Maud never stopped writing — not through pregnancy, nor after giving birth. She woke early, around six a.m., and wrote by hand a few hours each morning. She typed during the afternoon — a long, hard task, but her handwriting was so bad she feared no one else could decode it. There were now book-related business matters to manage as well — fan mail, personal correspondence, and money matters to attend to, in addition to all her household duties as minister’s wife and new mother. Evenings she reserved for reading, staying up late into the night.
Maud stayed astonishingly productive all through early motherhood, publishing almost a book a year. The year Chester was born, Maud published a collection of stories, Chronicles of Avonlea. She had sent L. C. Page & Company several stories to choose from, assuming they would discard the rest. But Page not only retyped and kept all those stories; the publisher would later insist on claiming the work as their own property.
In 1913, Maud published the sequel to The Story Girl, titled The Golden Road. As always, Maud fretted that the sequel was not as strong as her first book. She was relieved when critics and fans disagreed.
Maud’s troubles during these early years in Leaskdale were chiefly comic rather than serious. When Frede visited Leaskdale she brought along her thorny older sister, Stella. Stella was unmarried and at loose ends. She stayed on as a salaried maid for the Macdonalds, though by all accounts she tyrannized the household. Ewan especially disliked and feared her sharp tongue. Stella was bossy, quarrelsome, and a hypochondriac — and she seemed ready to stay put in Leaskdale forever. In many ways, she represented the worst of all the family habits and temperament — with Grandfather Macneill’s prickly temper and Grandmother Macneill’s dislike and resentment of company. But Stella was family. It was impossible to simply dismiss her or ask her to leave.
If fierce, Stella was also fiercely loyal. If hard-driving, she would nonetheless “work her fingers to the bone for you, complaining bitterly” every minute. She chided Maud in front of guests for not putting enough cream in the company’s tea, and when Maud was asked when she planned to begin spring cleaning, Stella interrupted to say, “I am going to begin next week.” Frede was finally able to convince her older sister she was needed back at home in Park Corner. The Macdonalds heaved a sigh of relief and hired a new maid named Lily, who proved more tractable.
Frede stayed on in Leaskdale, helping with baby Chester till December, then left for a teaching post in Alberta. Her departure left a gaping hole in Maud’s domestic and personal life. Without Frede, Maud had “no real friend near.” The cousins had confided in each other, gossiped, sat in companionable silence, or talked philosophy. Maud and Frede had secretly conducted séances together over a Ouija board — till rumor got out that the minister’s wife was seen trying to summon the devil.
Maud delighted in her newfangled Victrola, but she and Frede had to turn the volume down low so the neighbors wouldn’t hear. Without Frede’s company, Maud felt bereft. “I have no social life here . . . not even as much as I had in Cavendish,” she mourned.
Of course, Maud had the company of her husband and beloved infant son. But nothing replaced the merriment, intimacy, and ease she felt with Frede. It’s hard to gauge Ewan’s role in his wife’s life, since Maud wrote so little directly about her marriage. Her silence on the subject speaks volumes. We know that one Valentine’s Day he called her “the dearest little wife in the world,” and that such open expressions of affection were rare. Ewan was a shy, reserved, and reticent man — the opposite of what Maud always craved.
Superficially, they had seemed well matched. Both were Presbyterian, educated; both were of a certain class. But Ewan’s humor leaned toward practical jokes. He was so slow-moving and soft-spoken that he struck strangers as dull, while Maud was all mercurial brilliance and shimmer. Ewan was at ease only when speaking off the cuff in public, just where Maud was tongue-tied. Ewan was melancholy at heart, while Maud loved merriment. Perhaps in the end they were not different enough to be lovers, nor kindred enough to be friends.
