Twice upon a time, p.1
Twice upon a Time, page 1
Twice upon a Time
SELECTED STORIES, 1898–1939
Although L.M. Montgomery (1874–1942) is best remembered for the twenty-two book-length works of fiction that she published in her lifetime, from Anne of Green Gables (1908) to Anne of Ingleside (1939), she also contributed some five hundred short stories and serials to a wide range of North American and British periodicals from 1895 to 1940. While most of these stories demonstrate her ability to produce material that would fit the mainstream periodical fiction market as it evolved across almost half a century, many of them also contain early incarnations of characters, storylines, conversations, and settings that she would rework for inclusion in her novels and collections of linked short stories.
In Twice upon a Time, the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, Benjamin Lefebvre collects and discusses over two dozen stories from across Montgomery’s career as a short fiction writer, many of them available in book form for the first time. The volume offers a rare glimpse into Montgomery’s creative process in adapting her periodical work for her books, which continue to fascinate readers all over the world.
(THE L.M. MONTGOMERY LIBRARY)
BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, is director of L.M. Montgomery Online. His publications include an edition of Montgomery’s rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted, and the three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Reader, which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Literature from the Association of American Publishers. He lives in Kitchener, Ontario.
THE L.M. MONTGOMERY LIBRARY
Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre
A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917
A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921
Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939
L.M. MONTGOMERY
Twice upon a Time
SELECTED STORIES, 1898–1939
Edited by BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE
© University of Toronto Press 2022
Toronto Buffalo London
utorontopress.com
ISBN 978-1-4875-4415-7 (cloth) ISBN 978-1-4875-4413-3 (EPUB)
ISBN 978-1-4875-4412-6 (paper) ISBN 978-1-4875-4414-0 (PDF)
“L.M. Montgomery” is a trademark of Heirs of L.M. Montgomery Inc. “Anne of Green Gables” and other indicia of “Anne” are trademarks of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc.
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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication
Title: Twice upon a time : selected stories, 1898–1939 / L.M. Montgomery ; edited by Benjamin Lefebvre.
Other titles: Short stories. Selections
Names: Montgomery, L.M. (Lucy Maud), 1874–1942, author. | Lefebvre, Benjamin, editor.
Series: Montgomery, L.M. (Lucy Maud), 1874–1942. L.M. Montgomery library.
Description: Series statement: The L.M. Montgomery library | Includes bibliographical references.
Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20220132445 | Canadiana (ebook) 20220132488 | ISBN 9781487544126 (softcover) | ISBN 9781487544157 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781487544133 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781487544140 (PDF)
Subjects: LCSH: Montgomery, L.M. (Lucy Maud), 1874–1942—History and criticism. | LCGFT: Short stories.
Classification: LCC PS8526.O55 A6 2022 | DDC C813/.52—dc23
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This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
We wish to acknowledge the land on which the University of Toronto Press operates. This land is the traditional territory of the Wendat, the Anishnaabeg, the Haudenosaunee, the Métis, and the Mississaugas of the Credit First Nation.
University of Toronto Press acknowledges the financial support of the Government of Canada and the Ontario Arts Council, an agency of the Government of Ontario, for its publishing activities.
Contents
A Note on the Author
Abbreviations
Preface
A Note on the Text
Our Uncle Wheeler
A New-Fashioned Flavoring
Miss Marietta’s Jersey
The Old Chest at Wyther Grange
Aunt Ethelinda’s Monument
Aunt Susanna’s Birthday Celebration
The Hurrying of Ludovic
The Little Fellow’s Photograph
The Old South Orchard
The Life-Book of Uncle Jesse
A Garden of Old Delights
A Pioneer Wooing
A Chip of the Old Block
The Indecision of Margaret
Aunt Philippa and the Men
By the Grace of Sarah May
Abel and His Great Adventure
The Schoolmaster’s Bride
Our Neighbors at the Tansy Patch
The Matchmaker
Tomorrow Comes
I Know a Secret
Retribution
An Afternoon with Mr. Jenkins
Appendix: Dog Monday’s Vigil
Afterword
Notes
Bibliography
A Note on the Author
L.M. Montgomery is now widely recognized as a major twentieth-century author, one whose bestselling books remain hugely popular and influential all over the world more than three-quarters of a century after her death. Born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in 1874, into a family whose ancestors had immigrated to Canada from Scotland and England, she was raised in nearby Cavendish by her maternal grandparents following the death of her mother and spent a year during her adolescence with her father and his new family in Saskatchewan. Raised in a household that distrusted novels but prized poetry and oral storytelling, she began to write during childhood, although few examples of her juvenilia survive. She received a teaching certificate from Prince of Wales College (Charlottetown) and, after one year of teaching school, took undergraduate courses in English literature for a year at Dalhousie University (Halifax), but she did not have the financial resources to complete her degree. During this time, she began publishing essays, short fiction, and poems in North American periodicals. In 1898, after two more years of teaching school, she returned to Cavendish to take care of her widowed grandmother and to write full-time, soon earning more from her pen than she had teaching school. With the exception of a nine-month stint on the staff of the Halifax Daily Echo, where her duties included writing a weekly column entitled “Around the Table,” Montgomery remained in Cavendish until 1911, when the death of her grandmother freed her to marry a Presbyterian minister. After a honeymoon in England and Scotland, she and her husband moved to southern Ontario, where she divided her time between writing, motherhood, and the responsibilities that came with her position as a minister’s wife.
Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), the benchmark against which her remaining body of work is measured, was followed by twenty-three additional books, including ten featuring Anne Shirley: Anne of Avonlea (1909), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), Rilla of Ingleside (1921), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), Anne of Ingleside (1939), and The Blythes Are Quoted, completed shortly before her death but not published in its entirety until 2009. During her distinguished career, she was made a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts, was named one of the twelve greatest women in Canada by the Toronto Star, and became an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. When she died in 1942, apparently by her own hand, her obituary in the Globe and Mail declared that her body of work “showed no lessening of that freshness and simplicity of style that characterized Anne of Green Gables.” Since her death, several collections of her periodical pieces have been published, as have more than a dozen volumes of her journals, letters, essays, and scrapbooks. Ontario and Prince Edward Island are home to many tourist sites and archival collections devoted to her, and her books continue to be adapted for stage and screen.
Abbreviations
PUBLISHED WORK BY L.M. MONTGOMERY
AA
Anne of Avonlea
AfGG
After Green Gables: L.M. Montgomery’s Letters to Ephraim Weber, 1916–1941
AGG
Anne of Green Gables
AHD
Anne’s House of Dreams
AIn
Anne of Ingleside
AIs
Anne of the Island
AWP
Anne of Windy Poplars
AWW
Anne of Windy Willows
BC
The Blue Castle
BQ
The Blythes Are Quoted
CA
Chronicles of Avonlea
CJLMM, 1
The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900
CJLMM, 2
The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911
EC
Emily Climbs
ENM
Emily of New Moon
EQ
Emily’s Quest
FCA
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
GGL
The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909
GR
The Golden Road
JLH
Jane of Lantern Hill
KO
Kilmeny of the Orchard
LMMCJ, 1
LMMCJ, 2
L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1918–1921
LMMCJ, 5
L.M. Montgomery’s Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1930–1933
MDMM
My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery
MM
Magic for Marigold
MP
Mistress Pat: A Novel of Silver Bush
NH
A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917
RI
Rilla of Ingleside
RV
Rainbow Valley
SG
The Story Girl
SJLMM
The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 4: 1929–1935; Volume 5: 1935–1942
TW
A Tangled Web
WOP
The Watchman and Other Poems
WS
A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921
Preface
IN HER 1995 ARTICLE ON L.M. MONTGOMERY’S PROCESS of writing and revision, Elizabeth Epperly suggests that “anyone who has studied manuscripts knows the excitement of finding out something intimate about the writer in the changes of ink and slant of the words, in the crossings out and the additions, in the marginal notations and in the quality and care of the papers themselves.”1 In the years since Epperly’s pioneering research in this area, readers have had the opportunity to see Montgomery’s writing process in action, thanks to the recent publication of Readying Rilla (2016), edited by Elizabeth Waterston and Kate Waterston, and of Anne of Green Gables: The Original Manuscript (2019), edited by Carolyn Strom Collins. As Elizabeth Waterston notes, the manuscript of Rilla of Ingleside shows “Montgomery’s scrupulous self-editing,” both in “the first rush of writing” and throughout the process of revising. In short, studying the manuscript gives readers access to “the log of [Montgomery’s] creative voyage.” Extending this idea further, Collins suggests that “it should be comforting to those who wish to gain inspiration and insight into the construction of a classic novel such as Anne of Green Gables that it did not spring fully formed from the pen of the author, but had to be ‘pruned down and branched out,’ as Anne said about herself, before it made its entry into the world of exceptional literature.”2 Although cover art on recent trade editions of Montgomery’s novels tends to opt for a vaguely turn-of-the-twentieth-century aesthetic, regardless of when each book was written or is set, these particular editions of Anne and Rilla emphasize the process of creation and revision as rooted in time and place—Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, around 1905; Leaskdale, Ontario, between 1919 and 1920—and in the materiality of pen and paper.
