The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche

By Wendy Roy

• taps into current interest in adaptations of literary works;

• brings together discussions of three Can authors born in the same decade but never considered together

• uses archival material to provide information and analysis on the publication and adaptation of the works of McClung, Montgomery and de la Roche

• potential readers include strong community of L. M. Montgomery fans

• Language: English
• Publisher: Wilfrid Laurier University Press
• Release date: Nov 28, 2019
• ISBN: 9781771123938

Wendy Roy

Wendy Roy is a professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Saskatchewan. She researches gender and culture in Canadian women's writing and is the author of Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel (2005) and co-editor of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual (2012).

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THE NEXT INSTALMENT

This book has been published with the help of a grant from the Canadian Federation for the Humanities and Social Sciences, through the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program, using funds provided by the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada. Wilfrid Laurier University Press acknowledges the support of the Canada Council for the Arts for our publishing program. We acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada. This work was supported by the Research Support Fund.

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Library and Archives Canada Cataloguing in Publication

Title: The next instalment : serials, sequels, and adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche / Wendy Roy.

Names: Roy, Wendy, 1957– author.

Description: Includes bibliographical references and index.

Identifiers: Canadiana (print) 20190084022 | Canadiana (ebook) 20190084057 | ISBN 9781771123914 (hardcover) | ISBN 9781771123938 (EPUB) | ISBN 9781771123945 (PDF)

Subjects: LCSH: McClung, Nellie L., 1873-1951—Influence. | LCSH: Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud), 1874-1942—Influence. | LCSH: De la Roche, Mazo, 1879-1961—Influence. | LCSH: Canadian literature—20th century—History and criticism. | LCSH: Serial publication of books. | LCSH: Sequels (Literature) | LCSH: Serialized fiction—Canada—History—20th century. | LCSH: Publishers and publishing—Canada—History—20th century.

Classification: LCC PS8071.3 R69 2019 | DDC C813/.5209—dc23

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Cover and text design by Lime Design Inc. Front-cover images are details of photos of (clockwise from top) Mazo de la Roche, courtesy Museums of Mississauga, donated by Mazo’s daughter-in-law, Bianca de la Roche; L.M. Montgomery, courtesy University of Guelph, McLaughlin Library, Archival and Special Collections, collection XZ1 MS A097; and Nellie L. McClung, courtesy Glenbow Archives, NA-1514-3.

© 2019 Wilfrid Laurier University Press

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www.wlupress.wlu.ca

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Printed in Canada

Every reasonable effort has been made to acquire permission for copyright material used in this text, and to acknowledge all such indebtedness accurately. Any errors and omissions called to the publisher’s attention will be corrected in future printings.

No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a licence from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For an Access Copyright licence, visit http://www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

FOR MY MOTHER, Irene Roy,

who shares (and inspired) my love of stories

CONTENTS

Acknowledgements

INTRODUCTION

Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada

PART ONE

NELLIE L. MCCLUNG AND THE PEARLIE WATSON TRILOGY

1   Sowing the Seeds for McClung’s First Novel

2   Serialization as Marketing Strategy

3   McClung’s Second Chances

4   Changing Popular and Critical Responses

5   Sequel (Non)Recognition = (Non)Adaptation?

PART TWO

L.M. MONTGOMERY, ANNE, AND OTHER SEQUEL HEROINES

1   Beginning the Cycle: Montgomery’s First Serials and Sequels

2   New and Old Continuing Stories: The Teen Years

3   Anne and Emily of Somewhere Else: More Sequels and Serials

4   Anne Grows Up: The Sequel as Bildungsroman

5   Love for and Criticism of the Red-Headed Girl

6   Adapting and Internationalizing Anne

PART THREE

MAZO DE LA ROCHE AND THE WHITEOAKS OF JALNA

1   From Magazine Short Stories to Magazine Novels

2   Beyond the Trilogy: The Serial–Sequel Continuum

3   More Non-Jalna Novels, and New Jalna Prequels and Sequels

4   From Acclaimed Contest Winner to Outside the Range of Literary Criteria

5   The Whiteoaks of Hollywood – les Whiteoak de Paris

CONCLUSION

The Next Instalment

List of Abbreviations

Notes

Works Cited

Index

Acknowledgements

I WOULD LIKE TO THANK the many people who helped make this study possible. First, I thank the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada for a research grant that provided crucial support for my initial work and for an award from the Awards to Scholarly Publications Program that aided publication of this book. Warm thanks also to the University of Saskatchewan for scholarly support and sabbatical time to allow me to complete the research and writing of my study. Parts of this research appeared in my essays "Home as Middle Ground in Adaptations of Anne of Green Gables and Jalna," International Journal of Canadian Studies 48 (2014): 9–31; and Revisiting the Sequel: Carol Shields’s Companion Novels, The Worlds of Carol Shields (U of Ottawa P, 2014), 63–79.

