All the books Lucy Maud Montgomery mentions reading in her journals

When I read the journals of Lucy Maud Montgomery, she kept on mentioning all the books she was reading. She was writing between about 1886 and 1940. So it’s books from that era or earlier. Eventually, I got interested and wanted to read them myself, and started keeping a list of them. Here are all the ones I caught.

I, by the way, had access to Davis Library at UNC Chapel Hill when I started reading these books, and that library system has like 8 million books. They had most of these books mentioned by Lucy Maud Montgomery, even though a lot of them are now unknown or not the thing that you’ll find in a regular town library. But even after moving on from Chapel Hill, I have found quite of few of these in our small town library. And I don’t usually read books online, but since a lot of these are no longer in copyright, you can find them on Project Gutenberg and places like that.

Can I just say one thing? Having written all of the below, and seeing my reflections on the books put together like this, I am realizing that practically all the titles or authors that are unknown today are not that good. I guess there is a reason they are not well-known any longer.

But there have been some amazing gems among the rust that I’m so grateful to have read. At this point, having read about 30 out of the 50 books listed here, my favorites are The Woman in White, Waverly, The Life of Charlotte Bronte, Farthest North, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush, The Wind in the Willows, and Roughing It.

In parenthesis I’ve written in what library I found and read the book.

The count of Monte Cristo, Alexandre Dumas, 1844 (Concord, NC, libraries) — I read this before I knew that Lucy Maud Montgomery had read it. I read it a long, long time ago. But I think I liked it. Oh, except I do remember every woman in the book (and there are many) is described as a perfection of beauty. Whenever I thought back to the book, it seemed like the standards for womanhood were very appearance-centered and very impossible to attain. Of course, the book was written by a man.

Midshipman Easy, Frederick Marryat, 1836 (Rice University) — this book was terrible. It’s an adventure story of a boy in the English navy, early 1800s. It’s an ugly, violent, misogynist book, and the hero himself, and all the “good characters”, are celebrated by the author for being nasty and brutish. And the “heroics” and “valor” of the hero are not so great, mostly it’s all coincidence and it gets so tiring and annoying.

Froude’s Elizabeth

Trilby, George du Maurier, 1894 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) – this was a best-seller from 1895. This book made me realize why though a book may be popular at its time, 100 years later no one has heard of it. It has some good points and some good passages. Otherwise, the very over-blown section describing Trilby’s angelic singing was not inspiring, but annoying. Trilby is depicted as a perfect saint and a perfect beauty, and as such, the ideal woman. It was all very ridiculous. But there’s other parts of the book that are very insightful and explain a lot.

Sorrows of Satan, Marie Corelli, 1895 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — A best-seller from 1896. It was really, really good at the beginning. But later it bogged down. In part because the character Mavis Clare is so ridiculous – she’s very perfect, and the fact that she spends all her time telling people how perfect she is, apparently doesn’t take away from her perfection. I liked the secondary character Sybil a lot more. I don’t think she deserved the end she got. What’s even more ridiculous is that Mavis Claire is supposed to be modeled after the author herself. Talk about vanity.

Kate Carnegie, Ian McLaren, 1896 (Los Angeles library, an 1920s edition) — this was a follow-up to another book on this list, Beside the Bonnie Brier Bush. Well, while I mostly liked the Bonnie Brier one, this Kate Carnegie one was a little too dull, tangential, went on and on, and the main plot of the story was like an afterthought. Also, one of the main characters is John Carmichael. But this author loves to just throw out names with no explanation at all, so at one point, he goes off on a tangent (like 20 pages long) about John, and the whole time I thought he was talking about John Carmichael, but no, he was talking about a completely different John. Who I don’t recall really did much in the story. We just got 20 confusing pages on him, and others, for free. Also, the old old reverend guy dying among his books was supposed to be sympathetic, I guess, but some of his self-sacrifices that were supposed to be noble just seemed maudlin. Also, I kept getting confused between the Auld Kirk and the Free Kirk, and thinking the one was the other, and when they started talking about the nice reverend from the Auld Kirk, I was so confused, because wasn’t Carmichael actually the reverend? Did Carmichael just get kicked out without the author telling us (that’s something he would do). But no, the nice reverend was from the Auld Kirk, and Carmichael, who is also nice, was from the Free Kirk.