In those early years, Maud as a lark took one of the quizzes that still appear today in popular magazines. She copied her answers into her journal. Her favorite time of day was sunset and the hour just following. Her favorite season, spring. But when it came to her “idea of happiness,” she hesitated. First she wrote flippantly, “a good novel and a plate of russet apples.” Next she thought of her darling son, Chester. “But to be in the arms of a man whom I loved with all my heart . . . is, after all, every woman’s real idea of happiness, if she would be honest enough to admit it. There are dear and sweet minor happinesses. But that is the only perfect one.”
Maud lacked perfect happiness, undoubtedly. Her marriage to Ewan often left her lonely. Yet life still brimmed with “dear and sweet” moments. In 1913 she set to work at last on Anne of the Island, the romantic college novel her Boston interviewer had urged her to write years earlier. Maud was reluctant to begin this sequel in Anne’s story, and the work went slowly.
Maud always disliked the first stage of planning a book. Once the writing began in earnest, it became a challenge not to write. She was known among her friends and relations for talking to herself, trying out lines from her novel, and then rushing out of a room to set them down. She’d laugh out loud when a funny scene came to her. But she had difficulty re-entering the “atmosphere of Anne — like putting on a dress worn years ago . . . something I have outgrown.” Her publisher pressured her to produce more and more Anne books, as did her fans.
Though she struggled to find entry into the novel, Anne of the Island is one of Montgomery’s most beautiful and fully imagined books. It is filled with a host of memorable secondary characters that were always Maud’s great stock in trade. It may be second only to Anne of Green Gables in its lyricism and accomplishment. Anne of the Island features an unforgettable death scene, based on what Maud had witnessed in the early death of her close childhood friend and relation, Penzie Macneill. But it’s also a story full of the promise of youth. Maud would question the value of Anne of the Island, published during the first dark days of World War I, but critics and readers have always loved it.
That same summer, Maud returned to Prince Edward Island, the place she still called “home.” Her first glimpse of the ever-present blue shimmering sea from the crest of a red hill struck her to the heart. At that moment, she confided to George MacMillan, “it seemed passionately to me that I could never leave it again.”
Maud did not visit the old Macneill homestead on this trip back, but she stayed nearby for nearly three weeks, “beautiful weeks, with a vein of sadness running through them.” She went down to the shore and indulged in reviving “dips” in the sea. She, baby Chester, and Ewan wandered through fields of oxeye daisies and drove over the red island roads. Maud picked wild strawberries and strolled among the fir trees in dew-dampened air till it seemed as if she had “never been away from Cavendish and as if my Ontario home was a dream.”
The old Macneill household had been neglected and boarded up by Maud’s uncle John, and Maud could not bring herself to go near it. Instead she walked in Lover’s Lane; in fact, she “haunted it by day and night.” Finally, one evening at dusk, Maud climbed a hill overlooking her old house and gazed down at her own familiar window, and the orchard, woods, and lanes. It all looked the same and, at the same time, utterly changed — precious and unreachable as her dream of married love. “And I went back from that pilgrimage . . . with a very full heart.”
Maud soon learned she was pregnant again. This time she hoped for a little girl. She was at work on Anne of the Island, and once returned to Leaskdale, she felt amazed to find herself “glad to be back — to be home!”
The year 1913 began full of promise. Ewan had started a foreign missionary program through the Leaskdale church. A successful missionary program often served as a stepping-stone to more prestigious congregations. Maud and Ewan had their eye on the large, elegant city of Toronto. Maud often visited Toronto when she
wanted contact with the Canadian literary world.
And she was developing a lucrative second career as a popular public speaker. In October, she addressed a crowd of nearly one thousand women at the Women’s Canadian Club in Toronto. She went not as Mrs. Macdonald, the minister’s wife, but as L. M. Montgomery. Both Maud and Ewan felt renewed, energetic, and hopeful about their future. They had no way to guess at the storms that lay just ahead.
Maud’s second pregnancy proved harder than her first. She suffered constant nausea and exhaustion, and spent a miserable last few days in 1913 trying to survive the holidays. She confided to her journal that she would be “bitterly disappointed if the baby is not a girl.” Maud was nearing forty, and believed this second baby would be her last. She felt more anxious about this birth than the first, with neither cousins Stella nor Frede nearby to help or ease her loneliness.
