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Rita Bode, Lesley D. Clements, E. Holly Pike, and Margaret Steffler, eds., Children and Childhoods in L. M. Montgomery: Continuing Conversations

2023; Canadian History of Education Association; Linguagem: Inglês

10.32316/hse-rhe.2023.5221

1911-9674

Shannon Murray,

Themes in Literature Analysis

I was recently hiking in Europe and walked with dozens of people from around the world -New Zealand, Germany, US, Poland, Ireland, Slovakia, Indonesia -and about half of the people I met knew Prince Edward Island, the tiny Canadian province I live in.Those who did, knew it for one reason: Anne of Green Gables.They told stories about how central it and other novels by L. M. Montgomery were in their childhoods, how much their ideas about themselves and their early identities were shaped as children by the power of Montgomery's writing.They are the "Anneites" or "Maud Squad" that Kate Scarth refers to in her chapter of the edited collection Children and Childhoods in L. M. Montgomery.In this varied but uniformly strong collection of essays about connections, conversations, confluences, and influences in Montgomery's works, we get a sense of where that power comes from, power over both child and adult readers for over a hundred years and from around the world.Children and Childhoods in L. M. Montgomery covers a lot of ground in Montgomery studies.It arranges its twelve essays into four groupings: conversing with the past; fantasy, the ideal, and reality; transformative relationships and spaces; and anime, fanfiction, and TV adaptations.Two big ideas run through the collection.The first is the way Montgomery redefines, rethinks, and models children and childhood through her characters, a thread that makes this a very useful addition to the history of the idea of the child.The second is the complex interplay of connections to texts, characters, and genres that Montgomery or her readers make beyond the novels themselves.Those connections are presented variously as "influence," "confluence," and my favorite, "conversation," and the essays together insist on the richness that comes when one has, in the words of the introduction, "meaningful conversations with what one is reading" (7).Kate Scarth's examination of domestic space in Montgomery's Emily of New Moon and Jane Austen's Mansfield Park is a stand-out.She elegantly traces how the two heroines, Emily and Fanny, claim agency through natural and domestic spaces.Equally strong and quite moving at times is Lesley D. Clement's look at the understanding of death and dying in Montgomery's novels and how the child characters come to terms with loss.Margaret Steffler traces the "Performance of the Beautiful Dream Boy" in Montgomery's novels and Frances Hodgson Burnett's, drawing connections between the fictional boys and the authors' own sons.Bonnie Tulloch is interested in the blurring of the real and the fantastic and the distinction between adult and child responses to the fantastic as she connects Anne and Peter Pan.Asa Warnqvist has new and interesting things to say about playful and imaginative children as she connects Anne with Pippi Longstocking.Other essays raise connections with Shakespeare, Madeleine L'Engle, Suzanne Collins, Charles Dickens, and then the afterlives of Anne in animé, adaptations, and fanfiction, all suggesting how centered L. M. Montgomery is within this rich and generative conversation.