A book that Tennyson’s son wrote about him, by Hallam Tennyson

The flower patch among the hills, Flora Klickmann, 1916

Tommy and Grizel, John Barrie (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — This is by the man who wrote Peter Pan. It had some of the funniest passages I’ve ever read: Tommy and his “broken” leg, Grizel’s handkerchief, Tommy’s conversations with the rich, stuck-up lady. But in other places, the book kind of dragged. And I don’t know what the point was in it ending the way it did.

Hypatia, Charles Kingsley — I have not read this. But I did check it out once, with every intention of reading it. It’s about a female mathematician in ancient Egypt, and it’s written as a fiction. So I’m going to try to actually read it one day. But the time I had it in my possession, the first page looked overwhelmingly boring. So I didn’t even start.

The end of the House of Alard, Sheila Kaye-Smith

The mill on the Floss, George Eliot (Concord, NC, libraries) — Lucy Maud Montgomery mentions reading this in her journals multiple times. It was my second George Eliot book – I first read Adam Bede, also on the promptings of Lucy Maud Montgomery. The first 300 pages and change are good – just a little bit plodding. You keep saying, okay, okay, and now … ? The next 200 pages and change are riveting, and will make you sit up and pay attention with a vengeance! I was very engrossed. Then there were about 50 pages left, and I was very interested to see how all the confusion was going to be wrapped up. Well! It was awful!!! Just awful. That was the worst ending to any book – it pretty much seemed like she’d gotten tired of writing (wouldn’t you?) and she just polished it off in the quickest way possible. And it’s not just me that thinks that, because I then read the introductory notes and other people have felt the same, and George Eliot in fact agreed!

Roughing it in the Bush, Mrs. Moodie

Waverley, Sir Walter Scott (Los Angeles libraries) — loved this! I never thought I’d like a book about one of those obscure wars the kings of England were setting off. And this was a really obscure one, the Lancaster rebellion (unless it was the York rebellion). At first, I wasn’t too sure about it, because each sentence was a paragraph long, and I had to read them twice before I figured out what the author was trying to say. But then, I got used to it. I liked some of the old-timey ways of saying things. A lot of the Scottish words were like Swedish words. I liked the characters. It was all very nice.

Ardath, Marie Corelli, 1889

Undine, Friedrich Foque, 1811 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — this was so nice! This is a fairytale-like book, quite short, and it was apparently super-popular in the 1800s. But now no one has heard of it. At least I hadn’t until I read that Lucy Maud Montgomery liked it as a child. As I read it, I found myself wishing I’d found it as a kid, because I’m sure I would have loved it. The end is not so nice, because Undine ends up sad, and I kind of wish she could have stayed carefree and bold, but it was still very nice.

Penrod, Booth Tarkington (Los Angeles libraries) — This book is about a mischievous little boy, and was published in 1914. It’s in the spirit of a book like Tom Sawyer: high-spirited boy and the funny situations he gets himself into. Except, the situations Penrod gets into are a lot funnier. I re-read Tom Sawyer during the pandemic and I was sort of bored in comparison. However, Penrod is not a book that I can recommend to anyone, because it also has extremely racist parts to it (it’s set in Indiana). Just think, if the author hadn’t been so racist, so a “product of his times”, his book could now be as well-known as Tom Sawyer, but probably everyone who reads it knows they can’t recommend it. Penrod also is a little different from Tom Sawyer-type books because while Tom Sawyer is always well-intentioned and endearing, Penrod can be outright mean and selfish.