A number of graduate and undergraduate research assistants have been invaluable in my work over the past decade, including Nicole Berard, Amelia Horsburgh, Caitlin Iles, Smokii Sumac, Kayla McCutcheon, Kayla Penteliuk, and Mabiana Camargo. Other people have provided much-needed help for me at a distance and in person, including Alan Filewod, Gisele Tsai, Meghan Burry, Ann Leifeste, Victor Vaivads, Izumi Adachi, and Audrey Loiselle. My gratitude also to the staff at the Interlibrary Loans Office at the University of Saskatchewan, who dealt heroically with my numerous odd demands, as well as people at archives across Canada who were unfailingly polite and helpful in fulfilling my many requests and in permitting the use of various documents. These include the Royal BC Museum and Archives, Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library at the University of Toronto, Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph Library, L.M. Montgomery Collection and Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island (especially Simon Lloyd), Queen’s University Archives (especially Jeremy Heil), McMaster University Library, Confederation Centre in Charlottetown, Library and Archives Canada, Massachusetts Historical Society, Harry Ransom Center (University of Texas at Austin), CBC and Radio-Canada Archives (especially Geoffrey Hopkinson, Russ McMillen, Kate Zieman, and Suzie Houde), and BBC Written Archives Centre (especially Jessica Hogg).

This is a work in progress, which other scholars will undoubtedly correct and add to in future years. I owe a deep debt of gratitude to the many scholars who paved the way for my initial investigations. For L.M. Montgomery in particular, the work of Benjamin Lefebvre in his collected readers and L.M. Montgomery Online has been invaluable, as have the bibliographies of Montgomery’s stories prepared by Rea Wilmshurst (with Ruth Russell and D.W. Russell) and Carolyn Strom Collins, and the publications posted in electronic form on the L.M. Montgomery Institute website, especially those in the Ryrie-Campbell Collection. I am grateful to the editors and publishers of Montgomery’s journals, Mary Henley Rubio, Elizabeth Hillman Waterston, and Jen Rubio (Oxford University Press and Rock’s Mills Press), as well as to the editors and publishers of collections of her letters, including Wilfrid Eggleston (Ryerson Press/Borealis Press), Francis W.P. Bolger and Elizabeth R. Epperly (McGraw-Hill Ryerson), and Hildi Froese Tiessen and Paul Gerard Tiessen (University of Toronto Press).

Thank you to Siobhan McMenemy, Rob Kohlmeier, Clare Hitchens, and others at Wilfrid Laurier University Press who helped to shepherd this book through the publication process. Thank you also to Matthew Kudelka and Elaine Melnick. Melanie Fishbane provided friendly support and inspired a trip to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, and students in my graduate class on Canadian Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations helped me to take my thinking in new directions. As always, my love and thanks to my husband, Garth Cantrill, who makes all things possible.

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Anne of Green Gables and other indicia of Anne are trademarks and Canadian official marks of the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority Inc.

L.M. Montgomery, Emily of New Moon, The Story Girl, and The Blue Castle are trademarks of Heirs of L. M. Montgomery Inc.

INTRODUCTION

Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations in Early-Twentieth-Century Canada

WHAT HAPPENS NEXT? Early-twentieth-century authors Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche were each asked that question by their readers, their publishers, and themselves, and each answered through the writing and dissemination of continuing stories. In the more than a century since the first of these works was published, a series of critical readers have judged McClung’s Pearlie Watson trilogy (published from 1908 to 1921), Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books (1908 to 1939), and de la Roche’s Jalna novels (1927 to 1960) as any one of sentimental, melodramatic, juvenile, lightweight, didactic, or sensational. Often, this assessment is linked to the fact that while the first volumes were stand-alones, they did not remain as such, but instead were followed by popular sequels and prequels.

At the time of their initial publication, though, the authors’ first novels especially were critical and popular successes circulated and marketed through a variety of media. They were avidly read both as individual volumes and as serials in popular and literary newspapers and magazines, and several were adapted to stage, film, and later television and the internet. These three writers have been critically reassessed over the past forty years, in part as a result of second-wave feminism’s interest in recovering little-studied works by women writers. Montgomery’s novels have most often been interpreted as children’s stories that have become an integral part of Canadian popular culture; McClung’s as didactically expressing her political, social, and religious stances; and de la Roche’s as offering audacious modern representations of sex and marriage within a more politically conservative context. Only recently have the authors been juxtaposed in significant cultural studies, but never all three together. In his foundational study, Clarence Karr considers McClung and Montgomery as part of popular literary culture in Canada (2000), while Lorraine York examines Montgomery and de la Roche as Canadian literary celebrities (2007). Cecily Devereux, meanwhile, argues that McClung and Montgomery both engaged in the culture of imperial motherhood that is the hallmark of feminism in the British Empire in the early twentieth century (2000, Writing 9), while Kathleen Patchell investigates their contrasting reputations as determined by the religious practice evident in their writings (2011).

