“Sex matters”: L. M.

Montgomery, Friendship, and

Sexuality
Laura M. Robinson

Children's Literature, Volume 40, 2012, pp. 167-190 (Article)

Published by Johns Hopkins University Press

DOI: https://doi.org/10.1353/chl.2012.0017

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 “Sex matters”: L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and
Sexuality
Laura M. Robinson

I understand [Isabel’s] “special need of me” only too well—much better

than she understands it herself. It is the horrible craving of the Lesbian.
—L. M. Montgomery, 24 June 1932, Selected Journals 4: 185

From 1926 onward, a thirty-something female schoolteacher plagued

Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874­–1942), best known for
her 1908 novel, Anne of Green Gables. Begging for letters, visits, phone
calls, Isabel Anderson1 was from Acton, Ontario, close to Norval, where
Montgomery, then in her fifties, lived at the time. Because Montgomery
had previously and without difficulty maintained devoted friendships
and filled the pages of her novels with tales of girls’ love for each other,
her horrified responses to Isabel as recorded in her journals, often
overtly for posterity, offer a fascinating glimpse into changing ideologies
toward women’s friendships in Canada between 1890 and 1930. While
I certainly wish to acknowledge the terrible emotional toll Isabel’s at-
tentions undeniably took on Montgomery, her sexualization of Isabel’s
unrelenting interest in friendship opens the door to exploring the
intersection between romantic friendships and the newly articulated
pathology of lesbianism. Examining Montgomery’s troubled relation-
ship with Isabel offers insight into the degree to which sexuality polices
gender roles; in post–World War I Canada, inappropriate gender be-
havior might lead to accusations of lesbianism, and thus of illness. In
her discussion of sexual oppression and sexual panics, anthropologist
Gayle Rubin suggests that sexuality is political and can thus operate
in the service of the dominant culture to maintain traditional gender
roles: “Because sexuality is a nexus of the relationships between genders,
much of the oppression of women is borne by, mediated through, and
constituted within, sexuality” (28).
The casualty of this renewed spotlight on women’s gendered be-
havior is women’s friendships with each other, shifting from the “ro-
mantic friendships” of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries
to a pointedly nonromantic paradigm. This shift is clearly evident in
Montgomery’s panicked depictions of Isabel, which, as historian Mary
Beth Cavert’s research establishes, bear only a slim resemblance to the

2012. Children’s Literature 40, Hollins University © 2012. 167

168 Laura M. Robinson

woman who lived in Acton, Ontario: an active and successful school-

teacher, church volunteer, writer, and witty poet. I will argue that, in
the face of a public discourse after World War I which recast women’s
same-sex friendships, the figure of Isabel emerges in the journals to
establish Montgomery’s own intense love for women as normal, to
construct herself for the first time as distinctly heterosexual. More-
over, Montgomery’s example reveals her strategy for reinterpreting
friendship in this new era as she “heterosexualizes” herself in such a
way as to maintain the centrality and legitimacy of her long-standing
same-sex attachments.
Ultimately, Montgomery’s carefully crafted representation of Isabel
bears historical and literary significance, as it demonstrates that the shift
in society’s attitudes toward female friendship had a decided impact
on Montgomery’s self-representation. An analysis of her representation
of the friendship with Isabel contributes to ongoing dialogues about
women’s history, female friendships, life-writing, and Montgomery
studies in the following ways. First, it provides a Canadian case study
of the postwar backlash against women and its deleterious effect on
women’s relationships with one another. Second, it works to historicize
an analysis of female friendship. Third, it uncovers one woman’s strategy
for maintaining the centrality of friendship in the face of a changing
discourse that pathologizes women’s same-sex attachments. Last, it
prepares the way for analyzing Montgomery’s shifting representation
of female friendship in her fiction, although such an analysis is beyond
the scope of this present study.

Writing Her Life

Before discussing the historical context of, and in, the journals, it is
important to discuss the actual reading of them. As such notable schol-
ars of Montgomery’s life-writing as the editors of the journals, Mary
Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, and critic Helen Buss clearly indicate,
reading them is at best a problematic enterprise, as they are far from a
straightforward representation of Montgomery’s life. Montgomery was
continually in the process of writing and rewriting her journals2; she was
constantly reshaping and reflecting on herself. After the publication of
Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery knew she was famous and wanted her
heirs to publish her journals after her death: “Today I finished copying
my journal into uniform volumes. . . . This journal is a faithful record
of one human being’s life and so should have a certain literary value.
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 169

My heirs might publish an abridged volume after my death . . .” (16

April 1922 [3: 51]).3 She recopied her earlier journals into identical
account books for her heirs, but she most likely did not reproduce the
journals unchanged, even though she said she did. Making reference
to pages sliced out and replaced, bleach marks, and erasures in the
ten ledgers, Margaret Turner discusses Montgomery’s process of writ-
ing, revising, rewriting, annotating, editing, and erasing, concluding
that “It is obvious that we cannot take Montgomery’s journals in any
sense as naïve, objective accounts of her daily life” (96). Montgomery
is consciously constructing and reconstructing herself for posterity;
thus, even if journals ever could, hers in particular do not transpar-
ently record her lived reality. While her journals cannot provide any
kind of Truth, they do, however, provide a fascinating insight into the
complexity of self-construction.
In order to unpack that self-construction, Buss suggests “reading
between the lines” (“Decoding” 84).4 She notes that Montgomery was
a Victorian woman writing a personal narrative; significant editing and
censoring might be at play in any description because of ingrained
pressures to behave in a proper fashion. Montgomery highlights her
own self-censoring, for example: “I have not yet found anything much
pleasanter than talking with the right kind of man—except—but I won’t
write it. My descendents might be shocked” (31 Jan. 1920 [2: 396]). In
this moment, Montgomery draws attention to the degree to which parts
of her life remain purposefully unwritten. Buss’s approach to Mont-
gomery’s journals accords with other life-writing scholars’ perspectives
on reading women’s diaries. Suzanne Bunkers and Cynthia Huff argue
that “the self-presentation in women’s diaries often tells the truth slant
by leaving out as much as leaving in. The use of encoding, whether it
is in the form of silences and gaps or foreign and special phraseology,
invites us to interrogate the public/private construction of the diarist
as well as the truth value and presumed historical objectivity of the
diary record” (19–20). Similarly, Valerie Sanders encourages readers
to notice what is not said, to observe where women writers downplay
their abilities (167).
To locate the ambiguities of Montgomery’s self-construction, I am
choosing the deconstructive approach to her journals as articulated
by Catherine Belsey:
The object of the critic, then, is to seek not the unity of the
work, but the multiplicity and diversity of its possible meanings,
its incompleteness, the omissions which it displays but cannot
170 Laura M. Robinson

describe, and above all its contradictions. In its absences, and

in the collisions between divergent meanings, the text implicitly
criticizes its own ideology; it contains within itself the critique of
its own values, in the sense that it is available for a new process
of production of meaning by the reader, and in this process it
can provide a knowledge of the limits of ideological representa-
tion. (57)
Most importantly, I am not attempting to identify Montgomery as
a repressed lesbian by seeking through the coded language for ex-
amples of where the lesbianism emerges. Instead, I am fully engaged
with Montgomery’s complicated representation of herself and of the
contradictory ideology surrounding friendship and sexuality as they
emerge through the journals. Montgomery was caught in a time period
during which attitudes toward friendship and marriage were undergo-
ing seismic shifts.

