“Today I happened to pick up and open at random an old scrapbook containing reviews of my books.  A clipping caught my eye, written in 1910.  Some editor had written me, asking some questions about my views on ‘Canadian Literature’ and in my reply I find the following paragraph—rather significant in view of what has come since.

‘I do not think our literature is an expression of our national life as a whole.  I think this is because we have only very recently—as time goes in the making of nations—had any real national life.  Canada is only just finding herself.  She has not yet fused her varying elements into a harmonious whole.  Perhaps she will not do so until they are welded together by some great crisis of storm and stress.  That is when a real national literature will be born.  I do not believe that the great Canadian noel or poem will ever be written until we have had some kind of baptism by fire to purge away all our petty superficialities and lay bare the primal passions of humanity.’

When I wrote that I had no premonition of the Great War.  But if I had known what was coming I could hardly have described it better.  Many a prophet’s reputation has been made out of less!  It remains to be seen if the rest of my prediction will come as true.  I believe it will, but it may take twenty—thirty—forty years before it is made manifest.  That great Canadian literature will come from the generation born of this conflict not from the generation that fought through it.”

It seems that Maud did not stop to consider her own work as a sample of Canadian pre-war literature.  What do you think of Maud’s comments about the country’s birth of literature?  If we go by Maud’s way of thinking, how would we then characterize all the works that came before the First World War – including her own?

Source: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume II: 1910-1921

Photo taken from An Avonlea Christmas.