In their studies of popular Canadian fiction and literary celebrity in the early twentieth century, Karr and York outline some of the ideological and material forces at work in the critical categorization of early-twentieth-century fiction, including sequels written by McClung, Montgomery, and de la Roche. Carole Gerson, meanwhile, has studied in detail the market practices that influenced the production of Montgomery’s sequels, in a series of provocative essays published between 1997 and 2010. These historical and theoretical contextualizations demonstrate that the changing conditions that make for the success or failure of sequels are intimately connected to more wide-ranging changes in political ideologies and cultural norms. They also suggest that studying sequel fiction that extends over decades and is associated with both serialization and adaptation can reveal changes not just in literary tastes but also in broader social and cultural relations and structures.

This current study investigates and compares three Canadian women writers who, for varying reasons and with varying results, were influenced by early-twentieth-century publication, marketing, and reading practices to become heavily invested in the cultural phenomenon of the continuing story. As Canadians, they focused on narratives about fictional Canadian young people in rural areas of Canada, even though their works were frequently published and sold outside the country. As women writers, their continuations often completed the bildungs, including the vocational and romance plots, of young female protagonists (or, in de la Roche’s case, of both male and female characters, since hers were family romances).¹ As with other writers of the time both in Canada and elsewhere, the venues for dissemination of their continuing stories were multiple, including serials, sequels, and adaptations.

While these three generic categorizations are of necessity flexible and debatable, the terms are used in particular ways in my analysis. I define serials as discrete prose works published in instalments, usually originally in newspapers or magazines but in recent years also in electronic media. In relation to literature, I use the term sequels to refer to published stories written to follow up and complement what were initially stand-alone works by the same author. Commonly, these are novels that continue and extend the narrative line of the originary work – the term I use throughout this study to refer to a text that provokes sequels and adaptations – using the same narrative style and featuring the same characters. Subgenres of the sequel based on a variance in standard past-to-present chronology include so-called prequels, with narratives that fill in the time period before the originary novel, and interquels, which fill in chronological gaps between a book and its sequel or prequel. I make a distinction between sequels and books written as part of pre-designed series, sometimes, as with the Nancy Drew series, with volumes composed by different authors but published under the same pseudonym, and with characters who never age and thus whose adventures can be read in any order.² My third major term, adaptations, refers to the reworking of originary texts (in the case of this study, usually novels) for another medium and/or genre such as the stage, radio, film, television, or the internet.

Cultural theorists such as Michael Lund and Patricia Okker have argued convincingly for the need to acknowledge the widely variant modes of production and reception of novels published in serial form as opposed to those published and read in volumes; they advocate for the augmentation of previous studies that sometimes make no mention of the fact that a novel was first published as a serial (Lund 17; Okker 3). While much useful recent theoretical analysis of serialized novels has occurred in the British and American contexts, detailed study remains to be done in the Canadian milieu. For instance, in the early twentieth century many readers in rural Western Canada did not have easy access to bookstores but did subscribe to weekly or monthly newspapers and magazines that presented long works of fiction in instalments. Before radio became widespread in the 1920s and 1930s, almost all periodicals in North America included substantial fiction sections; indeed, this was the primary way that many families not only received their news but also gained access to storytelling. Works by both McClung and Montgomery that appeared in such publications have been very little studied.

In A Theory of Adaptation, Linda Hutcheon makes a firm distinction between sequels and adaptations, arguing that while sequels are motivated by never wanting a story to end, adaptations arise from a very different desire to retell the same story over and over in different ways (9). Adaptations are certainly distinct from serials and sequels both in their almost universal removal of elements of authorial control inherent in the other two genres and in the enormous transformations in narrative methods necessitated by the change in medium. All three modes have significant overlaps, however. As researchers of serials, sequels, and adaptations acknowledge, all are fundamentally intertextual. Okker calls serial stories published in magazines inherently intertextual, since their reception is influenced by other fictional and non-fictional stories in the magazine, by illustrations and advertisements, and by references to contemporary events (23). Canadian sequel theorists Paul Budra and Betty Schellenberg argue in Part Two: Reflections on the Sequel that [t]he sequel, by definition, is extravagantly intertextual, since it is inherently dependent upon at least one previous text (11). And Hutcheon notes that "adaptation as adaptation is unavoidably a kind of intertextuality if the receiver is acquainted with the adapted text" (21). Thus all three are deeply dependent on other significant complementary texts presented either at the same time or previously.

