Lucy Maud Montgomery Short Stories, 1909 to 1922 — Reading Notes

The Weight of a Single Gesture

Montgomery often builds emotional resonance through small, physical actions. In “A Golden Wedding,” a boy’s “mouth was how much like his father’s” becomes a trigger for the antagonist Turner’s buried hatred—and then, moments later, for a flicker of recognition that complicates his revenge. The gesture is economical: one sentence, one resemblance, and the entire moral landscape shifts. Similarly, in “Robert Turner’s Revenge,” the memory of a childhood promise made “under a bloom-white apple tree” is not merely sentimental; it is a structural anchor that the plot will return to. Montgomery trusts her readers to feel the force of these details without explanatory commentary.

Dialogue as a Window to Class and Character

The speech patterns in these stories are carefully differentiated. The boy in “A Golden Wedding” says “I’d a-thought” and “if they was,” marking him as rural and uneducated, yet his earnestness is never mocked. Turner, by contrast, speaks in clipped, grim sentences: “So she has to leave it, has she?”—the adverb “grimly” doing double duty as both description and judgment. Montgomery uses dialect sparingly but precisely: a dropped “g,” a double negative, a colloquial contraction. These are not caricatures; they are individuals whose voices reveal their histories. The narrator’s own voice, meanwhile, remains formal and slightly arch, creating a subtle distance that allows the reader to observe without being overwhelmed by sentiment.

The Past as a Living Presence

Memory in these stories is not a passive recollection but an active force that shapes present action. In “Robert Turner’s Revenge,” the protagonist’s hatred of Neil Jameson is rekindled by the sight of the dead man’s son—but then undercut by the memory of “little Lisbeth Miller,” his schoolboy sweetheart. The narrative shifts fluidly between present and past, using the imperfect tense (“How clearly he remembered her!”) to create a sense of immediacy. Montgomery does not simply tell us that Turner is conflicted; she shows him reliving a childhood promise, a fight over spice apples, and the thrill of being thought a dunce for love. The past is not a prologue; it is a character in its own right.

Setting as Emotional Barometer

Montgomery’s landscapes are never merely decorative. The “weather-grey house” hidden by a “thick, shrubby growth of young apple orchard” in “A Golden Wedding” is not just a location; it is a physical manifestation of neglect and loss. The “sunken stone doorstep” and “straggling, uncared-for vines” mirror the protagonist’s dashed hopes. In “Robert Turner’s Revenge,” the sea is a constant presence, and the boy’s “troubled blue eyes” looking “seaward” link his inner turmoil to the vast, indifferent ocean. These settings are not described in isolation; they are woven into the emotional fabric of the narrative, so that a boarded-up window or a bloom-white apple tree carries more weight than any direct statement of feeling.

These stories reward attention to the small, deliberate choices Montgomery makes in diction and description. A reader attuned to the way a character’s voice shifts from colloquial to formal, or the way a landscape mirrors an emotional state, will find layers of meaning beneath the seemingly straightforward plots. The collection offers a chance to observe a writer refining her craft across a decade of short fiction, where every detail—from a vine to a verb—is chosen with care.

I keep thinking about how Montgomery writes leaving and coming back—the way a room can hold everything you’ve lost. That quiet ache of remembering shows up again in Off duty: A dozen yarns for soldiers and sailors — Context and Discussion, though the voices are rougher, the homesickness nearer the surface. It stayed with me like a letter I wasn’t sure I was meant to open.