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L. M. Montgomery's Complete Journals: The Ontario Years 1911-1917. Edited by Jen Rubio. Toronto: Rock's Mills, 2016.
Readers of the five volumes of L. M. Montgomery's Selected Journals have long been curious about what had been left out by joint editors Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Complying with Montgomery's wishes to publish her complete journals seemed out of the question in 1985. To claim, however, as the blurb on the back cover of this third volume of the Complete Journals does, that "The original publication of Montgomery's journals in 1987 contained only a selection of her entries" is misleading. The first two installments of The Complete Journals published by Oxford University Press, The PEI Years, 1889-1900 (2012), and The PEI Years, 1901-1911 (2013), reveal, as does this volume, the restrictions imposed on the editors of The Selected Journals.
According to L. M. Montgomery Online, the editors of The Selected Journals "were directed to abridge Montgomery's journal text by fifty percent." The back cover of volume 1 of The Complete Journals asserts that "To save space and present an easily digestible, fast-moving narrative, passages describing Lucy Maud Montgomery's darker, more reflective moods and her religious and philosophical speculations were cut." This statement, however, is misleading since many of Montgomery's "reflective moods" and her "religious and philosophical speculations" were well represented in those volumes. Indeed, scholars perusing The Selected Journals discerned Montgomery's habit of copying verbatim passages from her journals into her correspondence with her pen pals Ephraim Weber and G. B. MacMillan. Furthermore, many of these passages addressed her religious beliefs and discussed philosophical matters. This is particularly true of her correspondence with Weber. The Selected Journals did fulfill Oxford University Press's stipulation that the editors cut the material by fifty percent, but Rubio and Waterston struggled to decide what to include and what to exclude, trying hard to make the half representative of the whole.
Just what material was edited out? Rubio and Waterston faithfully indicated where ellipses in the text occurred (…), but one discovers how many complete journal entries were cut by consulting the list entitled Omissions (1: 416; 2: 435). For example, in volume 1 of The Selected Journals 1889 is complete; 1890 is missing eleven entries, and...