The L.M. Montgomery Reader: Volume Three: A Legacy in Review

by Benjamin Lefebvre

Now available in paperback, The L.M. Montgomery Reader assembles rediscovered primary material on one of Canada’s most enduringly popular authors, spanning the entirety of her high-profile career and the years since her death. Volume A Legacy in Review examines a long overlooked portion of Montgomery’s critical reviews of her books. Although Montgomery downplayed the impact that reviews had on her writing career, claiming to be amused and tolerant of reviewers’ contradictory opinions about her work, she nevertheless cared enough to keep a large percentage of them in scrapbooks as an archive of her career. This volume presents more than four hundred reviews from eight countries that raise questions about and offer reflections on gender, genre, setting, character, audience, and nationalism, much of which anticipated the scholarship that has thrived in the last four decades. Each volume in The L.M. Montgomery Reader is accompanied by an extensive introduction and detailed commentary by leading Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre that traces the interplay between the author and the critic, as well as between the private and the public Montgomery.

464 pages, Hardcover

First published December 31, 2014

About the author

Benjamin Lefebvre is the author of the novel In the Key of Dale (Arsenal Pulp Press, 2022) and the non-fiction work The Glory and the Dream: L.M. Montgomery’s Writing Life (Dundurn Press, 2026). His edited books include the three-volume critical anthology The L.M. Montgomery Reader (UTP, 2013–15), which won the 2016 PROSE Award for Literature from the Association of American Publishers, and an edition of L.M. Montgomery's rediscovered final book, The Blythes Are Quoted (Penguin Canada, 2009), which has since appeared in Polish, Finnish, Japanese, Brazilian Portuguese, and Italian and which was republished as part of Penguin Canada Modern Classics in July 2018.
He is also editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library, a series of books that collect Montgomery's extensive publications in the areas of short fiction, poetry, and miscellaneous pieces. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917, A World of Songs: Selected Poems, 1894–1921, Twice upon a Time: Selected Stories, 1898–1939, and Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903–1913 are already available, and several more volumes are in progress.