Love and Friendship

While several critics have examined the importance of female friend-

ships in Montgomery’s fiction,5 in her letters, and primarily in her
journals, Montgomery represents her emotional energies as centering
on girls and women. Her youthful letters to friends are filled with the
adolescent hyperbole that was popular at the time. She and her second
cousin Penzie Macneill, a girl several years older than Montgomery,
were “great chums” (22 Sept. 1889 [1: 1]). In a letter to Penzie on 20
September 1890, Montgomery effused: “Oh don’t I wish that instead
of writing to you I could go to you and get my arms around you and
kiss you. I am waiting with the greatest impatience for a letter from
you” (Letter to Penzie Macneill; Bolger 88). Decades later, she com-
ments in her journal on an 1890 poem she wrote to Penzie: “I certainly
gilded the violet with lavish pen” (20 Oct. 1936 [5: 106]). Even later, as
a married woman, she shows that her primary emotional sustenance
came from her female friends. Throughout her later life, she longed
for what she characterized as the “deeply passionate attachment” with
her girlhood friend Laura Pritchard (10 Oct. 1930 [4: 75]), going so
far to write a fifteen-page passage after Laura’s death (26 Nov. 1933
[Unpublished journals 8: 505–20]).6 At fifteen, she befriended Laura
during the year she spent in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, visiting her
father and his wife. Montgomery was twenty-eight when Nora Lefurgey
came to Cavendish as a schoolteacher, fulfilling a “long-felt want” in
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 171

Montgomery (21 Sept. 1902 [1:283]); they, too, remained friends for
life, as I will discuss later. Her cousin and very best friend Frederica
Campbell was almost inarguably the emotional core of Montgomery’s
life. After Frederica moved to Red Deer, Montgomery complains: “It
seems just now as if I couldn’t live without Frede” (16 Dec. 1912 [2: 115;
emphasis in original]). Her feelings for her cousin are so intense that
when Frede is ill with typhoid and close to death, Montgomery cries
out in the pages of her journal, “Frede, my more than sister” (11 April
1915 [2: 164]). This term of endearment recalls the exact phrase that
Victor Frankenstein uses for his adoptive sister, who becomes his wife,
in Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein.7 The passages that occur after Frede dies
several years later are some of the most poignant in all the journals. Each
year on the anniversary of Frede’s death, Montgomery grieved anew.
My point here is that Montgomery represented herself as seeking
out and deriving great sustenance from her female friendships. This
emotional intensity, and the often flamboyant descriptions of the af-
fections, both physical and emotional, emerged from a society that
generally encouraged this style of female friendships. Scholars such
as Lillian Faderman, Carroll Smith-Rosenberg, Sharon Marcus, and
Lisa Moore explore women’s same-sex relationships in the nineteenth
century and suggest that, because of the separation between male and
female cultures at the time, girls and women necessarily forged intense
bonds with each other. Women in “romantic friendships” declared
passionate love for one another, as Montgomery did in her journals.
Smith-Rosenberg cites some examples of physical affection from let-
ters of romantic friends: “Imagine yourself kissed a dozen times my
darling” (57); “I thought as I watched her light figure how often I
had held her in my arms—how dear she had once been to me” (72).
In a letter congratulating a new husband, one young woman wrote of
the bride: “Do you know sir, that until you came along I believe that
she loved me almost as girls love their lovers. I know I loved her so”
(58). Both Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg suggest that these intense
same-sex friendships were greeted with approbation in the nineteenth
century. According to Moore, however, such relationships elicited a
host of differing responses, from the threatened to the indifferent.
While Moore’s point is certainly well taken, the textual exuberance of
women’s passionate friendships changes significantly after the turn of
the century, as both Faderman and Smith-Rosenberg effectively argue.
Given her passionate friendships, Montgomery’s panic about Isabel
Anderson stands out as an anomaly, if regarded ahistorically. In her
172 Laura M. Robinson

journals of 1926, Montgomery backhandedly mentions receiving a

delightful letter from a young fan (17 July 1926 [3: 299]). By 1930,
she retrospectively relates the tale of Isabel’s interest in her with hor-
ror (1 Mar. 1930 [4: 32–36]). As both Cavert and Rubio document in
their historical overviews of Montgomery’s friendship with the younger
woman,8 Isabel was a spinster schoolteacher of thirty when she first
contacted Montgomery, then in her fifties. At first, according to her
journals, Montgomery took pleasure in Isabel’s letters and responded
in kind. As the younger woman began pressuring her for more and
more intimacies and hounding her for visits, the older writer began
to have serious misgivings: “I am up against something now which is
too much for me—and which nauseates me past all telling into the
bargain” (1 Mar. 1930 [4: 36]). She labeled Isabel a pervert and a
lesbian, attempting to distance herself, to no avail. Isabel was relent-
less. Montgomery expresses her frustration, for example, when Isabel
continues to write letters to her: “If she does not give up persecuting
me I vow I will open a vein” (9 April 1930 [4: 46]). The Isabel episode
becomes an important ideological moment; the figure of Isabel as she
is represented in the journals demonstrates the changing ideology sur-
rounding women’s friendships and their support for each other. While
Isabel perhaps emulates the gushing intimacies of the Victorian era, this
kind of relationship is no longer savory in the late 1920s and early ‘30s.
As the primary breadwinner in her family, an internationally acclaimed
writer, and a public figure, Montgomery is situated uncomfortably in
an era in which there is a strong backlash against early feminism. Her
journals define Isabel as a lesbian and, in doing so, necessarily define
Montgomery as normative, as nonlesbian, as heterosexual, an identity
particularly vital in the face of her enduring love for her female friends
and her ambivalence about heterosexuality. Her labeling of Isabel also,
perhaps ironically, enables her to maintain her own strong connections
with women.

