One of the first things to strike me as I read through the three typescripts of The Blythes Are Quoted was their overall tone and outlook, which seemed completely unlike any of Montgomery’s earlier work. Wearing a pair of white cotton gloves to help preserve the original documents, I made a list in my notebook of themes and topics that kept recurring: adultery, illegitimacy, despair, misogyny, murder, revenge, bitterness, hatred, aging, and death. Surely, I thought, these were not what most readers associated with L.M. Montgomery. And later, as I discussed what I had found with friends and colleagues, some of whom had only a passing familiarity with Montgomery’s writing, the almost unanimous response I received was that I had stumbled upon a completely different work.
As the novelty wore off, however, I began to wonder if the change in tone and subject matter could really be that abrupt. I know of several individuals and groups who regularly read through all of Montgomery’s books in chronological order, from Anne of Green Gables (1908) to Anne of Ingleside (1939), in an attempt to trace the ways in which the author’s style and outlook evolve throughout her career. I have often done this myself, and with each rereading of these familiar texts I always see something new. When I first did so after several months of immersion in the pages of The Blythes Are Quoted, I noticed that the elements on my list began to emerge from the margins of the earlier books in ways I hadn’t noticed before.
It is well known that Montgomery suffered from bouts of depression and despair throughout her adult life, but I was interested nevertheless when in September 2008 it was made public that she had died of a drug overdose that may have been deliberate. Montgomery’s possible suicide has some bearing on The Blythes Are Quoted, particularly since her obituary in The Globe and Mail offers a tantalizing hint of the book’s relationship to the end of her life. Noting on April 25, 1942, that Montgomery “died suddenly yesterday,” the obituary continues: “For the past two years she had been in ill health, but during the past winter Mrs. Macdonald compiled a collection of magazine stories she had written many years ago, and these were placed in the hands of a publishing firm only yesterday.” While the obituary does not shed light on whether Montgomery or someone else submitted this work to her publisher, the presence of a typescript and a carbon copy in the archives for McClelland and Stewart confirm that it arrived.
Readers who have enjoyed Montgomery’s larger body of work—which includes twenty novels, over five hundred short stories, five hundred poems, ten volumes of journals, and numerous essays—will in fact recognize much that is familiar in this final book. It picks up familiar story patterns, such as orphans yearning for healthy homes, marriages culminating after years of delay, the creation of alternative families, and the resolution of past grievances and misunderstandings. As well, Montgomery returns to a series of debates that preoccupied her throughout her career: between romance and realism, individual and community, hope and hopelessness, harmony and conflict, order and chaos, memory and forgetting. Much like her protagonists, who walk the fine line between their ambitions and the expectations of their families and communities, Montgomery always strove for the happy medium between the stories she yearned to tell and the predictable packages that could contain them. Partly for these reasons, and partly because her own marriage was a disaster, many of her romantic resolutions appear unsatisfying to some readers. In The Blythes Are Quoted, she shifts the emphasis but retains the familiar format, reviving for a final experiment her best-known characters: Anne and Gilbert Blythe, their six children, housekeeper Susan Baker, and friends and neighbours in their community.
But while these elements are all familiar, what changes is the way these final stories are told. As the storms of the Second World War raged on, Montgomery returned, with this final sequel to Anne of Green Gables, to two conventions about which she had always been ambivalent: the romance plot and the book sequel. Montgomery had a love-hate relationship with both, feeling trapped by expectations she found both financially profitable and creatively stagnating. Although courtship and marriage are frequent themes in her work, she privately complained that she felt awkward writing about romance, preferring the humour to be found in stories concerning the young and old. She had difficulty bringing Anne’s romance to a “proper” conclusion that would satisfy her readers, but six years after Anne of Avonlea (1909), she finally produced, at the insistence of her publisher, Anne of the Island (1915), in which Anne finally agrees to marry Gilbert Blythe.