On August 13, 1914, Maud’s worst fears proved real. Her second son — named Hugh Alexander after her father and maternal grandfather — was delivered stillborn, the umbilical cord knotted around his neck. By the time Maud was fully awake, the beautiful baby lay dead beside her. “Little Hugh,” as she called him, was buried in Zion Cemetery, near Uxbridge. Maud’s grief over the lost child was intense, her heartbreak mingled with guilt. If only she had not wished for a girl! The doctor assured her that infant deaths were common; Maud was not to blame. Still she suffered a long, slow, sad convalescence. She wrote to George MacMillan, “All the sorrow of my life before put together could not equal it in agony.” Only the company of baby Chester, sweet-tempered and affectionate, brought Maud any solace.
The world was swept up in its own turmoil. On June 28, 1914, the Archduke Franz Ferdinand of Austria was assassinated in the small, little-known country of Serbia. This was the first match lit in the firestorm later known as World War I. On August 5, Maud noted with horror that England had declared war on Germany. She could not believe it — it seemed to her “a horrible dream.” Less than two weeks later, her baby lay buried in Zion Cemetery, and terrifying war news continued to spread. “Civilization,” wrote Maud, “stands aghast at the horror that is coming upon it.”
Most of Maud’s well-to-do farmer neighbors in Leaskdale felt aloof from the war in Europe. Maud’s passionate involvement was unusual for her place and time. She became president of the local Red Cross and later traveled around, “stumping” for conscription — a mandatory draft for Canadians.
Maud followed the war news as if her life depended every skirmish. Again, little Chester was her comfort in the face of grief and anxiety. One night she took him into her own bed, and in the middle of the night, she felt him kissing her hand. In her diary she wrote, “What a blessing you are to me! Will you always be so?” When she thought of the soldiers dying in foreign fields and of children murdered in Belgium, she pictured her own son.
She told George MacMillan, only half jokingly, that she had “not had one decent dinner since the war began.” The mail arrived each day at twelve thirty, a half hour before lunch. If the news was good, Maud felt too excited to eat. If bad, she was too distraught.
To her neighbors, Maud’s fixation on the war news seemed crazy. She took some comfort in writing to MacMillan, who was living in Scotland, in the thick of things. But she worried constantly that zeppelins were falling on him. She began to dream about battles, and many of the dreams struck her as ominous. According to her own count, she had more than ten predictive dreams during the course of the war.
Maud was still at work on her college novel, Anne of the Island. She felt ridiculous writing about college parties, exams, and romances while the world was falling to pieces. But as she had promised herself years earlier, she meant to be a “messenger of optimism and sunshine.” Maud’s writing would later be given to Polish soldiers during World War II, to comfort and strengthen them. The book they chose was another novel Maud composed during the first world war, Anne’s House of Dreams.
Maud turned forty in 1914, and she remained full of hopes, dreams, and ambitions. She learned to her great joy that she was pregnant a third time. Bad news followed on the heels of the good. A letter came from Montreal, warning that her precious cousin Frede was dangerously ill with typhoid fever. Doctors feared the worst, and Maud panicked. She “could not face a world with no Frede in it.” The two friends had shared every confidence since the long, hot summer night in Park Corner when they first discovered each other as kindred spirits.
Maud rushed to Montreal to be with her best friend. Her presence seemed to have a magical effect. As soon as Frede laid eyes on Maud, she began to recover. Miraculously, and against the doctors’ predictions, Frede survived the typhoid fever.
That summer, Maud returned to Prince Edward Island for a visit, but for the first time, she was reluctant to leave Leaskdale. She suffered from morning sickness, and she kept one eye always on the war news. More than that, she had a premonition that this visit home would not be happy or easy. Indeed, she was met almost at once with news that the mother of one of her childhood friends had died. She had dreamed one of her eerie dreams about that friend just a few months earlier.