Love and Marriage

Several Montgomery scholars have discussed her ambivalence about

sexuality, mostly through identifying how her fiction evades or side-
steps it.9 For the most part, however, critics have traditionally avoided
overt engagement with the issue of sexuality in Montgomery’s fiction
and journals. One could argue that they do inadvertently address the
representation of sexuality in discussions about the various heroines’
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 173

crushes, romances, and marriages. Because this sexuality is the expected

heterosexuality it is not characterized as sex, but as romance, itself an
interesting ideological slippage.10 Moreover, few critics investigate the
representation of sexuality in Montgomery’s journals. In her intro-
duction to the collection The Intimate Life of L. M. Montgomery, Irene
Gammel writes: “The findings of several essays in this book suggest
that Montgomery was sexually repressed, and that a great deal of her
erotic life was lived in the realm of fantasy and fiction” (11). But in
her journals, Montgomery does not remain silent on issues of sexual-
ity, and I would suggest that these issues are linked quite intrinsically
to her response to Isabel.
In the nineteenth and very early twentieth centuries, Montgomery’s
passionate same-sex friendships and her lack of wedded bliss would not
necessarily be troubling or threatening, either to herself or to others.
However, by the time Isabel shows up in 1926, the world has changed
fairly dramatically. Historian Veronica Strong-Boag writes: “Whether it
was because of the war, the flapper, or the Great Depression, Canadians
only knew that domestic relationships had changed, and too often seem-
ingly for the worse” (93). While many historians, such as Strong-Boag,
have shown that women remained quiet about courtship and sexuality,
in her journals Montgomery wrote about her sexual discomforts and
desires. She describes her aversion to Edwin Simpson, a young man
to whom she was engaged. Not only did she recoil against the thought
of marrying him, she was physically repulsed by him (30 June 1897 [1:
189]). She details a quiet crush on Will Pritchard but points out that,
while they were good companions, she was never in love with him (14
Oct. 1930 [4: 82]). Nate Lockhart is another young beau for whom she
admits physical revulsion, as she suggests that she did for many of her
beaux: “Most of them kissed me occasionally. And a very boring and
silly performance I thought it at best and at worst very nauseating” (2
Aug. 1931 [4: 145]). Indeed, she describes only the farmer Herman
Leard as eliciting her almost uncontrollable desire. But he is, in her
view, her social inferior, and thus remains unattainable for reasons of
social class.11 Irene Gammel argues that Montgomery had a “discomfort
with sexuality” (“‘I loved,’” 131, 139) and intriguingly suggests that
Montgomery represented Leard as “safe” by feminizing him.
Montgomery is fairly mute concerning her courtship with her future
husband, Ewan Macdonald, in her journals, but she does include pas-
sages detailing how she felt like a “hopeless prisoner” on her wedding
day (28 Jan. 1912 [2: 68]) and that if the despair had continued, she
174 Laura M. Robinson

would have committed suicide. She admits that she was never in love
with Ewan, but acknowledges that she was fond of him (5 Jan. 1917 [2:
206]). Her reasons for marrying him, although not spelled out com-
pletely in the journals, are clear. First, she says that, while she was not in
the market for a husband, she did want what a marriage would bring: “I
wanted a home and companionship; and more than all, to be perfectly
candid, I wanted children” (12 Oct. 1906 [1: 322]). Second, and per-
haps most importantly, she had nowhere else to go. Montgomery lived
with her grandparents; upon the death of her grandfather, the house
was left to her cousin. Her grandmother, and thus Montgomery, could
continue to live there, but Montgomery knew she would be homeless
upon her grandmother’s death (see Rubio 105–06). Moreover, Mont-
gomery explains that in 1905 her Uncle John and cousin Prescott had
been “trying to turn her [grandmother] out” (1 Oct. 1905 [1: 310]),
so her vulnerable position was undeniable.
In his history of divorce in Canada, James Snell comments that “mar-
riage, of course, was fundamentally a source of economic security for
women” (161), and this holds true for Montgomery. Her marriage was
not a particularly happy one; Ewan had a recurring mental illness, and
he was not pleased with his wife’s fame. Snell also points out that the
weight of creating a happy marriage fell on women’s shoulders: “It was
a woman’s special responsibility to sustain her marriage. Her charge
was the marital home, and she alone had the obligation to make it (and
thus the marriage itself) happy and comfortable” (24). Strong-Boag
agrees: “Whether they were homemakers or wage earners, women were
regularly scapegoated for all the failings of modern marriage” (95).
Eliane Silverman’s study of women in Alberta from 1880 to 1930 shows
that women expected marriage to be practical: “Love was not . . . what
marriage meant. Before 1929, its primary purpose was not emotional.
Rather, marriage was a working partnership designed for survival, pro-
ductivity, and reproduction” (57). Montgomery’s emotions for Ewan
certainly follow this practical path. Snell points out, however, that in
the first few decades of the twentieth century marriage itself changes.
The ideal of the conjugal family, based on more equality between hus-
band and wife and romantic love, supplanted the ideal of traditional
marriage, in which the husband had authority over the wife. So, after
Montgomery’s early romances and her marriage to Ewan, the face and
expectations of marriage change.
Moreover, conceptions of sexuality in general also necessarily shifted
dramatically. Faderman and Jonathan Katz, among others, suggest that
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 175

the time period 1929–35 is particularly fraught in the history of sexual-

ity. In the first volume of The History of Sexuality, Michel Foucault states
that sexuality “is the name that can be given to a historical construct”
(105), emphasizing that sexuality is not a fixed, pre-given way of being,
but is constructed through discourse. He explains: “Sexuality must
not be thought of as a kind of natural given which power tries to hold
in check, or as an obscure domain which knowledge tries gradually
to uncover” (105). Society is not repressed about sexuality, Foucault
insists; instead, in the very act of apparent repression emerges a virtual
explosion of discourse around sexuality, replete with requisite confes-
sions. He suggests that “the deployment of sexuality has its reason for
being, not in reproducing itself, but . . . in controlling populations in
an increasingly comprehensive way” (107). Foucault locates 1870 as the
birth year of the term “homosexual,” with all its attendant pathologiz-
ing impulses and concomitant empowering discourse of identification.
However, he does not discuss the emergence of heterosexuality into
discourse, and historian Katz argues that heterosexuality was in the
process of being “invented” in the early twentieth century. He writes
that “[h]eterosexuality, we imagine, is essential, unchanging: ahistori-
cal” (13), but of course it is not. He points out that homosexuality was
invented first, and a necessary definition of heterosexuality followed.
He concludes his study by saying:
Heterosexuality, I now think, is invented in discourse as that which
is outside discourse. It’s manufactured in a particular discourse
as that which is universal. It’s constructed in a historically specific
discourse as that which is outside time. It was constructed quite
recently as that which is very old: Heterosexuality is an invented
tradition. (182)
Katz suggests, then, that heterosexuality is an ideology and not an
unchanging, irrefutable fact. Exposing the constructedness of het-
erosexuality works toward dissolving the rigid lines between straight/
normal/healthy and gay/abnormal/diseased and understanding how
these binaries operate to support patriarchal domination. Eve Sedgwick
agrees that the homo/hetero binary is at the root of twentieth-century
Western culture:
New, institutionalized taxonomic discourses—medical, legal,
literary, psychological—on homo/heterosexual definition prolif-
erated and crystallized with exceptional rapidity in the decades
around the turn of the century, decades in which so many of the
176 Laura M. Robinson

