My book club read After Anne by Logan Steiner, a biographical novel centered on the life of Lucy Maud Montgomery author of Anne of Green Gables. This book is very literary-y 🙂 . It has a very complex structure — time periods mixed throughout combined with a series of flashbacks not dated. My book club felt that the structure interfered with the story, taking them completely out of the narrative. It is also more about Montgomery’s personal life, rather than writing life. She did not have a happy marriage, and the reader is treated to all the disfunction. A supremely successful author with a clergyman husband with mental illness combined with one very oppositional son made this a depressing read. I hate to say it, but no one in my group liked this book. I’m not sure the life of Montgomery could have been treated in any other way, but the writing style did nothing to make us want to continue reading a sad and tragic story. This one is for only hardcore Montgomery fans.
(I purchased the ebook from Amazon. All opinions expressed are mine alone.)
A stunning and unexpected portrait of Lucy Maud Montgomery, creator of one of literature’s most prized heroines, whose personal demons were at odds with her most enduring legacy—the irrepressible Anne of Green Gables.
“Dear old world,” she murmured, “you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you.” —L. M. Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables, 1908
As a young woman, Maud had dreams bigger than the whole of Prince Edward Island. Her exuberant spirit had always drawn frowns from her grandmother and their neighbors, but she knew she was meant to create, to capture and share the way she saw the world. And the young girl in Maud’s mind became more and more persistent: Here is my story, she said. Here is how my name should be spelled—Anne with an “e.”
But the day Maud writes the first lines of Anne of Green Gables, she gets a visit from the handsome new minister in town, and soon faces a decision: forge her own path as a spinster authoress, or live as a rural minister’s wife, an existence she once called “a synonym for respectable slavery.” The choice she makes alters the course of her life.
With a husband whose religious mania threatens their health and happiness at every turn, the secret darkness that Maud herself holds inside threatens to break through the persona she shows to the world, driving an ever-widening wedge between her public face and private self, and putting her on a path towards a heartbreaking end.
Beautiful and moving, After Anne reveals Maud’s hidden personal challenges while celebrating what was timeless about her life and art—the importance of tenacity and the peaceful refuge found in imagination.
Logan Steiner is a lawyer by day and a writer by baby bedtime. Her writing explores motherhood and the creative life.
After graduating from Pomona College and Harvard Law School, Logan clerked for three federal judges, spent six years in Big Law, and served for three years as an Assistant United States Attorney. She now specializes in brief writing at a boutique law firm. Logan lives in Denver with her husband, daughter, and the cranky old man of the house, a Russian Blue cat named Taggart.
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