On April 17, 1939, Maud began a sequel to Jane of Lantern Hill, tentatively titled Jane and Jody. Writing was both a relief and a sign of renewed energy. Maud made a last visit home to Prince Edward Island that spring. As always on these visits, her mood became more buoyant, her handwriting less shaky. Like the mythical Antaeus whose mother is Earth, as soon as Maud’s feet touched home ground, her strength was renewed. But she soon turned to Journey’s End in Toronto, drawn by duty to Ewan and the life that was killing her. So quick to rescue others, both in fiction and in life, Maud failed in the end to rescue herself.
The errant Chester moved in for a time with Luella and the children, in Aurora, a town just north of Toronto. Maud paid for him to buy a share of a legal firm with a lawyer named Downey. But his return home did not mean that Chester had become a dutiful and loving husband and father — far from it.
Chester stayed out till all hours. He neglected his young family, failing to provide even the most basic comforts. Luella dressed the children in clothing remade from Maud’s hand-me-downs, and she heated the kitchen — the one livable room in the house — with firewood she salvaged and chopped herself. Chester ate breakfast at home — the only meal he ate with family — wearing his heavy coat and gloves against the freezing cold. The children huddled around the kitchen fire. Still Luella hung on, determined to make the marriage work. Then she visited her doctor, only to learn that Chester had given her a venereal disease. This was the last straw. Luella took the children home to live with her father. Chester slunk to Journey’s End in disgrace and moved into his parents’ basement.
There was one bright note in 1939. Anita Webb, Maud’s distant relation from Prince Edward Island, came to join the family in June. Anita became an invaluable helper and welcome companion with her sturdy, sunny disposition. Anita and Maud worked well together at simple chores — Anita washing the dishes, Maud drying them. They shopped together once a week at the local store and the butcher’s. Anita was fiercely protective of Maud and disliked Chester, who she felt cheated and bullied Maud. One day he “borrowed” his mother’s expensive Kodak movie camera, only to report it “stolen” the next day.
By September 1939, war was declared again in Europe. Maud watched the growing conflict with dread. She had suffered through World War I, trembling at each setback, dreaming of the war each night. She had seen the sufferings of friends and family who lost loved ones.
Now the danger edged closer to home. Maud’s two sons were of age to fight. Chester registered for military service but was rejected because of poor eyesight. Stuart had set his heart on the navy, and planned to enlist as soon as his medical internship ended.
Maud did not believe she could survive a second world war. Horrified, she watched Hitler make inroads through Europe. “A madman is in control,” she declared. She saw the world as “riding on an avalanche.” In this dire state of mind, she felt certain that Stuart would be killed. “I have seen all my other hopes crushed to death,” she wrote in her journal. “Why should this one survive?” Maud’s despair deepened on all fronts. Ewan’s health and state of mind were as fragile as her own. He tried “a new medicine every day and nothing has the slightest effect.”
Perhaps most devastating of all, Maud’s ability to express herself in words had finally deserted her entirely. This was the ultimate blow to a mind that had always been lit by radiant imagination. Biographers Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston have suggested that “true tragedy came into her life when she could no longer write — neither fiction nor fixative journals.”
In 1940, Maud fell and injured her right arm. A few years earlier she had hurt her left arm but was thankful at least that she still had the use of her good arm. Now she could barely perform even basic household tasks. She could write only a few words at a time. Maud had trouble sleeping, and believed that she would never get well, though her local doctor, Dr. Lane, tried to convince her otherwise. She wrote to her ever-loyal friend George MacMillan, “I do not ask you to write me until you hear that I am better.” Yet his cheerful “sane letter” raised her spirits considerably, and she read his soothing words over and over.
Chester had become an expert at manipulating his mother to get what he wanted. “He was always after money,” Anita Webb reported grimly. Chester now became the affectionate child, Stuart the more reserved. Maids would find Chester in Maud’s bedroom, lying with his head on her shoulder, while she ran her fingers through his dark hair. There is an eerie resemblance here to her passionate evenings with Herman Leard. When Chester needed the car to drive around town trolling for women, he came to Maud in his most winning mode. Other times — for instance, when he needed money quickly — he would become aggressive, angry, and bullying.
Maud grew tremulous and frightened, nearly unrecognizable from her usual upright and energetic self. “My conception of heaven,” she wrote in her journal, “would be life without fear.” Maud clung to Anita Webb like a child, following her from room to room. Yet in this same period she remained a poised and popular public speaker, full of funny, lively, sparkling stories. Anita was struck by the stark difference between these two Mauds, the public and the private woman.
Then, in early 1942, family problems forced Anita to travel home to Cavendish for a long visit. Stuart arranged for a temporary nurse to look after Maud. In this period, Maud could barely express herself coherently. Her journal entries are few and agonized. The hired nurse wrote to fans and friends explaining that Maud was too ill to correspond. Her final postcards to her old pen pals Weber and MacMillan sound alarmingly distraught. In her last correspondence to MacMillan, she confessed:
The past year has been one of constant blows to me. My eldest son has made a mess of his life, and his wife has left him. My husband’s nerves are worse than mine even. I have kept the nature of his attacks from you for over 20 years but they have broken me at last. . . . I expect conscription will come in and they will take my second son and then I will give up all effort to recover because I shall have nothing to live for.
