Selected Journals Volume I - Lucy Maud Montgomery

Title: Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Volume I, 1889-1910 Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery Genre: Biography Rating: 10/10 # pages: 397 Date read: December 2007, July 2021

Beginning when Lucy Maud Montgomery is fourteen, this first volume takes her to 1910, the year before her marriage, when she left Prince Edward Island. It recounts her schooldays in Cavendish, redolent with incidents, impressions, and romantic "crushes" that found their way into her fiction; a year spent in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan wither her father and stepmother; a year of study at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, where she trained to be a teacher, and another at Dalhousie University; her teaching years; a powerful infatuation with the son of a family she lived with; a long and mostly unhappy period of keeping house for her grandmother; and the publication of Anne of Green Gables.

The autobiographical content will fascinate every devoted reader of the Anne books. But the Montgomery journals are especially interesting because they provide a unique social history and the privilege of viewing closely the life of a remarkable woman. Comprising perhaps the most vivid and detailed memoir in Canadian letters, the journals will join Anne of Green Gables in ensuring Montgomery's lasting place in Canadian literature.


I've read all five journal volumes several times but this one remains my favourite. One could get a good impression of what LMM was like, just from reading this one.

LMM is one of my favourite authors, and I find it fascinating to read her journal and see what she was actually like in real life. Unfortunately she had a very hard and depressing life - not at all like the happy characters you meet in her books.

Despite her hardships, LMM had a very interesting life, and apart from letting me get to know her as a person, the journals are also a good way to learn what the life was like for a girl/woman on PEI around the turn of the last century.