The Road to Yesterday

The Road to Yesterday was published in 1974, more than thirty years after Lucy Maud Montgomery’s death, as a posthumous short story collection. The fourteen stories in it had been written across the last years of her life and intended as part of the larger manuscript that eventually became The Blythes Are Quoted in its 2009 unabridged form. This older edition stripped out the connecting Blythe family material and the poetry, leaving only the stand-alone stories.

Readers coming to it cold will find familiar Montgomery territory. Small-town Prince Edward Island. Sharp-tongued spinsters. Quietly heartbroken bachelors. Children solving adult problems through accident and instinct. A few stories feature the Blythes directly, in small cameos. Most do not. Several stories are darker than the earlier Anne novels, with subjects that would have raised eyebrows in 1908: a battered wife, a suicide, an illegitimate child. Montgomery had lived a longer and harder life by then. If you read the 2009 Blythes Are Quoted, this earlier collection is largely redundant. If you have not, this is a gentler introduction to her late work.