Lucy Maud Montgomery

Elizabeth R. Epperly

Lucy Maud Montgomery's scrapbooks from the years 1893 to 1910 provide a revealing look into her life and inspiration during the time she created the beloved character of Anne Shirley while living on Prince Edward Island as a college student, teacher, and writer. In "Imagining Anne," over 100 pages of the scrapbooks are fully and beautifully reproduced in colour, and the significance of the souvenirs and clippings Montgomery collected are explained by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly. This beautiful gift book is a must-have for all Montgomery fans, lovers of Canadian history, and scrapbook enthusiasts.

The Island Scrapbooks of L.M. Montgomery

Imagining Anne

Elizabeth Rollins Epperly recounts her experience of leadership as the president of the University of Prince Edward Island in this beautifully written creative memoir-a book that is both funny and moving. When she became president of UPEI in 1995, Epperly began to reshape the university into a more vibrant, forward-looking and inclusive institution. Her tenure was a success, but she met many obstacles along the way. Epperly's narrative considers analogies of leadership, particularly her own past experiences, as ways of understanding the challenges she faced as president. She also draws insight from the 2500-year-old meditations of Chinese philosopher Lao Tzu, a search for the middle path between contending forces. Her account of the kinds of people who often oppose change, and her mindful use of Lao Tzu to bring resolution, makes for nothing short of mesmerizing reading. Known for her profound and sensitive literary readings, Epperly also has an intuitive understanding of body language and of unseen flows of energy that adds layers of fascination to the narrative. Running a large institution is challenging enough; doing so as its first female president required fortitude and insight (not to mention patience). This book will interest those contemplating power and authority in their own lives. If you have ever signed a contract or worked against behind-the-scenes politics, Power Notes may help you to think about analogies of leadership, and positions of power, in new ways.

Leadership by Analogy

Power Notes

Anne Shirley is the best known of a memorable group of heroines created by Lucy Maud Montgomery, a group that includes Emily Byrd Starr, Valancy Stirling, and Pat Gardiner. These characters are at the centre of Epperly's book, the first full-length critical study of all L.M. Montgomery's fiction. Epperly contends that Montgomery was a master of the romance genre, and through her use of literary allusions, repetitions, irony, and comic inversions she deftly manipulated the normal conventions of romance novels. By studying the fictional biographies of the heroines and their pursuit of romance, Epperly questions the ways romance shapes what we consider valuable in our imaginings and experience.

L. M. Montgomery's Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance

The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass

It might surprise some to know that internationally beloved Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942), author of the Anne of Green Gables series, among other novels, and hundreds of short stories and poems, also fuelled a passion for photography. For forty years, Montgomery photographed her favourite places and people, using many of these photographs to illustrate the hand-written journals she left as a record of her life. Artistically inclined, and possessing a strong visual memory, Montgomery created scenes and settings in her fiction that are closely linked to the carefully composed shapes in her photographs. Elizabeth Rollins Epperly's Through Lover's Lane is the first book to examine Montgomery's photography in any depth; it is also the first study to connect Montgomery's photography with her fiction and other writing. Drawing on the work of Montgomery scholars, as well as theorists such as Susan Sontag, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, John Berger, and George Lakoff, Epperly connects Montgomery's practice of photography with the writer's metaphors for home and belonging. Epperly examines thirty-five of Montgomery's photographs, demonstrating how they figure in the novelist's life and fiction. She argues that the shapes in Montgomery's favourite place in nature - Lover's Lane in Cavendish P.E.I. - organized Montgomery's other photographs, underpinned her colourful descriptions, and grounded her aesthetics. Through Lover's Lane suggests how an artist creates metaphors that resonate within a single work, echo across a lifetime of writing and photography, and inspire readers and viewers across cultures and time.

L.M. Montgomery's Photography and Visual Imagination

Through Lover's Lane

Irene Gammel

University of Toronto Press

Contributors from a wide range of disciplines explore L.M. Montgomery's writing and its relation to Canadian nationalism, including regionalism, canon formation, and Canadian-Amerian cultural relations.

Elizabeth R. Epperly

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