House of Dreams

by Liz Rosenberg

  Ewan’s talk about his plans on the carriage ride made his upcoming departure seem suddenly real. He was going away, to another country — another continent. Maud had enjoyed the ease of his company. She was intrigued by his dimpled smile, and she felt his attraction as a man. But she also knew she could never marry as long as Grandmother Macneill was alive — to abandon the elderly woman now was unthinkable.

  There was another fly in the ointment: Maud felt no desire to become a minister’s wife, any more than she had wished it with the unfortunate John Mustard or the detested Edwin Simpson. A cleric’s wife was hemmed in on all sides. Why, she would not even be allowed to play whist! she noted with dismay. Maud loved to dance and have fun; to go out driving, dress up in fashionable clothing, attend parties, and have adventures. All this and more would be frowned on in a minister’s wife.

  In Maud’s “three o’clock in the morning moods” of despair, she thought she had better marry no matter whom, no matter when. But by day, she thought it “wiser to keep my freedom and trust life.” All in all, she concluded, she did not “care enough for Ewan Macdonald to justify my marrying him.”

  As Maud and Ewan drove in silence together that October night through the dark and rain, Ewan suddenly spoke up: “There is one thing that would make me perfectly happy, but perhaps it is too much to hope for. It is that you should share my life — be my wife.” Maud came to her own surprising realization. She could not lose him. Ewan had become an essential part of her existence. Somehow, she felt, “I could not let him go out of my life. He seemed to belong in it.”

  Maud agreed that if Ewan would wait, she would marry him. The engagement would be secret — and it might be long. She couldn’t abandon her aging grandmother. Indeed, the engagement stretched out for five years. Maud wore the little diamond solitaire on her left hand only at night, in the privacy of her upstairs room. She felt, in her own word, “content.” The engagement might not stir joy — certainly not the ecstasy she had felt in Herman Leard’s arms — but it seemed the beginning of a new, secure happiness.

  And meanwhile, what had become of Anne of Green Gables? After Maud completed the novel, she faced the daunting prospect of having to type up the whole thing in order to send it out. Maud used an ancient typewriter that didn’t print legible capital letters and could not print the letter w at all. She had to go back and fill in every single w by hand.

  First the hopeful young author sent her book off to a new American publishing company. The rejected manuscript bounced right back. Next Maud mailed Anne of Green Gables to an older, more established Canadian firm. The older company sent it back, too. Maud was grateful that her family ran the post office. At least no one in town need know about these embarrassing rejections. She tried three other “betwixt-and-between” publishing houses, and all three sent it back. Of the five rejections, four were form letters. The fifth contained a terse note: “Our readers report that they find some merit in your story, but not enough to warrant its acceptance.”

  Discouraged, Maud hid the Anne manuscript away — for good, she thought, dumping it in an old hatbox. At some later date, she decided, she might take it out, polish it up, and boil it back down to the original seven chapters deemed fit for a Sunday-school magazine. Down the line, she might earn thirty or forty dollars for it.

  Maud was cleaning out her room the following year when she came across the Anne manuscript. She reread the novel and liked it enough to tell herself, “I’ll try once more.” This time she sent it to the L. C. Page publishing company in Boston, Massachusetts. While she waited for an answer, Maud put the book out of her mind.

  Maud had more pressing and worrisome thoughts that winter. Ewan Macdonald was struggling alone in far-off Glasgow. His inner turmoil began almost as soon as he arrived in Scotland. Whatever energy Maud had inspired in her fiancé deserted him once he was out of her sight. He found his fellow students unfriendly and felt himself inferior and unworthy.

  Ewan quickly fell into the religious melancholy that would periodically plague him all the rest of his life. His academic failures, he felt, were proof of condemnation from God. He started skipping classes. Maud urged him to seek help, but he was convinced that nothing on earth could aid him — and given the state of mental health treatment at the time, he may have been right. There are no records to indicate that Ewan passed a single class at Trinity College.