While this resolution concluded Anne’s romance plot, Montgomery seems to have found new life in her characters when she realized that their popularity gave her an established audience for her most central preoccupation throughout this period: the Great War of 1914–1918. Montgomery agonized over the events of the war, living through them vicariously as they were described to her in the mainstream press. Although her next two novels are set several years earlier, they are written in wartime and address the worldwide conflict in indirect ways: Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), about the early years of Anne and Gilbert’s marriage, culminates in the stillbirth of their daughter Joyce and the birth of their eldest son, Jem; and Rainbow Valley (1919), set thirteen years later, focuses on the Blythe children and their friends. Her next novel, Rilla of Ingleside (1921), revisits these characters as young adults and focuses on the impact that the Great War has on the lives of community members at home. This last book, in the planning stages as early as 1917, was not begun until four months after the Armistice was signed; as she drafted, Montgomery had full knowledge of the war’s outcome along with the expectation of a new utopian world about to be born. Although the focus of this novel is on the women at the home front, with Rilla Blythe and maid-of-all-work Susan Baker representing two generations of women who had to adapt to a rapidly changing world, the book encompasses an entire generation of young men in Anne and Gilbert’s son Walter, an aspiring poet who struggles to reconcile his love of beauty with his duty to serve his country. His death symbolizes the larger sacrifice made in defence of the British Empire, and his poem, “The Piper,” circulates around the world as an inspiring message of courage and optimism in the face of terrifying chaos. Although readers of Rilla of Ingleside are offered only one phrase from this poem— the call to “keep faith,” recalling John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields”—Walter Blythe’s “The Piper” is the only war poem worth commemorating in Montgomery’s depiction of these events.
Upon completing this second trilogy of Anne books in 1920, Montgomery recorded in her journal that she did not intend to pursue this series further. New projects beckoned to her, including a semi-autobiographical trilogy about a young girl, Emily Byrd Starr, who dreams of becoming a writer, and the plot of a more mature novel that would never materialize. But she continued to feel bound by the conventions that had made her earlier books such a success, and the economic chaos that followed the stock market crash of 1929 made her resist straying too far from patterns that had already proven financially profitable. By the mid-1930s, once she began work on a novel that would fill the three-year gap between Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams, the purpose that writing served for her had likewise evolved: although she returned to Anne partly to capitalize on the commercial success of a 1934 movie version of Anne of Green Gables, she also yearned for the security and the comfort that this series had always offered her. As a result, both Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) and Anne of Ingleside (1939) are largely episodic, filled with recycled plot elements that seem increasingly old-fashioned by this time. And yet in Anne of Ingleside we see Montgomery having difficulty maintaining the patterns for which she is best known: amusing anecdotes about Anne’s young children experiencing disappointment and disillusion are juxtaposed with two storylines involving marital hatred and disintegration, including Anne’s suspicion that Gilbert has lost interest in her. These suspicions are proven in the end to be unfounded, but many adult readers have found the happy ending to be unconvincing.
Sometime after Anne of Ingleside was published in 1939,
Montgomery began work on the project that would become The Blythes Are Quoted. Its composition is a mystery; there is no mention of it anywhere in her surviving journals and correspondence, most of which had tapered off by this time. Apparently unable or unwilling to compose a full novel, Montgomery revised previously published short stories (as well as a few she had been unable to publish in their original form) to include mentions and appearances of the Blythe family and attributed forty-one of her own poems to Anne and to Walter. The short stories were fairly recent, having appeared throughout the 1930s in Canadian and American magazines such as Family Herald and Weekly Star, Canadian Home Journal, Country Home, and Holland’s, the Magazine of the South, but the poems were from a wider span of her career, appearing first in The Canadian Magazine, Canadian Bookman, Ladies’ Home Journal, The Commonweal, Saturday Night, Chatelaine, and Good Housekeeping.*
In this final project, Montgomery stays within the patterns she and her readers are used to, but the outcomes no longer fit. Two stories focus on characters whose actions are driven by decades of bitterness, only to have the tables turned on them by circumstance. Three stories contain elaborate deathbed scenes, and the plots of three more hinge on the ways that the death of an adult can manipulate the lives of younger people. For every worthy romantic prospect or responsible guardian in the lives of the main characters, there are close calls with additional characters who are brutish, controlling, selfish, and abusive. Moreover, poems that celebrate the safety of family and home are balanced by ones concerning jealousy between lovers, anguished yearning for the past, and personal failures. The book’s unique structure creates a contrast between the short stories, which include numerous laudatory mentions of the Blythe family from the perspective of outsiders (and a few nasty comments as well), and the vignettes, which show that life at Ingleside is not always how it is perceived. And in dividing her book into two parts, with the Great War at its centre, Montgomery provided a further contrast, between the relatively peaceful pre-war period and the rapid changes that came in the war’s aftermath.