The word that comes up again and again is broken. Broken heart, broken spirit, broken down: a “dread that I am going to break down altogether.” Maud was still keeping notes toward her journal, but she no longer had the strength to gather them into a coherent narrative. As she had done during the terrible mid-1930s, she would write up rough notes, planning to later edit them and make the narrative more flowing, using these notes to reconstruct her days. By mid-April she had compiled 175 pages of those rough notes.
In spring, Anita Webb returned at last from Prince Edward Island, and her calm presence was a blessing, but Maud continued her relentless downward spiral. Her last known act is a literary one. On April 23 she took in hand her newest book, a story collection called The Blythes Are Quoted, and mailed the manuscript off to her publisher.
The Blythes Are Quoted is a complex, divided book — one half taking place before World War I, one half after. It is one of Montgomery’s most experimental books, a fictional collage consisting of snippets of a novelistic narrative, stand-alone stories, descriptive passages, and poems. To the very end, Maud was stretching and testing herself as an artist.
On the morning of April 24, 1942, Dr. Lane phoned Stuart at his office with terrible news. Anita Webb had found Maud in her bed, a bottle of pills lying beside her. There was no way to revive her. Stuart came to the house at once. On the table by her bed lay a piece of writing dated a few days earlier. It was numbered page 176 and written in legible and flowing handwriting. It reads as follows, beginning calmly enough:
This copy is unfinished and never will be. It is in a terrible state because I made it when I had begun to suffer my terrible breakdown of 1942. It must end here. If any publishers wish to publish extracts from it under the terms of my will they must stop here. The tenth volume can never be copied and must not be made public during my lifetime. Parts of it are too terrible and would hurt people.
The passage continues, increasingly desperate in tone:
; I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare to think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.
Stuart and Dr. Lane believed what they found by Maud’s bed was a suicide note. Neither man was aware that Maud used rough notes like these to compose her journal, and they did not stop to consider the date, nor the fact that the page was numbered page 176. Stuart hastily shoved the paper into his pocket. Dr. Lane advised Stuart to look after Maud’s personal effects while he wrote up the report for the coroner.
The scandal over Maud’s apparent suicide would have been enormous, so the family decided to guard their secret. In that regard, not much has changed in the last seventy-five years. Suicides are even now considered shameful, private matters. Stuart kept the folded note to himself and said nothing further about it for more than fifty years. Dr. Lane’s own reputation was on the line as well. After all, Lane had prescribed the medication that had killed his patient. No one openly discussed the bedside note for decades.
Finally, in September 2008, the Macdonald family broke their silence. Stuart’s daughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, came forward with the family’s permission to declare Maud’s death a suicide, and to describe her grandmother’s long struggle against depression. “I have come to feel very strongly that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us — and most certainly not to our heroes and icons,” Kate wrote.
At the time of Maud’s death, the coroner’s report declared the death a result of “arteriosclerosis and a very high degree of neurasthenia.” (Neurasthenia is a term that covers a wide range of psychological and nerve disorders.) Experts and fans have been debating the circumstances of L. M. Montgomery’s tragic death ever since. And there is reason to feel uncertain.
Maud regularly mixed enough medications to kill a much stronger woman. She had lost a great deal of weight quickly, and may not have realized that a dose that seemed right at her usual weight would be lethal in her present condition. Maud’s death by overdose may have been an accident, or it may have been deliberate. She wrote in her journal, “The present is unbearable. The past is spoiled. There is no future.” Her despair was clear. Nor did Maud believe that suicide was a sin. Decades earlier, she had noted: “My attitude to it is much that which I have found quoted in Lecky. ‘Life is forced on us; we did not ask for it; therefore, it if becomes too hard we have a right to lay it down.’”
After a minor surgery, she once came out of the anesthesia saying, “Oh, doctor, heaven is so beautiful I’m sorry you called me back.” She had been toying with the idea of death, thinking about it for a long time. One young visitor shortly before the end was told that Maud did not “expect to be there” in a week or so. That statement mystified the young friend. It is no mystery that Maud was sad enough to die.
Other puzzles remain unsolved. For instance, what happened to the other 175 rough pages of her journal notes? They might shed more light on the circumstances of Maud’s final days. But those pages disappeared around the time of her death and have never resurfaced. Likely they were deliberately destroyed. Undoubtedly they contained passages that would have been especially damning to Chester.
We know that Chester began removing things from the house almost as soon as Maud’s body was discovered. Chester’s later life was full of troubles and petty crimes — he was jailed for embezzlement, and he died in his early fifties, of unknown and suspicious causes. According to the terms of the will, since Chester was no longer living with Luella, he had no rights to any personal property. Yet he kept taking carloads of things out of the house, till neighbors finally called the estate, and the locks on the house were changed.