Perhaps most importantly, serials, sequels, and adaptations are all part of the same cultural and material continuum, focused on expanding consumption of a narrative by developing and extending the originary story in one way or another. As Norman Feltes argues, they are part of the commodification of literary works. What he calls the commodity-text – a series of books, a magazine serial, or a part-issue novel – allows the extraction of ever greater surplus value from the very production (or ‘creative’) process itself (9). I add adaptation to this list of commodity-texts, and indeed several critics use almost the same wording to make their arguments about the reception of sequels and the reception of adaptations: Budra and Schellenberg contend that sequels are fuelled by a desire for repetition-with-variation (9, 17) of the further adventures of known characters, while Hutcheon argues that much of the pleasure of watching adaptations comes simply from repetition with variation, from the comfort of ritual combined with the piquancy of surprise (4). This cultural continuum has several components. When novels are serialized – as was standard practice in early-twentieth-century publishing – writers, readers, and publishers recognize the possibility for further continuing the story through sequelization. Novels that have sequels, in turn, are prime candidates for adaptation to film or television, since sequels that continue the stories of young people to maturation – as do the later Pearlie Watson books, the Anne sequels, and the Jalna novels – provide conclusions to vocation and courtship plots that are essential to success in the new medium of adaptation. The process of continuing the story, either through serialization, sequelization, or adaptation, fundamentally changes the ways in which the story is perceived and received and, ultimately, how it can be further continued.

Finally, serials, sequels, and adaptations are also all recognized and at the same time criticized for their generic constraints and for the ways they lead to categorization of a work as popular or lowbrow rather than literary or highbrow. Lund points to criticism of the serial novel as constantly interrupting itself (61, quoting Norman Feltes) as well as lacking creativity and being at times mediocre, banal, [and] merely sensational (68, quoting Charles Dudley Warner). In her 1986 study of Samuel Richardson’s sequel to Pamela (1740), Terry Castle states categorically that it is a commonplace that sequels are always disappointing (133). Erica Brown and Mary Grover discuss this critical disdain for the sequel in their introduction to the 2012 collection Middlebrow Literary Cultures as related to the conviction that sequels are simply repetition motivated by profit (8), while Faye Hammill notes that because sequels are interpreted as capitulation to market pressures and as based on a formula which can be reproduced, their literary value decreases (Sensations 93). Hutcheon, meanwhile, points to so-called fidelity criticism (6–7), which scorns adaptations as secondary and inferior (xv) because they cannot possibly be entirely faithful to the originary text.

As my study of serials, sequels, and adaptations of McClung, Montgomery, and de la Roche demonstrates, the position of their various works on the popular culture–high culture continuum is not historically fixed. Works shift from one categorization to the next, depending on the interests and issues of the place or period in which the work is being consumed and the ways in which the narrative is produced, extended, and reproduced. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is a trenchant example. Developed from an idea for a magazine serial and written for young people but with a hope that adults might also be interested (GG Letters 51), the novel was first published in an illustrated format and was an immediate North American success, earning high praise from commentators, including American writer Mark Twain (UGA 3 Oct. 1908).³ Even before the book was published, Montgomery’s enterprising American publisher, L.C. Page, demanded a sequel, and as Gerson suggests, his request indicates that sequels can be generated not by the clamour of enchanted readers but by the current practices of market publishing (Dragged 149). Less than a year after it was first published, the novel was serialized in the daily American broadsheet The Gazette Times of Pittsburgh, and later that year in the monthly American Magazine for Women The Housewife and the weekly Canadian rural newspaper The Family Herald and Weekly Star. Additional sequels were produced at the request of readers and publishers; Montgomery’s journals show that she both resented and found comfort in writing the subsequent Anne novels, the first five published from 1909 to 1921, the next two in 1936 and 1939.

The acceptance of Montgomery’s narratives in North American popular culture was confirmed through a 1919 American silent film and a 1934 talkie, both of which began with Anne of Green Gables but also borrowed plot points from the sequels; these made money primarily for Montgomery’s by-then estranged publisher, as well as for the American film adaptors. Anne of Green Gables was revived in the mid- to late twentieth century as it became the basis for a 1965 musical play that is still in production, as well as several television adaptations, all of the later ones serials: in 1952 in England; 1956, 1957, and 1958 in Canada (two of these precursors to the 1965 musical); 1972 in England; 1979 in Japan; and 1985, 2016–17, and 2017–19 and beyond in Canada and the United States. The 1985 Canadian miniseries was among the highest-rated television programs in the country and won several awards. At the same time as this series and its sequels were being aired to popular acclaim, there was a burgeoning academic interest in the print version of Anne of Green Gables and in Montgomery’s other writings, including selections from her riveting private journals edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston. Beginning with a landmark essay by Waterston in 1966, academic writers have considered not just Montgomery’s role as a writer for children but also her place in Canadian literary culture. Special issues of Canadian Children’s Literature in 1998 and 2000, and Irene Gammel’s and Elizabeth R. Epperly’s essay collections of 1999 and 2002 stemming from biennial conferences of the L.M. Montgomery Institute, began an important discussion of the Anne novels as part of Canadian and international popular and middlebrow culture. This discussion has continued since in a number of other monographs, collections, and individual essays, many of them coinciding with the novel’s hundredth anniversary in 2008. Literary critics have considered myriad literary, political, and social subjects drawn from the Anne books; a number have also studied some of the novels’ adaptations to film and television and their reception in the international context.⁴