  Ewan had not confided this disturbing aspect of himself to Maud during their courtship, and she later wrote that had she known of his lifelong mental illness, she would never have agreed to the marriage. She maintained that incurable insanity was justification for divorce — though she stood by Ewan, anxious and protective, to the end.

  That March, Maud received a strange, troubling postcard from Scotland. It was completely blank, without a single word or image. A few weeks later, Ewan himself arrived back in Prince Edward Island. Ewan stayed away from Maud and avoided Cavendish as he tried, unsuccessfully at first, to find a new ministry and pull himself back together.

  But now Maud had a happy distraction — the happiest of her life. Less than a month after Ewan came home, an acceptance letter arrived from L. C. Page & Company. The letter was dated April 8, 1907. It was signed by the owner and editor, Louis Page himself. They would be delighted to publish Anne of Green Gables, he wrote. In fact, as Maud learned much later, it was not Page who had championed her novel but a young visiting intern from Summerside, Prince Edward Island, who had convinced the editors to take a chance on a new author. Maud was beside herself with joy.

  L. C. Page & Company offered its first-time author a choice. Maud could accept an outright payment of five hundred dollars — her entire year’s income from writing. Or she could gamble on making a percentage of the earnings, with nothing at all paid in advance.

  Maud took the plunge and opted for a royalty instead of the advance. The L. C. Page terms were meager even for the time — offering only 10 percent royalty on the wholesale price of the book. Maud would receive nine cents for each copy sold. The contract also obliged Maud to publish all of her books with L. C. Page for the next five years, at this same low “beginner’s” rate. She had to commit herself to writing sequels. But Maud balked only at their final condition: Page told the brand-new author to publish under Lucy Maud Montgomery — a name Maud had never liked or used. Eager as she was to publish, Maud held fast. Her books would appear under the name she’d been using all along: L. M. Montgomery.

  Maud expected Anne to be out that fall, as she jubilantly announced to her pen pals, MacMillan and Weber. But one delay after another kept pushing back the publication date. An early printing contained two garbled sentences and had to be discarded. There were problems with the illustrations, and the artist kept putting off the work. When Anne of Green Gables finally appeared in June of 1908, Maud called it an “epoch” in her life, to borrow an expression from Anne.

  That precious instant when Maud laid hands on her first published book was a “proud, wonderful, thrilling moment.” The book sported a handsome cover and was elegantly bound and printed. The author dedicated this first book to “the memory of my Father and Mother.” Grandmother Macneill never received any book dedication, not then, not ever. But Maud told herself how glad her parents would have been, how her father’s eyes would have glowed with pride. Maud regarded the volume with the wonder of a new mother, trying not to brag — “Not a great book at all — but mine, mine, mine,” she crooned.

  The novel’s success was immediate and dazzling. Anne of Green Gables sold better than Maud could have ever dreamed. Her days were enlivened by the warm reviews that flooded in — almost seventy in all. Maud’s novel was universally praised. The book went into a second edition in less than a month, and L. C. Page at once began pressuring their new author for a sequel.

  By the end of the year, Anne of Green Gables had gone through six editions, and Maud received her first royalty check of $1,730, which meant nearly twenty thousand copies had already sold. “Not bad,” she
crowed, “for the first six months of a new book by an unknown author!”

  Her gamble on herself proved wise. And though she described the novel to Ephraim Weber as “a juvenilish story, ostensibly for girls,” she was touched and delighted to discover that it reached so far and deep. Adults embraced the story. Grown men wept over it. She received not only rave reviews, but fan letters from all over the world — some addressed to her as Mister, some written directly to Miss Anne Shirley, Green Gables, Avonlea. Eager fans offered to tell her their own life stories — to be converted into works of fiction, of course — and one letter, pretending to be from a relative, began, “My dear long-lost uncle.”

  One fan letter Maud especially treasured came from the seventy-three-year-old Mark Twain — one of her own favorite childhood authors — praising Anne as “the dearest, most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.” Maud answered each piece of mail personally, even when eighty-five letters came from Australia on one day.