other critical nodes of the culture were being, if less suddenly

and newly, nonetheless also definitively reshaped. Both the power
relations between the genders and the relations of nationalism
and imperialism, for instance, were in highly visible crisis. (2)
One place this crisis becomes visible is around women’s lack of choices.
In her journals, Montgomery repeatedly calls attention to a lack of
choice surrounding marriage, highlighting the degree to which a
heterosexual partnership was the only viable option for women before
the late 1920s. Roberta Buchanan indicates that Montgomery felt pres-
sure to marry as part of her “desire to conform to social expectations
of femininity” (153): “Montgomery saw marriage as the only way out
of her problems: her lack of a home, her marginalization as a spinster,
the dread of loneliness” (155). Buchanan cites passages from Mont-
gomery’s journals highlighting the practicality of her decision to marry
Ewan Macdonald—she wanted a home, company, and children, for
instance—and which emphasize how few other options she had. Little
did Montgomery know, when she accepted Ewan’s proposal in 1906,
that she would become an internationally famous writer in just a few
short years. Buchanan shows that Montgomery viewed Frede’s marriage
in a similar fashion: “marrying to avoid loneliness and the stigma of
spinsterhood” (157–58). Furthermore, Montgomery’s journals refer to
many women who “have to get married” because they are pregnant (4:
92, for example). Indeed, her biggest fear over her own son Chester’s
secret marriage is that, once it is revealed, people will think that the
couple “had to” do it (2 Dec. 1933 [4: 242]). Chester claims that he
and Luella secretly got married in 1932, but this claim is an attempt
to hide the fact that they did indeed “have to” get married (see Rubio
427 for more details). In a discussion about a large family, Montgomery
reveals her attitudes toward women’s choices:
Sixteen of their children grew up and married. One wonders
about all those marriages. Were they all for love: or were some
of them contracted because people had to get married in those
days—girls, anyhow? No other career was possible for them. (2
June 1931 [4: 132])

Controlling “Sex Matters”

Not surprisingly, in the face of changing attitudes about marriage and

sexuality, Montgomery decries the sex education she received as a
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 177

child: “All sex matters—the basic matters of life—were taboo—evidently

something too vile and shameful to be spoken of.” She continues, “The
present generation has saner views of sex and its presentation to the
young. There are several excellent books which make a parent’s duty
somewhat easier” (11 Jan. 1924 [3:157]). She describes the attitude
of her era:
Sex is to men and women one of the most vital subjects in the
world—perhaps the most vital subject since our total existence is
based on and centers around it. Yet with how few, even of women,
can this vital subject be frankly and intelligently discussed. It is so
overlaid with conventions, inhibitions and taboos that it is almost
impossible for anyone to see it as it really is. (28 Feb. 1922 [3: 39;
emphasis in original])
Montgomery demonstrates an intuitive, almost prescient, awareness
of the cultural baggage that not only clings to sexuality but, from a
poststructuralist perspective, defines it; as she points out, “sex mat-
ters” matter. Montgomery’s shifting response to the women in her life
demonstrates how, in this time period, a particular sexual discourse
was deployed as a means to control women’s new-found freedoms.
This new concern surrounding gender and sexual identity, then, had
an impact on female friendships. As Faderman explains in Surpassing
the Love of Men, multiple coalescing forces reconfigured middle-class
society’s presentation and reception of women’s same-sex relation-
ships after the turn of the century. The rise of the New Woman and
early feminism presented a challenge to traditional patriarchal rule,
particularly with regard to women’s financial and emotional support of
each other. In the introduction to the third volume of Montgomery’s
journals, Rubio and Waterston clearly identify Montgomery’s “mood”
in the period 1921–29 as feminist (xii). This mood shifts in later years
as feminism and women’s same-sex relationships come to be portrayed
as troublesome, particularly by the medical profession and the media.
Faderman argues that the new work of the sexologists, doctors who
specialized in analyzing human sexuality, played a large role in the
attempt to “keep women down”: “When women’s increasing freedom
began to threaten to change the world—or at least parts of Europe and
America—many who had vested interests in the old order were happy
to believe the medical views of lesbians as neurotic and confused and to
believe that women who wanted independence usually were lesbians”
(Surpassing 332). Faderman suggests that the specter of the lesbian
178 Laura M. Robinson

operated to scare women back into traditional marriages and roles.

The work of sexologists such as Richard von Krafft-Ebing in Psychopathia
Sexualis (1882) and Havelock Ellis in Studies in the Psychology of Sex: Sexual
Inversion (1897) identifies women’s sexuality and relationships with
each other as not only diseased and pathological but also as threaten-
ing marriage and the family. For example, Krafft-Ebing explains that
“man has a much more intense sexual appetite than woman” and is
naturally drawn toward woman. He continues: “If she is normally de-
veloped mentally, and well bred, her sexual desire is small. If this were
not so the whole world would become a brothel and marriage and a
family impossible. It is certain that the man that avoids women and the
woman that seeks men are abnormal” (13). Krafft-Ebing’s “findings”
are an example of the prescriptive quality of much of the sexologists’
work. He defines what a middle- or upper-class white woman should be:
passive and asexual. However, Krafft-Ebing’s analysis of homosexuality
has few references to women, as Ellis points out. Ellis addresses girls’
and women’s “passionate friendships” head on, connecting these friend-
ships to lesbianism and linking this so-called abnormality to masculinity
in women (218–19); an “actively inverted woman” has a “more or less
distinct trace of masculinity,” for example (222). As Faderman sug-
gests, the sexologists clearly concerned themselves with the challenge
to traditional gender roles that women potentially posed at this time.
Women, according to many of the sexologists, should stay passive and
asexual. Any other manifestation was regarded as abnormal because
masculine and lesbian. Drawing on Faderman’s work, Cameron Duder’s
history of lesbians in Canada demonstrates that the sexologists’ beliefs
affected women’s relationships in that country as well. He explains:
“Expressions of romantic love between women, which previously could
have been uttered without condemnation, were, by the 1920s, being
viewed with suspicion” (24).
Montgomery acknowledges this change in discourse: “The subject of
‘sex perverts’ has been aired sufficiently of late in certain malodorous
works of fiction. I had learned of it in the cleaner medium of medical
volumes. There was something in it that nauseated me to my very soul
center but I did not think of it as anything that would ever touch my
life in any way” (1 Mar. 1930 [4: 34]). On 2 July 1932, Montgomery
writes that she has been reading the work of a sexologist whom she
mistakenly identifies as “Andre Thedon.” She writes that “his chapter
on ‘Unconscious Homo-sexualism’ might have been written about
Isobel, even to the very wording of the letters” (4: 186). The book in
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 179

