Description
In Writing a Life, Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston look at the work of the prolific Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery, paying particular attention to her children's fiction and the secret journal that she began in 1889 and maintained until her death in 1942. Montgomery is revealed as a “subversive author” who “built secret messages of rebellion and resistance against authority (especially patriarchal authority) into her superficially sunny stories.” Writing a Life is an engaging portrayal of the covert passion and rebellion of a woman known to the public as a good wife, loving mother, and popular author.
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Lucy Maud Montgomery was born with the storyteller's gift. Throughout her life she would use this talent to tangle and reinforce the intersecting threads of her experience: her Scots heritage, her early years in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island, her teacher training at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, her unhappy marriage to a Presbyterian minister, and her powerful, tormenting ambition.With the creation of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery quickly became Canada's most enduring and celebrated author. Yet this biography presents the Montgomery legend with a darker cast. Rubio and Waterston reveal Montgomery to be a subversive writer, who interjected messages of resistance into her superficially pleasant stories. The authors pay attention to Montgomery's private journals, which pulse with open resentment at the structures of daily life that caught her ambition in cobwebs. Trapped in her marriage, confined by motherhood, and bound by the need to present a smiling face of domestic and feminine amiability in accord with the romantic tales she was producing, Montgomery's journals testify to her struggles with emotional depression and her self-destructive dependence on her increasing popularity. Before long, she became caught by her very facility in creating narratives, unconsciously adapting her life to suit her writerly needs.
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