Kindred Spirits: The works of LM Montgomery

[Deleted]

Just read a new biography of LMM (published last year) by Mary Henley Rubio (one of the writers involved in publishing her private journals).

It was very interesting. I've read all her journals, but like Rubio points out in her book, LMM edited and rewrote her journals meaning for them to be published eventually, so she often left stuff out or wrote things from her own POV.
Rubio actually has been working on this for over 30 years, she interviewed people starting back in the 1980's before the journals came out so that she got their impressions of LMM before their memories could be "tainted" as she says by the journals.

She interviewed several maids, neighbors from various places where LMM lived, daughters in law, and others.
I don't want to give stuff away about her life if other people would rather read it and discover it on her own, but I really recommend the book.

(I also feel in a way that I've come full circle with reading this book and posting about it here: I originally discovered the FT site by googling "heirs of lucy maud montgomery" because I'd just finished her journals and was intensely curious to find out what happened to her older son's children and if her younger son ever had any--I wasn't able to find the information to that anywhere on the internet but I did come across the LMM thread on FT which was over 70 pages at that point. I sat and read through it in a couple of hours, then discovered all the other literary threads, then all the pop culture stuff... which eventually led to being a member on this board which has definitely been a part of my life since. So anyway, I now finally have been able to satisfy my curiosity on both of those points and I knew I had to come here to post about it!)

[Auroranorth]

I just recommended the Emily books to one of my housemates- our library has all three and she'd never heard of them!

Has anyone else read the recent prequel, Before Green Gables? I thought it was terribly Mary Sueish.

[Deleted]

Jul 7, 2009 9:14:40 GMT -4 Auroranorth said:

Has anyone else read the recent prequel, Before Green Gables?

Yes. It was embarrassingly bad. (Embarrassing for the author, that is). I gave up on it at the point where Bertha was making corned beef for dinner which caused Walter to rhapsodize about how much he loved her. After that, I skipped around to the end. So I don't remember much of the plot, but I'm sure I didn't miss anything.

Re the Emily books: I loved the Anne books best when I was younger, but now I prefer Emily. (Strangely, whenever I see the title New Moon for the Twilight books, it makes me think of Emily.)

[dwanollah]

Before Green Gables was totally pointless.

And Mary Rubio rocks!

[tabby]

I decided to read LMM's stuff this summer, in my quest to read various kid-lit classics I'd missed. (I had read The Blue Castle, which I love and which I re-read every year.) I've read through the Anne books and am now almost through the first Emily.

I have to say, for all the talk about how idyllic these books are most of the time - WWI in Rilla excepted - there's a lot of nasty stuff going on in these kids' lives! Between the sociopathic teachers you're stuck with for multiple years because of the one-room schoolhouse thing, the vicious small-community infighting, and the pets dying from poison every damn time you turn around, it could get pretty grim around old P.E.I. I really am enjoying the books, I just wish Montgomery would quit making all the pets die in agony (fortunately, this usually happens off-stage).

I want to read a bio of LMM, too, so I'll have to get the Rubio one.

[Strawberry]

The Anne series is when my love affair with reading began. I couldn't even read any of LMM's other works because nothing could replace Anne for me. Still one of my all time favorites.

I saw AoGG in the dollar aisle at Target and flipped through it. It was adapted and condensed and was crap. The beautiful prose and imagery was replaced with lines like, "Matthew saw a girl waiting. She had red hair and a brown dress. Matthew went to say hello." That's not an adaptation, because it isn't even the AoGG books without LMM's writing style, spirit and whimsy!!! You bastards! Seriously, why do we have to dumb things down for today's kids?

What is FT? I could read 70 pages worth of LMM.

[Auroranorth]

FameTracker was a pop culture message board which melted down in March 2005. It's now defunct- a number of people from there ended up here after the collapse. I presume the threads are all vanished now. Sorry.

[Deleted]

Yeah, it was too bad. That LMM thread was pretty amazing. FT was my introduction to message boarding. I realized it was populated by kindred spirits when I'd read far enough into the thread to come across a diatribe against the Rock People-- (still remember the line, but not the poster "Die Rock People! Die!) which was really the only part of the Anne books that I've always skipped because it was just too...ridiculous, I guess, is the word I'm looking for.
Anyway, even with some of the flaws in the Anne books that I've noted as I've grown older, there are some passages that still make me cry when I reread them. Today I randomly picked up Anne of the Island and was in the part of Ruby's funeral where her mother gives Anne her unfinished piece of embroidery and Mrs. Lynne, with tears in her eyes, says, "There's always a piece of unfinished work left. But I suppose there's always someone to finish it." So poignant, in so few words.

[sumire]

Today I was browsing the Japanese used-book store and I found these really neat Anne of Green Gables tie-in books: Anne of Green Gables Handmade Picture Book, volumes one, two, and three, first published in 1980 and still in print today.

They're full of awfully complex handicrafts and recipes that seem to have only the most tenuous connection to the books, but the neat thing is that they're copiously, copiously illustrated with watercolors depicting scenes straight out of the books--Matthew giving Anne the puffed-sleeve dress, Gilbert rescuing Anne after that boat sank, Miss Lavender Lewis and Charlotta the Fourth, Anne and Gilbert's wedding, Walter creeping up the stairs after becoming homesick and walking six miles home during the night, Rilla throwing the cake into the stream... I'm not crazy about Hideaki Matsuura's art style in the first book, where Anne is a lollipop with a huuuuuge forehead, but he tones it down in the later books so Anne's children don't look like freaks, and there's nearly word-perfect detail, like how in a picture of Anne and Marilla walking home after apologizing to Mrs. Lynde, Anne is carrying a bunch of June lilies picked from Mrs. Lynde's garden. Initially, I thought the illustrations were recycled from a Japanese edition of the novels, but they were done specifically for these craft books--some of them have the food or craft item incorporated into the picture.

I bought volumes one (covering events of AoGG) and three (House of Dreams, Ingleside) because the covers were in poor condition and they were marked down to a dollar each, but I think I need to go back tomorrow and pay the full $5 to get volume two and complete the set.

If (if!) I ever manage to scan them, I'll post pictures here.

[SGleason]

Sumire, I just spent 15 minutes at the Amazon site for those and I'm CONSUMED with envy!

My favorite auto-translated customer review says,
"The lovable red-haired girl was suffering, the women also quite nice Ann . . . Anne and Marilla, cooking and handicrafts make hardening of the maid's arm, and Susan, as they watch the workmanship of each and every second."