question is Andre Tridon’s 1922 Psychoanalysis and Love, in which he

echoes these earlier sexologists. While a relatively lesser-known sexolo-
gist, he is important to this study because Montgomery cites his work.
He writes of passionate friendships:
The sentimental attachments of school girls for certain teachers,
the pleasure which they derive from spending nights with some
friend on whom they have a “crush,” the thousand and one bodily
caresses female friends shower on each other, the curiosity they
manifest about each other’s physical condition, their frequent
bed room [sic] or bathroom conferences, are manifestations of
a mild homosexualism . . . (179)
Tridon’s work makes clear the link between feminism and the “rise” of
labeling women as lesbian, supporting Faderman’s central argument.
For example, he decries the new fad of bobbing hair and the “boyish
sort of women” who became trendy after the war, those who “conceal
their natural curves.” He considers both the clothing and the hair style
as “symptomatic of an increase of homosexualism” (184). Surely Tridon
has it backwards: the need to point out homosexualism is symptomatic
of the increased economic power of women after the First World War,
a power symbolized by the new, more practical, fashion. Emphasizing
the degree to which the sexologists’ theories urged women back into
traditional roles, Tridon’s book boasts a chapter entitled “The New
Woman and Love,” in which he discusses masculine women who have
“invaded” the workforce (275).
So, by about 1928 or so, a woman who is not passive, who supports
her family economically, who derives all of her emotional support and
fulfilling relationships primarily from women, and who acknowledges
ambivalence about relationships with men might very well be consid-
ered abnormal or sick or perverted. Montgomery did, and was, all of
the above. In Odd Girls and Twilight Lovers, Faderman suggests that by
the ‘30s in the US, no one could feign ignorance about lesbianism:
Knowledge of sexual potentials, which was by now virtually ines-
capable, necessarily had complex effects on female same-sex love:
for example, it made love between women “lesbian”; it challenged
women to explore feelings that they would have repressed in
other eras; it frightened many women away from any expression
of love for other women. (116)
180 Laura M. Robinson

Therefore, Isabel’s appearance in Montgomery’s life and the journals

is timely. While she is mentioned earlier (17 July 1926), Isabel is first
named in the 1 March 1930 journal entry that provides a retrospec-
tive of their growing acquaintance. Montgomery had received several
“brilliant” letters from the younger woman and responded in kind, as
she always did to her fan mail. Montgomery “had supposed from her
gushing letters that [Isabel] must be about eighteen” and was surprised,
upon meeting her, to find her in her 30s. Isabel’s increasing letters,
gifts, and phone calls caused Montgomery enough distress, but the
breaking point came when Isabel wanted “to come to Norval and stay
all night at the manse—and she wanted to sleep with me” (4: 34; original
italics). From this desire, Montgomery concludes that Isabel is a sex
pervert. She did go to visit Isabel in Acton after this, convincing herself
that she had been mistaken about the younger woman’s intentions,
even though the bed in which they were to sleep together “was fitted
out like a bridal one—exquisite sheets, pillows, coverlet, blankets and
puff—all evidently brand new and purchased for the occasion” (4: 35).
She also describes Isabel as acting like “a girl in the presence of her
lover” yet remains convinced that she had been too harsh in her earlier
conclusion (4: 35). Her own waffling on Isabel’s intentions reveals the
ideological contradictions of this historical moment; the style and tenor
of women’s friendships is clearly in transition.
However, Isabel sends her a love letter a few days later, which moti-
vates Montgomery to record the whole affair in her journal, copying
out the letter to “illustrate [her] problem.” Isabel’s letter is effusive:
“Darling, I love you so terribly, I do,” she writes. “I want to hold in my
arms what is dearer than life to me—to lie ‘spoon fashion’ all through
a long long night—to cover your wee hands, your beautiful throat and
every part of you with kisses. I’m just mad with love for you” (4: 35).
Montgomery is horrified and disgusted. She expresses that she simply
does not know what to do: “If I snub or scold her—if I ignore her—I
am terrified over the possible results” (4: 36).
While I would never wish to argue that Isabel’s persistence and obses-
sion are reasonable or appropriate, I would suggest that much of her
behavior is consistent with the fashion of passionate friendships of the
previous few decades, the type of friendships described in the novels
of Isabel’s favorite author. Montgomery describes Isabel’s response
when she visits Acton, for instance: “‘I am perfectly and entirely happy
tonight,’ said Isobel in a strange impassioned tone” (4: 35). Montgom-
ery is disturbed by Isabel’s comment, but surely it is one worthy of a
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 181