Wooden ships and iron men, Frederick William Wallace, 1925

Our sentimental garden, Agnes Egerton Castle, 1915

The heart of the ancient wood, Charles Roberts, 1900

Tish (1911) and Tish plays the field (1926), Mary Roberts Rinehart (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — This is a series about a main character called Tish. The one I found in the library was: Tish: the chronicle of her escapades and excursions (1916). From how Lucy Maud Montgomery described it in her journal, I was all ready for a book about a saucy and spunky 20-year-old back in the early 1900s. Well, it turned out that Tish is 50. Yet in books today, rarely will you see a spunky and saucy 50-year-old that can match Tish. Tish knows how to change a tire on a car, and lots of other things, that I don’t know how to do. The words ‘feminism’ or ‘girl power’ are never mentioned in the book, but they don’t need to be mentioned. As I read Tish, I started realizing how many books I have read whose authors lived in the 1800s and early 1900s, and how independent and capable the female characters they created were — even though we’re kind of conditioned to think of women back then as submissive and docile. The problems with this book were 1) some of the chapters were a little boring and repetitive, and sometimes the writing wasn’t clear enough to figure out what was going on and 2) the use of racial slurs and nasty comments towards immigrants. There’s a whole chapter about a young man who’s immigrated from Syria. The author tries to make him seem foolish and worthy of contempt; but it was a poor attempt, because the contempt in the author’s words were actually unable to disguise that this young immigrant was simply a person trying very hard to make a new life for himself.

Roughing it, Mark Twain, 1872 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — this book surprised me positively. Because I think I had read it was about the silver mines in Nevada, and honestly, that sounded boring to me. But it started out with a stagecoach ride. Like from back in the day, when you had to travel the country by carriage, and every ten miles you changed horses so that you’d keep going at “high” speeds. So Mark Twain rode from Missouri, all through the plains and Colorado, the Rockies, and Utah, and out to Nevada, on these stagecoaches. The nice thing about Mark Twain is that he will have interesting anecdotes the whole way through to keep things interesting. The book is 600 pages, but hardly dull for a page. I even was interested by the silver mining. In the second half, it did start dragging a bit. Because, honestly, there were less funny stories. Also, compared to “Innocents Abroad” and the comment about American Indians in “A Tramp Abroad”, Twain was less racist in this book. He even said complementary things about Chinese-Americans. After what he said about Arabs, I would have expected him to chew them apart, but no. There was also a horrific description of a massacre that occurred, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. Mormons in Utah laid siege to, starved, tricked and then massacred a caravan of those pioneer “covered wagons” with a bunch of families heading west. There were many women and children amongst these families, and they all got killed, except for a handful of little babies. All their belongings were looted by different Mormon families in the area, who also stole the surviving babies and abused them until they were finally rescued like two years later. The Mormons also call all non-Mormons “gentiles.”

Flaming Youth, Samuel Hopkins Adams, 1923 — I haven’t read this, but Lucy Maud Montgomery hated it and shredded it into her fireplace

Guadalla’s Palmerston

The Woman in White, Wilkie Collins, 1859 (Concord, NC, libraries) — WOW!! This was amazing! This might have been one of the most amazing books I’ve ever read. I can’t believe I’ve never heard of it before. I’ve heard of the Brontes and Jane Austen and Charles Dickens, but never of this one, and when I saw it listed in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals, I still thought it was just an obscure book from back in the day. But no! It was a major best-seller, and I can see why. The first day, I just read 20 pages. The day after, I maybe read 15. Then I read 15 more. The next day, I read 50. The day after, I read 100. The day after, I read 130. The day after, I read 110. Because this book is so long, I was still barely 2/3 through after all that reading! But goodness, it had me on the edge of my seat, and I lay awake, so, so worried about the characters, late at night after finally putting it down. It is one of those old books which still explores so many issues that we grapple with today. For example, one was the court system. Here is a book written in 1859-1860, where the characters don’t trust turning to the courts because they know whoever has the most money will win! So pretty much nothing has changed. One thing that’s never explained is, how the heck was Philip Fairlie so stupid that he made his daughter promise to marry Sir Percival? This book is still popular enough today that there’s 3 copies of it at my small local library. I still can’t believe I’d never heard of it!

