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.
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Today, July 1st, we celebrate Canada’s 157th birthday. This is also an opportunity to celebrate Montgomery’s legacy in Canada, one of the many topics discussed at the LMMI’s 16th international conference held two weeks ago, “The Politics of Home.” The Rt. Hon. Adrienne Clarkson, Canada’s 26th Governor General, one of the speakers at the first conference in 1994, was instrumental in inspiring the establishment of the Institute. In the Foreword she wrote for L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture (edited by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, University of Toronto Press, 1999), Clarkson states that “L.M. Montgomery in all her books gave me a profound understanding of what Canada is” and that the “profoundly anti-materialistic” lesson Montgomery’s novels convey reflects “the best of Canadian life … It is not about bending the world to your will … It is about listening to the heart and adapting to one’s immediate society because one is part of it, the larger organism.” The three tributes for today – from Adrienne Clarkson, Alexander MacLeod, and Isabelle McNeill – are a testament to Montgomery’s Canadian legacy.
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Adrienne Clarkson on modelling her life on Anne’s
In her autobiography Heart Matters, Adrienne Clarkson acknowledges the profound impact Lucy Maud Montgomery’s most beloved novel Anne of Green Gables had on her. “For me, as an immigrant child to Canada, Anne's adopted family and her wonderful sense of place in Prince Edward Island were identifiers of belonging. I loved the fact that Anne was an orphan who earned her way into the life and affections of Marilla and Matthew and of such starchy people as Mrs. Rachel Lynde. I think I used Anne's temperament, her drive, and her sense of knowing what she wanted to do very much as a model for my own life.”
–The Rt. Hon. Adrienne Clarkson is Canada’s 26th Governor General.
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Alexander MacLeod on Montgomery’s journals and “our shared existence”
For me, L.M. Montgomery’s journals are one of the most important documents in the history of our country’s literature. I come back to them, year after year, usually in the fall, a time when I feel my own life changing so acutely, just like hers, just like the world. I always find something new in these pages, or one of my students puts a new lens on something I only thought I knew. There is no better record, no more searingly honest examination, of the way our public and private worlds interpenetrate, or the way fame and anguish are so often linked in the writing life. I also read her to follow her desire, the way it flows uninterrupted through the vulnerabilities of childhood and adolescence, the flurry of courtship, and the disappointment of marriage, motherhood, mental health and aging. A great artist, facing down the great challenges of our shared existence: the journals hold everything.
Alexander MacLeod is a fiction writer and a professor of Literature and Atlantic Canada Studies at Saint Mary's University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.
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Isabelle McNeill on performing “The Ten Provinces March” on Parliament Hill
Loving Montgomery has followed me in every step of my life including as a military musician. During the summers, I parade with the Band of the Ceremonial Guard in Ottawa, and we perform Howard Cable’s “The Ten Provinces March” daily as we step on the grounds of Parliament Hill. The march features melodies from every province including the main theme from Anne of Green Gables: The Musical. Playing it brings me extraordinary pride for my home, family and friends past and present, and my university community, while I represent my beautiful province.
Corporal Isabelle McNeill, the LMMI’s 2023 Avery Award recipient, graduated this spring with a BA at the University of Prince Edward Island with a double major in Applied Communication, Leadership, and Culture, and Music. She enjoys researching connections between Montgomery and music, and parades with the Prince Edward Island Regiment Band.
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Next week’s tributes will feature Montgomery’s “Ontario novel,” The Blue Castle, inspired by her 1922 summer holiday in Bala, Muskoka.