Montgomery heroine. In Anne of Green Gables, after Mrs. Barry forgives

her for intoxicating Diana, Anne says to Marilla, “You see before you a
perfectly happy person, Marilla” (146). Montgomery herself records
such a statement on 10 November 1918 about being with Frede: “We
sat alone and talked until midnight—and we were strangely, perfectly,
weirdly happy” (2: 274). Moreover, Isabel may deliberately have mod-
eled her effusions after Montgomery’s most famous character. In Anne
of Green Gables, for example, Anne sleeps with Diana’s letter under her
pillow, and they make vows akin to marriage vows. Anne is awash in
love for girls and women. The following are a few examples:
“I love Miss Stacy with my whole heart, Marilla.” (191)
“Mrs Allan is one of the naturally good people. I love her pas-
sionately.” (181)
“I love Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever live without her.” (119)
“Diana stood at the window and threw kisses to me all the way
down to Lovers’ Lane.” (147)
Smith-Rosenberg explains that in the nineteenth century, “[g]irls
routinely slept together, kissed and hugged one another” (69). Mont-
gomery records sleeping with her female friends throughout her life.
For example, she describes one night with Frede: “So we cuddled
down under our blankets and, as we could not sleep, began to wile
away the hours seeing which of us could say the wittiest things . . .”
(12 Nov. 1918 [2: 275]). This sleepover with Frede occurred well after
Montgomery’s marriage; clearly this behavior was not seen as a threat
to her heterosexual identity at this time. Unfortunately for Isabel,
however, she appeared in the late 1920s and early ‘30s. While I accept
that Isabel’s attentions are dismaying for multiple reasons—she is much
younger than Montgomery, she relentlessly pursues her, her discourse
is inappropriate for the time period—her appearance in the pages of
Montgomery’s journals also serves a purpose.
Gavin White claims that the advent of Isabel caused Montgomery to
educate herself about lesbianism (49). I disagree. Instead, I would argue
that emerging discourses on lesbianism caused Montgomery to define
Isabel, quite against the latter’s will, as lesbian. In her journal entry of 1
March 1930, Montgomery indicates that she has been reading about sex
perverts and conveys the impression that this reading occurred before
Isabel’s appearance: “I did not think of it as anything that would ever
touch my life in any way” (4: 34). Discourses on lesbianism had been
gradually appearing in the popular consciousness. In addition to the
182 Laura M. Robinson

work of the sexologists, Faderman discusses how the French aesthetes

of the late nineteenth century, such as Baudelaire, deployed lesbian
imagery in an attempt to shock the bourgeoisie. These images were
picked up by the decadent writers, such as Algernon Swinburne, in
England. Lisa Duggan recounts the media’s fascination with lesbian
criminals in nineteenth- and early twentieth-century America. Radclyffe
Hall’s 1928 lesbian novel The Well of Loneliness and its resultant very
public court case, and even the gossip about Virginia Woolf’s sexual
practices formed a backdrop to Montgomery’s foray into what Fader-
man believes is the twentieth century’s tragic impulse to label and
pathologize. On 17 July 1926, Montgomery sees nothing wrong with
Isabel’s “very adoring” first letter (3: 299). It hardly merits a mention.
By 13 March 1928, however, she betrays a different attitude toward
women’s relationships: “The other day I noticed two young girls who
called themselves ‘friends’—and may be. I noticed the way they caressed
and kissed each other—with mouths, by the way, which looked as if they
had been making a meal of blood. A lip-stick is really a vampirish thing”
(3: 365). The connection to the supernatural evil of vampirism and the
unnatural “meal of blood” emphasizes Montgomery’s feelings about
this new style of friendship. She follows this episode with an apologia
for her own distaste for physical caresses between women:
It suddenly occurred to me how little I and my friends were ever
given to physical caresses—even in emotional youth. To me, it has
always been positively abhorrent to kiss or caress one of my own
sex. I cannot recall a single instance when Frede and I ever kissed
each other. When we met we shook hands with a joke or a yelp
of pleasure—when we parted we waved an off-hand farewell. The
only chum I ever recall kissing frequently was Laura Pritchard.
She had been trained in the convent to “greet her friends with a
holy kiss” and she was a demonstrative girl. She always flung her
arms around me with an energetic kiss and hug combined—from
which I emerged rather thankful, much as I loved her, that that
was over. . . . (3: 365; emphasis and ellipsis in original)
Even before Isabel became a problem, then, Montgomery was engag-
ing with the emerging discourse on lesbianism, and defining herself
against it.
Tellingly, her relationships with her friends were not necessarily
free of physical caresses. As Montgomery describes reuniting with
Laura Pritchard in 1930, her “deeply passionate attachment” (4: 75)
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 183

to Laura is quite physical, yet she does not seem to feel thankful when
the physicality is over:
We would embrace and kiss—draw back and look at each other—
embrace again. I don’t really know how long we kept this up.
Time had ceased to have any meaning for us. I have never in my
life felt so extraordinary and overwhelming an emotion as I felt
then . . . I knew then that love was immortal. (2 Oct. 1930 [4: 68])
These powerful and moving attachments, crucial to Montgomery’s
emotional survival, perhaps had little on the surface to distinguish them
from the “lesbian” relationships pathologized by the sexologists. Fader-
man speculates: “One wonders how many romantic friends, who had
felt themselves to be perfectly healthy before, suddenly saw themselves
as sick, even though their behavior had in no way changed, as a result
of the sexologists’ formulations” (Surpassing 244). Isabel’s infatuation
with Montgomery, while certainly disturbing to her, is quite similar to
the outpourings listed by Smith-Rosenberg and Faderman. Montgomery
is particularly disgusted, for instance, by Isabel’s claim that she wants to
“cover your wee hands, your beautiful throat and every part of you with
kisses” (4: 35), but Isabel could be seen as gushing with exaggerated
nineteenth-century sentiment. Moreover, Isabel’s sentiments are not
so different from Montgomery’s for Laura and Frede, or the character
Anne’s for Diana, or Montgomery’s early letters to Penzie Macneill.
Isabel’s passionate obsessions and overinflated language also extended
beyond Montgomery. Montgomery records in 1938 that, upon the death
of Queen Marie, Isabel wrote to her: “My heart is buried in a sixteenth
century cloister,” to which Montgomery adds her own comment: “The
romance of that will be meat and drink to Isobel” (5: 273).12
Montgomery’s terror over Isabel’s behavior and effusions suggests
why she expends so much energy detailing this friendship in her jour-
nals; she not only feels the need to protect her reputation, but she also
uses the figure of Isabel to create one. In an unpublished journal entry
from 22 Jan. 1933, Montgomery cites twelve quotations from a letter
from Isabel and responds to each in turn. Isabel’s comments are indeed
“yowls,” as Montgomery characterizes them in a later entry. She fires
accusations and questions at Montgomery. “This so-called friendship
is not what you promised me,” she writes, for example, implying that
Montgomery rendered a promise. Another cry: “Why did you ever say
such things as ‘I would love to pretend I was a schoolgirl again, sleeping
with a friend’—which made me think you so lonely and sweet.” Mont-
184 Laura M. Robinson

