The Red Room

by L.M. Montgomery

The Red Room

Genres: Short Stories

30 pages, Paperback

About the author

Lucy Maud Montgomery was a Canadian author whose novels, stories, essays and poems made her one of the most widely read writers in Canadian literary history. Publishing under the name L. M. Montgomery, she achieved international recognition with the novel Anne of Green Gables, released in 1908, which quickly became a bestseller and introduced readers to the imaginative orphan Anne Shirley. The success of the book transformed Montgomery from a schoolteacher and magazine contributor into a celebrated literary figure whose work reached audiences far beyond Canada. Raised on Prince Edward Island, she drew deeply on its landscapes, rural communities, and storytelling traditions, turning the island into the setting for many of her novels. The popularity of Anne of Green Gables led to numerous sequels, including Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, establishing a beloved series that followed Anne from childhood to adulthood. Montgomery continued to write steadily throughout her life, producing twenty novels and more than a thousand short stories poems and essays. Her fiction often centered on young women, personal growth, and the emotional ties between people and place, combining gentle humor with reflections on memory, imagination, and belonging. Although she enjoyed enormous popularity, Montgomery also faced personal difficulties, including long periods of depression and the strain of caring for her husband, a Presbyterian minister who struggled with mental illness. Writing became both a profession and a refuge, allowing her to transform memories of childhood and observation of everyday life into vivid storytelling. In addition to the Anne series, she created other notable works, including the Emily novels and several stand alone stories that explored identity, creativity, and attachment to home. Her books were translated widely and attracted devoted readers around the world, helping shape the international image of Prince Edward Island as a place of pastoral beauty and warm community life. Scholars later studied her extensive journals letters and manuscripts, which revealed the complex inner life behind the cheerful tone of many of her books. By the time of her death in 1942, Montgomery had become one of the most successful and influential authors in Canadian literature. Her stories about imagination, resilience, and the search for belonging continue to inspire readers of all ages, and Anne Shirley remains one of the most recognizable characters in children's fiction. Through generations of readers, Montgomery's work has encouraged appreciation for storytelling, nature, and the emotional richness of ordinary life. Her legacy also includes a vast body of diaries and correspondence that document the challenges faced by a professional woman writer in the early twentieth century. Institutions such as the L. M. Montgomery Institute have continued to examine her influence on literature culture and tourism, particularly on Prince Edward Island, where sites associated with her fiction attract visitors from many countries. Adaptations of Anne of Green Gables for film, television, and theatre have introduced new audiences to her stories, ensuring that her characters remain part of global popular culture. Though critical opinion once dismissed her as merely a writer for children, later scholarship recognized the depth of her themes and the enduring craft of her storytelling. Today she is remembered as a central figure in Canadian literature whose imaginative vision gave voice to the beauty of rural life while celebrating the hopes of young dreamers who search for belonging.

Reviews

[Katja Labonté · Rating 2 out of 5]

2 stars. This is a dark, wild, Gothic story, more so than Jane Eyre ... more along the lines of Rebecca. Actually, it reminded me quite a bit of that book. It’s a sad story, full of misery and wrongdoing, beautifully written and rather haunting, with strong characters and a good little message or two tucked subtly away… but I can’t get over the fact that it’s told by a grandma to her grandchild… or the fact that the grandma was a grandchild herself when she witnessed all this…

Content: Married woman in a very immodest dress & husband is displeased. Lots of passion and hatred. Murder. married woman is caught by her husband + the narrator kissing/hugging/sitting on her lover. Woman later murders her husband and flies with her lover.

[Manybooks · Rating 1 out of 5]

Well, I guess I could perhaps consider trying to appreciate Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 1898 short story The Red Room as a “Gothic Thriller” type of writing experiment, complete with an overwhelmingly creepy atmosphere, marital infidelity leading to cold blooded murder and an old family with an aristocratically outlandish sounding name being full of and replete with a myriad of secrets, lies and tragedy (and all narrated by a grandmother to her grandchild as some kind of family memoir horror tale).

But really, even with regard to Lucy Maud Montgomery obviously trying to make The Red Room in every way as spooky as possible, sorry, textually speaking (and in my humble opinion) Montgomery’s narrative flow is so ridiculously overwrought in The Red Room that the entire story of Hugh Montressor’s murder by his unfaithful and wayward young wife Alicia actually tends to feel so unbelievably artificial that I do actually rather feel as though I am in fact reading an inadvertent parody (and that in fact, during Hugh Montressor’s death scene, I in fact have ended up giggling a bit derisively, although I am more than well aware of the fact that L.M. Montgomery is obviously trying to be totally and utterly serious here, is trying to show a tragedy occurring, but that no, the exaggeratedness of narration and description just does not permit me to consider The Red Room as to be taken seriously as a tragedy but to consider both contents and writing style as just too overly strange and overdone).

And considering that how Lucy Maud Montgomery also and automatically makes Hugh Montressor’s new bride Alicia appear as some “bad to the bone genetically” exotic and inherently dangerous person simply because of her ethnically “foreign” background, indeed and truly, combined with how ridiculously exaggerated The Red Tent is, yes, the story, Montgomery’s writing is naturally also rather majorly politically incorrect, maybe a sign of the times to be sure, but equally really very much making for very much uncomfortable and annoying reading, and in fact so much so that whenever I do reread Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side (the L.M. Montgomery short fiction collection where I first encountered The Red Tent) I usually make a point of actively skipping over The Red Tent.

[Kristi · Rating 3 out of 5]

This gothic short story is written in the tradition of dark Christmas stories, which were popular during the Victorian era. This macabre tale is narrated in the voice of a grandmother to her grandchild, reflecting on a Christmas ball of her childhood and the sinister side of family heritage and relationships. "The Red Room," is a favored family parlor, whose name has meanings other than the innocent reference to the decor. Perhaps too with literary references to the red room of Bronte's _Jane Eyre_. Most troubling about the story, as was perhaps Montgomery's intention, are the repeated references to "race" in association with family belonging. Trigger warnings for suicide and domestic violence.

[Alayne · Rating 4 out of 5]

A very dark tale. Not her best.