The Selected Journals Of L.M. Montgomery, Vol. 4: 1929-1935

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery #4

by L.M. Montgomery, Lucy Maud Montgomery, Mary Rubio (Editor)

Of the earlier volumes of L. M. Montgomery's journals, Pulitzer Prize-winning author Carol Shields has "These diaries possess the crisp, honest, unsparing voice of a real woman who fought all her life to bring her two selves the celebrated writer and the unloved child." Now
comes the much anticipated fourth, and penultimate, volume in the series, covering the tumultuous period from 1929 to 1935.
By 1929 Montgomery was 54 and known world-wide as the author of Anne of Green Gables . Yet with the stock market crash came a severe drop in her royalties and other troubling financial problems. Tremendous personal difficulties Montgomery witnessed her husband's total nervous breakdown,
faced concerns over her own mental state, and became the unwilling object of a young woman's passionate declaration of love. Yet this is not a period without joy, as the volume opens with exuberant travels to Prince Edward Island and western Canada and ends with her looking forward to a new life in
Toronto.
For anyone wishing to better understand this complex and gifted author, as well as the time and place in which she lived, these journals offer a wealth of insight and information.

Genres: Nonfiction, Biography, Canada, Memoir, Classics, Biography Memoir, Historical

472 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1988

About the author

Lucy Maud Montgomery was a Canadian author whose novels, stories, essays and poems made her one of the most widely read writers in Canadian literary history. Publishing under the name L. M. Montgomery, she achieved international recognition with the novel Anne of Green Gables, released in 1908, which quickly became a bestseller and introduced readers to the imaginative orphan Anne Shirley. The success of the book transformed Montgomery from a schoolteacher and magazine contributor into a celebrated literary figure whose work reached audiences far beyond Canada. Raised on Prince Edward Island, she drew deeply on its landscapes, rural communities, and storytelling traditions, turning the island into the setting for many of her novels. The popularity of Anne of Green Gables led to numerous sequels, including Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, establishing a beloved series that followed Anne from childhood to adulthood. Montgomery continued to write steadily throughout her life, producing twenty novels and more than a thousand short stories poems and essays. Her fiction often centered on young women, personal growth, and the emotional ties between people and place, combining gentle humor with reflections on memory, imagination, and belonging. Although she enjoyed enormous popularity, Montgomery also faced personal difficulties, including long periods of depression and the strain of caring for her husband, a Presbyterian minister who struggled with mental illness. Writing became both a profession and a refuge, allowing her to transform memories of childhood and observation of everyday life into vivid storytelling. In addition to the Anne series, she created other notable works, including the Emily novels and several stand alone stories that explored identity, creativity, and attachment to home. Her books were translated widely and attracted devoted readers around the world, helping shape the international image of Prince Edward Island as a place of pastoral beauty and warm community life. Scholars later studied her extensive journals letters and manuscripts, which revealed the complex inner life behind the cheerful tone of many of her books. By the time of her death in 1942, Montgomery had become one of the most successful and influential authors in Canadian literature. Her stories about imagination, resilience, and the search for belonging continue to inspire readers of all ages, and Anne Shirley remains one of the most recognizable characters in children's fiction. Through generations of readers, Montgomery's work has encouraged appreciation for storytelling, nature, and the emotional richness of ordinary life. Her legacy also includes a vast body of diaries and correspondence that document the challenges faced by a professional woman writer in the early twentieth century. Institutions such as the L. M. Montgomery Institute have continued to examine her influence on literature culture and tourism, particularly on Prince Edward Island, where sites associated with her fiction attract visitors from many countries. Adaptations of Anne of Green Gables for film, television, and theatre have introduced new audiences to her stories, ensuring that her characters remain part of global popular culture. Though critical opinion once dismissed her as merely a writer for children, later scholarship recognized the depth of her themes and the enduring craft of her storytelling. Today she is remembered as a central figure in Canadian literature whose imaginative vision gave voice to the beauty of rural life while celebrating the hopes of young dreamers who search for belonging.

Reviews

[Anna · Rating 3 out of 5]

I enjoyed this more than I thought I would. Maud has several years of relative peace and comfort. I begin to see that she is not nearly as harsh and judgmental as I had previously supposed. She uses the journals to complain which gives them more of a negative tint, but as I read between the lines I can see that she generally does not really hate the people that annoy her and can even enjoy their company. She continues more generous than wise with her money which becomes a problem for her during the great depression. Toward the end new trials emerge, as well as a resurgence of the old, and I am afraid this brings her to a sadly cynical point of view that she cannot enjoy anything because she will have to pay for it with a greater trial later. The bitter devastation she suffers from the secret marriage of her son and his misfortune in his first choice of profession seems an over the top response to me but I am not parent and live in a different time, so I cannot judge.

[Katie · Rating 4 out of 5]

These journals get increasingly depressing- you can see some suicidal thoughts she's having. One moment I really felt for her was when she turned sixty and said that it was the first time she had no loved ones with her on her birthday. In this volume, her husband's mental issues get much worse and he's hospitalized for a long time. Her son knocks a girl up and has to marry her, which she's so horrified by that she can't bring herself to write about it for a long time. (She was writing the Pat books during this time, and I think this was the inspiration behind Pat's brother marrying a girl the family didn't like.) Said son also has a lot of problems in school, which she stresses out about. And there's a whole thing with a fan named Isobel who she became friendly with but who kept writing her these scary-intense love letters. Maud's reaction to them is unsettling for a couple of reasons: first, because her views on homosexuality are not exactly enlightened and she writes some very upsetting things, and second, because why the heck does she keep responding to Isobel, sometimes even visiting her? Like...why aren't you just trashing the letters the moment they come and not bothering to respond? It was confusing. The volume ends with her husband leaving his church as they move to Toronto.

