What happens next?

That was the question asked of early-twentieth-century authors Nellie L. McClung, L. M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche, whose stories and novels appeared serially and kept readers and publishers in a state of anticipation. Each author answered through the writing and dissemination of further instalments. McClung’s Pearlie Watson trilogy (1908–1921), Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables books (1908–1939), and de la Roche’s Jalna novels (1927–1960) were read avidly not just as sequels but as serials in popular and literary newspapers and magazines. A number of the books were also adapted to stage, film, and television.

The Next Instalment argues that these three Canadian women writers, all born in the same decade of the late nineteenth century, were influenced by early-twentieth-century publication, marketing, and reading practices to become heavily invested in the cultural phenomenon of the continuing story. A close look at their serials, sequels, and adaptations reveals that, rather than existing as separate cultural productions, each is part of a cultural and material continuum that encourages repeated consumption through development and extension of the originary story. This work considers the effects that each mode of dissemination of a narrative has on the other.

Contributor: Wendy Roy

Wendy Roy is a professor of Canadian Literature at the University of Saskatchewan. She researches gender and culture in Canadian women's writing and is the author of Maps of Difference: Canada, Women, and Travel (2005) and co-editor of Listening Up, Writing Down, and Looking Beyond: Interfaces of the Oral, Written, and Visual (2012).

"Drawing on an impressive array of rare and archival sources, Wendy Roy’s The Next Instalment places three enduringly popular Canadian women authors in conversation with each other in order to situate their well-known books in the context of their contributions to a thriving periodical market in the first half of the twentieth century. This study promises to make a significant contribution to the fields of Canadian literature, popular literature, women’s writing, book history, and the burgeoning field of periodical studies." —Benjamin Lefebvre, editor of The L.M. Montgomery Library and the Early Canadian Literature series

--- "The strength of this book is the granularity of its detail: this will be a resource for scholars and students for years to come.... Roy does an excellent job of transforming archival detail into historical narrative peppered with entertaining characters and interactions." --- A unique, exceptionally informative, meticulously researched and thought-provoking work of seminal scholarship that is enhanced for academia with the inclusion of bibliographical references and an index, "The Next Instalment: Serials, Sequels, and Adaptations of Nellie L. McClung, L.M. Montgomery, and Mazo de la Roche" is especially and unreservedly recommended for community, college, and university library Canadian Literature collections and supplemental curriculum studies lists.