Charting the outlines of Canadian children's literature

Abstract

Charting the Outlines of Canadian Children’s Literature Mavis Reimer (bio) Elizabeth Waterston. Children’s Literature in Canada. Twayne’s World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1992. Genevieve Wiggins. L. M. Montgomery. Twayne’s World Authors Series. New York: Twayne, 1992. Both of these additions to Twayne’s Children’s Literature Series provide useful introductions to their subjects, succeeding in shaping a bulk of material into accessible form. L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908) is widely acknowledged as a children’s classic, but many of her other publications—a total of 20 novels, 500 short stories, and uncounted numbers of poems—are little known. In L. M. Montgomery, Genevieve Wiggins provides a guide to much of this material, following the conventional Twayne format of outlining Montgomery’s life and then considering the themes and the significance of each of the major publications. The book concludes with an afterword in which Wiggins assesses Montgomery’s standing as a writer and with a selected bibliography of primary and secondary works. Although Wiggins does not emphasize it, one of the contexts for the critical assessment of the achievements of L. M. Montgomery is the study of Canadian children’s literature. An editor of Montgomery’s journals, Elizabeth Waterston surveys the recurrent themes and major genres of this literature from settlement in the eighteenth century to the present day in Children’s Literature in Canada. The 16-page selected bibliography of [End Page 95] primary works appended to Waterston’s study not only provides a valuable resource for readers unacquainted with the rich variety of children’s texts published in Canada, but also points readers well acquainted with the literature of the past few decades to the largely unknown but significant holdings of early children’s texts in Canadian archives and libraries. But, because organizing large quantities of information is a main objective of these books, the forms Wiggins and Waterston choose are themselves significant aspects of these texts. In several cases, the assumptions implied by the formats seem to me questionable ones. In her introductory sketch of Montgomery’s life, Wiggins organizes the biography into “epochs” on the basis of Montgomery’s moves from one location to another. There are “The Island Years,” “A Year in Saskatchewan,” “Country Schoolmarm and University Student,” “Return to Cavendish,” “The Leaskdale Years,” “The Norval Years,” and “The Toronto Years.” That Montgomery saw place as constitutive of personality seems obvious from the titles of many of her books—Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), Anne of the Island (1915), Rilla of Ingleside (1921), Emily of New Moon (1923), Pat of Silver Bush (1933), Jane of Lantern Hill (1937)—but Wiggins is, for the most part, content to list the biographical and literary milestones associated with these stages of Montgomery’s life rather than to explore the emotional, intellectual, or aesthetic effect of her homes on Montgomery’s development. Wiggins apparently assumes that the early years in Cavendish set Montgomery’s personality: what she calls “the story of a lonely, sensitive child dominated by unsympathetic adults” (2) is seen as the narrative Montgomery continues both to tell and to live, with her husband, his parishioners, and her publishers variously taking on the metaphorical role of “unsympathetic adults.” This reading of Montgomery’s life has become a commonplace in the criticism and Wiggins’s book clearly is designed to record received opinion rather than to challenge it. But I regretted finding little sense in this biographical essay of the power Montgomery felt as a mother, of her pleasure in her growing, intimate friendship with Frederica Campbell, of her pride in her accomplishments as a writer, or of the glee she took in verbally leveling people she met, aspects of her adult life that can also be read in the entries contained in the first two volumes of The Selected Journals (1985, 1987), from which Wiggins frequently quotes. Wiggins chooses to organize her discussion of the books primarily by the type of central character and only secondarily by chronology. Anne of Green Gables gets its own chapter, with Wiggins deftly integrating the [End Page 96] insights of many of the...