While Montgomery’s Anne novels and their serializations and adaptations call into question clear transhistorical divisions between high and popular culture, McClung’s Pearlie Watson trilogy exemplifies changing responses to literary representations of social issues. Her 1908 novel Sowing Seeds in Danny sold more than 100,000 copies during the twentieth century (Dean, Early 205), and as part of its North American marketing was serialized in the American monthly Woman’s Home Companion and the biweekly Canadian The Nor’-West Farmer. It was popular both because of its format of interconnected sentimental and religious sketches, several of which had already been published separately in magazines and newspapers, and because it and its sequels, The Second Chance (published in 1910) and Purple Springs (1921), raised important social and political concerns such as immigration, class relations, temperance, suffrage, and women’s rights to property and child custody. The subsequent two novels of the trilogy were initially well received, despite a hiatus between them connected to McClung’s shifting focus on suffrage and other political struggles; however, the links among the novels sometimes went unrecognized, and her type of sentimental and melodramatic writing soon fell out of favour with general readers interested in realism or modernism, while the political and religious aspects of the book were reinterpreted as outdated and too didactic. While Sowing Seeds in Danny was reprinted periodically until 1965, the other Pearlie Watson novels fell out of print shortly after initial publication. They were read only as social history, alongside her much more commonly considered 1915 essay collection In Times Like These. The only contemporaneous adaptations of her trilogy were for temperance recitations. She was remembered primarily for her work as a suffrage and temperance activist and as one of the Famous Five who in the late 1920s launched the Persons Case that eventually concluded that women were indeed full persons under Canadian law. Her fictional and autobiographical works began to be reread and reconsidered in the 1970s, however, with Veronica Strong-Boag’s analysis of her early-twentieth-century maternal feminism, and again in the 1980s and 1990s through Randi Warne’s discussion of the Christian social feminism and peace activism evident in her writing and Misao Dean’s analysis of her use of self-expression as a political strategy. In 2004, during celebrations of the seventy-fifth anniversary of the conclusion of the Persons Case, questions that academic writers had considered about McClung’s racial and eugenic attitudes were raised in the popular press, and her feminist political legacy was thrown into question. Since then, in Growing a Race (2005), Devereux has analyzed in detail what she calls McClung’s eugenic feminism as evident in her fiction as well as her political writing. Despite this questioning of McClung’s legacy – or perhaps as a response to it – Sowing Seeds in Danny was for the first time adapted into a play in 2006–07.

McClung’s Pearlie Watson novels exemplify changing popular and critical responses to continuing works that demonstrate an uneasy intersection – for today’s readers, at least – between the sentimental, the religious, and the political. Mazo de la Roche’s novels, in contrast, raise questions about the link between literary status and general North American popularity. Her books exemplify the inevitability of critical comment on sequels and an associated retrospective negative revaluation of the originary novel. De la Roche was already a published writer of what were considered serious literary works when she sent the manuscript of Jalna to The Atlantic Monthly novel competition in 1927. The first judgment on the novel, by one of the contest’s manuscript readers, was dismissive, noting in particular the Whiteoak brothers’ unseemly affairs with their sisters-in-law (Weeks, In Friendly Candor 85). Despite this assessment, de la Roche was awarded the $10,000 prize, and Jalna was widely read as a serial before being published separately as a book. While serialization in a literary and cultural magazine meant that the novel was immediately part of North American middlebrow culture, according to Ruth Panofsky it was also hailed as a significant contribution to high culture (At Odds 57), in part because of its strong characterization and rejection of the conventional romantic plot. The next Jalna novel, Whiteoaks of Jalna, published in 1929, was also a critical as well as popular success, but the subsequent fourteen sequels, prequels, and interquels were increasingly criticized as melodramatic and overly sexual in subject matter, or, in later years, as conservative and colonialist in politics. Interest in all the books by general readers remained high, however, with attention renewed after a 1935 American film, a 1936 play based on the first sequel novel and written by de la Roche herself, television adaptations in England in 1954–55, a 1972 Canadian television miniseries, and a 1994 miniseries in France, all of which incorporated some of the Jalna sequels. According to Ronald Hambleton, nine million hardcover and two million paperback copies of the Jalna books were sold during de la Roche’s lifetime (Mazo 50, 53), and the novels are still in print. In part because of her commercial success and the fact that she was perceived as simply churning out sequels, however, de la Roche’s critical reputation suffered until reassessment of her writings beginning with Douglas Daymond in 1975. She has since been reconsidered in terms of nationalism, canon formation, and same-sex desire, but, as with McClung, her fiction is not studied by many literary critics, nor is it often read in university classes.⁵

