to have disappeared.
Montgomery, L. M. Anne of Green Gables. 1908. L. C. Page, 1909. [PS8526 .O6 A56 1909]
Although this December 1909 edition of Anne of Green Gables was issued just 18 months after its initial publication, it is the book’s 16th impression, indicating the immediate popularity of Montgomery’s debut. The book’s end pages contain selections from American publisher L. C. Page’s “List of New Fiction,” including Anne of Avonlea (1909), the sequel to Green Gables that Page pressured Montgomery to write following her first novel’s success. Page also used the end pages to advertise animal stories by Canadian author Charles G. D. Roberts, such as The Haunters of the Silences (1907), Red Fox (1905), and The Kindred of the Wild (1902). Montgomery’s success made her Roberts’s contemporary, and she later wrote in her journal that she “wanted to meet Dr. Roberts and thank him for writing The Heart of the Ancient Wood” (7 Nov. 1928). M. A. and W. A. J. Claus’s original illustrations reflect the peripheral role of animals in Green Gables. Birds appear only in the margins of the images, flying behind Anne as she walks along a ridge pole or up the lane with love interest Gilbert Blythe. Animals appear much more frequently in Montgomery’s later novels but remain consistently subordinate to human characters and plots.
---. Further Chronicles of Avonlea. L. C. Page, 1920. [PS8526 .O6 F8]
Beginning in 1917, Montgomery levelled a series of lawsuits against publisher L. C. Page for, among other crimes, illegally withholding royalties from the Anne books. Then, in 1920, Page published (without Montgomery’s permission) Further Chronicles of Avonlea, which he compiled from stories the author had decided not to include in the earlier Chronicles of Avonlea (1912). Montgomery’s experience with Page connected her to Marshall Saunders, another Canadian woman author who, according to Montgomery’s journal, had also been “cheated without pity and without remorse” by the publisher (13 Apr. 1919). Saunders was a valuable source of information about Page, and she and Montgomery bonded over gossip about his wife and family. They were never quite friends—Montgomery refers to Saunders in her journal as “clever but a bit of a bore” (13 Oct. 1919)—but they respected each other’s work. Montgomery read all of Saunders’s animal novels to her eldest son, Chester, though they made her worry he was too “keenly sensitive to accounts of suffering” (28 Oct. 1919).
The first story in Further Chronicles is “Aunt Cynthia’s Persian Cat,” in which adult sisters Sue and Ismay Meade temporarily lose their wealthy aunt’s beloved and expensive Persian cat, Fatima. John Goss’s illustration for the story is of Sue sitting with Fatima while Max Irving proposes to her for the eleventh time, and the cat appears just as bored as her mistress’s niece. However, Fatima possesses no subjectivity in the story, existing only as a plot device to bring Max and Sue together. This lack of characterization distinguishes her from cats in Montgomery’s other books, who have less impressive pedigrees but more developed personalities.
---. Rilla of Ingleside. 1921. McClelland & Stewart, 1922. [PS8526 .O6 R5 1922]
Rilla of Ingleside (1921) is the eighth book in the Anne series but the sixth in publication order. The teenage heroine is Rilla Blythe, Anne and Gilbert’s youngest child, who comes of age during the First World War. Published three years after the war’s conclusion, Rilla was the first Canadian novel about the conflict written from a woman’s perspective. Sometime after Montgomery’s death in 1942, publishers cut a few thousand words from the story, removing passages with especially strong anti-German sentiment. As a first edition, however, this copy includes the complete and unabridged text as well as a cover and frontispiece by M. L. Kirk, designed to match earlier novels by Montgomery, such as Anne’s House of Dreams (1917) and Rainbow Valley (1919). Kirk’s painting shows Rilla sitting on the grass, smiling softly and clasping a love letter to her chest. This image contrasts starkly with scenes in the novel in which letters contain devastating news, including that one of Rilla’s brothers has died and the other is wounded and missing. The publisher’s decision to feature a romantic moment on the cover and frontispiece of this war novel suggests they were wary of the book’s serious subject matter deterring young readers, particularly as Montgomery had become known for writing cheerful and wholesome girls’ fiction.
Animals assume a supernatural quality in Rilla, predicting and discerning major events before their human counterparts become aware of them. The family cat, for example, is named Dr. Jekyll-and-Mr. Hyde (“Doc” for short) because of his variable moods, which seem to correspond to changes in the weather and the war effort. Dogs in the novel are more closely associated with boys, as in the case of Dog Monday, who lives for years at the train station while waiting for Jem Blythe to return from the war. He howls for hours the night Walter Blythe is killed in action, although the family does not learn of Walter’s death until the following day.
---. Magic for Marigold. Stokes, 1929. [PS8526 .O6 M3 1929]
At six years old, the protagonist of Magic for Marigold (1929) is Montgomery’s youngest heroine. Nature in the novel is accordingly anthropomorphic; the family cats, Lucifer and the Witch of Endor, speak to each other (and select humans), and each tree species has a distinct personality. Marigold’s attachment to her imaginary friend Sylvia emphasizes the strength of her creative power, connecting the novel’s unusual anthropomorphism to the heroine’s age. Edna Cooke Shoemaker’s cover illustration for this first edition depicts Marigold sitting on the grass, hands clasped and gazing upward. Human faces hidden within the surrounding trees relate Marigold’s imagination (her childish gaze) to personified nature.
