The Woolners’ North Rustico farm abutted William S. Macneill’s property through the back woods. At age nineteen, in 1843, Lucy Ann Woolner married Alexander Marquis Macneill, bringing with her a pride in her own family heritage. Lucy was Anglican, but she converted to her husband’s Presbyterianism, as was conventional for wives in that time. She moved as a bride into the home owned by the forceful, aging Speaker Macneill and his wife, Eliza. By the time her in-laws died, in 1870 and 1869 respectively, Lucy Woolner Macneill and her husband had raised their entire family of six children to adulthood.
Alexander and Lucy Macneill set high standards for their children. The eldest son, Leander, took a degree from the University of Edinburgh in Scotland, one of the world’s most prestigious universities, and became a very successful minister. The second son, John Franklin, purchased a large farm adjacent to that of his parents. The third son, Chester, followed a career in law, eventually moving to British Columbia. Daughter Annie married John Campbell of Park Corner, thirteen miles away, one of the good farms on the North Shore. The next daughter was Clara (born in 1853), who became Lucy Maud’s mother after marrying the son of Senator Montgomery. The last Macneill daughter, Emily, a dark beauty, married John Malcolm Montgomery, one of the most prominent and well-liked men of Malpeque, farther west along the North Shore.
Although family events were much discussed in the Macneill household, one unhappy story was generally kept quiet: the tale of the sad, short marriage of Maud’s parents, Clara and Hugh John Montgomery. The Macneills could not have been pleased to learn that their beautiful, talented daughter Clara intended to marry Hugh John Montgomery, despite his family’s status. Their objections would have been political, theological, and personal.17
The Macneills were staunch Liberals, deeply scornful of the Conservatives, on an island where politics were taken very seriously. Senator Donald Montgomery (Hugh John’s father and Maud’s grandfather) was not just a Conservative, he was also said to be a drinking crony of Sir John A. Macdonald, Canada’s first prime minister and a very skilful politician. Sir John A. Macdonald’s detractors claimed that he ruled with one hand on the whisky bottle and the other in the pork barrel. The strict Presbyterian Macneills regarded the freewheeling Montgomerys as “little better than brands yet unplucked from the burning” (June 2, 1931).
And worse, Hugh John was a poor businessman. After several unproductive ventures before his marriage, he opened a store with his brother-in-law, Duncan McIntyre, a dissolute man who probably falsified the account books and cheated him. Scottish entrepreneurs were making fortunes all over North America, but Hugh John Montgomery could not even keep one small country store running successfully. Worse, he was unlikely to inherit much, in spite of being the oldest son: his father had selected a younger, more promising son to inherit the Park Corner property, and in his will left only one hundred dollars to Hugh John, the same token amount that he left to the daughters. (The Senator’s youngest son, Cuthbert, who had been slated to take over his father’s farm, died shortly before his father, so the farm eventually went to the middle son, James Townsend Montgomery.) Although charismatic and from a fine family, where notions of old-world class structure still permeated colonial thought, Hugh John showed doubtful promise as a provider.
Maud grew up feeling the tension between the different families in her heritage—the “passionate Montgomery blood” and the “Puritan Macneill conscience” were kept in precarious balance through the Woolner common sense, self-control, and grit.
CHAPTER 2
Maud’s birth and early years
Hugh John Montgomery was thirty-three when he married twenty-one-year-old Clara Woolner Macneill on March 4, 1874. They moved into a small wooden frame house in the village of Clifton (now called New London) on the North Shore, where Hugh John’s general store was located. Just under nine months later, on November 30, 1874, Clara gave birth to her first and only child, Lucy Maud Montgomery. (First children are often late, and Maud’s early birth was undoubtedly noted.)
