Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  This longer biography represents my attempt to answer more questions. By the time of Dr. Macdonald’s death, I had seen the depth of his loyalty to his mother, alongside some unresolved feelings, including anger. What was the quality that made those who knew his mother so loyal to her memory, including all of the family’s housemaids? (I had started locating them in the late 1970s, and talked to them and other acquaintances before people’s memories were tainted by the publication of the journals.) How could one explain the contradictions in Maud’s character? Where in this complicated woman did her books actually originate? What gave her books their staying power as best-sellers? (Their sales were not inflated by being required novels on courses.) And, most puzzling of all, what was the basis of their appeal to readers of diverse cultural backgrounds, in different generations, with varied experiences and temperaments and educational backgrounds, all over the world?

  In 1984, I travelled to Denmark and Poland with Elizabeth Waterston and Ruth Macdonald, Dr. Stuart Macdonald’s widow. We saw a command performance of a Polish musical based on The Blue Castle in Krakow, and a drama based on Anne of Green Gables in Warsaw. When the audiences found out that we were from Canada, and represented their beloved “L. M. Montgomery,” we were mobbed in both theatres by autograph-seekers. The passion in Poland was astonishing. In 1992, my younger daughter and I retraced Maud’s 1911 honeymoon path in Scotland and England. Staying in bed-and-breakfasts, we met only one hostess on the entire trip who did not know of Maud’s books. As my contacts with other countries outside North America developed (Germany, Israel, China, Japan, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Spain, India) through the Internet, I was staggered by her worldwide appeal.

  It particularly surprised me when people said that they reread their favourite Montgomery novel(s) every year. (After all, there are many other good books in the world, and our lives are finite!) As I dug deeper, and met other scholars, I began to see that Maud’s books actually changed people’s lives. Where did these books get that power?

  Editing the journals helped reveal where her novels came from, at least in part. All the stories that Maud told were essentially variations on her own personal narrative—those of young girls and women trying to find a home and a life where there is love, approval, and respect. From the orphaned Anne (who wants to be adopted into a home where she will be loved and valued), through Emily of New Moon (an orphan who likewise wants love and acceptance but who also wants a writing career), to Valancy Stirling of The Blue Castle (who wants to escape a cruel mother and find love in marriage), Maud’s heroines begin life without the comforting kindness of a protective mother. This might explain the interest of girls and women in her books, but it hardly explains their appeal to famous statesmen in England.

  The more we worked with the journals, the more obvious became the shaping and pruning. We found almost no outright factual falsehoods in her journals, but there were evasions and omissions. It was as if Maud had become an actor in the drama of her own life, a movie that she was writing, directing, acting, editing, and reviewing. As we edited the last three volumes (published in 1992, 1998, and 2004) we recognized the extent to which Maud was constantly rereading, revisioning, and reshaping her own life document—no real surprise since she recopied all her journals, beginning in 1919.

  More puzzles emerged. How far could one trust the journals, which were designed as a creative work on their own? What was the emerging narrative trajectory that shaped her life story as she wrote it over a period of fifty-five years? Did the narrative trajectory affect the way she interpreted her life—and, even more interesting, did that trajectory itself affect the choices that she made in her life? And what about the gaps? What segments of her “film” were cut and discarded?

  After the publication of Maud’s journals began in 1985, revealing, to almost everyone’s surprise, that she was often a tormented woman in her private life, arbiters of literary taste started giving her a second look. Other developments fuelled this re-evaluation: the birth of feminism, new attention to popular culture and the oral tradition, new theories about language, subjectivity, and literary value. It was a turbulent period in the academy, producing an explosion of new scholarship that challenged the old, and Maud was one of its many beneficiaries—and not just in North America. Articles and doctoral theses about her from abroad began spilling into the critical void. Judging by the more recent Internet blogs and websites devoted to her, she has certainly regained her place in the literary firmament. She is now widely acknowledged to have been an extremely important cultural influence.

  —

  This biography, then, is not a mere retelling of Maud’s own compelling account of her life. It is based on my own research and analysis conducted over several decades during a busy career in academia and raising a family. I have examined old newspapers, magazines, and archival records, trying to absorb the ambiance of her time. I have tried to verify the stories in her journals, given that she had always intended them for eventual publication. It is self-evident that anyone as concerned with her legacy as Maud was would present herself as she wanted to be remembered, only giving away intimate (or damaging) revelations when it suited her. Having her eye on the future reader certainly worked against full disclosure, and she herself admits there are certain things she cannot commit to her journals. Some of those blanks are filled in here.

  My research took me into many areas ancillary to literature—the Scottish-Anglo heritage from which Maud emerged, the educational practice in Prince Edward Island, the publishing industry in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the history of religion and science, the development of the professions, major historical events such as World War I, the spread of communication networks, the legal profession (which touched her life in so many ways), the practice of medicine, psychiatry, and pharmacology in the first half of the past century, and the history of the book trade, including the influence of her books in other countries. I try to set her life in those contexts.

