A Community Endeavor: Dr. Emily Woster Curates the L.M. Montgomery Exhibit, Exploring a National Treasure
In summer 2022, the Confederation Centre of the Arts, located in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, Canada, plans to open the virtual doors to their newest exhibit: Exploring a National Treasure: L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Manuscript. The exhibit, curated by Dr. Emily Woster (English, Linguistics, and Writing Studies) with Dr. Elizabeth Epperly (L.M. Montgomery Institute founder and Professor Emerita from the University of Prince Edward Island) as a consultant, will provide museum visitors with access to a digitized version of Montgomery’s handwritten Anne of Green Gables (1908) manuscript.
With the digitization of the 800+ double-sided pages, visitors will be able to flip through the manuscript and click on icons set up within the pages, allowing them to read a transcript of the writing, view associated pictures, hear an opening paragraph in a variety of languages, or study annotations. Access to the digital manuscript will anchor the exhibit, with four surrounding “rooms” presenting artifacts and other material leading to the manuscript’s creation or resulting from the book’s publication.
A transcript needs to be paired with the digital manuscript because Montgomery’s handwriting is notoriously difficult to read. She also used an extensive alpha-numeric numbering system for her revising and editing notes. However, Woster relishes working with this manuscript in particular because it is considered Montgomery’s most extemporaneous one—in reading it along with Montgomery’s revisions, one can see the book take shape. In particular, Woster believes the notes are where Montgomery really developed her characters, and many of the notes are some of the most memorable lines to fans.
If her notes were not enough to pour over, Montgomery wrote her manuscript on the backs of shorter works, such as poems and short stories, demonstrating the economy of her paper use. The shorter works embedded within the manuscript are random chunks and crossed out, but one can still read them, making for a captivating find opposite Anne of Green Gables that will also be available for viewing in the exhibit.
Curating and preparing any exhibit is challenging, but this one has a community behind it. The L.M. Montgomery community is unique in that both average fans and scholars regularly converse and share materials. Any time Woster’s team has wondered if an artifact existed, the community has helped, and then some, ultimately providing more material than they could ever use in the exhibit.
Given the logistics of digitizing the manuscript and curating the exhibit, one may question why anyone would take on such a daunting task. However, when Woster speaks about the project, one should be more worried she will spontaneously combust from the excitement she contains for the intense work than her collapsing under the workload.
Woster first entered the L.M. Montgomery community when her mother, Christy Woster, an avid collector of Montgomery books and ephemera, brought Emily* (aged 17 at the time) and Emily’s sister, Anne* (aged 12), to the biennial L.M. Montgomery Institute Conference. Attending the conference introduced Woster to her future career. Her graduate studies focused on Montgomery’s reading lives and textual worlds, and from 2017-2019 she was the L.M. Montgomery Institute Visiting Scholar. Since her mother’s passing in 2016, Emily retains her mother’s collection, one of the top L.M. Montgomery collections in the world.
Put simply, Woster was prepared both personally and professionally. Woster became curator of the exhibit in 2020 when the $250,000 project proposal she helped re-envision was funded by Digital Museums Canada, “the largest funding program in Canada dedicated to online projects by the museum and heritage community,” along with in-kind donations. The Confederation Centre of the Arts is involved because they already own many of Montgomery’s manuscripts, including the Anne of Green Gables manuscript being digitized.
Ultimately, Woster hopes the exhibit enhances the L.M. Montgomery community and spurs further scholarship. A large focus of her own research is intertextuality, which considers the relationships between texts and their production. Given her background, it should be no surprise that Woster expects her students at UMD to go to the primary source and consider the intertextuality of course readings. For example, her fall 2020 WRIT 3100 students read The Astonishing Life of Octavian Nothing by Matthew Tobin Anderson, which contains numerous references to Locke, Rousseau, and other figures from the Enlightenment period. The students’ assignment was to locate the original source material referenced and find out how that source influenced Anderson’s text.
“I want them to be curious. I want them to nerd-out about whatever it is that they’re passionate about and find that primary text and analyze that community and their influences,” Woster said.
Woster’s zeal for studying Montgomery’s writing certainly provides an excellent model to follow.