Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L.M. Montgomery

This collection of essays calls for new interpretive strategies in reading the texts of Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), author of Anne of Green Gables (1908). Long overlooked in academic critical discourse as a writer of popular and children's fiction, Montgomery is reread here in the light of gender and cultural studies, as well as of autobiographical theory. The first section of essays places Montgomery and her texts (including her journals) in a literary and cultural context; the second section focuses on selected individual novels. In these essays by an international group of scholars from the United Kingdom, the USA, Scandinavia, and Canada, Montgomery is established as an immensely influential writer who has gained and maintained a world-wide readership throughout the twentieth century.A best-selling writer in her native Canada and throughout the world, Montgomery published some 20 books, over 500 short stories and over 500 poems during her lifetime. At her death she left 10 volumes of unpublished 500-page journals, covering the years from 1889-1942, whose recent publication has added immensely to our understanding of the interior life of a woman of her era.