Twice upon a Time, the third volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, likewise gives readers a chance to look under the hood, so to speak, of some of Montgomery’s best-known books in order to gain a more nuanced understanding of the process of inspiration, creation, reconsideration, and revision that led to book-length fiction that has remained in print for decades since her death. As the first volume in this series to centre on Montgomery’s fiction, preceded by a volume of her selected miscellaneous pieces (A Name for Herself) and a volume of her selected poems (A World of Songs),3 it offers readers a selection of her short stories that, with a few exceptions, were first published in periodicals between 1898 and 1939 and that consist of early versions of well-known characters, plot points, conversations, and settings in her books. As such, this volume of short fiction, like those that will follow in this series, seeks not only to add to the canon of known Montgomery texts but also to trouble the notion of a canon, showing the complex relationship Montgomery saw between periodical work (fleeting, given the frequency of publication, but with the potential to reach a large number of new readers) and book publication (given that a book could be reprinted indefinitely depending on public demand).4 In a study that juxtaposes Montgomery with four contemporaneous Canadian authors who also wrote bestselling fiction, Clarence Karr notes that “after a long apprenticeship, she managed, with Anne of Green Gables, to find the proper mix of good writing, satire, wit, and character portrayal to synchronize with the popular market for fiction.”5 Although Montgomery downplayed the scope of this “long apprenticeship” in several autobiographical essays published after she had become a bestselling novelist,6 her strategic use of the periodical story as a place to test out characters and storylines was considerable.
Earlier scholars who have looked at some of these stories have referred to them as “practice exercises” in the case of Elizabeth Waterston, “prequels” in the case of Irene Gammel, and “brief periodical warm-ups” in the case of Wendy Roy. Yet examining the material included in this volume shows that Montgomery’s use of the periodical story as a prelude to the novel—or as what Cecily Devereux calls an “early working-out in narrative”—is far more complex than it first seems.7 While stories such as “A Garden of Old Delights,” “Aunt Philippa and the Men,” “Abel and His Great Adventure,” and “Tomorrow Comes” were published a few years prior to their revised reappearance in book form, adding weight to the speculation that Montgomery wrote these stories with the intention of using them in a book that was already in progress, others like “Our Uncle Wheeler,” “A New-Fashioned Flavoring,” “Miss Marietta’s Jersey,” “The Little Fellow’s Photograph,” and “The Matchmaker” appeared in revised form in a novel a decade or longer after their appearance in periodical form, making for a different kind of creative process. Also in this collection is evidence of two more kinds of creative revision: “Retribution,” found in Montgomery’s papers in the form of a typescript that evidently precedes her expansion of the story for her final book, The Blythes Are Quoted (2009), but not, apparently, ever published in this form; and, as an appendix, “Dog Monday’s Vigil,” which was reworked from Rilla of Ingleside for inclusion in the third edition of Our Canadian Literature: Representative Prose and Verse (1923).
It is important to point out that, although Montgomery acknowledged in her book The Watchman and Other Poems (1916) the several periodicals that had first published some of the poems reprinted therein, she did not do likewise in any of her books of fiction.8 This includes Chronicles of Avonlea, a collection of linked short stories previously published separately in different form (“The Hurrying of Ludovic,” in this present volume, is a representative sample of a short story reworked for the Chronicles collection). Moreover, except for occasional remarks in her surviving life writing, she left no record of her rationale for selecting certain pieces as worthy of repurposing over others, nor did she comment on the timing of these publications. What fascinates me especially is that Montgomery published “The Schoolmaster’s Bride” and republished “A Pioneer Wooing” and “The Indecision of Margaret” in periodicals just before the publication of the novel in which a revised version appeared, almost as an attempt to whet the reading appetites of prospective book buyers, for whom the periodical story would be an unstated advertisement for a forthcoming novel. In so doing, Montgomery gave interested readers the “log” of her creative process, to return to Elizabeth Waterston’s phrase, but left much open to speculation based on the evidence she left behind.
Indeed, connecting the dots between Montgomery’s stated intentions and the clues scattered in hundreds of periodicals around the world has involved the time and expertise of several dedicated people. I am grateful to friends and colleagues in the L.M. Montgomery community—particularly Vanessa Brown, Mary Beth Cavert, Donna J. Campbell, Carolyn Strom Collins, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, Melanie J. Fishbane, Carole Gerson, Caroline E. Jones, Yuka Kajihara, Joanne Lebold, Jennifer H. Litster, Simon Lloyd, Andrea McKenzie, Kate Sutherland, and the late Christy Woster—for several years of conversation and collaboration about Montgomery’s publishing history. Thanks as well to Mark Thompson, Christine Robertson, and their colleagues at University of Toronto Press for shepherding this book through the production process; to two anonymous referees whose helpful feedback on a draft of this book’s manuscript gave me much to think about; to a James F. Harvey and Helen S. Harvey Travel Scholarship at McMaster University that made possible a research trip in 2006 (near the end of my doctoral studies) to Charlottetown, where I spent some time with Montgomery’s handwritten manuscripts; to staff at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery (Charlottetown), Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph Library, and University Archives and Special Collections at the University of Prince Edward Island Library, all of which house many Montgomery materials; to staff at the interlibrary loan departments at several university libraries, including Guelph, Laurier, Ryerson, Waterloo, and Winnipeg; and to Jacob Letkemann for his continued support and encouragement.