---. Emily of New Moon. 1923. McClelland & Stewart, 1925. [PS8526 .O6 E6 1925]
Emily of New Moon (1923) is the first in a trilogy of novels about Emily Byrd Starr, another Canadian girl sent to live with strangers after her parents’ death. In Emily’s case, the strangers are her mother’s siblings, Elizabeth, Laura, and Jimmy Murray, who became estranged from their sister when she scandalously eloped with Emily’s father. Emily is an intensely emotional child with a deep connection to Prince Edward Island’s landscape. Her experience of nature transcends the beautiful to reach sublime, almost spiritual heights. Unlike Anne, Emily’s love of nature extends to animals, especially cats—an obsession adults in her life regard with suspicion. When Elizabeth tries to drown a “superfluous” kitten, Emily’s sympathy for the animal and indignation at her aunt’s cruelty compels her to confront her intimidating new guardian and rescue the kitten from a freezing creek. Altogether, the three Emily books reflect a broader transatlantic culture that, in the interwar period, was increasingly concerned with animal welfare, environmental degradation, and changing attitudes toward religion.
Although Emily of New Moon is set sometime around the 1880s, Stanley Turner’s cover of this 1925 edition (part of the “Cavendish Library” series, so-named for the author’s hometown) reveals the Canadian publisher’s attempt to present Emily as one of the “new girls” of the early twentieth century. She is wearing a bright pink jacket, matching skirt, and loafers with socks. Most strikingly, her legs are bare—a stark contrast to the aprons and buttoned boots Elizabeth forces her to wear in the novel. Emily’s modern outfit and confident posture seem radically out of place in the Victorian kitchen behind her, suggesting she has brought the twentieth century with her into New Moon.
---. Jane of Lantern Hill. McClelland & Stewart, 1937. [PS8526 .O6 J3]
One of the last novels Montgomery published, Jane of Lantern Hill (1937) is dedicated to the memory of “Lucky,” the author’s favourite cat and “charming affectionate comrade of fourteen years.” In 1923, Lucky was shipped from Prince Edward Island to Ontario, where Montgomery lived with her husband and children. He was her constant (and sometimes only) companion, and his death in 1937 dealt her an emotional blow.
Perhaps unsurprisingly, then, animals—especially cats—figure prominently in this novel. Jane Victoria Stuart is living in Toronto with her mother, Robin, and grandmother Mrs. Kennedy when her estranged father invites her to spend the summer with him on Prince Edward Island. There, Jane quickly befriends her quirky new neighbours, including the Snowbeam family, the Jimmy Johns, and Ding Dong Bell, all of whom give her animals as presents. While Jane cares for but never loves the Persian cat her grandmother forces upon her in Toronto, she adores the pets her friends give her. As in “Aunt Cynthia’s Persian Cat,” Montgomery suggests a connection between an animal’s pedigree—or lack thereof—and its capacity for love.
In many of Montgomery’s novels, the author uses cruelty toward animals to indicate which characters pose a threat to the heroine. When Jane learns Mrs. Kennedy poisoned Robin’s dog because she was jealous of her daughter’s love for the animal, the reader understands how far Mrs. Kennedy will go to prevent the reunion of Jane’s parents. A similar revelation occurs in Emily of New Moon when Emily suspects Mrs. Kent of drowning her son Teddy’s cats out of the same jealousy she feels for Teddy’s love of Emily.
---. The Watchman and Other Poems. McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart, 1916. [PS8526 .O6 W3]
Although Montgomery published some five hundred poems throughout her career, The Watchman and Other Poems (1916) is the only collection of poetry released in her lifetime. The volume comprises ninety-four poems, most previously published in periodicals such as The Youth’s Companion, The Sunday School Times, The Ladies’ World, The Canadian Magazine, and The Delineator. “The Watchman” is a dramatic monologue from the perspective of Maximus, a Roman soldier who witnesses the resurrection of Jesus. Following this title poem, the sections “Songs of Sea” and “Songs of the Hills and Woods” are characteristically filled with natural imagery and evocative prose. The collection concludes with a “Miscellaenous” section, containing such poems as “In Memory of ‘Maggie’: A pussy-cat who was the household pet for seventeen years.” Several characters in Montgomery’s novels compose tributes to their departed pets, and the author herself was not opposed to the practice. One year after the death of her favourite cat, Lucky, she handwrote a nearly forty-page obituary for him in her journal: “Cats before him I loved as cats. I loved Luck as a human being. And few human beings have given me the happiness he gave me” (9 Jan. 1928).
Montgomery, L. M., Marian Keith, and M. B. McKinley. Courageous Women: Inspiring Biographies of Girls who Grew to be Women of Courage and Achievement. McClelland & Stewart, 1934. [CT3202 .M63]
The collection Courageous Women (1934), co-authored by Montgomery with fellow Canadians Marian Keith (1876–1961) and Mabel Burns McKinley (1881–1974), is advertised as a “series of inspiring biographies of girls who grew to be women of courage and achievement.” Fifteen of the twenty-one women featured in the book are Canadian, including Laura Secord, Catharine Parr Traill, and Pauline Johnson (Tekahionwake). The final chapter, “Champion of Dumb Animals,” is an account of Marshall Saunders’s life and career. McClelland & Stewart published several of Saunders’s novels, and there is an advertisement for their new edition of Beautiful Joe on the back flap of Courageous Women, strategically following the chapter on Saunders. The ad calls Beautiful Joe “the world’s most famous dog story” and references Saunders’s recent induction into the Order of the British Empire.