The Deadly Pestilence: Pain and Mourning in L.M. Montgomery’s Pandemic Life Writing

Abstract

Montgomery’s life writing from December 1918 to May 1919 reveals a shift from the public anxiety of war to the private pain and grief of a pandemic. The author’s focus on her personal experience with influenza demonstrates what Elaine Scarry posits is pain’s “unsharability,” while her narrative construction of grief represents a Freudian “work of mourning.”