Living in the basement of Journey’s End, Chester probably had greatest access to Maud’s habits and hiding places. He was out of the house when Maud’s body was found. But he would have had sufficient time later to dispose of all but her final note.
Maud had once specified the epitaph she wanted on Frede’s gravestone. “After life’s fitful fever she sleeps well.” She added, “It is the one I want on my own when I die. And I trust I shall sleep well . . . For I think it will take me a long while to get rested.”
Maud’s body was flown to Prince Edward Island for burial beside her relatives. She once wrote that any visitor to her island must feel “I have come home.” There, she declared, “we realize that eternity exists . . . ‘our own will come to us’ — we have only to wait.” Maud’s body lay in state at the house known as Green Gables, and was driven to the Cavendish church for the funeral on April 29, 1942. The local outpouring of grief was immense. The little white wooden church filled to overflowing. Mourners spilled out of the church and onto the grounds. The Cavendish school closed for the afternoon; grieving schoolchildren came running over. One girl remembered telling her mother, “I have read all her books and I know her.”
Ewan Macdonald, the widower, was bewildered and disoriented. Maud’s death struck a terrible blow to his sense of reality. He kept wandering off during the funeral, calling, “Poor Maud, poor Maud,” like a bird without its mate. At other moments his voice interrupted the ceremony, crying out, “Who is dead? Who is dead?” Then he would call in a ringing voice, “Who is she? Too bad! Too bad!”
John Sterling, Ewan’s old friend, the minister who had presided at their marriage service, conducted Maud’s funeral. He spoke of her personal and artistic accomplishments, predicting that future generations would “feel their pulses quicken at the thought of their proximity to the dust of one who painted life so joyously, so full of hope, and of sweetness and light.”
On the day of Maud’s funeral, spring had not yet arrived on Prince Edward Island. The temperatures that late April day hovered near freezing. Snow lay in drifts along the ground. When John Sterling gave his eulogy, a warm island wind blew over the gathered mourners. The day briefly brightened. The birds of spring sang their first notes. Maud had come home at last.
The teenage Maud who ruefully confided to her journal “I have no influence of any kind in any quarter” touched millions of readers with her words. And the young writer who jubilantly celebrated her first five-dollar check became one of the best-paid authors of her time. Maud feared she would always live in poverty, in rented rooms; instead she lived to buy a house she loved in an elegant neighborhood of Toronto. Scolded as a child for indulging her peculiar habit of “scribbling,” she became one of the most important Canadian writers the world has known.
The popularity of L. M. Montgomery’s writing continues unabated. Maud’s books have sold millions of copies. Her work lives on in dozens of forms — some of which she never knew, and could not have even imagined. Her writing has been successfully adapted to the stage, the movies, and for television, and is available in books, CDs, and DVDs. Discussions of her work abound in journals dedicated to her writings, and in online blogs and articles.
Anne’s House of Dreams was distributed to Polish soldiers during World War II to lend them courage and hope. Her words have been read and memorized by countless fans of all ages, cultures, and backgrounds. One young girl, confined by illness to her bed, confided that she had read Anne of Green Gables more than fifteen times. It may be the most reread of all children’s novels.
Thousands of visitors flock to Prince Edward Island each summer to pay homage to L. M. Montgomery and her work. The late author is the best-known national treasure of her island home. Prince Edward Island estimates that 350,000 come to visit Green Gables each year. Kate Middleton, as the newlywed wife of Prince William, flew to Prince Edward Island on her honeymoon in honor of the book, citing Montgomery as one of her favorite and most influential authors.
Kate Middleton was not Green Gables’s first famous visitor, nor will she be the last. In 1927, Stan
ley Baldwin, then prime minister of England, wrote a fan letter to Maud, asking if she would be on Prince Edward Island when he came to visit. “It would give me keen pleasure to have an opportunity of shaking your hand and thanking you for the pleasure your books have given me. . . . I must see Green Gables before I return home.”
Maud read that letter while strolling in her beloved Lover’s Lane, marveling that such a note had come the way of “the little girl who walked here years ago and dreamed — and wrote her dreams into books.” She had expected little by way of success — she had been raised to expect nothing at all. To many of her childhood friends and neighbors, she seemed a mere charity case. Yet a British prime minister flew all the way to her remote island to meet her.
Maud’s books and dreams live on. Her works are treasured by children and adults all over the world — they are particular favorites among Japanese schoolchildren, fellow islanders living half a world away. Her work has taken on as many forms as it’s possible to imagine — animation, comic books, radio shows, magazines, movies and theatrical presentations. The musical Anne of Green Gables played in England, Africa, Asia, and America and has been performed to full houses in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, for more than forty-five years.
The 1986 television miniseries Anne of Green Gables won an Emmy Award and swept television’s other honors, making still more popular Maud’s already well-known books. Two award-winning television movies followed, and then a successful television series called The Road to Avonlea. Anne with an E aired this year, offering a darker vision of her work. Her single most beloved and famous book, Anne of Green Gables, has sold more than fifty million copies worldwide and been translated into more than twenty languages.
House of Dreams Page 20