Life lessons from L.M. Montgomery
Countless young readers have come of age alongside Anne Shirley, L.M. Montgomery’s beloved protagonist in her Anne of Green Gables books. It is common knowledge among her fans that Montgomery’s famous fictional place, Avonlea, set in a remote Canadian province, is Montgomery’s homage to her own early years in Cavendish, on Prince Edward Island. Although readers recognise the real-life places that thread their way through Montgomery’s books, what may be less well known are the contours of her personal life — the choices she made, the losses she felt — all of which serve as scaffolding for the numerous stirring narratives she composed during a period of decades.
Geared toward young adult readers, Liz Rosenberg’s new biography, House of Dreams: The Life of L. M. Montgomery, tells the story of the much-loved writer’s life. The book is enlivened with Julie Morstad’s sweet and spare illustrations, through which we can feel the precision as well as the pathos of Rosenberg’s affecting account.
We witness Montgomery’s heartbreaking childhood losses, her exalted place as a star pupil, her few brief stints as a young teacher, her years caring for her grandmother, her complicated courtships and marriage, cherished but often troubling children, possible mental illness and the revisionism surrounding accounts of her death. And as Rosenberg emphasises, while her life was taking its circuitous course, Montgomery was dogged in her pursuit of her creative aims.
Rosenberg takes the bare facts of this treasured writer’s life and allows them to be imbued with meaning and purpose in ways that will inspire young readers and writers. While she details the defining moments of Montgomery’s life, she shows us how these moments are reshaped and reimagined through Montgomery’s writing.
In Rosenberg’s telling, Montgomery didn’t simply experience her complicated and at times dispiriting life — she worked diligently to make meaning of it. Rosenberg writes that Montgomery “performed the great alchemy of art. She transformed her own history of abandonment into a story of rescue”. Rosenberg reminds us that “Fiction is the art of transformation. For many writers, including
L. M. Montgomery, it allows for happy reconciliations they cannot achieve in real life.”
Take heart, she seems to say — your life, no matter how confusing or complicated, can be fodder for your art, if you work with dedication.