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Print Price: $27.50

Format:
Paperback
496 pp.
226 b/w photographs, 6" x 9"

ISBN-13:
9780199029648

Publication date:
April 2017

Imprint: OUP Canada

The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery

The PEI Years, 1889-1900

Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston

The first edition of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery was published in the 1980s, with fifty percent of the material removed to save space, as well as to reflect a quaint, marketable vision of small-town Canada. The editors were instructed to excise anything that was not upbeat or did not "move the story along." The resulting account of Montgomery's youthful life in Prince Edward Island depicts a fun-loving, simple country girl. The unabridged journal, however, reveals something quite different.

We now know that Montgomery was anything but simple. She was often anxious, bitter, dark, and political, although always able to see herself and her surroundings with a deep ironic - and often comical - twist. The unabridged version shows her using writing as a means of managing her own mood swings, as well as her increasing dependency on journal keeping, and her ambition as a writer. She was also exceedingly interested in men. We see here a more developed portrait of what she herself described as a "very uncomfortable blend" between "the passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience." Full details describe the impassioned events during which she describes becoming a "new creature," "born of sorrow ... and hopeless longing."

In addition, this unedited account is a striking visual record, containing 226 of her own photographs placed as she placed them in her journals, as well as newspaper clippings, postcards, and professional portraits, all with her own original captions. New notes and a new introduction give key context to the history, the people, and the culture in the text. A new preface by Michael Bliss draws some unexpected connections.

Available for the first time in paperback, the full PEI journals tells a fascinating tale of a young woman coming of age in a bygone rural Canada, a tale far thornier and far more compelling than the first selected edition could disclose.

Readership : The earlier editions of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery were widely read, but had been heavily edited. Fans of Montgomery include a wide range of readers, from the general trade to social historians to historians of women's lives.

Acknowledgements
Michael Bliss: Foreword
Introduction
The PEI Years, 1889-1899
Illustrations
Index

There are no Instructor/Student Resources available at this time.

Mary Henley Rubio is professor emerita at the University of Guelph. Her biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (Doubleday, 2008) was nominated for British Columbia's National Award for Canadian Non-Fiction and has successfully sold across the world. Rubio's other publications include co-editing with Elizabeth Hillman Waterston five volumes of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery (Oxford University Press, 1985-2005).

Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, FRCS, O.Ont., is professor emerita at the University of Guelph. Her critical work, Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery (Oxford, 2008), considers all of Montgomery's novels in the context of a richly textured imaginative landscape. Other books by Waterston include Rapt in Plaid: Canadian Literature and the Scottish Tradition (University of Toronto Press, 2003) and Children's Literature in Canada (Simon & Schuster, 1992), as well as two recent novels: Passion Spent (Lulu, 2007) and At the Corner of Hope (Borealis, 2008).

Magic Island - Elizabeth Waterston
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume V: 1935-1942 - Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume IV:1929-1935 - Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume II: 1910-1921 - Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume III: 1921-1929 - Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume I: 1889-1910 - Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston

Special Features

First time available in paperback
Notes from previous edition:
At first publication in 1985, 50% of original material from the journals was cut. Now restored here and complete.
Illustrated with hundreds of Montgomery's own photographs, plus newspaper clippings, postcards etc. Includes Montgomery's original captions.
A new set of informative notes provide context for the people, the history, and the culture behind Montgomery's narrative.
A new introduction provides insights into unexplored possible readings of the journal.
New preface by Michael Bliss draws some unexpected connections.
Reveals an artist-in-the-making, fascinated with storytelling, the power of language, and the manipulation of style.
New insights into the psychological panoramas of one of Canada's great storytellers - which, it turns out, has considerably more topography than revealed by the first selected edition.
Fascinating details of social history, from how to keep warm in a turn-of-the-century Canadian winter to travelling across the country by rail.
Fascinating glimpse into social change in late nineteenth-/early twentieth-century Canada: new communications technology becoming available, new trends in education, new materials science in clothing, building, and farming.