  L. C. Page & Company only published one book that ever outsold Anne of Green Gables, the 1913 bestseller Pollyanna, which sold more than a million copies in its first year. In both cases, L. C. Page & Company pressed its authors for immediate and numerous sequels. As early as August of 1907, they were demanding a sequel to Anne of Green Gables. In October, Maud began writing the first few pages of Anne of Avonlea, still full of affection for her central character. But as winter descended, Maud’s mood darkened and her enthusiasm flagged.

  She confided to MacMillan, “I don’t think the book is as good — comparatively speaking — as the first. But I may not be able to judge — I feel so soaked and saturated with ‘Anne’ that I’m sick of the sound of her name.” She was bombarded by requests from fans who flocked to Prince Edward Island hoping to meet her, and “I don’t want to be ‘met,’” she grumbled.

  Along with cold weather came Maud’s usual winter depression and fatigue, “coupled with a heavy dread of the future — any future, even a happy one.” While she was famous now in the world of children’s books, she remained a prisoner at home. She could not leave her aging grandmother for a single day. Nor could she convince her grandmother to make any of the unused rooms in the house as a cozy winter library or study. Instead, with the coming of cold weather, Maud was forced to work in the kitchen, where she was constantly interrupted by the comings and goings of the post office.

  That year her nerves also frayed when the kitchen roof caught fire. The day was windy, so the fire spread quickly. Maud dragged a ladder from her uncle John’s barn, filled a pail with water, and managed to douse the flames. It was a close call. Maud stayed calm till the danger was over, and then collapsed. All her life, Maud had dreamed of fires. She wondered if those dreams had been prophetic. Now she lived in constant terror that the old homestead would burn to the ground.

  Her anxious thoughts turned often toward her upcoming marriage. After his breakdown in Scotland, Ewan took a long time finding his balance again. At first, even his search for a new ministry was unsuccessful. Finally he found a position in the tiny Bloomfield parish, far from Cavendish. Ewan and Maud rarely saw each other. The bride-to-be worried whether, with the strained condition of her nerves, she could possibly be “fit to be his or anyone’s wife.” She must have also wondered how fit a husband Ewan would prove.

  Maud finished that first sequel, Anne of Avonlea, in August of 1908, declaring it “not nearly so good as Green Gables.” L. C. Page held up the sequel’s publication for a time on the grounds that Anne of Green Gables was still selling so well that they did not want to compete with their own success.

  One early reviewer noted that Anne of Green Gables “radiates happiness and optimism.” For all its mishaps, pathos, and misadventures, Anne of Green Gables is indeed a sort of literary antidepressant. The novel serves as a charm against darkness. The laughter and beauty in the book are never forced, for they came from a deep source. Whatever Maud owed to books like the ever-magical Alhambra by Washington Irving she amply repaid in her writings. The brilliant sparkle of her work, its heart-raising effervescence, was hard-earned. “Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work,” she wrote. “I would not wish to darken any other life — I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine.”

  As Maud’s fame increased, Ewan’s fortunes slowly rose. He’d become a popular minister at his small parish, and he began once more to turn his attention and ambitions to the wider world. One of Ewan’s closest friends, Edwin Smith, had fled Prince Edward Island for the larger scope of the mainland. Smith, a charismatic minister, was thriving off-island. In September 1909, Ewan followed suit and left Prince Edward Island for a double-charge parish in Ontario. There he would wait till Maud was free to marry and join him.

  Maud watched Ewan’s success with a mixture of pride and horror. Exile from her beloved island home was now inevitable. Ontario was home to Toronto, the literary center of Canada, but it was a far cry from Cavendish — culturally, geographically, and emotionally.

