LOOKING FOR ANNE. How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic [Hardcover]

Irene Gammel (Author)

Product Details

• Hardcover: 312 pages
• Publisher: Key Porter; First Edition edition (2008)
• Language: English
• ISBN-10: 1552639851
• ISBN-13: 978-1552639856
• Product Dimensions: 9.1 x 6.4 x 1.3 inches
• Shipping Weight: 1.4 pounds
• Average Customer Review: 4.1 out of 5 stars  See all reviews (12 customer reviews)
• Amazon Best Sellers Rank: #2,280,532 in Books (See Top 100 in Books)

More About the Author

Irene Gammel is Professor of English and holds the Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture and at Ryerson University, Toronto. She is also the director of the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre, which is dedicated to the preservation and study of early twentieth-century modern texts and artifacts. She is has published eleven books, including the internationally-acclaimed Baroness Elsa: Gender, Dada and Everyday Modernity: A Cultural Biography (MIT Press, 2002) and most recently Body Sweats: The Uncensored Writings by Elsa von Freytag-Loringhoven (MIT Press 2011). Irene Gammel is well-known for her scholarship on gender, identity, and modernism. Her research has helped uncover the earliest roots of modern and feminist performance art, contributed to the consolidation of L.M. Montgomery Studies as an academic field, and claimed women's confessional discourses as a sub-discipline of autobiographical studies.

Irene Gammel has served as president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, editorial board member of Canadian Literature, co-chair of the L. M. Montgomery Institute, vice-president of the Canadian Comparative Literature Association, and director of Women's Studies at UPEI. She has also served as a visiting scholar at the Centre for Comparative Literature and Department of English at the University of Toronto (Spring 2004), as well as visiting professor at the Friedrich-Schiller-Universität Jena and Erfurt Universität in Germany (Spring 2001). In 2009, she was elected a member of the Royal Society of Canada.

Customer Reviews

Most Helpful Customer Reviews

22 of 25 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars The definitive study of how Anne of Green Gables came about., August 19, 2008

By 

Nancy Smith "Beemish" (Cleveland, Ohio) - See all my reviews
(REAL NAME)   

This review is from: Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic (Hardcover)

I recently made a trip to Prince Edward Island and picked up a number of books related to L.M. Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables. I actually had passed on this one because I saw that Amazon had such a fantastic price on it. Anyway, as an Anne of Green Gables and L.M. Montgomery junkie, I've read practically every book on Maud and her work and this one is by far the best. The research in this book is positively amazing. Kudos to the author for digging so deeply and for taking the time to be so complete and thorough. However, I don't want people to think that this is some dry scholarly book, on the contrary, it is almost impossible to put down. Not only does the author dig up facts, she analyzes them with exceptional insight and brillance. She knows her subjects backwards and forwards. At times during the book, one could almost sense the presence of Maud Montgomery herself. It is as though she whispered her secrets to the author who then revealed them to us the readers. I highly recommend this book to anyone who loves Anne or Maud. It is as close as a book can come to being perfect.

9 of 10 people found the following review helpful:

5.0 out of 5 stars Picked it up by chance, Can't put it down, October 7, 2008

By 

JMD (Boston, MA) - See all my reviews

This review is from: Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic (Hardcover)

I read the Anne of GG books as a girl and watched the PBS movies countless times, but I'm not an Anne fanatic. For example, I've never visited PEI. :) I also don't really like to read biographies. I saw the book at my library and picked it up out of curiosity. So I'm not the typical reviewer of this book...

But I can't put it down! It reads like a mystery about how Maud was inspired to write Anne. It also has reflective commentary on the themes in the Anne books, which is interesting to think about in terms of what Anne meant to me while I was her age. And the reliance on Maud's diaries for piecing together history is intriguing to me, as someone who has sporadically kept diaries.

Overall, I am thoroughly enjoying the book -- it is my guilty pleasure every day.

24 of 32 people found the following review helpful:

3.0 out of 5 stars A Biography of the Book, not the Person, September 2, 2008

By 

Cherie Miller "Wisdom Creek Press, LLC" (Georgia) - See all my reviews
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Amazon Verified Purchase

This review is from: Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic (Hardcover)

I was disappointed by two aspects of this book. The first was the dramatic style of writing by the author. Just write, we get it.

The second was that I expected a biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery's life, but I really didn't get a sense of who she was. This book ends near the publication date of "Anne," so I don't know anything about Maud's marriage, move west, birth of her 2 sons (I don't even know their names!), and when she and her husband die.

This is more of a scholarly look at the life of the book, instead of it's creator, so I was disappointed in that. There are also some allusions to lesbianism, but they're unfounded. No facts are brought to bear on that allegation. It just seems too "fashionable" to publish some "dirt" on this pastor's wife. It's speculation - looking back on 100 years of history - and I didn't like it. (The same thing was said when the author alludes that Hans Christian Anderson was a homosexual.) If you're going to make such statements, at least provide me with FACTS, not speculation. It's tawdry.