Zanoni, Edward Bulwer-Lytton, 1842 (Rice University library) — I was in love with this book. This book was a favorite of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s when she was a child, and I could see why. It was beautiful, mysterious, idealistic, romantic. It took me to all these places, and all these scenes, I’ve never gone before. I was all ready to tell everyone to drop everything and read Zanoni. But three-fourths of the way into the book, one of the characters does something very stupid and honestly, something very out-of-character for that character. The action made no sense. But I was going to forgive that, because the last fourth was exciting and swept me and my doubts away again — until the the last 3 paragraphs. They were just very stupid. But you should still probably read this book. Update: after reading “The Woman in White” (entry directly above), and read a bit about that author’s biography, I have discovered that Edward Bulwer-Lytton was a monster.

Beside the bonnie brier bush, Ian McLaren, 1894 (Los Angeles library, a 1895 edition) — this was a best-seller back in the day. It’s written in the most obscure way, and I had to keep reading the same page again and again to figure it out, and half the words are in Scottish, and sometimes, a whole chapter was about some minor church doctrine that the whole village was debating, and on and on they’d go. But for all that, I really liked it. If you can get through the obscurity, it’s really really funny. Wonderful sly humor. And in some places it was so so sad. I was surprised by the sadness, after battling dry obscurity, but there it came. If you can get your hands on it, I would definitely recommend it. I wrote more about this book here.

The days of auld lang syne, Ian McLaren, 1895

Doctor Thorne, Anthony Trollope, 1858 (Monrovia library) — I found this book in a small little library! Even though it’s so old and unknown. I found out it is part of series of six books, all of which are monster-sized, and even though I’d never heard of this author until I found him in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s journals, apparently he’s still sort of well-known in England. Well, I liked it. But it was a little too safe and all-loose-ends-tied up. A little too much like a walk in a stifling flower garden where nothing really risky happens.

Framley Parsonage, Anthony Trollope, 1861

Life of Lady Byron, Ethel Mayne, 1929

The wind in the willows, Kenneth Grahame, 1908 (Berkeley library) — I started reading this; it was very slow and boring. Mostly I got impatient with the slow descriptions of nature. But then I remembered: when I was little, I would have pitied someone who got impatient with descriptions of nature as slightly indecent. So I kept reading and it was after all a very lovely story.

The story of an African farm, Olive Schreiner, 1883

Elizabeth and her German garden, Elizabeth von Arnim, 1898 (Berkeley library) — At first, I liked it: it was kind of amazing how you could write a whole book with pretty much no action, and just talking about this lady’s garden. This was a best-seller (100 years ago). But then, towards the end of the book, the husband says the stupidest things about women, and the two women present, Elizabeth and her feisty friend whose name I can’t remember, don’t make him shut up. So it’s like the husband won. These were super offensive comments about the intelligence and capabilities of women. So I started thinking that the author must have been very stupid, but then I read about her on Wikipedia. She didn’t sound like someone who believed women are silly and nothing else. Did she make the husband say outrageous things, with no surefire pummeling in return, because the comments were outrageous enough that even 100 years ago people would have been angry, without the author needing to point it out? I don’t know. And she also made a whole awful lot of mean, unjust implications and comments about people not as rich as her.

Herodotus’s history

Little Katey and Jolly Jim, Julia Matthews, 1865 (online) — This book was published in 1865. Lucy Maud Montgomery mentions it a lot in her journals as a favorite childhood book, and I thought from the title that it must be a very jolly, fun read. Well, it was not. In fact, it was 1/3 very sweet, and 2/3 ridiculous. Like super ridiculous. This is a book that just doles out fanciful, evangelical prescriptions to poverty. It’s in fact really annoying.

Books by the Bronte sisters, c. 1847 — these are all great books.