  When I first began this project in the early 1980s, personal computers had not come into use, search engines were unheard of, and the potentials of the digital world were only a gleam in the eye of twenty-five-year-old Bill Gates and others. The development of e-mail has greatly increased my contact with scholars and readers in countries around the world. The L. M. Montgomery Collection at the University of Guelph has become its most consulted archival resource, attracting scholars from many foreign countries. Every contact has enriched my understanding of Maud’s reach and impact, which truly circles the globe.

  The story of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life begins—in its most elemental form—with the birth of a little girl, Lucy Maud, on Prince Edward Island in 1874. It moves through time until she becomes a best-selling author at age thirty-six, then marries, and lives the rest of her life in Ontario, as a committed author and public-spirited citizen. But her life is much more than her “lived” life.

  Her “story” extends into the impact of her books. In a twentieth-century society still dominated by patriarchy, she was one of the many forces convincing young women that they could have careers in many different professional fields (such as medicine and law), opening new vistas for them.

  In the same way, her influence extended to young women who aspired to become authors. They saw that it was possible for a woman writer to work with the community she knew, rather than tackling the sweep of great world events. After all, what goes on in the human heart rules both the domestic and the larger political world. These young writers saw that stories about plain people in small communities could catch a wide audience. It might also be said that Maud was an early pioneer in the technique of “branding” a named but imaginary fictional community. From Maud’s “Avonlea” in Prince Edward Island, Margaret Laurence could move to “Manawaka” on the Canadian prairies, Alice Munro to “Jubilee” in south-western Ontario, and Margaret Atwood could depict new fictional neighbourhoods within Toronto. The creation of named fictional communities continued with Ca
nadian male authors, with Stephen Leacock’s “Mariposa” in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and with Robertson Davies in his “Deptford” novels in the 1970s. Around the world, many other women writers would claim Maud as their favourite childhood writer—and sometimes as their model, as in the case of Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of the “Pippi Longstocking” tales. Maud’s characters may have been ordinary people, but she moved into people’s inner emotions and dealt in miniature with events occurring on a much larger scale in the world outside. Her magic chariot was “the story.”

  The tale of her impact continues. Her creativity has spread from the book realm to other media. Anne of Green Gables was first made into a silent film in 1919 and then into a “talkie” in 1934. Anne of Windy Poplars became a film in 1940, and there have been many other interpretations of the Anne story since: in musicals, plays, television, movies, videos, comics, and animated films. An immensely successful musical based on Anne of Green Gables was developed in 1965 and is performed each year in the Charlottetown Festival. Theatrical versions are regularly staged by schools across North America, and Anne’s life has been extended into “prequels” in book and film. Her Emily of New Moon series—the books that budding writers love—have recently been made into an animated television series by a Japanese studio, following the earlier Anne of Green Gables. The economic impact of her books is beyond measure.

  Maud’s own personal story took on a completely new life with the publication of her secret journals long after her death. Covering the period between 1889 and 1942, The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery were published in five volumes between 1985 and 2004, establishing her as one of the most readable female diarists of the twentieth century. These journals reveal a woman much engaged in the intellectual world she found herself in, even when she was living in rural outposts before television and radio. Her reading was prodigious and omnivorous—not only fiction, but also history, biography, science, psychology, medicine, anything that might explain the evolving world to her. She had been catapulted from a bucolic, rural childhood into a turbulence heading towards two world wars. She wrote in November 1901 that the story of “human genius” was seen in “its colossal mechanical contrivances. Two or three thousand years ago men wrote immortal poems. Today they create marvellous inventions and bend the erstwhile undreamed of forces of nature to their will.”

  Maud’s own life story carries us through the social and economic history of the twentieth-century world. We witness the new arsenal of medications developed to alleviate human disease and misery, the development of railroads, automobiles, airplanes, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, silent and then talkie movies, electric refrigerators, washing machines, and many other marvels of science and technology, especially those pertaining to modern warfare. In February 1932, she calls this new warfare “a hideous revel of mechanical massacre.”

  In 1942, Maud exited from her own stage play (and life). About that sad event, we can only reflect that “the manner of a death is hardly the measure of a life.” As the distinguished Canadian novelist Robertson Davies said at the time of her passing: “Nations grow in the eyes of the world less by the work of their statesmen than their artists. Thousands of people all over the globe are hazy about the exact nature of Canada’s government and our relation to the British Empire, but they have clear recollections of Anne of Green Gables.”4 The impact of Maud’s writing will continue in the twenty-first century—her heroines will continue to charm us, but as we come to know her better as a woman, her own story also will haunt our imaginations.

  PART ONE

  ——

  The PEI Years

  1874–1911

  CHAPTER 1

  What’s in a place?

