I finally finished it last night. I haven't been reading much lately, so that's my main excuse.
My brief, final thoughts...
The stories could have been so much better if (a) LMM had not died before properly editing them, and (b) she would not have felt the need to mention the Blythes in every other paragraph. That really did get old. I did find it interesting that whenever someone mentioned the Blythes the person to whom it was said almost always had a negative reaction. It made me wonder if LMM herself was resenting Anne and Gilbert by that time!
(And I do really wonder that. Did she feel trapped as a writer, sort of as an actor might feel typecast?)
Also, the poems were actually quite good, on the whole. I thought that, overall, they were better than most of the stories.
You really can see an almost preoccupation with death, grief, loss, and the like. She cloaks much of it around
Walter's death
, but I do wonder what was going on in her real life.
There were glimpses of the glory that LMM often displayed in her Anne books. She was a good writer, even if this last sample was sub-par.
Which leads me to my final thought--I've never read a proper biography of LMM, and I think it's high time I did so.