I Smile for His Sake: Unmasking Grief in L.M. Montgomery’s “Our Women”

Abstract

This essay recovers a “doubleness” or “second and more difficult poem” that exists beneath the surface of the only Great War poem that L.M. Montgomery published during her lifetime. Using Montgomery’s wartime journals, as well as her war novel Rilla of Ingleside, this analysis suggests that “Our Women” is a complex text that simultaneously voices patriotic sentiments as it subverts the traditional elegy and exposes the emotional traumas Montgomery and other women endured during the Great War and in its aftermath.