My objective here isn''t to try to "prove" that Montgomery died by suicide or that she didn''t, nor is it to suggest that the way she died is in itself a reason to re-evaluate her work. It''s clear to me that Montgomery''s descendants have believed sincerely that her death was premeditated suicide prompted by depression and that they struggled for decades with the weight of this knowledge, and I''m fully conscious that my perspective on how she died is constrained by the fact that I was not present at the scene and had no opportunity to discuss this event with anyone who was. As such, I also take the evidence as circumstantial, given that the note found on Montgomery''s deathbed does not point explicitly to suicide; even without Brown''s discovery of the link between the handwritten note and the typescript version of her journals, the "it" that "must end here" refers unambiguously to a written record of Montgomery''s life that she intended to leave behind as a major component of her literary legacy, rather than her life itself. Given Macdonald and Lane''s fear of scandal (which would have been entirely understandable in 1942), it''s impossible to piece together decades after the fact what really happened or how closely the death certificate reflects what happened. Besides, even if an autopsy had confirmed that Montgomery had died of a drug overdose, the results couldn''t have proven whether that overdose had been premeditated or caused by years of addiction to mood-stabilizing prescription drugs and exacerbated by a recent weight loss, as Rubio suggests.While all these revelations add crucial pieces to the puzzle -- Macdonald''s role in the aftermath of his mother''s death, passed down to family members; the note on Montgomery''s deathbed, entrusted by Macdonald to his mother''s biographer; and the careful work of dedicated scholars who have prepared and contextualized these archival pieces for public consumption, for the benefit of us all -- the broader picture remains incomplete, because Montgomery left no clear record of the "awful position" she claimed to be facing at the end of her life. The woman whom Gammel refers to as "Canada''s most enigmatic literary icon" remains as unsolvable in her death as she did in her life.Montgomery''s final letters to MacMillan and to Weber, her final journal entry, dated March 23, 1942, and the single sheet of paper found on her bedside table after her death may not constitute suicide notes in the conventional sense, as what Jerry Jacobs considered to be "an unsolicited account of the victim''s thoughts and emotions regarding his intended act and, often, what he felt was responsible for it.

" Yet, as Edwin Shneidman noted in Voices of Death, the meaning of a suicide note can be found in the note itself as well as in the context of the life that has ended:Suicide notes, written, as they are, as part of the life that they reflect, can have a great deal of meaning . when they are examined in light of the details of the full life history of which they are the penultimate act. By putting a suicide note within the context of the life history of the individual (who both wrote the note and committed the act), one can find that many words, ideas, emotional proclivities, styles of reaction, modes of thinking, etc., that characterized that life are reflected in the specific details of the suicide note. And conversely, many words, phrases, ideas, passions, emphases, etc., contained in the suicide note are extensions of those very same threads that had previously characterized the life. Living or dying, a particular individual has a certain consistency,. a certain "trademark," which he or she will show in work style, in play style and in life style, whether celebrating life in a poem of love or contemplating death in a note of suicide.

As though echoing Shneidman''s remarks, Rubio notes in her biography that "the ability to face the world through a composed, inscrutable mask, while deciding how to respond to a situation, would become her trademark in later life."[iv]While Montgomery''s journals come across as spontaneous, in-the-moment observations about her life, her relationships, and her problems, they also include recurring patterns of delay, silence, and indirection. For these reasons, it''s no surprise that the note found on Montgomery''s deathbed doesn''t point directly to premeditated suicide, even if that was the cause of her death.3There''s no one else like L.M. Montgomery.From the time she published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 to the end of her life in 1942, she occupied a unique place in Canadian literature, given that her work was widely popular, critically acclaimed, and enduring in its appeal. She published twenty-four books in all, including nine more that featured Anne Shirley, her celebrated Emily trilogy, fan favourite The Blue Castle, a volume of poems, and a co-authored book of biographical essays.