One night, Maud slipped out of the Cavendish manse and walked over the church grounds, along the meadow’s edge, past the spruce grove till her grandparents’ house “lay before me in a soft, silvery shadow.” She stood beneath the window of her old room. It seemed Grandmother was alive and waiting; that the cat Daffy played nearby, her school friends surrounded her, and her own white bed lay waiting for her to return. It was a strange, enchanted stay among the ruins of the old house — and for a half an hour, the lost world breathed for her again.
Yet when Maud returned to Leasksdale with Frede at her side, she declared her homecoming one of the rare “perfect” moments of her life. Children, gardens, cats — all her loved ones dazzled her. She also arrived home to find the first copy of Anne of the Island waiting between brand-new covers.
That book marked a close in Anne’s chapters in several ways. Maud was certain that she was at last done with writing about Anne. And Anne of the Island marked the end — at last! — of her long five-year contract with L. C. Page & Company. They had rejected a volume of her war poems; another company seemed interested. Perhaps at last, her publishing career could take a new turn.
On October 7, 1915, ten days earlier than expected, Maud gave birth to a healthy ten-pound baby boy. They named him Ewan Stuart Macdonald, but always called him Stuart. Half an hour after his birth, he lifted his head and looked around him “with bright wide-open eyes.” That quality of alert intelligence would prove true all his life; Stuart was the easygoing darling of the family. He could never replace the baby who had died, but Stuart gave Maud another reason to overcome the sadness and anxiety of those years.
Meanwhile, the war in Europe edged closer to home. Maud’s youngest half brother, Carl, her father’s son from his second marriage, was injured on the battlefield and left to lie in the bitter cold for eighteen hours. As a result, he lost one leg. He resembled Hugh John both in looks and in his gentle warmth of personality, and Maud loved him dearly. She called Carl his “father’s son and my full brother.”
The following year brought a string of illnesses to the house. Stuart did not grow as quickly as he should. Chester, always a healthy, easy baby, began to suffer from one illness after another. He slept poorly and suffered from stomach upsets. Maud was a fretful mother. She worried especially about her “dear little Chester, the core of my heart since his birth — my first born.” Maud came down with the grippe, and Ewan fell ill with a protracted case of bronchitis and laryngitis. As usual, Maud pasted a smile over her worries, “a mask and . . . a cheerfulness I am far from feeling.”
As president of the Red Cross, Maud forced herself out of her sickbed and ran a “pie social.” In the old days, she had won the highest bids from the handsomest young men in town, whose reward would be to eat the pie in her company. Now the bid went to “an awkward schoolboy who could say nothing and to whom I could
say nothing.” They ate the pie in silence, and Maud felt “as if every mouthful must choke me.”
She had discovered gray hairs threaded among the brown. Maud had always admired silver hair — in others. But now her age seemed another sign of loss. Maud’s earnings had dropped off from their peak of a few years earlier. Ewan’s salary had always been small. The family depended heavily on Maud’s income, and with two growing boys and a husband whose ambitions seemed doomed to fail at every turn, she could not afford to slow down for an instant.
Ewan’s funds toward a foreign mission had fallen far short of the goal. Maud remained his chief benefactor. She had predicted, rightly, that Ontario farmers would be unmoved by appeals to send money to far-flung places. Ewan’s career stalled. He was not offered a new ministry in Toronto or anywhere else.
People who knew Ewan at this time described him as secretive and hard to read. As had happened in Scotland, Ewan considered his failures a sign that he was cursed by God. This line of thought would lay him low time and again. He helped to found a wartime committee dedicated to helping bereaved families, but Ewan’s own spirits were often troubled, and he became more and more silent and withdrawn, both at home and at church.
Maud’s world revolved around her children, her work, and the war. She posted a map of Europe in the manse. She kept up with three newspapers each day. In November 1916, her first book of war poems, The Watchman and Other Poems, appeared. Almost the only relief that year came when Frede arrived for a precious Christmas visit, and then the house rang with unaccustomed laughter.
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