*In rewriting stories set originally in the 1930s and situating them before the Great War, Montgomery inadvertently introduced a few anachronisms: in “An Afternoon with Mr. Jenkins,” Timothy mentions that his father, who had been a soldier, was the recipient of “the Distinguished Service Medal,” an honour only awarded in the Great War, and in “The Twins Pretend,” Jill and P.G. enact the execution of Edith Cavell, a British nurse who would not be put to death until 1915 in Belgium. In the final story, “The Road to Yesterday,” set during the Second World War, Susette and “Dick” reminisce about their childhood adventures with Anne and Gilbert’s grandchildren, which is impossible in terms of the book’s chronology.
Montgomery revised the continuity of the overall series by revealing for the first time that Anne has written occasional poems throughout her life. Readers who were disappointed that Anne’s writing ambitions petered out in some of the later books will welcome this revision, especially given Anne’s assertion that many of these were written at key moments in her life: “Grief,” written as an echo to Matthew’s death, which occurs in Anne of Green Gables; “Old Path Round the Shore” and “The Gate of Dream,” written while she was a schoolteacher, in Anne of Avonlea; “Man and Woman,” “Midsummer Day,” and “Remembered,” written while at university, in Anne of the Island; and “Farewell to an Old Room,” written on the eve of her wedding day, in Anne’s House of Dreams. However, although Montgomery herself had published most of these poems in periodicals, there is no indication anywhere in this book that Anne succeeded in publishing any of them. As well, readers who applaud Anne when she breaks her slate over Gilbert’s head in Anne of Green Gables may be disappointed to read Gilbert’s version of these events so many years later, as revealed in their discussion of “Farewell to an Old Room”: “Your mother thought she had a grudge against me, but I always wanted to be friends.” Equally disappointing, of course, is the fact that Anne offers nothing in reply.
Finally, nowhere do we see Montgomery reconsidering her earlier work more than in her changed depiction of the Great War, which in Rilla of Ingleside had been celebrated as a necessary sacrifice for the sake of a peaceful future. This is most immediately apparent in Anne and Jem’s final discussion at the end of the book, but there are several additional clues as well: in the typescript that was used as the basis of this edition, Montgomery included the term “Great War” on the title page, but crossed out “Great” and added “First World” in ink, an admission that the new world she had once predicted would emerge out of the ashes of the Great War would not materialize after all. Part of this admission can also be found in the devastating battle staged in the poems at opposite ends of the book. Addressing her readers with the proviso that the full text of “The Piper” “seems even more appropriate now”—that is, in the dark days of the Second World War—“than then,” Montgomery begins the book with two stanzas that feel far more conflicted than the poem alluded to in Rilla of Ingleside. And yet “The Aftermath,” arranged to bring the story to a close, invites us to reconsider this ambivalence, perhaps to see a layer of despair that could otherwise be missed. The text of “The Aftermath,” written from the perspective of a soldier who wishes he had not survived the war, is a surprise to readers who remember the courage and nobility that Walter exhibited in Rilla. Montgomery proved highly ambivalent about this poem, crossing out the poem and the final dialogue in ink but saving the deleted pages for posterity. And although “The Piper” is attributed to Walter, Montgomery submitted it to Saturday Night magazine, with a nearly identical introductory note, three weeks before her death. Published posthumously on May 2, 1942, it is Montgomery’s final poem—it commemorates the end of her career and the end of her life.
