Would you like to read one (or two) of L.M. Montgomery’s novels with my friend Naomi and me? As I mentioned last Friday in the introduction to the guest post Naomi wrote for my blog, she and I met several years ago through an Anne of Green Gables readalong. A couple of years later, she hosted a readalong for Montgomery’s three “Emily” novels, and not long after that, we co-hosted a readalong for The Blue Castle.

We’ve been talking about reading another Montgomery novel together in the spring. Maybe Jane of Lantern Hill or Kilmeny of the Orchard. Or Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat. If you’d like to join us, please let us know. Which novel(s) would you vote for?

I was sure I had a copy of Kilmeny of the Orchard, but I can’t find it. I know I read it when I was ten or eleven, back when I was completely obsessed with the world of Montgomery’s novels. I do, however, have this copy of “Una of the Garden,” a story Montgomery published in 1908-1909 and later transformed into Kilmeny of the Orchard.

Sometimes I think of this blog as a kind of scrapbook, inspired by the many scrapbooks Montgomery kept, in which she collected poems, stories, and book reviews, along with mementos such as ribbons, concert programs, pressed flowers, and so on.

In that spirit, then, I’ll add to my “scrapbook” some photos of spring flowers, given to me by my sister, who has been taking pictures of crocuses in Bonn, Germany, and my daughter, who was in Washington, DC last weekend.

If you’d like to read more about Montgomery’s scrapbooks, I recommend Carolyn Strom Collins’s article “Cutting and Pasting: What L.M. Montgomery’s Island Scrapbooks Reveal About Her Reading,” in the Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies. I heard Carolyn present this paper at the L.M. Montgomery International Conference “L.M. Montgomery and Reading” in June of 2018 at the University of Prince Edward Island.

Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, founder of the L.M. Montgomery Institute at UPEI, curated a virtual exhibition that includes scrapbook pages: “Picturing a Canadian Life: L.M. Montgomery’s Personal Scrapbooks and Book Covers.”