2024 is L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday! The L.M. Montgomery Institute (LMMI) at the University of Prince Edward Island is celebrating with 150 tributes – celebratory statements or greetings – that reflect upon personal connections to Montgomery or on an aspect of her life, work, or legacy.
February 19 is “Islander Day” in Prince Edward Island and to celebrate Maud’s 150th, we have tributes from four Islanders: Edward MacDonald, Deirdre Kessler, Jean Mitchell, and Jane Ledwell.
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A celebratory tribute from Edward MacDonald:
When I was ten, my mother’s friend from Montreal took her daughter and my sister to see Green Gables House. I was left home – Anne was seen as a girl thing. I was annoyed. When I was twelve, our aunt from Winnipeg took me to see the musical, my first exposure to “high culture.” I was enchanted. As an adult, I read Anne from a sense of Islandness. I was entranced. I came back to Montgomery’s work as a researcher seeking to define that island and its appeal. I was enlightened. Turns out L.M. Montgomery isn’t just a girl thing. Or just an Island thing. She is one of literature’s golden gifts: author of works that touch us deeply and kindle in us that fragile sense of wonder that marks great art. Few authors have inspired such loyalty from so many for so long. And that is something worth celebrating.
Edward MacDonald is an Island historian at the University of Prince Edward Island.
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A nostalgic tribute from Deirdre Kessler:
In my essay, “L.M. Montgomery and the Creation of Prince Edward Island,” published in L.M. Montgomery and Popular Culture (U of T Press), I assert that the influence of a century of readers of Montgomery’s work has permeated the Prince Edward Island landscape and the consciousness of residents and visitors to such an extent that the Island is part physical geography and part Montgomery’s vision of the place combined with her vision instilled in millions of readers. I first read Anne of Green Gables to my grade 3 class in Vernon River. When we got to the chapter in which Matthew dies, we all sat still and quiet until one student said, “I didn’t know a teacher could cry.”
Deirdre Kessler, a former Poet Laureate of P.E.I. and author of over two dozen books of fiction and nonfiction, has taught the course on Montgomery as well as children’s literature and creative writing with UPEI English Dept. for many years and was in on the ground level of the founding of the Montgomery Institute.
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A grateful tribute from Jean Mitchell:
L.M. Montgomery is world-making: rendering stories and making relations visible. While growing up on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, I read Montgomery and she confirmed that landscapes are sentient and that ‘making kin’ with trees, fields, and shorelines and their inhabitants is not just the work of children. Later on, Montgomery led me to the material that wove Prince Edward Island and Oceanic islands into a story that I never imagined possible.
Jean Mitchell, an anthropologist at UPEI, researches islands in Oceania and is a fan and scholar of L.M. Montgomery's writing.
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A glowing tribute from Jane Ledwell:
I grew up 27 kilometres and 98 years from Lucy Maud Montgomery: nearer in space than in time to her life and her creations. Growing up a writer within that circumference, it was hard to say if Maud cast a shadow or a gleam across the literary landscape and Island imagination. In the shadow of saccharine oversimplifications and commercialization, the writer was tempted always to challenge, to write against her legacy. But on an August day by a brook or on a December evening meeting a sharp-tongued character with a sharp eye on Island cultural characteristics, the writer is required to recalibrate: to recognize that we write, here, in her gleam. Happy 150 years since that first glimmer.
Jane Ledwell is a Prince Edward Island writer and editor.
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To continue this week’s theme of “Islanders,” next week we’ll be featuring tributes from Islanders and an Islander at heart living abroad.