National Library News June 1999 Vol. 31, no. 6

Major Lucy Maud Montgomery Acquisitions at the National Library of Canada

The National Library now has an outstanding, nationally significant collection of biliographically distinctive works by one of Canada’s best-known and loved authors, thanks to two significant donations, the National Library of Canada now has a major collection of the works of Lucy Maud Montgomery. Ronald I. Cohen, a Friend of the National Library, has generously donated over 300 books by Lucy Maud Montgomery. In addition, the Friends of the National Library have funded the acquisition of an extremely rare poetry volume published by the author.

During her lifetime, Montgomery published 22 books of fiction, a serialized version of her life, a book of poetry and approximately 450 poems and 500 short stories. At her death, she left 10 volumes of over 5000 pages of unpublished personal diaries. Montgomery scholar, Dr. Mary Rubio, has described Prince Edward Island’s most famous author as "Canada’s most enduring literary export". Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908) was an instant bestseller and was followed by seven sequels, the autobiographical Emily trilogy, and two well-received novels for adults. The red-haired ‘Anne’ has become a world-famous literary character, with near legendary status in Japan and Poland.

The Ronald I. Cohen Lucy Maud Montgomery Collection is a rich bibliographic resource which could lay the foundation for the production of an important research tool: a formal, descriptive bibliography of L.M. Montgomery. In collecting these books over the years, Mr. Cohen’s goal was to provide a bibliographically significant a grouping of L.M. Montgomery’s works. In bringing together many states, issues and variants of each edition, Mr. Cohen he has provided the opportunity for a future bibliophile or bibliographer to conduct research on a vast array of Montgomery’s published works in a single location. The collection has approximately 35 editions of Anne of Green Gables alone. Mr. Cohen also took great care to collect as many volumes in dust jackets as possible. These books with dust jackets represent the state in which the work was offered to the public and provide valuable and unique information about their publishing circumstances.

In keeping with Montgomery’s international reputation, the collection also includes some very good representation of non-North American editions of her works. On various trips, the donor gathered editions from Great Britain, Australia, Japan, Norway and Korea. The collection also includes a number of rarities and a few unpublished works, e.g., two copies of the unpublished screenplay of Anne of Green Gables: Tthe Musical. One of these was an early draft and the other a later version signed by its authors, Norman Campbell and Don Harron. (The musical feature film was never produced.) There is also a significant signed autographed letter in which L.M. Montgomery encourages a fan to write to the film studio, RKO, to persuade the studio of the importance of making a motion picture based on Anne’s House of Dreams.

With some 120 editions and variants not previously held by the National Library, this collection enriches the National Library’s Lucy Maud Montgomery holdings immensely. The Ronald I. Cohen Lucy Maud Montgomery Collection will be housed in the National Library’s Rare Book collection.

An extremely rare volume of poetry by Lucy Maud Montgomery, which the National Library acquired through the support of the Friends of the National Library, will be housed in the same collection. This self-published volume bears the author’s inscription, "with the compliments of the author L. M. Montgomery, Xmas '03". The titles of the magazines (most of them American) in which they the poems were originally published are included. A comparison of these poems with their listings in Ruth Weber Russell’s Lucy Maud Montgomery : A Preliminary Bibliography (Waterloo, University of Waterloo Library, c1986) indicates that the earliest original publication date is 1897 and the latest is 1903. This volume, therefore, probably predates by five years the publication of Anne of Green Gables (Boston: L.C. Page, 1908), to this point regarded as her first book. McClelland, Goodchild & Stewart re-published two of the poems contained in this early volume ("Golden Rod" as "In the Days of Goldenrod" and "Two Loves") in the first trade edition of Montgomery’s poetry, The Watchman and Other Poems, in 1916. It is worth noting that The Watchman preceded by a full 26 years the first Canadian edition of Montgomery’s most famous book, Anne of Green Gables, which Ryerson published in 1942, the year of Montgomery’s death.

No other copy of the rare 1903 volume of poetry is known to exist in a Canadian library and no record of this publication could be traced at the British Library. The University of Guelph has a photocopy of a similar, but less complete copy. A note in their its catalogue indicates that "this collection was probably privately printed by LMM to give to people she knew such as Marion Webb whose name is handwritten on the first page along with title ‘Poems, L.M. Montgomery’".

Moreover, the author’s early ambition to be a poet and her regard of for poetry as a higher form of expression over than prose adds to the significance of this book. While her fiction writing assumed more importance, she did not abandon her first love, as she published more than 500 poems in various contemporary magazines, primarily between 1893-1916. ¹ Although Montgomery’s poetry varies in quality, her early poetry is praised for its freshness, an achievement which Kevin McCabe attributes to "the remarkable correlation between the markets she wrote for and her own loves and enthusiasms. The magazines wanted poems about fishing boats and storms at sea. She was born and bred within walking distance of the Gulf of St. Lawrence and always loved all the moods of the sea and shore. The magazines wanted poems about spring and meadows and woods. She loved the outdoors and spent most of her free time among trees, brooks, and fields." ² While Montgomery’s massive popularity derives from her fiction, her poetry, which was designed for a popular audience, has been compared favourably with that of contemporaries such as Pauline Johnson and Robert Service. ³

¹ Genevieve Wiggins, L.M. Montgomery, New York: Twayne Publishers; Toronto: Maxwell Macmillan Canada, 1992, p. 163.

² Kevin McCabe, "Introduction" The poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1987, p. 2.

³ Kevin McCabe, "Introduction" The poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, Markham, Ontario: Fitzhenry & Whiteside, 1987, p. 4.