L. M. Montgomery and War ed. by Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell

Reviewed by: L. M. Montgomery and War ed. by Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell Adrienne Kertzer (bio) L. M. Montgomery and War. Edited by Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell. Montreal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2017. Andrea McKenzie and Jane Ledwell’s edited collection has much to offer anyone interested in how readers remember female authors who do not abide by the cultural scripts defining the topics appropriate to them. While Rilla of Ingleside, the Montgomery novel most directly concerned with characters who live and die during the First World War, is the focus of many of the essays, one of the collection’s many strengths is how Rilla is nearly always viewed in a comparative context that situates it beside either the works of other artists and writers responding to the war, or other works by Montgomery. Thus, in “Mapping Patriotic Memory: L. M. Montgomery, Mary Riter Hamilton, and the Great War,” Irene Gammel explores “the subversive potential of a consoling aesthetic” (58) by juxtaposing Rilla with the work of a contemporary of Montgomery’s, the painter Mary Riter Hamilton. In contrast, in “Education for War: Anne of Green Gables and Rilla of Ingleside,” E. Holly Pike observes how many characters in Rilla regard the war as “a dividing line in history” (88), a perspective in keeping with that of Montgomery, who wrote “that the Anne series belonged to ‘the green untroubled pastures and still water’ before the war” (87). Just as Anne of Green Gables and the other Anne novels published before the First World War have a vexed relationship with the Anne books produced during and after the conflict, Montgomery’s war writing is similarly complex, moving from the longing expressed in Rilla that a better world would be born from the destructiveness of the war to a less hopeful vision as Montgomery witnessed the resurgence of global warfare. This darker vision is readily apparent in Montgomery’s treatment of Walter Blythe, whose death in battle features in Rilla. In titling their final section “Healing or Hurt? The Aftermath,” McKenzie and Ledwell clearly allude to the title of the poem that concludes Montgomery’s post-humously published The Blythes Are Quoted. In The Blythes, “The Aftermath” is attributed to Walter and presented as a poem that he composed just prior to his death. The poem’s exploration of the persona’s horror at having bayoneted a young boy prompts Anne’s relief that her son did not survive. Mirroring her own torment about the return to global conflict, Montgomery has Anne observe that Walter might have been further distressed “had he seen the futility of the sacrifice they made then mirrored in this ghastly holocaust” (Montgomery 510). One of the many questions raised by Montgomery’s war writing is how readers determine the relationship between the author and her fictional characters. Is Walter as a character authorized to express what the female author cannot? This possibility resonates in Susan Fisher’s essay “‘Watchman, What of the Night?’: L. M. Montgomery’s Poems of War.” Probing the relationship between Walter’s poetry and The Watchman and Other Poems, the only collection of poetry that Montgomery published [End Page 107] during the First World War, Fisher asks whether Montgomery intended Walter’s poem “to be taken as her last word, her ultimate assessment of the Great War” (107). The answer is not clear. That the manuscript of The Blythes Are Quoted was delivered to Montgomery’s publisher on the day of her death in 1942 is not necessarily proof of her views, for as Caroline E. Jones observes in “The Shadows of War: Interstitial Grief in L. M. Montgomery’s Final Novels,” Montgomery debated whether she should include “The Aftermath” in the manuscript. Jones reads this uncertainty as further proof of “Montgomery’s struggle . . . between the truth she experienced and the truth she so desperately longed for” (181). A second question is how concepts of gender inform Montgomery’s literary production, a topic analyzed in Laura M. Robinson’s “L. M. Montgomery’s Great War: The Home as Battleground in Rilla of Ingleside” and Maureen O. Gallagher’s “Across Enemy Lines: Gender and Nationalism in Else Ury’s and...

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