The Lion and the Unicorn

The key to appreciating Elizabeth Epperly's Through Lover's Lane: L. M. Montgomery's Photography and Visual Imagination lies with understanding the book's central, though somewhat unspoken, purpose. Given Epperly's unprecedented access to over two thousand original photographs by and of L. M. Montgomery (4), and given Montgomery's status as a judge for a 1931 Kodak-sponsored photography competition (44), one might expect that this critical study would analyze Montgomery's photographs in detail, offering a reconsideration of Montgomery as a photographer, as well as an author. Though Through Lover's Lane does undertake some analysis of Montgomery's photographs—particularly in the "Selected Photographs" chapter that introduces the thirty-five photographs reproduced in the book, with emphasis on the self-portraits and Lover's Lane photographs—that is not the book's main focus. Likewise, with chapter titles like "Anne's Green Arches" and "Emily's 'Memory Pictures,'" some might expect that the book is primarily a work of literary criticism, using the photographs to offer up new readings of Montgomery's classic works. Though the three to five chapters dedicated to literary analysis do this deftly, literary analysis is not the thrust of this critical endeavor. Rather, Through Lover's Lane uses a combination of Montgomery's photographs, descriptions of her scrapbook images, published and unpublished journal entries, personal correspondence, and published fiction to create a cross-media lens for viewing the author herself: as private individual, as woman, as public figure, and most especially, as an artist. Epperly creates a word-framed "portrait of the artist," a constructed image that in turn becomes a new lens for re-investigation of Montgomery's works. Like the iconographic photograph that Montgomery takes of Nora Lefurgey taking pictures on the Cavendish shore (figure 15 within the book), Epperly's book is both image and lens, developing simultaneously a picture of Montgomery and [End Page 111] the revelation of her aesthetic processes. What emerges is a sparkling example of multimedia biographical criticism, and the view it offers of L. M. Montgomery is complex and compelling in its own right.

Essentially, Epperly suggests that Montgomery draws on certain "persistent metaphors" in her photographs, journals, and fiction, and that the recurrence of these images reflect broader patterns in Montgomery's life that she, in turn, conveys to readers (68). Epperly hypothesizes that these selfsame images train readers to read metaphorically through recurrence and adaptation. As she puts it, upon considering a group of glass-plate photographs of Montgomery's favorite landscape, Lover's Lane: "Here were the predominant patterns Montgomery loved: the bends in roads, distant circles or keyholes of light, and archways made by curving branches, all carefully framed to capture a way of seeing as well as a sight" (5). She continues, "Lover's Lane not only furnished, inspired, and recalled patterns, but also reflected and eventually symbolized Montgomery's own emotional state" (5). Roughly the first half of the book is dedicated to establishing Montgomery's "visual imagination" and its symbolic currency. Epperly delineates these concepts through analysis of photographic practices in Montgomery's time period, as well as Montgomery's own descriptions of her visual mental processes. For better and for worse, "visual imagination" is defined broadly throughout the text, suggesting at different points the "memory pictures" that Montgomery discusses in her journals (12), the "flash" of insight that Montgomery experiences and ascribes to Emily in Emily of New Moon (16, 125–44), general landscape description within the fiction, and character and narrative perspective (103–24). The "visual imagination" developed within the first half of the book is then applied to the second half of the book, which returns to Montgomery's fiction using this new biographical lens, this portrait of Montgomery-as-viewer and Montgomery-as-constructor-of-views.

Readers familiar with Elizabeth Epperly's groundbreaking The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass: L. M. Montgomery's Heroines and the Pursuit of Romance will recognize many of the same...