Life of Charlotte Bronte, Elizabeth Gaskell, 1857 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — this was a beautiful book. It’s a biography of my favorite author, and it’s full of her letters, which are just as beautifully written as all her books. Plus, I learned all about the old English moors from back in the day. I was just in despair because right afterwards, I found like 10 huge books with the originals of all of Charlotte Bronte’s letters, and I just won’t ever have time to read them all.

Fraulein Schmidt and Mr. Anstruther, Elizabeth von Arnim, 1907

Sam Pepys’ Diary, 1660-1669

Elizabeth and Essex, Lytton Strachey, 1928

The Black Douglas, Crockett, 1899

Elsie books, Martha Finley (there’s a ton of these books), 1867-1905 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — I read the very first book, called “Elsie Dinsmore“. It’s about a little girl who is very, very anxious about having no sins. She’s been living with relatives, but now her dad has shown up and she desperately wants him to love her. I read that people describe the girl, Elsie, as a little prig. I mean, they didn’t describe her as a prig in the 1800s when these books were published, but current critics describe her that way according to our norms today. I didn’t really get that impression of Elsie, though. A prig is someone who flaunts how much better they are than everyone else, right? Elsie never does that, she never wants anyone to feel bad. Also, I thought how passive Elsie was under mistreatment is very interesting, because I myself have often debated if “turning the other cheek” and trying to “kill them with kindness” is the better approach when you’re dealing with mean people, or should you instead talk back, be mean right back, be underhanded right back? So I overall liked the Elsie character. On the other hand, her dad is a psychopath. He is the most disgusting character, maybe, I’ve ever read. He was such a jerk. Then he gets all self-pitying and says, “Elsie, why do you act like I’m a despicable tyrant?” Uh, wow! The lack of self-awareness! He knows Elsie never lies and never does anything wrong on purpose, and yet he sees her blotted copybook, won’t believe her clear protests that she didn’t do it, and is on the brink of whipping her with a riding-whip before someone stops him. Then he goes all, oh, oh, oh! I could never have lived with myself had I punished my daughter unjustly! Ha! It should have been obvious to his thick skull from the first that he was getting ready to punish her unjustly. He just kept her in a state of terror for months and months. He would say things like: you must sit here and you cannot get up until I tell you to! You must remember that I am in charge and you must obey me in all commands! Then, after he had further terrorized her, he told her she was not to have any dinner and only sent up some bread and water. Elsie was too sad to be hungry, so she didn’t eat it. Her father comes up later, sees the uneaten food, and flips out, as usual! I told you to eat that bread and water so you must do it! Elsie cries in vain, she can’t get any food down her throat. The dad: no! You must! You must do as I say! What an idiot. Poor Elsie somehow chokes it all down. Elsie spends about half the book crying because of things like this. (Usually crying makes your face blotchy and puffy, but this doesn’t happen to Elsie, she’s still the most beautiful child anyone ever saw.) Pretty much the dad was priming her to one day get married to someone extremely abusive and think it was all her own fault when the husband mistreats her. But do you know something? I think the reason this book was so popular in the 1800s was precisely because Elsie was so innocent, and people like to imagine themselves being that innocent, and being in Elsie’s shoes, and acting so perfectly even under unjust treatment. They like the idea of the stern father actually being loving underneath. Any case, at first the book truly disgusted me because I thought the author was implying the father’s strictness was the correct way for a parent to behave. Then, however, the dad comes to see the error of his ways, actually, and so he loses his strictness and he even, sort of, acknowledges that he cannot command his daughter in all things. BUT! There’s a sequel (actually there’s like 27 sequels) and I read the wikipedia summary of the first sequel because I can’t get my hands on the actual book, and in the sequel, the dad reverts to being an idiot all over again! So he hadn’t really seen the error of his ways. As mentioned, the author wrote 28 Elsie books in all, I think over a 40 year time span or so (some of the latest ones were published in the early 1900s), and Elsie gets married (would love to know if her husband is like her dad) and has kids and then becomes a grandmother, and on and on. Just think, the books were popular enough to spawn that many sequels, and today, who has heard of them?! The one good thing the dad did was he did seem to believe in women’s education, and he made sure Elsie learned not just reading and writing and stuff, but botany and geology and got exercise and ate well.

