Schooled with Briars

Out of the roughly five hundred shorter works of fiction that L.M. Montgomery published in periodicals between 1895 and 1940, about a dozen consisted of multi-chapter serials. As a form of print storytelling, fiction serials offered more complexity than short stories by virtue of their relatively longer word count, but since they appeared in instalments, they had to be structured for readers who had to wait to find out what happened next.

Schooled with Briars: Collected Serials, 1903-1913, the fourth volume in The L.M. Montgomery Library, reprints Montgomery's six surviving fiction serials published over a ten-year period. Benjamin Lefebvre offers an in-depth analysis of these serials and what they reveal, sometimes problematically, about normative gender roles (including the figure of the "ideal woman"), whiteness and otherness, terminology and ableism, and the ways that her characters' abilities to earn a living are often constrained by complex attitudes about gender and class. He also traces fascinating parallels between this material and her novels, including the iconic Anne of Green Gables. This volume offers readers fresh insights into Montgomery's career as a contributor to a competitive, metropolitan literary marketplace.