Penguin set to publish “new” L.M. Montgomery title

This October, Penguin Canada will be releasing a new – or at least sort of new – Lucy Maud Montgomery title. According to Benjamin Lefebvre, a postdoctoral fellow at the University of Alberta who rediscovered the work and brought it to Penguin’s attention, The Blythes Are Quoted is a collection of 15 short stories featuring several Anne of Green Gables characters, including Anne herself.

Lefebvre, who is now editing the collection for Penguin, first read the manuscript in the University of Guelph archives; the school bought Montgomery’s journals in the 1980s, he says, and subsequently received a number of related files, including typescripts for The Blythes Are Quoted. Much of the work has been published once before, in 1974, as The Road to Yesterday, but Lefebvre says there were a number of significant cuts.

Between the stories, he explains, Montgomery included a number of vignettes, including 41 poems attributed to Anne and her son Walter, each followed by scraps of dialogue between the family members. These elements – which add up to approximately 100 pages of text – were all left out of Yesterday, says Lefebvre, and many of the stories were  shortened “quite a bit.”

One possible explanation for the relative obscurity of the material is that the stories don’t reflect the sunny tone readers might expect from Montgomery. Several themes in The Blythes Are Quoted are inescapably grown-up: adultery, illegitimacy, hatred, revenge, death. “For anybody who’s read Montgomery’s journals,” which depicted a woman who was often depressed and even vindictive, Lefebvre says, “nothing in [the story collection] is very surprising.”

Despite the dark subject matter, Penguin senior editor Alexander Schultz says the collection will be targeted at young and old alike, and that the company is hoping to reach the same  audience that recently made a hit of Budge Wilson’s Before Green Gables, which has sold more than 50,000 copies to date. Sales and marketing plans are still being hammered out, but Schultz says there will likely be promotional links to Jane Urquhart’s Extraordinary Canadians biography of Montgomery, which is set to be published at the same time.