Clara died of “galloping consumption” (tuberculosis) on September 14, 1876, when her baby was only twenty-one months old. Hugh John’s store had already failed, reinforcing his bad image in the Macneill eyes. He brought his sick wife back to be cared for, and die, at her parents’ home in Cavendish. The baby “Lucy Maud” remained there, to be raised by her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill, aged fifty-six and fifty-two respectively. Their own six children were grown, and only the youngest, Emily, was still at home. (Emily remained until her marriage in 1881, when Maud was seven.)
At age fifty, reflecting on how her childhood had been blighted by her young mother’s death, Maud Montgomery would write that three simple words had fortified and sustained her throughout a troubled life. She remembered sleeping over with her cousin, Pensie Macneill, in a frigid farmhouse and hearing Pensie’s mother, Mrs. Charles Macneill, creep into their bedroom to make sure the little girls were warm enough. Maud pretended to be asleep, but wasn’t.
“Mrs. Charles” bent over us. “Dear little children,” she said gently and tenderly.
That was all. Mrs. Charles has been for many years in her grave. She was a very illiterate, simple-minded woman from whose lips no pearls of wisdom or jewels of inspiration ever dropped. But I have forgotten most of the wisdom and culture I have listened to; and I shall never forget those three simple words of love. I came from a household where affection was never expressed in words. Stern Grandfather, reserved Grandmother would never have said to me “dear little child” even had they felt it. And I loved such expression—I craved it. I have never forgotten it. (March 1, 1925)
Her grandparents’ sternness was not unusual. The child-rearing advice that came from the Bible was “Spare the rod and spoil the child.” Her grandparents seem to have been more progressive than many parents, however, in that they did not use corporal punishment on Maud. But for all the eloquent words in their culture, these two grandparents did not indulge in the special language of childish endearment that their sensitive little granddaughter longed and needed to hear.
The earliest picture we have of Maud was taken in 1880 when she was about six. Her distinctive features are apparent: the high forehead, the heavy eyelids, and the tiny “Montgomery mouth” and jaw.18 Her abundant hair is brown, her eyes are blue, her body is small, fragile, and waiflike. She is brushed and shined, as befits a child from a prominent Island family. She sits stiffly, where she has been put, in a chair too big for her, her hands crossed in a good-little-girl position. She does not look comfortable, perched on an adult chair, with a photographer arranging her image, but she is obedient and remarkably poised. Because of the long exposure times required in nineteenth-century photography, photographic subjects had to remain motionless for several minutes. So her face registers no emotion—no apparent fear, pleasure, impatience, or excitement. The ability to face the world through a composed, inscrutable mask, while deciding how to respond to a situation, would become her trademark in later life.
Behind the composed face of the 1880 photograph was a complex personality. Maud was a lovable child—clever, articulate, imaginative—but she was not easily managed. Given to extremes, she was excitable and impulsive, overreacting to each joy and sorrow.
Maud’s later recollection of her two imaginary childhood playmates, “Katie Maurice” and “Lucy Gray,” reveals her early imagination. These “friends” lived in a “fairy room” behind a bookcase in the Macneill sitting room. Looking through the two oval glass doors of the bookcase (which was used for storing good china), Maud saw her own reflection twice: the left-hand reflection was “Katie Maurice” and to the right was “Lucy Gray.” She recalled that she would stand in front of Katie and “prattle to her for hours, giving and receiving confidences … at twilight when the fire had been lighted …, and the room and its reflections were a glamour of light and shadow” (March 26, 1905). Lucy Gray was a widow who was “always sad and always had dismal stories of her troubles to r
elate to me,” wrote the adult Maud in her journals. (Maud claimed that she preferred Katie Maurice to Lucy Gray, but to be fair to both she gave them equal amounts of time.)
Maud was precocious and inquisitive. She told the story of attending church one Sunday with her Aunt Emily, and asking, in a whisper, where her dead mother was. Her aunt merely pointed upwards. Maud looked up and saw the trap door in the ceiling, and spent the rest of the sermon wondering why they didn’t just get a ladder, climb up, and retrieve her mother. But she also recalled being scared to ask questions, fearing ridicule if they were too obvious. She learned as a child that it was safest to keep her mental musings to herself.
