Elizabeth Waterston is a 2011 Fellow of The Royal Society of Canada.

The fourth volume of the immensely successful The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery covers the years from 1929 to 1935, a tumultuous period in the writer's life. By 1929, Montgomery was 54 years old and known world-wide as the author of Anne of Green Gables and many other books, yet this was also a time of numerous setbacks. The stock market crash, a drop in royalties from her many books, the need to provide her two sons with a university education, her husband's modest church salary in arrears, and the fact that many loans she made to friends and family were not repaid, placed Montgomery in the position where she had to type her own manyscripts for the first time since 1910. She also had to face personal crises as her sons' university results were extremely disappointing, her husband suffered a total nervous breakdown, she had concerns over her own mental state, there was further controversy in her husband's parish -- Norval Presbyterian Church -- and Montgomery became the unwilling object of a young woman's declaration of passionate love. Yet this was not a period of joy as well--the volume opens with joyful travels to Prince Edward Island and western Canada and ends with her looking forward with great excitement to a new life in Toronto.

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Elizabeth Waterston is Professor Emeritus, University of Guelph. She is a lifetime member of the Association of Canadian Studies and a former National President of the Humanities Association of Canada.

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"The journals, with their vivid account of both daily routines and more significant life events, are written with all the passion, wit and insight into human nature that have made Montgomery's 'books for young people' immortal to her readers." --Toronto Sun

"These journals are so enlightening, so fill of wisdom, humor, philosophy and tragedy that they are worth a winter's reading and reflection."--Ottawa Citizen

"Montgomery's interweaving of joy and grief makes her a felt presence on the page....Very few books in recent years have given me the depth of pleasure I've found in these first four volumes of Lucy Maud Montgomery's journals." --Carol Shields in The Globe and Mail