Through Lover’s Lane: L.M. Montgomery’s Photography and Visual Imagination

It might surprise some to know that internationally beloved Canadian writer L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942), author of the Anne of Green Gables series, among other novels, and hundreds of short stories and poems, also fuelled a passion for photography. For forty years, Montgomery photographed her favourite places and people, using many of these photographs to illustrate the hand-written journals she left as a record of her life. Artistically inclined, and possessing a strong visual memory, Montgomery created scenes and settings in her fiction that are closely linked to the carefully composed shapes in her photographs.

Elizabeth Rollins Epperly’s Through Lover’s Lane is the first book to examine Montgomery’s photography in any depth; it is also the first study to connect Montgomery’s photography with her fiction and other writing. Drawing on the work of Montgomery scholars, as well as theorists such as Susan Sontag, Gaston Bachelard, Roland Barthes, John Berger, and George Lakoff, Epperly connects Montgomery’s practice of photography with the writer’s metaphors for home and belonging. Epperly examines thirty-five of Montgomery’s photographs, demonstrating how they figure in the novelist’s life and fiction. She argues that the shapes in Montgomery’s favourite place in nature - Lover’s Lane in Cavendish P.E.I. - organized Montgomery’s other photographs, underpinned her colourful descriptions, and grounded her aesthetics. Through Lover’s Lane suggests how an artist creates metaphors that resonate within a single work, echo across a lifetime of writing and photography, and inspire readers and viewers across cultures and time.