Happy Book Birthday!: After Anne by Logan Steiner
A novel of L. M. Montgomery as revisionist and editor
I grew up in the Maritimes, with red hair and a bookish personality, so the comparisons to Anne Shirley abounded in my childhood. Luckily, she is a charming enough character that I did not end up hating her as some others of my acquaintance did.
Much as I’ve loved Anne, I’ve never delved very far into the life of her author, Lucy Maud Montgomery (known to her friends as Maud). In fact, the disclosure by her granddaughter in 2008 of the circumstances around Maud’s death, completely escaped me until reading the description of this novel. I confess I wasn’t completely surprised to hear it.
Maud kept journals all her life with the intention of having them published after her death, she also rewrote and edited those journals later in her life, and even after that used a razor to remove pages from the “final” copies.
It’s in these moments that Steiner sets her imaginative novel, After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Life.1 Steiner recreates possibilities for the little lost moments of Maud’s diary. Her novel explores the what-might-have-beens of the pages Maud rewrites or edits out: both those she considers too young and flighty and those where she was too despondent to earn the respect of “The Reader”: the archetype of her audience Maud’s created in her mind.
Steiner’s tale is respectful and loving, but also unflinching. You can tell that while she is a great fan of LMM, she is also a realist about the tragedies that wore Maud down through her life: the great change in her husband, the estrangement from one of her two sons, the insistence of the reading public that her work was only for children.
The difference between one’s public face and one’s private persona drives this novel. We all have different “selves” that we put on for other people; and they wear at us, sometimes, they wear us down.
A good companion to this novel would be the essay collection: Run Towards the Danger: Confrontations with a Body of Memory by Sarah Polley — who has a tangential connection to LMM.
Links lead to Owl’s Nest Books. Please consider buying these titles from an independent bookstore near you.