There were many playmates in the village: children of all ages played together, and Maud was related to most of her Cavendish friends. The happy, active, free outdoor life Maud led in her Cavendish surroundings was an ideal palliative for her overly sensitive and emotional nature. Maud recalled how children could “wade on the rock shore, and bathe on the sand shore; climb the cliffs and poke sea-swallows out of their nests; gather pebbles, dulse, sea-moss, kelp, ‘snails’ and mussels; run races on the sand, dig ‘wells’ in it, build mounds, climb the shining ‘sand-hills’ and slide down in a merry smother of sand, pile up drift wood, collect and unravel into twine the nets of wrecked lobster-traps, make ‘shore pies,’ peep through the spy-glass at the fishing boats.”19 When the children saw distant sailing vessels, they glimpsed the exciting world beyond.
As well as the seashore, Maud also loved the woods around the village. She later named her favourite walk—along a ferny path in a hollow—“Lovers’ Lane.” (Her books have made this location famous.) She walked alongside a bubbling brook in dappled shade, under the cover of tall trees, smelling wildflowers, spicy ferns, and aromatic cedars and pines. Small fish darted in the pools of cool water. Towards the end of Lovers’ Lane, white birches rustled, and the path led onto the property of David and Margaret Macneill, an elderly brother and sister related to “her Macneills” (this couple provided a partial model for Matthew and Marilla in Anne of Green Gables). She grew up feeling a part of this idyllic, safe, and cozy landscape.
There was another way home from David and Margaret Macneill’s home, through the “Haunted Wood,” a forest of dense pine trees. The lower horizontal branches of these trees had died for lack of sunlight as the treetops lofted to the sky, and these spiky branches threatened to catch and impale anyone foolish enough to enter the thick grove. It lay parallel to an open road, the “hill road,” but Maud sometimes walked home through the Haunted Wood just to feel the frisson of fear. It was the stuff that fed her young imagination, and she could work herself into a delightful terror by imagining its storybook dangers. It was easy for her to transplant the fairy folk and fearsome ghosts from the Scottish oral tradition and balladry into the tamer woods of Prince Edward Island.
But while the surroundings of her childhood were idyllic, her home life was not always so. Grandfather Macneill could be a sharp and irascible man. His erratic behaviour (which ranged from general irritability through raging tempers to “arbitrary kindness”) made her feel highly insecure, particularly given his tendency towards barbed sarcasm. But his difficult nature did teach her to be thoughtful, watchful, and analytic—it was necessary to constantly evaluate her grandfather’s moods. For self-protection against his hurtful comments, she learned the skill of instantly “reading” people through facial expressions, body language, and movements, and this fed her writing talent.
Yet, her grandfather was not an unkind man. He had merely grown up in a judgmental family, under the gaze of a powerful, articulate father whose severe words and looks controlled others. Alexander Macneill perpetuated these tactics. Later, Maud wrote:
There were many fine things about Grandfather Macneill. He had a rich poetic mind, a keen intelligence and a refined perception. He was a good conversationalist and a lover of nature … He had no patience with anything that fell short of his ideals, and never seemed to have any conception how harsh and brutal were some of the things he said, especially to children.… (January 7, 1910).
When she was nine, Maud fell sick through the winter with a cough, constant colds, and night sweats. This was alarming given that a lung ailment—consumption—had killed her mother. She recalled her Grandfather Macneill bending over her as she lay sick in bed and saying, “You will be in your grave before spring” (recounted in entry of May 3, 1908). She believed him, and cried inconsolably for many nights. Saying such a thing to a sick child was a measure of his insensitivity, but the comment probably came from genuine grief. Maud would later describe how hurt she was in her childhood by the fact that her grandfather praised her cousins to her, but criticized her.
