Honoring Lucy Maud Montgomery in Sydenham

Sep 25, 2014

As part of their programming titled "Home Town Home Front: Kingston Frontenac in World War 1", the Kingston Frontenac Public Library's Sydenham branch invited Laura Robinson (photo left), head of the English department at the Royal Military College in Kingston, to present a talk on the life of famed Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery and her reflections of World War 1.

Robinson's talk coincides with a multi-media exhibit she put together that will be up in the Delahaye Room at the Kingston Library's Central Branch until Saturday, September 27.

Robinson focused her Sydenham talk on Montgomery's 1921 novel titled "Rilla of Ingleside", the eighth novel in her Anne of Green Gables series. Robinson said that while Montgomery drew on the raw material from factual war time realities, she used this material to create her own style of fiction and in doing so “highlighted the heroism that took place in rural Canada during those times.”

Robinson also said that Montgomery demonstrates in the "Rilla" characters some of her own ambiguities about the war by presenting many female characters doing their best to serve the war efforts, some happily, but others not so much. Similarly some of her male characters are presented with some opposing emotional feelings about the war itself.

Perhaps the most interesting part of Robinson's talk was when she spoke of Montgomery's more private self as gleaned from the author's journals, which when published beginning in the 1980s, caused a huge resurgence of interest in the Canadian author. The journals laid bare a side of Montgomery not formerly known, a more caustic, biting side, less charming and up beat than how she presented herself in public.

Robinson is the perfect choice to speak about Montgomery, having focused on her as a PhD student while at Queen's University in Kingston. Robinson included Montgomery's Anne series in her PhD thesis, which focused on girls' stories.

In her talk Robinson was careful to present Montgomery as a complex character, one who experienced her own personal woes throughout her life and who was a far more complicated individual than her books infer. For Robinson it has always been Montgomery's mastery of irony that attracted her to her work. “On the surface she always managed to toe the party line and behave properly and yet she still managed to get away with a lot. I think that is why so many people continue to love her and read her. It's because she writes things that are not as straight forward as they appear. Her characters and their feistiness show that although everything seems to work out in the end, in the middle parts of her books, her characters are always getting away with lots of stuff.”

Judging by the wealth of questions and comments from the audience at Robinson's talk in Sydenham, Lucy Maud Montgomery continues to inhabit the hearts and minds of many Canadians.