This book identifies important connections among continuing stories by these contemporaneous authors. While Montgomery has been the most thoroughly examined of the three, studies of her sequelization process by writers such as Gerson have not been exhaustive, and investigations of the adaptations have omitted lesser-known works. Perhaps most importantly, scarce attention has been paid to Montgomery’s serial publications in magazines and newspapers, except by Rea Wilmshurst, who researched her magazine stories and published them in several collections. Similarly, while the effect of de la Roche’s sequels on her literary reputation has been analyzed by Panofsky and Candida Rifkind, little analysis has been presented of adaptations of those sequels for stage, film, and television except briefly in essays by Faye Hammill and Wendy Roy. There has been almost no attention to the magazine serialization of de la Roche’s works, other than in Hambleton’s listings of her works at the conclusion of his biography. And while McClung’s Pearlie Watson trilogy has been studied by Randi Warne and by Mary Hallett and Marilyn Davis for its representations of social issues, the novels have not been considered as part of early-twentieth-century cultural manifestations of continuing stories. Finally, the various modes of continuation of these authors’ narratives in serials, sequels, and adaptations have not been considered in relation to one another, nor has the notion of these modes as an intertextual continuum been previously posited. By addressing these concepts and relationships, this study considers the place of early-twentieth-century fiction in Canadian culture as a whole and explores how and why such works continue to be read, revised, and adapted throughout the twentieth and into the twenty-first century.

The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche asks the following questions: What is the relationship between serialization of novels in magazines and newspapers and the production of sequel novels? Which other forces drive the production of sequels by Canadian women authors of the early twentieth century? Do similar forces propel the works’ adaptation for popular media such as film and television? Why and how do such works become accepted or criticized as part of popular, middlebrow, or high culture, and how does the place of works on this continuum change? And what might the varying manifestations of continuing stories have to tell researchers not just about changing reading and viewing practices, but also about changing social and political relations in Canada and internationally?

McClung, Montgomery, and de la Roche were certainly not producing their literary works in isolation; other turn-of-the-twentieth-century Canadian writers were busy writing and publishing serials and sequels, some of which were also adapted to film.⁶ As Pierre Berton has noted in Hollywood’s Canada, there was a period in Canadian literary history when certain Canadian novels were in furious demand by an international audience and therefore by the movies (19). Gilbert Parker, who was raised in Ontario but eventually moved to England, issued the Pierre books in volume form beginning in 1892, while also publishing the thirty-nine linked stories in periodicals; they became the film Pierre of the Plains in 1914, which was remade in 1942.⁷ (Margaret) Marshall Saunders, who was from Nova Scotia but who later lived and wrote in Ontario, published two novels about the dog Beautiful Joe (1893, 1902) and two about high-spirited orphan ’Tilda Jane, issued by Montgomery’s publisher L.C. Page (1901, 1909). Ontario-born Norman Duncan, who moved to the United States, published the three Billy Topsail books set in Newfoundland between 1906 and 1916; while these books were not adapted to film, several of his other books and stories were. Alberta writer Charles Gordon published the Glengarry and Sky Pilot novels in both serial and volume form under the pen name Ralph Connor from 1899 to 1934; The Sky Pilot, The Man from Glengarry, and Glengarry School Days were made into silent movies in 1921, 1922, and 1923 (the latter renamed in the United States The Critical Age). Ontario-born Arthur Stringer, who moved to the United States, published the two Wire Tapper novels in 1906 and 1907 and the Prairie trilogy between 1915 and 1922, again in serial and volume form; he also worked as a Hollywood scriptwriter, including as co-writer for the silent film adaptation of his novel The Prairie Wife (MGM 1925).⁸ Elsie Bell Gardner, who was born in England but immigrated to Canada as a young woman, published the Maxie books about a young girl’s international adventures between 1932 and 1939. Muriel Denison, who was born in Manitoba but lived in Ontario, published the four Susannah novels between 1936 and 1940; she also wrote for magazines under the pen name Frances Newton, and her novel Susannah of the Mounties was loosely adapted for a 1939 film starring Shirley Temple. Compared to McClung, Montgomery, and de la Roche, however, these other contemporaneous writers are little read and studied today, and almost none of their literary works have been readapted to newer media such as television.

The choice of the authors in this study is based in part on the longevity of their appeal: the works of these Canadian women writers are still read (and viewed in adapted form) and have continued to make cogent social, cultural, and political statements for a century or more. I have already noted some of the authors’ similarities in subject matter and dissemination approaches, but other convergences are also apparent. All three were born in rural Canada in the same decade of the nineteenth century – McClung in Ontario in 1873 (her family moved to rural Manitoba when she was seven), Montgomery in Prince Edward Island in 1874, and de la Roche in Ontario in 1879. All wrote and published poetry, stories, and novels. All three published their first books, which featured children, when they were in their thirties or forties after an apprenticeship writing short stories and magazine serials. And as members of the small community of active Canadian writers, each was also well acquainted with the others and their works.

