The L.M. Montgomery Reader

"Benjamin Lefebvre amasses a century-long, world-wide array of responses to L.M. Montgomery's work. Readers will be surprised and amused by his revelation of wild swings in taste and bias among critics of the ever-popular Canadian writer." -- Elizabeth Waterston, Department of English, University of Guelph

The L.M. Montgomery Reader traces the author’s enduring legacy as a Canadian icon and as a literary celebrity both during and beyond her lifetime.

Now available in paperback, The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles rediscovered primary material on one of Canada’s most enduringly popular authors, spanning the entirety of her high-profile career and the years since her death.

Volume Three: A Legacy in Review examines a long overlooked portion of Montgomery’s critical reception: reviews of her books. Although Montgomery downplayed the impact that reviews had on her writing career, claiming to be amused and tolerant of reviewers’ contradictory opinions about her work, she nevertheless cared enough to keep a large percentage of them in scrapbooks as an archive of her career. This volume presents more than four hundred reviews from eight countries that raise questions about and offer reflections on gender, genre, setting, character, audience, and nationalism, much of which anticipated the scholarship that has thrived in the last four decades.

Each volume in The L.M. Montgomery Reader is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that traces the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and the public Montgomery.