The fall reading series of the Sunshine Coast Arts Council continues on Saturday, Oct. 17, at 8 p.m. with a reading and a talk by Mary Henley Rubio, whose biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings, was published last year to much acclaim and some controversy.
It reveals the complicated history of a complicated woman, whose soaring imagination brought joy to millions of readers and some kind of emotional relief to herself.
Rubio has spent a large part of her academic career under the spell of the author of P.E.I.'s and Canada's gift to the world, Anne of Green Gables.
Anne's creator was beloved by millions around the world, lauded in her lifetime by such macho fans as Britain's prime minister Stanley Baldwin, by Canada's Governor General, Earl Grey (yes, the Grey Cup Earl Grey) and Huck Finn's creator, Mark Twain. The many obstacles she encountered throughout a difficult life compelled her to seek refuge primarily in the fictional worlds she invented. Montgomery's life ended prematurely in a drug-induced fog of the sort we usually associate with debauched rock stars, not someone whose work featured the innocently bucolic pleasures of turn-of-the-20th-century Maritime Canada.
As Anne herself said prophetically, "It's all very well to read about sorrows and imagine yourself living through them heroically, but it's not so nice when you really come to have them, is it?"
Rubio, University Professor Emeritus at the University of Guelph, will read in the Doris Crowston Gallery of the Sunshine Coast Arts Centre, corner of Trail and Medusa, in Sechelt. Admission is free, thanks to the generosity of the Canada Council for the Arts.
- Submitted