Articles in The Canadian Bookman for 1921 show that McClung and Montgomery were founding members and on the original council of the Canadian Authors Association, and that de la Roche joined within the first few months (Canadian Authors 4 and Members Admitted 56–57).⁹ McClung and Montgomery shared the stage at literary events a number of times; the work of de la Roche, who was more publicity shy and who lived for a number of years in England, was sometimes also discussed at these events (Rubio, Lucy 431). Because Montgomery and her correspondents kept such comprehensive records of her personal responses, we know in much more detail her acerbic evaluations of her two colleagues. After sharing the head table with McClung at a dinner of the newly formed Canadian Authors Association in 1921, Montgomery wrote in her journal that McClung’s speech was full of obvious platitudes and amusing little stories which made everyone laugh and deluded us into thinking it was quite a fine thing – until we began to think it over (CJ 4 347, 18 Nov. 1921). Six years later, Montgomery sent long-time Scottish correspondent George MacMillan a copy of de la Roche’s new novel Jalna with the comment, Canada is ‘tickled’ that a Canadian was awarded a major prize, adding that although the novel was well written and modern, Montgomery was not certain she liked it (My Dear 128, 2 Dec. 1927).

Another similarity among the three authors is that they all began their literary careers by selling short stories to American and Canadian magazines, sometimes the same ones; for example, a number of stories by McClung, Montgomery, and de la Roche were published in issues of the middlebrow Toronto-based The Canadian Magazine during the years 1899 to 1917, a magazine to which Montgomery in particular was a frequent contributor.¹⁰ From her base in rural Prince Edward Island, Montgomery used the mail system to disseminate and sell hundreds of early literary works to periodicals in Canada and the United States, mailing manuscripts to editors and awaiting their acceptance letters and accompanying cheques. McClung and de la Roche each did the same from their locations in rural Manitoba and Ontario, albeit to a lesser extent.

All three writers’ careers were helped by the flourishing in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century of general-interest magazines, which published material mailed in by freelance writers throughout North America. Karr points out that glossy-paged new magazines in the United States, such as The Delineator and The Saturday Evening Post, carried this writing to millions of readers (28); he also notes the rise in religious publications driven by the Sunday School movement internationally (63). While Montgomery especially published numerous times with American religious magazines – Karr reports that of the more than seventy magazines Montgomery sold to in 1903, at least ten were religious (64) – and McClung sold some stories to Canadian religious and general-interest magazines, de la Roche sold solely to American, British, and Canadian literary and general interest magazines.¹¹ Canada had many fewer magazines and newspapers than the United States, but the government of Canada considered periodicals a way of promoting literacy as well as a national consciousness, and thus at the turn of the twentieth century it reduced the postal rate for domestic periodicals to one cent per pound (Distad 295). Mary Vipond demonstrates that this discount led to a rise in mass-market magazines such as The Canadian Magazine, Saturday Night, and The Chatelaine, with contents that were deliberately diverse, so that each issue would appeal to people with many different interests (Mass Media 21).¹² These contents included both short stories and serialized novels, since as Lund points out, in North America at the time literary reading was often done in periodicals rather than in books (46). Karr notes, however, that over the first half of the twentieth century, general interest magazines began to publish less poetry and then less fiction until, by the 1950s, three-quarters of the content consisted of non-fiction articles (210). During this time a number of magazines also folded or merged, such as the 1937 merger of The Delineator, in which Montgomery had successfully published, with the Pictorial Review. During this time, circulations declined despite a rise in populations, probably both because of the Great Depression and Second World War and because of the growth in other information and entertainment media such as film, radio, and later television.

Serialized novellas and novels by the three authors appeared in some of the same newspapers that had already published their short stories. Either before, concurrently with, or within a year of their publication as books, the three originary novels, McClung’s Sowing Seeds in Danny (1908), Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (1908), and de la Roche’s Jalna (1927), were printed in instalments in North American periodicals. Their publication as serials played a part in these novels’ subsequent sequelization and, later, adaptation, since serialization accustomed authors, publishers, and readers to the rhythm of the continuing story.

Readers who encountered these novels in magazines and newspapers had a very different reading experience from that of consumers reading the works in volume form. As both Lund and Okker argue, serialization has enormous consequences for both the production and reception of literary works. Editors impose different standards on works published in instalments than on complete books; comments from readers about early instalments may influence the authors’ composition of later instalments; and other fictional and non-fictional articles appearing at the same time in the magazine or newspaper, as well as accompanying advertisements, affect how each instalment is read. Instalments of novels published as serials are often edited, both for space and for emphasis. The conclusion of each episode, left with the reader for weeks or even months, takes on a significance that it does not have in the book as a whole, and illustrations that are created to accompany the serialized work similarly shift emphasis. Reading practices for serials are different from those for books; not only is the reading of necessity spread out over time – unlike volumes, which can be devoured in one sitting by a dedicated reader – but also serialized novels have traditionally lent themselves more readily to the custom of reading aloud in family groups. Finally, stories in books are sometimes given more weight than those in serials; Montgomery herself called serialized stories ephemeral (CJ 2 172), in part because it is much easier to throw out a newspaper than a book.