  The febrile intensity of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s imagination was both stirred and soothed by her early home of Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, in the Canadian Maritimes. Located where the land and sea met, it was a landscape of extremes—extremes in weather, extremes in beliefs, extremes in human passions—all contained in one of the world’s most beautiful settings. The land itself was the perfect correlative to extremes in Maud’s personality. A passionate young woman poured into the container of strict Presbyterianism, she characterized herself:

  I have a very uncomfortable blend in my make-up—the passionate Montgomery blood and the Puritan Macneill conscience. Neither is strong enough wholly to control the other. The Puritan conscience can’t prevent the hot-blood from having its way—in part at least—but it can poison all the pleasure and it does. Passion says, “Go on. Take what crumbs of happiness fall in your way.” Conscience says, “Do so if you will. Feed your soul on those blood-red husks; but I’ll scourge you well for it afterwards.” (April 8, 1898)

  The landscape of her childhood was capricious—subtle—and yet dramatic. On a clear summer day in Cavendish, the white beaches, sand dunes, red sandstone cliffs, and the sea itself stretched as far as the eye could see. At sunset, subtle shades of purples and mauves, of salmon pinks and saffron yellows, spread in glorious streaks across the sky, drawing the eye up from the darkening green fields, blue sky, and red soil. Sea mists rolled in, bringing an eerie feeling of a timeless world. Shapes softened, appearing reclusive and mysterious, even ghostly. But the grey, chill mists could suddenly dissipate, burned off by the morning sun, and the dazzling colours returned. Maud—whose moods were always responsive to the world around her—revelled in her love for the Island landscape:1

  … where red roads wound like gay satin ribbons in and out among green fields and woods, and where I gazed always on the splendid pageant of the sea—splendid with ever-changing beauty of dawn and noon and midnight, of storm and calm, wind and rain, starlight, moonlight, sunset.… I loved the trees around my old home with a personal love; I loved the little ferny nooks along the lanes of the woods; I loved the red roads climbing up amid the dark firs; I loved the farm fields, each individualized by some peculiarity of shape of fence or tree clump. To me they spoke with a thousand voices, each with a new and fascinating tale to tell.2

  The orderly little rural village of Cavendish, founded in 1790 by Maud Montgomery’s own Scottish Presbyterian ancestors, consisted of forty families. The farms, with neat frame houses and flower-filled gardens, were laid out along the winding roads running parallel to the sea. The fields were separated by rail and rock fences (dikes), but there was a strong sense of community that centred in the churches, the post office (in the Macneill kitchen), the one-room schoolhouse next to the carefully tended cemetery, and the public meeting hall. The sense of community grew from the bloodlines of kinship, the love of the land and sea, their shared religion, and the need to work together to survive.

  Cavendish people were self-sufficient. In the summer they grew crops and orchard fruit, while animals grazed on the gently rolling farmland. Sawmills produced lumber for the frame houses and barns. The men cleared and tilled the land, maintained the dikes and the barns, and fished. Lobsters were so plentiful that only the poorest people ate them. Tradespeople of every variety lived in Cavendish (or nearby Rustico): tanners and shoemakers, sheep-shearers and butchers, blacksmiths, seamstresses. The Jack sisters sheared all the local sheep, while farm women “carded” it, spun it, and used it for clothing.

  Women were essential. They processed foods for pantries and root cellars, such as wines, jams, and cheeses; they raised chickens and sold butter and eggs. They bore and raised large families, tended the sick, and prepared the dead for burial. Children were expected to be useful, picking apples, digging potatoes, tending animals and gardens, running lunches to men at work. Being a “good worker” was a high compliment, and Maud’s Macneill relatives were hard workers. Her Grandfather Macneill had one of the best apple orchards on the Island, as well as a successful fishing business.

  Life in Cavendish was governed by the seasons and the rhythms of nature. When storms blew in, the community battened down the hatches. Winter winds might sweep the glistening snow to the height of wind
ows, but the inhabitants were cozy in their kitchens, sitting beside crackling wood stoves, reading or telling tales. Winter provisions had been stowed in cupboards and cellars. At night, lamps were snuffed and newspapers put away. Prayers or Bible-reading ended the day, and families retired to unheated bedrooms to sleep under feather or quilted comforters in beds pre-warmed by hot irons or rocks. Many farmhouses were protected from the sea gales by a sheltering windbreak of spruce trees.

  Children lived mostly outdoors from April to December. Maud describes fishing in “the brooks, picking gum in the spruce copses, berrying in the stumps and gypsying to the shore.” Following a summer storm, children explored the washed-up treasures on the shoreline. Over the years as the sea eroded the headland, the repetitive lapping of the waves, in spite of all its erosive force, was soothing and reassuring.

  In the long winter afternoons and early evenings, Cavendish children sat with the adults in the warm kitchens. The more fanciful adults might launch into storytelling mode, telling of netherworld creatures that came from the sea or out of night mists, of fairies or tree-sprites that lived on the land, of Scottish heroes fighting against oppression, of clan rivalries and villainous treachery, or of lost loves and sea adventures. These legends told children who they were and what their clan valued. The tales were repeated over and over, with pleasure in the telling. A good storyteller, like Maud’s Grandfather Macneill, could make the familiar stories spellbinding.