[Hana · Rating 5 out of 5]

Maud endured so much and her resilience and strength is evident in the fact that despite all the hardships, her husband’s mental illness and her own depression, she still managed to write and publish more books! It hurts so much to read of her clear depression, I found myself sighing and saying O Maud, I wish I could have given you a hug. I hugely relate to her high sensitivity and her love of nature and I love her way of describing the beauty of the world. It was extremely difficult to read sometimes knowing what we do about her eventually taking her own life. I’m dreading the next and last volume.

[Nicole · Rating 3 out of 5]

If you're a super-fan of LM Montgomery, it's interesting to see her personal writing...but it is a journal so she's constantly writing about people and places you don't know. This is a later volume when she's in her '50's and 60's. I thought it was sad that her husband is hardly mentioned and in every single entry she's complaining about her health-mental and physical. And about a crazy young fan who she detests but she's constantly visiting and placating. It's wearing to read, and I didn't make it to the end. I liked the old photos and hearing about her visits to "the Island".

[Janine Jensen · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading L. M. M’s journals, I do prefer the complete journals over these selected journals, I don’t care for the choppy reading of these and the complete journals also provide a wealth of contextual information in the footnotes which the selected journals have in the appendix rather than the bottom of the page and they are much less thorough in the selected version. Unfortunately the complete journals don’t have a final volume so I switched to these to be able to read to the end of her life.

[Elinor Loredan]

A bit of a long slog, although it is fascinating in spots. But mostly it is full of despair and misery. I found myself frustrated with L.M.M. She continued to overload herself by not saying no and then complains of fatigue. Then she does not cut off communication with fanatical Isobel. I wanted to shout at her to say no to things and stop writing to or seeing Isobel. But then, I myself am terrible at setting boundaries. Despite the almost uninterrupted gloom, I would like to read the fifth volume.

[M.E. Hembroff]

Loved reading about her. She has been my favorite author for many years. I would recommend this book to anyone who likes L. M. Montgomery's books. I would rate it 5 stars.

[Zoe · Rating 5 out of 5]

On my second time reading these journals, it is astonishing the way one person can endure so much - and a reminder of the small actions people perform that can add to a load or lighten it. Maud's homophobia is horrible to read, but Laura Robinson's article offered a new way of reading Isobel and Maud's response to her: a kind of homosociality between women that had an effective currency in Maud's childhood that lost its acceptance after Freud's works were published and sexualised the language of affection women had for each other.

In spite of the economic crash of 1929 and the consequent financial worries they caused, Volume 4 is in many ways one of the lighter of her journals - or perhaps the feeling is more restrained and concealed as Maud knows people will one day read this. It is interesting that in all her concerns about money, she never sells any of her possessions, proving that while her modest wealth is affected by the Wall Street Crash, she retains enough to remain firmly middle-class.

Chester and Luella have such a modern relationship that wouldn't cause so many concerns these days, but which seem to have utterly ruined Maud's life at the time - a potential product of the sexual repression she grew up indoctrinated by.

[Mireille Duval · Rating 4 out of 5]

Took me forever to read it but I still quite liked it. Life in Norval was much more interesting than Leaskdale, and the Chester drama made for more interesting reading than the Pickering one - though it was of course terribly sad for L.M. It's something of a heavy read, with the depression felt by both her and her husband, the constant discussion of how well they slept or what drugs they used. This book seemed to discuss actual writing even less than usual (except for a fair amount of Mistress Pat. I'm looking forward to the next book, though I guess considering how everything ends it's silly to hope that things will pick up in Toronto...

[Amy · Rating 5 out of 5]

These are getting harder and harder to read--Montgomery is slipping deeper and deeper into depression as external events (a contentious congregation at her husband's parish) and home events (difficulties with her adult children, her husband's mental illness) cause intense strain and misery. Still, she sometimes finds the good in life.

One volume left to go; I was hoping that the last years of her life would be more pleasant, but a week or so ago LMM's granddaughter released a statement, saying the family had agreed it was time to tell the truth: LMM committed suicide. So, that last journal: probably not going to be so cheerful.

[Melanie Stone · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love all of LM Montgomery's writing. It's always been something that cheered me up and made me see good in the world. Reading this journal of her life made me realize she struggled with depression, and to me this makes her stories even more amazing as she found the joy to share with others that she couldn't always find in her own real life.

[Alexandra · Rating 4 out of 5]

This book was hard to read. It's clear she's completely depressed. The sensitivity with which she wrote her books, which made them such a success, is the same one that made her feel everything so keenly, and thus contributed to her depression.

[Danielle · Rating 5 out of 5]

hard to get ahold of- snippets of her life from one of my favourite writers... writeresses?

[Maria Elmvang · Rating 5 out of 5]

I love reading about the life of LMM, as she's one of my favourite authors, and I find it absolutely fascinating how different her life is from that of the characters in her books.

[Laura · Rating 3 out of 5]

Too depressing to talk about

[Mitzi · Rating 5 out of 5]

Reading Maud's journals is very bittersweet - there was so much hardship and sadness in her life...