While this final book certainly asks a lot of Montgomery’s devoted readers, I am hopeful that these revisions and reconsiderations will add to her legacy rather than take anything away. This familiar and unfamiliar book may surprise as much as it delights, but beneath the moments of despair and regret, Montgomery’s sense of humour, her uncanny ability to paint human interactions, and her compassion for people’s failings all shine through.
A NOTE ON THE TEXT
This edition is based on the last of three typescripts of The Blythes Are Quoted that are part of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library. This typescript was among a larger file of papers that was sold to the University of Guelph by David Macdonald (son of Montgomery’s eldest son, Chester) in 1984. Although none of the three typescripts is dated, copies of the final typescript are also part of the Jack McClelland fonds and the McClelland & Stewart fonds at McMaster University, confirming that the book was submitted to her Canadian publisher prior to Montgomery’s death. I have corrected obvious typographical errors and restored words that were inadvertently dropped from the final typescript (using whenever possible the wording from an earlier typescript). I have regularized Montgomery’s spelling and punctuation to make the text more readable. All ellipses are Montgomery’s, and I have followed her instructions (sometimes handwritten) concerning the placement of occasional footnotes that refer to her earlier texts. I have added nothing to what Montgomery wrote, and I did not correct more substantial errors in the text, such as the claim that Anne and Gilbert have five children when they have six (in “Twilight in Ingleside”), the names Charlie Pye and Rosamond West, the phrase “score of imagination,” and the consistent misspelling of Roy Gardner’s surname. My goal throughout has been to offer as close a reproduction of Montgomery’s text as possible. For more information about the individual short stories and poems in their original form, as well as further resources that pertain to this project and to Montgomery’s legacy, please visit the L.M. Montgomery Research Group website at http://lmmresearch.org.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
This edition of The Blythes Are Quoted is indebted to several friends and colleagues who supported the project in inn
umerable ways: Lorne Bruce, Donna Campbell, Mary Beth Cavert, Carolyn Strom Collins, Cecily Devereux, Elizabeth R. Epperly, Irene Gammel, Carole Gerson, Joshua Ginter, Maryam Haddad, Yuka Kajihara, Bernard Katz, Jennifer H. Litster, Andrea McKenzie, Jason Nolan, Donna Palmateer Pennee, Mavis Reimer, Laura Robinson, Mary Henley Rubio, Carl Spadoni, Meg Taylor, Elizabeth Waterston, Joanne E. Wood, Kate Wood, Christy Woster, Emily Woster, and Lorraine York. I also thank Ruth Macdonald, David Macdonald, Kate Macdonald Butler, Sally Keefe Cohen, and Marian Dingman Hebb at Heirs of
L.M. Montgomery, Helen Reeves and Alex Schultz at Penguin Canada and copyeditor Stephanie Fysh. I gratefully acknowledge doctoral and postdoctoral fellowships from the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada and a Major Research Grant from the Office of the Vice-President (Research and Graduate Studies) at the University of Winnipeg. My special thanks go to Jacob Letkemann, Kelly Norah Drukker, Lisa Richter, James Buchanan, Melanie Lefebvre, Jeremy Lefebvre, Éric Lemay, and Julie Trépanier. I dedicate this book to my mother, Claire Pelland Lefebvre, and to the memory of my father, Gerald M. Lefebvre.
Books by L.M. Montgomery
THE ANNE BOOKS
Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Anne of Avonlea (1909)
Anne of the Island (1915)
Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)
Anne’s House of Dreams (1917)
The Blythes Are Quoted Page 44