Anne Around the World: L. M. Montgomery and Her Classic ed. by Jane Ledwell, Jean Mitchell (review)

Reviewed by: Anne Around the World: L. M. Montgomery and Her Classic ed. by Jane Ledwell, Jean Mitchell Teya Rosenberg (bio) Anne Around the World: L. M. Montgomery and Her Classic. Edited by Jane Ledwell and Jean Mitchell . Montreal and Kingston : McGill-Queen’s University Press , 2013 . In 1975, Canadian Children’s Literature (CCL) published its first all–L. M. Montgomery issue, introducing an era of Montgomery studies that helped reveal the breadth of her work and establish her reputation as an important Canadian, and global, writer. The scholarly-critical work on Anne of Green Gables alone far outstrips that on any other text in Canadian children’s literature, and there is a solid oeuvre of scholarly editions of this novel and of Montgomery’s letters and journals, as well as criticism about her writing. In the past fifteen years, there have been at least eight monographs and five edited collections on Montgomery and her work, testifying to the dedication and productivity of Montgomery scholars. In this sixth edited collection, the essays are developed from papers given at the Eighth Biennial International L. M. Montgomery Conference on Prince Edward Island, sponsored by the L. M. Montgomery Institute in 2008. Corresponding with the centennial of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, the conference focused on that novel and on the idea of the “classic,” a focus abundantly clear in the nineteen essays, most of which engage with the notion of classic in some way. The collection is divided into five sections, moving from historical-biographical concerns (“Situating Montgomery and Her Classic”) through intertextuality (“The Terrain of the Classic: Allusions and Intertexts”), political approaches (“Provoking the Classic: Class, Colonialism, and Christianity”), global interest (“Anne and After: The Local and Global Circulation of a Classic Text”), and a miscellany section (“Paratexts and Aftertexts: Further Words on Anne). Most sections have three or four essays authored by a mix of established Montgomery and Canadian literature scholars as well as others not as well known. As with most edited collections, the essays vary in strength. The more interesting and successful are in the first and fourth sections. The first section, with four essays from founders of Montgomery scholarship, communicates the depth and breadth of, and long term commitment to, that field. Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, Elizabeth R. Epperly, Mary Henley Rubio, and Barbara Carmen Garner are all very much in control of their material, examining, respectively, Montgomery’s writing process; the connections between Montgomery’s photography and her creation and use of imagery in Anne; the questions surrounding the author’s death; and an overview of responses to Anne during the century of its publication, examined by theme. The essays are informative and entertaining. The fourth section deals with responses to and influences of Anne in different parts of the world: Iran, Uruguay, Turkey, Japan, and Sweden. Three of the essays (Gholamreza Samigorganroodi on teaching Anne in Iran; Tanfer Amin Tunc on teaching Anne and Willa Cather’s My Antonia [End Page 581] in Turkey; and Åsa Warnqvist on reading Anne in Sweden) discuss what readers respond to in Anne and how it corresponds to cultural values in those countries. The interview with Yoshiko Akamatsu about Anne in Japan touches on similar material in terms of Japanese audiences, as well as presenting the history of translations and publications, a topic also discussed by Warnqvist. Doreley Carolina Coll’s discussion of Anne in Montevideo examines the influence of Uruguayan author Armonía Somers on the dissemination of Anne during her time working in the Ministry of Education and with various education agencies, as well as Somers’s use of ideas and tropes from Montgomery, particularly from Anne, in her own writing for adults. One reservation I have about this section is that the interview with Akamatsu does not point readers to as much previous work done on Anne in Japan as it could have—CCL published articles in 1984 and 1998, and Irene Gammel’s edited collection, The Making of Avonlea: L. M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (2002) includes two essays. Other strong inclusions are Susan Meyer’s and Budge Wilson’s contributions. Meyer discusses Anne and Montgomery’s influence on later Canadian children’s writers...

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