gomery’s response is fearful: “But this distortion of Isabel’s frightens

me. It shows what she may say to injure me if she takes it into her devil-
ish head.” Montgomery explains that she could not prove that she did
not make such comments if Isabel elects to go public, because she had
kept no copies of her own letters “before this last year.” Montgomery
is thus recording Isabel’s behavior for future audiences.
Indeed, assessed in the context of Montgomery’s multilayered jour-
nal writing, this passage takes on greater significance. First, as I men-
tioned earlier, Montgomery maintained her uniform, written journals.
However, she also typed up an edited version, containing the material
she was comfortable about having published after her death. This entry
was included in the typewritten version of her journals—with the word
“devilish” crossed out. While Montgomery apparently did not want to
hide the story of Isabel, Rubio and Waterston made the difficult deci-
sion to remove this passage from the published journals.
Montgomery’s inclusion of these passages in a journal ready for the
public eye demonstrates that her depiction of Isabel carries an ideo-
logical charge. Depicting Isabel as a lesbian works to heterosexualize
Montgomery herself, to mark a difference in her own love for women.
Tellingly, Isabel does not agree with Montgomery’s diagnosis of her:
“She is full of indignation because in my last letter I hinted to her what
the world would call the sort of love she vows she feels for me” (10
June 1932 [4: 184]). However, Montgomery dismisses her response:
“Of course, I believe she is quite unconscious of her Lesbianism—or
rather, that it is Lesbianism” (4: 184; original emphasis). Montgomery
becomes more direct with Isabel: “I told her plainly at last that her pas-
sion for me is Lesbian, abhorrent in the eyes of all decent people” (7
Feb. 1933 [4: 215]). Isabel defends her feelings for the older woman:
“I’d love to be your friend,” she writes, followed by, “I do not know for
what I am asking but I do know that it is nothing unnatural” (8 Feb.
1932 [4: 165]). Montgomery even discovers that Isabel had been in
love with a minister (3 May 1933 [4: 181]), though this does not cause
her to reconsider her diagnosis.
Intriguingly, Isabel often appears in moments in which Montgom-
ery reflects on her relationships with Frede, Laura, and other girls
and women. The insistent labeling of Isabel’s “perversion” works to
construct Montgomery’s own passion for women as natural and nor-
mal. From the first mention of her name, Isabel is deployed to mark
a difference between perverted love and the healthy adoration of
hundreds of Australian schoolgirl fans for Montgomery: 150 sent her
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 185

adoring letters in three weeks. The 14 Sept. 1932 sad news of Laura’s
death is quickly followed by the 15 September mention of “a disgusting
letter from Isobel” (4: 200), where Montgomery laments the latter’s
continued life. A repeated metaphor of hunger exposes the intense
unfulfilled desire Montgomery has for her female friends. In July
1932, before Laura’s death, Montgomery mentions being “hungry”
for her (30 July 1932 [4: 188]). This metaphor is echoed on 8 April
1933, when Montgomery rereads all Laura’s letters, which “made me
hunger for the far, far past” (4: 218; original italics). In the same entry,
she recounts visiting Isabel, who “devoured me with her eyes” (4: 219).
On 8 February 1932, Montgomery writes out one of Isabel’s letters,
which cites her hunger for the older woman’s love (4: 165). The use
of the appetite metaphor is fascinating: in one instance Montgomery
hungers, whereas Isabel consumes. Yet, both typically hunger without
fulfilment. At one point, Isabel claims that Montgomery does not want
love. Montgomery reinterprets this statement and asks, “so I ‘cannot’
love. Can I not, Frede? Answer from the grave. But not with the love
Isobel . . . wants, I admit. I am not a Lesbian” (4: 166). Montgomery
first invokes Frede to prove her capacity for love, then the specter of
lesbianism to validate that same love as normal and healthy.
Montgomery not only constructs her own heterosexual identity in
her representations of Isabel, but she also manages to maintain the
tradition of nineteenth-century romantic friendships by the constant
comparison to an attachment that is more clearly troublesome. Her
journals continue to depict herself as deeply attached to women, even
if she needs to identify the limits of that friendship through labeling
Isabel as lesbian. She discusses a visit from Nora that occurred in 1934:
“I am greedily looking forward to a little real companionship,” she
writes, remarking the next day that “some power of enjoyment came
back to me” (12 and 13 July 1934 [4: 277]). After Nora leaves on 14
July, Montgomery highlights the difference between Nora and Isabel
by despairing about that afternoon spent in boredom with Isabel, who
“bestowed upon me a framed and colored picture of herself which I
neither asked for nor desired” (4: 278).
There is even more going on here, however. In her agonized de-
piction of and railing against Isabel, Montgomery’s journals forge an
intimacy with her at the very same moment they deny it. The friendship
between Montgomery and Isabel continued for the rest of the writer’s
life, although she mentions several times in the late thirties that Isabel
had become more sensible and had calmed down (see, for example, 21
186 Laura M. Robinson

Aug. 1937 [5: 197]). Temma Berg writes about Montgomery’s ambiva-
lence regarding same-sex friends in her fiction: “one emerges only at the
cost of another’s disappearance. Co-existence is impossible, as impos-
sible as the euphoric visions of sisterhood and female friendships with
which we surround ourselves” (48). In the case of Isabel, the opposite
occurs; Montgomery keeps resurrecting Isabel, and a deeply emotional
friendship with her, by her very attempts to make Isabel disappear.
Montgomery includes in her diaries some of their letters to one
another, in order to give “proof” to her descendents “that I have not
exaggerated my problems” (4: 164). Foucault argues that two mecha-
nisms have traditionally produced sex: erotic art and the confession.
What Montgomery records in her journal is a confession, in order to
exonerate herself in the eyes of future generations. Foucault suggests
that the confession “unfolds within a power relationship” in which
the listener “prescribes and appreciates it, and intervenes in order
to judge, punish, forgive, console, and reconcile” (61–62). However,
Montgomery troubles the truth of her own confessional by maintaining
control over her own narrative; she does so, in part, by transcribing
Isabel’s letters into her journal, rather than simply saving the originals.
In this way, her journals emphasize that the truth can never be fully
known. Instead, then, can we read between the lines here as Helen
Buss encourages us to do? Montgomery’s labeling and scapegoating of
Isabel enables her to maintain the centrality of female friendships in
a time period that pathologizes them. As twenty-first-century readers,
rather than just reading between the lines, perhaps we need to blur the
lines—those between gay and straight, diseased and healthy, abnormal
and normal—as Montgomery effectively does at the very same time she
decidedly attempts to delimit them.