  Maud’s departure from Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, and all she held dear, weighed heavily on her in the years between the publication of Anne of Green Gables and her marriage to Ewan. Though she kept busy writing new books and rereading old favorites, she often felt depressed and worried, and aside from cousin Frede’s welcome visits, there was little to distract her. Maud suffered hard days, when she felt “depressed, tired, broken, a prey to indescribable and unconquerable unrest.” In 1908 she had a near-total collapse when a cloud of depression seemed to descend, and she could neither eat nor sleep nor work. Ewan’s only advice was for Maud to give up writing for a month. She might as easily have promised to give up breathing.

  In all likelihood, Maud was in the throes of manic depression. She had always suffered from extreme highs and lows. Now she walked the floor for hours in an agony of nerves. She knew something was seriously wrong, but she refused to consult any local doctors, for fear of gossip. Leaving town — and Grandmother Lucy — was impossible, even for a medical consultation. None of Lucy’s five living children took any responsibility for their aging mother. Aunt Emily, less than thirty miles away, had visited just once in three years.

  A few years earlier, Uncle John and his son Prescott had broken their chilly silence and come next door to demand once more that eighty-one-year-old Grandmother Macneill move out so that Prescott could marry and move in with his potential bride-to-be. Grandmother would be farmed out to one adult child or another. Maud would be on her own. The suggestion was met with dismay by both women.

  The visit turned into a full-blown family feud, with John and Prescott pressing their case, an outraged Maud holding them off, and Grandmother Macneill weeping.

  Prescott never married. Instead he fell prey to tuberculosis, the same disease that had killed Maud’s mother. Prescott’s death hardened Uncle John’s heart further against Maud and his mother. He set obstacles in their path at every turn. Maud had to shovel the snow out to the road. She placed buckets beneath more than twenty leaks in the ceiling. Chunks of plaster fell down around her and her aging grandmother.

  Despite all this, Maud passionately adored the old homestead. She took long walks in fields and lanes nearby. Lover’s Lane sustained her. It was her refuge, an escape from life’s trials. She wandered down to the sea at sunset; she strolled in the graveyard where her mother lay buried and where, someday, Maud planned to be buried beside her. On late-night rambles she would spy the old homestead softened by moonlight and realize “how deeply rooted and strong is my love for this old place.” It was “terrible,” she thought, “to love things — and people — as I do!”

  “Smug, opulent Ontario,” as she called it, lay ahead in her near future. But Maud’s thoughts and dreams carried her back to her past. She began a new children’s book that incorporated many of the family tales her great-aunt Mary Lawson told so brilliantly. This new work was called The Story Girl, and it became Maud’s favorite of all of her books — though she sagely predicted
it wouldn’t do as well as Anne of Green Gables.

  The Story Girl cobbles together old family legends and ghost stories with the childhood adventures of a group of fictional Prince Edward Island children. The adventures are linked through tales told by Sara Stanley, the “Story Girl” of the title. (“‘I shall learn how to tell stories to all the world,’ said the Story Girl dreamily.”)

  The book’s construction allowed Maud free range to play with her own family history and with storytelling as an art: “true things that are, and true things that are not, but might be.” The book is set amid the glories of Prince Edward Island, and moments of humor peep constantly through its dreaminess. The Story Girl was dedicated to Maud’s best friend and cousin Frede, “in remembrance of old days, old dreams, and old laughter” — a favorite book for a favorite friend.

  One would never know from reading this jubilant book how much the author suffered during its composition. Maud lived through dangerous mood swings all that winter and spring, similar in intensity to what she suffered during her ill-fated engagement to Edwin Simpson. In February of 1910 she struggled through a month of “utter prostration — an utter breakdown of body, soul, and spirit.” It came on suddenly — Maud was too overwrought to eat or sleep, and as a result she could not work, read, or think straight. She paced the floor, unable to tolerate company but worse when left alone. Maud felt a “morbid dread of the future,” though even in her private journals, she never named Ewan or Ontario in that future. She wanted only to die, to rest. She longed for the company of the one person who unfailingly consoled her, her best friend and kindred spirit, cousin Frede. But Frede was away at university, her studies paid for by Maud herself.