What Should I Read Next?
Ep 521: Everything L.M. Montgomery and how to build a deeper reading roster
14 Apr 2026
Chapter 1: Who is Kate Scarth and what is her role in L.M. Montgomery Studies?
You know, and again, you know, not everything has to go back to Ellen Montgomery, but I can't help it.
But it might in this episode. It might. Hey readers, I'm Anne Bogle, and this is What Should I Read Next? Welcome to the show that's dedicated to answering the question that plagues every reader. What should I read next? We don't get bossy on this show. What we will do here is give you the information you need to choose your next read.
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That's modernmrsdarcy.com slash subscribe. Readers, I've been lucky to have lots of amazing women in my life, and I know I'm not alone. So many of us know women who have shown up for us like a mom or act in this role by sharing their wisdom, experience, and guidance across the years.
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Chapter 2: What are some of Kate's favorite L.M. Montgomery retellings?
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Chapter 3: How does Kate define her ideal reading roster?
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Hi, I'm Cassidy. And I'm April. And together we are fashion historians, friends, and co-hosts of Dress the History of Fashion, a podcast about why the clothes we wear matter throughout history and around the world. From the cultural and societal to the personal and often political, with each episode, we explore the multitude of meanings quite literally sewn into the clothes we wear.
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Readers, I'm sure many of you will well understand our team's excitement when we saw today's guest submission land in our inboxes. Today, I'm talking with Kate Scarth, Chair of Ellen Montgomery Studies at the University of Prince Edward Island. We're going to talk more about Kate's work today, but in addition to her academic role, Kate has partnered with the L.M.
Montgomery Institute, which she describes as a hub of the international Montgomery community and was part of the advisory committee for the Green Gables Interpretive Center. I was so interested in hearing more about Montgomery's life and work, and also Kate's life and work, and about some of her favorite Montgomery retellings and homages. But our main focus today is on Kate's reading life.
She's interested in building out a deep reading roster for the kinds of books she especially enjoys. Books featuring literary women, books where an investigation or detective work is a big part of the story, books that center on a house, and nonfiction about creative and artistic women in history.
She's also very interested in finding more books with magical realism and ghosts, and had some interesting thoughts to share in this vein connecting Stephen King and Ellen Montgomery, if you can believe it. Stick around to hear more. Let's get to it. Kate, welcome to the show.
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Chapter 4: What themes do Kate's favorite books explore?
Like she went back and copied them out and re-edited them so we can see them as kind of a great kind of literary output as well.
And she was very much on board with them being published one day. Do I remember you saying that?
That's absolutely true, yeah. Because she was a celebrity pretty much as soon as Anna Green Gables was published. She did a lot of public speaking because of her books, got a lot of fan letters. So she knew there would be interest in her journals. So she went back and wrote them. But, you know, sometimes she leaves things in, like nasty things she says about people.
And you think, oh, you know, why didn't she edit that out? Laura Robinson, a Montgomery scholar, you know, says, you know, we don't know for sure sometimes if a description, say, of a sunset appeared first in the novel or in the journal.
Chapter 5: What insights does Kate share about the book 'The Postcard'?
You'd assume it was in the journal and then she put it in the novel, but maybe she liked it so much in the novel that then it ended up in the journal. So, yeah, so they're not exactly, I mean, I guess diaries are never, you know, it's a person's version of reality.
Chapter 6: What makes 'A Ghost in the Throat' a compelling read?
But yeah, they're kind of this great literary work themselves. I mean, I do find that there's can be a bit of titillation around, especially in terms of how her life ended, that when I was doing the Audible, The Great Course, The Life and Work of Montgomery, I wanted to make sure that that wasn't too central.
Obviously, and we have such better understanding of mental health too, but the interesting thing about her is what she created.
Chapter 7: Why is 'The Five' significant in understanding Jack the Ripper's victims?
And of course, I mean, it's all the more powerful because she dealt with such hardship in her life. But I think it's really important not to lose track of the fact that she was this amazing artist.
I appreciate you speaking to that. And it's so interesting to hear you talk about the way she edited her journals, because when I had heard her journals referred to as literature in the past, I took that to mean quality and purpose. I was not at all thinking about the process by which they were written. That's so interesting.
It really is interesting. And in the audible that you listened to that I did, I talk about, for example, her experience of hearing about the Halifax explosion, which was this really devastating collision between two ships in World War I. And
how even that, like she kind of, you know, she's able to turn an event like that into this very personal psychological experience of how she coped throughout that day. But yeah, so they are literature, absolutely. And like the, you know, the way that you were thinking about them in terms of her crafting place and character.
But yeah, there's also this, I guess, imaginative editing at work as well. And they're also just really interesting because you can almost think of them as kind of experimental because she'll do these long diary entries where it's her kind of revisiting the Cavendish of her past. So Cavendish is where she grew up and dreamt of Anne of Green Gables.
And it's kind of the real life counterpart we could say to Avonlea in the end books. But she'll just kind of recreate with words like every turn in the road and the tree and who lived here. And so she had this amazing imagination. And that you could almost see it's like she's creating this map with words. So she's doing a lot of different kind of interesting things in the journals.
What would you say to anyone contemplating a trip of their own to PEI and surrounds?
Well, there is an online literary tour that you can follow. There are many sites tied to Anna Green Gables. So yes, I would definitely encourage anyone who's enjoyed the books and to make sure to go to Green Gables. The Interpretive Center has been recently redone and there's a lot of information about Montgomery and her world.
You can visit the house that has been known since Montgomery's lifetime as Green Gables. You can go to the site where she grew up, where she wrote Anne of Green Gables. And there are sites all over the island in Bedeck and elsewhere where she taught school. There are many sites to explore.
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