But her literary output was even more extensive than this, since starting in 1890 she''d also published over one thousand short stories, poems, and miscellaneous pieces, in venues from leading cosmopolitan magazines to daily newspapers all across North America. And while she shared the spotlight during her lifetime with many fellow Canadian writers whose books were popular -- including Ralph Connor, Nellie L. McClung, Mazo de la Roche, Robert Stead, and Stephen Leacock -- she''s one of the few Canadian authors from that period who continues to be recognized by the general public and whose work is still widely available in multiple formats.In addition to her journals, Montgomery kept a handwritten ledger of the income she earned as a writer and compiled more than a dozen scrapbooks of her shorter works and of the press coverage she and her books received. This included reviews -- many of them sent to her by a clipping service -- that had appeared in periodicals across Canada and the United States as well as in faraway places such as the United Kingdom, India, South Africa, Cuba, Australia, and New Zealand. These items -- now part of major Montgomery artifact collections at the University of Guelph library, the University of Prince Edward Island library, and the Confederation Centre Art Gallery in Charlottetown -- consist of Montgomery''s personal archive of her writing career, supplemented by occasional marginalia in her often indecipherable handwriting. But while her efforts have been a boon for researchers, these records aren''t always complete. One of her scrapbooks contains the first published half of a thrilling Gothic fiction serial she''d published in late 1903 but not the second half, and since copies of the issues in question haven''t been found yet, this gap in Montgomery''s record makes for the ultimate cliffhanger ending.

In the seven decades since Montgomery''s death, the conversation about her life, her work, and her legacy has continued to evolve, thanks to several initiatives that have kept her and her writing in the public eye. These include adaptations for stage and screen, biographies and other trade non-fiction books for adults or for young readers, university courses, academic conferences and scholarship, tourist sites in Prince Edward Island and Ontario, translations of her books into forty languages, creative works by new authors, and an endless array of memorabilia. Anne of Green Gables: The Musical, which premiered in Charlottetown in 1965, claimed the Guinness World Record for longest-running annual musical just ahead of its fiftieth anniversary, and although its yearly run was broken as a result of the COVID-19 pandemic, it continues to be performed today. Sullivan Entertainment''s first two Anne of Green Gables miniseries (1985, 1987) starring Megan Follows, the television series Road to Avonlea (1990-1996) starring Sarah Polley, and the CBC/Netflix series Anne with an "E"(2017-2019) starring Amybeth McNulty have all attracted massive international fanbases, including viewers who have never read Montgomery''s work.No other Canadian author comes close to matching the extent of this cultural reach (except arguably for Margaret Atwood), and the English-speaking counterparts outside of Canada are few and far between: Louisa May Alcott, Emily Dickinson, and Laura Ingalls Wilder in the United States come to mind, as do Jane Austen, the Brontës, Charles Dickens, and William Shakespeare in the United Kingdom. And because so many Montgomery readers encounter her work (or its offshoots) starting in childhood, they end up nurturing attachments to this author and her work that last their entire lifetimes.Like me, they never get tired of Montgomery''s writing. Like me, they keep returning to this body of work because each time they do, they discover something new to appreciate.

Since 1960 and particularly starting in the mid-1970s, published volumes of Montgomery''s letters, journals, short stories, and poems have expanded readers'' knowledge about the author and her work. The one-hundredth anniversary of Montgomery''s birth in 1974, for instance, saw the publication of three books of new Montgomery texts: The Road to Yesterday, billed as a late collection of short stories that featured an adult Anne and her family; a book version of "The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career," a 25,000-word celebrity memoir first published in instalments in 1917; and Francis W.P. Bolger''s The Years Before "Anne," which includes the full text of several of Montgomery''s earliest publications alongside biographical and historical commentary. But some critics reacted to these new Montgomery texts with surprise, if not with hostility, in reviews with titles like "So Feeble. Why Do It Now?" and "Scrap from the Barrel." For many of these commentators, The Road to Yesterday departed too much from what they expected of the author of Anne of Green Gables, whereas, paradoxically, "The Alpine Path" conformed too much to those expectations in that it seemed to reveal little about Mo.