Anne of Windy Willows, Anne of Windy Poplars, and the Fine Art of Being Sparing With the Truth

 

I think I was around five years old when my mother started buying books for me to read. It was strange because neither my mum, who came from a working class English family, nor my dad, who was middle class and came from a Swiss family, really read many books or at least I never saw them read many books.

Thanks to my mum I became an inveterate reader. When I got intense asthma when I was twelve I became an even more inveterate reader (and movie watcher I might add). Most of what I read as a teenager was fiction. I read Shakespeare. I read Mark Twain. I read George Orwell. I read Moby Dick. I read Dickens. I even read Ethan Frome (which was not one of my favourite reads by any stretch of the imagination). And I read all of the Anne books by Canadian author L.M. Montgomery save Rilla of Ingleside and The Blythe’s Are Quoted, which wasn’t published at the time save in excerpts in The Road to Yesterday.

My love of the Anne books has not changed over the years. The books remain amongst my favourites and I have, as a consequence, even collected Anne and L. M. Montgomery books over the years. What did change is that I went to college and I learned how to do research. 

One of the things that has interested me is the fascinating textual history of one of the Anne books, Anne of Windy Willows also known as Anne of Windy Poplars first published in 1938. I learned that Anne of Windy Poplars was not fully the book Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote. Montgomery, of course, had several different publishers. Frederick A Stokes was her publisher for the US market. Harrap was her publisher in Great Britain. Angus and Robertson was her publisher in Australia. McClelland and Stewart was her publisher for the Canadian market.  

Another thing I learned was that that Anne of Windy Willows was the original title of the book and that the American publisher was unhappy with that title and was unhappy with some of the darker parts of the text. For these reasons Montgomery changed the title of the book and excised and changed some of the text.

I note all this because I recently bought the Anne of Windy Populars Sourcebooks edition. Sourcebooks, which is based in Illinois and which has the imprimatur of the of the relatives of Lucy Maud, claims, on the back of the book, that this edition of Anne of Windy Poplars, has the original restored unabridged text of the novel. This, along with the fact that I wanted one Sourcebooks edition of the Anne books, was why I bought this edition.

So you can imagine my surprise when I discovered that the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Populars is not the original text of the novel. First off, it does not have the original title, the title Lucy Maud preferred, Anne of Windy Willows, a title Stokes apparently disliked because it was close to Wind in the Willows by Kenneth Grahame. Second, it does not contain the passages excised and changed by Montgomery because the American publisher and McClelland and Stewart which apparently followed the American leader, wanted. So, to sum up, this the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Willows is not the “original, unabridged text” Sourcebooks and the relatives of Montgomery make it out to be. Sourcebooks and the relatives, in other words, are being sparing with the truth. 

Wouldn't it be nice if all concerned could admit the truth, namely that Anne of Windy Willows is the text as Montgomery wanted? And wouldn't it be nice if all the Anne books could be standardised and that Anne of Windy Willows, the fourth in the series (though not the fourth published), could be published in the North American market as part of this standardisation?

A Note: Another thing the Sourcebooks edition of Anne of Windy Poplars has done is to renumber the chapters. In the original edition of the book the chapters for each of the three books begins with 1. In this reworked edition the chapters are numbered consecutively.