While serialization of a novel in a periodical is a much different process than the production of sequel novels, some intriguing comparisons can be made. Both modes of storytelling and publication present a continuing story, but with serials the story appears in smaller pieces and with less sense of completion and more of continuation at the end of each instalment. In addition, the common practice of serialization helped to stimulate a taste for continuing stories that many authors fulfilled through sequels (Lund 38–39). Lund points out that in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, novels that were serialized very often had sequels: Old stories ended so that new ones, which could be recognized as continuations of the old ones, could begin (90).

Studies in the American and British context have demonstrated that publication of novels and other literary works in instalment form was much more common in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century than before or since (Lund, Okker, Vann). While serialization had been around for centuries, a rise in popularity occurred after Charles Dickens and his London publishers issued The Pickwick Papers in monthly instalments from March 1836 to October 1837. In North America, serial novels were usually published in newspapers and magazines rather than in the stand-alone form of Pickwick. McClung, Montgomery, and de la Roche found that, as with sales of their short stories, the border between Canada and the United States for serial novel sales was permeable, with American and Canadian serial rights often sold separately. By the time they or their publishers were marketing their serials in the early 1900s, cheaper magazines that made their profits from advertising rather than subscriptions were beginning to challenge the literary supremacy of the ‘quality’ magazines (Lund 114). Certainly the market for serials by McClung and Montgomery was diverse: they had novels published in high-end American women’s magazines such as Woman’s Home Companion and The Housewife – with airy typesetting, discreet advertisements, and original illustrations – and at the same time in Canadian newspapers for rural audiences such as The Nor’-West Farmer and The Family Herald and Weekly Star – in long columns of crowded type, with intrusive unrelated advertising, and with no illustrations except the title drawings. While de la Roche’s early serialized novels were published in the literary and political The Atlantic Monthly magazine, in a non-illustrated, book-like format that included both no imbedded advertisements and no illustrations, her later serials appeared in more popular general-interest and women’s magazines such as Chatelaine, Redbook, and Woman’s Illustrated, often with illustrations, or were syndicated so that they appeared in multiple magazines and newspapers. Readers’ experiences of these novels in instalments, but in very different periodicals, were thus widely variant: spread out over weeks or months; heavily edited for length or published in their entirety; divided into differing sections, sometimes arbitrary and sometimes carefully planned; laid out in artistic or more compact, prosaic formats; and accompanied by divergent illustrations, advertisements, and news stories. The texts were also edited differently depending on the venue, although it appears that none of their works suffered the kind of bowdlerization that novels in publications for family audiences sometimes did (Vann 6–8) – McClung’s and Montgomery’s because they were already suitable for family reading, and de la Roche’s because they were published in magazines that deliberately courted adult readership.

While not all serialized novels are published in volume form, novels by Montgomery, McClung, and de la Roche were, with significant differences among them that reflected both publishing conditions and intentions related to publicity for the novels. For de la Roche, serialization of the early Jalna novels was seen as an integral part of the publication scheme, with the novel released as a stand-alone book only toward the end of the serial run, but before the run was finished in order to secure copyright. Serial publication for de la Roche’s novels was thus an end in itself: a substantial reading experience for subscribers of The Atlantic and of later magazines such as Redbook. Similarly, while chapters from McClung’s first novel had appeared earlier as stories in magazines and newspapers, publication of the entire book was delayed so that the first of four serialized excerpts could appear during publication month in Woman’s Home Companion. For Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables, in contrast, serialization was an afterthought, occurring for the first time almost a year after publication of the book. Many of Montgomery’s later books were serialized closer to the volume publication date, but still usually post-publication. For all three of the authors and their publishers, though, serialization served as a way of expanding the readership of that particular novel and at the same time bringing in some extra money. Significantly, both pre- and post-publication serializations were considered practicable ways of advertising the novel, any earlier books by the same author, and forthcoming sequels, with publishers’ and booksellers’ notices and advertisements sometimes placed on the pages on which the serial was printed.

As noted above, serials were often followed by other related serials: in other words, by a second novel that continued the story in more instalments. The expectation that serialized novels would be followed by sequels became even more insistent when the books, like Montgomery’s, were family-oriented stories and published by a company that printed children’s series, or, like de la Roche’s, were published as a result of a win in a magazine literary contest. With sequel publication, the authors and publishers had to negotiate similar issues to those of serial publication, such as whether and how the works should be illustrated. In addition, however, they worked through problems related to titling and book cover design and art, which were often sequential and complementary in order to emphasize links with the originary or earlier published novels.

Later chapters will explore how the authors’ writing desires and inspirations intersected with the demands of readers and the requirements of publishers of both books and periodicals to influence them to write sequels. Sequel novels are written, published, and read for many different reasons, the most commonly expressed being a desire by the reader for repetition, but with difference; a wish by the author to explore in more detail a character or situation from a previous work; and a need expressed by the author or publisher, or both, to