Notes

I would like to thank the anonymous reviewers for Children’s Literature, who offered
such detailed, reasoned, and insightful suggestions for improvement. I would also like
to thank Lara Campbell from the Gender, Sexuality, and Women’s Studies Department
at Simon Fraser University, for providing a forum for me to present an early draft of this
work and to receive thoughtful and constructive feedback from her colleagues; and the
Royal Military College of Canada for providing an Academic Research Program grant
to fund my work.
1
The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery spell Isabel Anderson’s name as “Isobel.”
Both Mary Beth Cavert’s research and my own suggest that the most common spelling
was “Isabel,” so that is the spelling I will use. Only in the fifth volume of the journal is
Isabel’s last name included. When citing the published journals, I will use the spelling
“Isobel,” but not otherwise. While Montgomery’s handwriting is often unclear, her spell-
ing of the name seems to be “Isabel” as well.
L. M. Montgomery, Friendship, and Sexuality 187
2
See Rubio and Waterston’s introduction to the fifth volume of the journals for a
detailed discussion of how Montgomery, in addition to rewriting all her earlier journals
into uniform volumes, kept up her contemporary journaling by jotting down entries
on separate pieces of paper, which she later transcribed into the uniform ledgers (xxi).
In this manner, one can clearly see that even when Montgomery was caught up on the
rewriting of her past journal entries, she was still rewriting the present ones. Moreover,
she also typed up a copy of her journals, which she edited with an eye to future, post-
humous publication.
3
Because the journal entry dates are an important part of my discussion, I am in-
cluding both dates and the volume/page number reference to the published journals.
4
While other scholars of women’s autobiography might agree with her, Buss’s “decod-
ing” approach to Montgomery’s journals is rather a problem, because “decoding” a text
implies that the reader is attempting to locate the truth underneath the code. Indeed,
Buss employs what she terms “thick description” in order to “read the trace of a human
person constructing her identity in her historical, social, cultural, and gendered place”
(Mapping 86) and to counter what she sees as the pitfalls of deconstructive readings.
While I am adopting a deconstructive approach, my method is not much different from
Buss’s even though I am not attempting to locate the person behind the text.
5
Most frequently, scholars suggest that Montgomery’s fiction presents an unequivo-
cally positive take on same-sex bonds, a “female utopia,” to use Eve Kornfeld and Susan
Jackson’s words from their article on Anne of Green Gables. Gavin White indicates that
Montgomery created a Platonic ideal in her friendships. Taking a slightly different
approach, Irene Gammel argues that “Montgomery experimented with a decidedly
autoerotic version of female pleasure when she presented her girl heroines growing
into young women delaying marriage, embracing careers, and generating their plea-
sure through creative work. Eros is projected into nature and played out in passionate
girl-girl friendships” (“My Secret Garden” 42). Gammel sees the “girl-girl attraction” in
the Emily books as a female-controlled, safe sublimation of erotic desire (43). Similarly,
Marah Gubar regards the postponement of heterosexual marriage in the Anne books as
allowing for passionate and far more interesting same-sex friendships. While I certainly
agree with these critics, each of them idealizes the same-sex bonds to a degree; Denyse
Yeast would agree with Gammel and Gubar that Montgomery’s fiction avoids romantic
connections in order to evade the inevitable submission of the female to patriarchal
power. Discussing Montgomery’s life-writing, Yeast also notes that Montgomery’s dear
friend Frederica Campbell was “her escape mechanism,” a perspective that upholds an
unproblematized view of that friendship. Troubling this view in “Sisterhood is Fearful,”
Temma Berg notes that Montgomery identifies Frederica as her best friend only after
the latter’s death. Interrogating Montgomery’s depiction of friendship in Anne of Green
Gables by tracing its influence from Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women to Margaret Atwood’s
Cat’s Eye, Berg suggests that the representation of female friendship is more disruptive
in Montgomery’s oeuvre than many readers acknowledge; Montgomery, however, suc-
cessfully represses “her misgivings about female friendship” (40).
6
I must acknowledge here that one reason for this long passage upon Laura’s death
appears to be the fact that Montgomery had come to the end of one of her account
books in which she wrote her journals. As Rubio and Waterston point out, she was prone
to writing long passages to finish off a volume of the handwritten journals.
7
I’d like to thank the anonymous reader who pointed out that Montgomery was
obviously familiar with Shelley’s novel, as her discussion of the film indicates (13 Dec.
1939 [5: 296]).
8
I am indebted to the work of Cavert (“Nora, Maud, and Isabel,” and “Who is Isabel
Anderson?”) and Rubio (Lucy Maud Montgomery 394–402) in locating the historical details
about the young woman who plagued Montgomery. While I may repeat some of the same
facts and diary entries as they do, I am doing so from a literary rather than a historical
188 Laura M. Robinson

perspective. Both Rubio’s biography and Cavert’s histories pinpoint and delineate the
facts; I am interested in Montgomery’s representation of the relationship.
9
Irene Gammel’s essay on Montgomery’s Emily books (“My Secret Garden”) and her
similar article on the Anne and Emily books (“Safe Pleasures”) trace the connection
between nature, writing, and the girls’ developing sexuality. Marah Gubar discusses
the postponement of heterosexuality in the Anne books. Benjamin Lefebvre portrays
how Anne’s son Walter is figured as a closeted gay man in Rilla of Ingleside, and my own
work explores lesbian desire in Montgomery’s Anne books (“Bosom Friends”). Gavin
White’s article appears to be about lesbian desire but actually presents an argument
against sexual desire and for platonic friendships in Montgomery’s works and journals.
Gabriella Åhmansson explores how Montgomery exposes the sexual double standard
and “‘stigmatizing and controlling’ of female sexuality” in The Blue Castle (151). Mar-
garet Doody suggests that Pat in Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat betrays an emotional
incestuous desire for her brother that enables her to be “antipathetic to sex” (43). Buss
discusses Montgomery’s erotic and romantic responses to men as represented in her
journals, concluding that rather than simply speaking to a fear around sexuality, Mont-
gomery inscribes her male suitors through the use of literary convention (“Decoding”).
10
Because Montgomery’s fiction tends to end with engagements or promises of mar-
riage, rather than marriage and thus an expression of sexuality itself, she avoids writing
about sex overtly (except perhaps in The Blue Castle). One might argue, then, that it is
Montgomery rather than her critics who evades sexuality. However, sexual desire or
identity does not require an act of consummation for its existence. The assumption that
Anne and Gilbert have crushes on each other, for instance, constructs them as having
heterosexual desire.
11
Rubio presents a compelling argument against Montgomery’s depiction of this
romance. See Lucy Maud Montgomery 96–103.
12
Isabel carries on with her new obsession with the death of Queen Marie and the
widower King Carol; see 18 Aug. 1938 and 31 Dec. 1938 for examples.

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