The cross, Sigrid Undset, 1920-1922 (Rice University library) — This is the third part of a trilogy. The books all together are just named after the main character, Kristen Lavransdatter. When I looked it up, I was pretty excited to read it, and I stayed excited for the first 130-ish pages. And then it was all downhill. And it’s a long downhill, because the book is 1128 pages long. It’s the most boring long book I’ve ever read. There are multiple 300-page lumps of pure boredom that you have to get through, to be rewarded with about 50 pages of some interest, before things are boring again. Because it’s basically 1000 pages of Kristen being “white-faced” and all the color draining out of her face, and not being able to breathe, but still able to speak calmly in the middle of her distress! On the inside-flap of the book, some prestigious reviewer had compared the book to The Brothers Karamozav. Are you kidding??? The Brothers K, where every sentence and every scene made you stop and breathe at either the beauty of the language, or the situation, or the thoughts being presented. No, there is no comparison between that and this Norwegian clunker. This was 1100 pages of blah blah blah. There is more profound feeling and thought in Taylor Swift’s new album Folklore. Seriously. Oh, and one more thing. The author kept confusing herself (and me) by saying things like: It was absolutely silent in the night; one heard the sound of the river and the sound of the wind in the trees and the sound of cowbells echoing around the mountain and the sound of the horses stamping their feet … are you confused? Or she’d say things like: it was a still, windless night, with great gusts of wind battering everything. I mean …

The last of the Mohicans, James Fenimore Cooper, 1757 (Concord, NC, libraries) — I read this … that is, plodded through it. It’s just too sad to read. You know that all the American Indians are going to be killed off, and that the beautiful forests have to be sacrificed for Wal-Mart parking lots.

The house of seven gables, Nathaniel Hawthorne, 1851 (Concord, NC, libraries) — This was kind of bad. When Charlotte Bronte goes on and on and on, I don’t mind because it is all beautifully written. This book was not. It could have been summed up in 20 pages. Wow, the dragging out of details was just painful. And the 15 pages devoted to unveiling that a man was dead, who we already knew was dead – well, it was a bit too much.

Adam Bede, George Eliot, 1859 (Berkeley library) — my first George Eliot book and also the first book she wrote. It’s really quite good. I didn’t like it as much as Charlotte Bronte’s Villete and Jane Eyre. It kind of dragged in some places. And the insights are not as insightful as with Charlotte. I did like the mom a lot. Hettie is silly and annoying, and the lady preacher is good and sweet. But can’t we use a little of both in life? Was Hettie supposed to be punished so harshly, or was the author criticizing the societal notion that scandal and silliness must lead to such a terrible downfall?

Farthest North, Fridtjof Nansen, 1897 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — This book was a bestseller way back in 1897! It’s about a polar expedition that made it “farthest north” to the North Pole than anyone had ever been before. Nansen was the head of the expedition, and when they got back, he wrote this book. He’s Norwegian, therefore I am obligated to dislike the book. However, you could read it for sure. It takes you along through the moonlit Polar night!

Vanity Fair, Thackeray, 1848 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — I know this is a classic, but it is an awful book. The only thing clear from the book is the great opinion Thackeray had of himself – he apparently thought he was the only moral person on the planet, the only one who really knew how to live an upright life. Meanwhile, he wrote before the Civil War and he thought slavery was the best thing ever. When I finally finished and picked up “Farthest North”, I felt like my soul was being washed from all the pollution and grime of Thackeray.

The Alhambra, Washington Irving, 1832 (Davis Library, Chapel Hill) — The story of when the author took a trip to Spain, and swung by the city of Granada, and spent several weeks hanging out at the old Moorish Castle, the Alhambra. It was nice to get to walk in his shoes, see the sights with him, and read the magical and somewhat wild legends of long ago.

Rupert of Hentzau, Anthony Hope, 1898