Consequently I believed for years that I was the only one of his grandchildren that he disliked. Later in life I discovered that he was just the same to them—saying harsh or sarcastic things to them and praising me.… If he had only reversed the process—at least to the extent of saying his kind things to our faces and holding his tongue to others about our faults … he would have exercised a much stronger influence for good over us. (January 7, 1910)
By the time he died, in 1898, when Maud was twenty-three, her grandfather had become crotchety and autocratic, feuding bitterly with his equally irascible son, John Franklin Macneill (who lived next door with his own growing family), and with anyone else who irritated him. Maud knew her grandfather as a force to be watched and feared.
One skill Maud did learn (or inherit) from Grandfather Macneill was the ability to tell stories. In the kitchen of their Cavendish house (where the post office was located) she saw him hold his audience spellbound, and she absorbed the structures and techniques of oral storytelling.
As she grew up, Maud showed more and more symptoms of a fragile nervous temperament. Hypersensitive as a child, she grew moody and brooding in puberty. Her grandmother, Lucy Woolner Macneill, was a steadfast and stable personality. As Maud grew older, this temperamental and precocious granddaughter grew increasingly difficult to handle, particularly when “Maudie” and her volatile grandfather “sparked.”
Maud later complained in her journals that her grandmother was “emotionally narrow,” incapable of understanding Maud’s complex personality: grandmother’s “method of dealing with my nature and temperament was the most unwise she could possibly have adopted” (January 2, 1905). Sensible, self-contained Lucy was determined to teach her granddaughter to conduct herself with discipline, self-control, and dignity, and to consider in advance the consequences of her impulsive tendencies.
In a patriarchal society, men were allowed to be moody, but women had to be more self-effacing. In fact, Lucy succeeded admirably at teaching young Maud to manage her moods. But it was not without pain and resentment on Maud’s part. Maud recalled the death of a beloved kitten, which left her weeping and heartbroken. Her grandmother did not like cats (especially in the house), and knowing the greater sorrow of losing a grown daughter, Grandmother Macneill sniffed unsympathetically that someday Maud would experience real grief, according to Maud’s journals.20
In spite of the tensions in the Macneill household, Maud had some advantages. One rare benefit was having her own bedroom. This was unusual in a time when large families were the norm, bedrooms were few, and houses contained several generations. At times, her grandparents’ own farmhouse had held up to ten people: Alexander, Lucy, their six children, and Alexander’s aged parents. In the winter Maud slept downstairs near the kitchen, where it was warmer, but in the summer she slept upstairs in her own beloved bedroom, overlooking the fields.
And there were other advantages. Most of the other children went barefoot in summer, and wore hand-me-down clothing. But Lucy Macneill had good taste, and dressed Maud well, insisting that she wear proper-fitting clothes and shoes. This engendered in Maud a growing sense of difference from others, which predictably had both positive and negative effects, ones she would later exploit in fiction. Maud’s father did not contribute
to her upkeep—and Maud’s grandfather often reminded her of this—but her grandmother had some money of her own that she used without grudge for Maud.
Lucy Macneill’s home was known as the best place for teachers to board—it was central, with the school just down a lane and across the road. But, more important, Lucy, a skilful cook, kept an excellent table in her tidy home. This was no small matter. Housewives dried, canned, smoked, or salted meats and other foods to preserve them from spoiling; they made cheeses, wines, preserves, and kept root vegetables in a deep cellar; they kept chickens for eggs, and cows provided milk and butter. Meals were made up daily for consumption in the home. Before refrigeration and an understanding of how bacteria multiplied, careless food preparation could make people very ill. Staples like bread could pick up foreign objects when kneaded on a dirty, crowded workspace. Before hot running water and detergents, food was often served on greasy dishes. These hazards made a clean, efficient household like Lucy Macneill’s particularly desirable, and it brought Maud extra attention from teachers. As well, Lucy used the money she earned from keeping boarders to benefit her granddaughter in other ways.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 4