The concept of time in Maud’s era was derived from religion. “Human time” was a mere bubble in “eternal time.” Maud describes a baby’s birth in one of her novels by saying it “made a safe landing on the shores of time.” Towards the end of her own life, she would speak of “when time gets through with me.” Eternal time was God’s time, the infinity out of which humans were born. In human time, they strutted about for a period and then died. Every sermon reminded the people of Cavendish of eternal time, and the short duration of human lives in it. When time finished with them, they took their restful spots in the centrally located graveyard: the boundaries of time between the sleepers were then erased. They had merely slipped behind the “veil” into a spiritual realm.
Maud’s young mother, who had died in 1876 at age twenty-three, lay in this graveyard. Close by was the tombstone of Maud’s great-grandmother, who died in 1869, as well as her great-great-grandmother, who died in 1849. Little Maud grew up with a sense of the proximity of maternal lineage and the other graveyard inhabitants. They lived on through stories told about them. Her own comments, standing at her father’s grave, recounted on October 14, 1930, reflect this: “There separated from me by a few feet of earth was what was left of father—of the outward man I knew. I might call to him but he would not answer. Yet I felt so tenderly, preciously, dreadfully near to him. As if, under that sod, his great tired beautiful blue eyes had opened and were looking at me.”
When little Maud saw her mother’s tombstone from the schoolyard, she felt some consolation in her mother’s presence, but her mother represented less a helpful presence than a terrible loss. When Maud clashed with her grandparents, her mind turned to her mother, close by, but buried and mute, unable to help. It is no surprise, then, that this gifted and well-cared-for granddaughter of prominent Cavendish citizens would eventually create classic fictions about little children orphaned in childhood.
The impulse to shape narratives about herself and her environment provided enormous comfort to this sensitive and needy child. It gave her a sense of having some control over her own environment and destiny.
Maud’s reading during the golden age of print
The Industrial Revolution, the rise of public education and a self-improving middle class, inventions in printing and bookmaking, the inception of public libraries, and the development of rail and shipping systems of distribution—all these factors had created a hugely expanding reading public by the 1890s. In this golden age of print, writers scrambled to provide a range of material for weekly serials and monthly magazines, in addition to poems and short stories for use as “filler” in newspapers. Novels were also needed for the new lending libraries.
Young Maud was steadily absorbing from her reading the literary patterns that she would later blend with the oral traditions of her community. The Royal Readers were full of stories and poems, introducing children to a range of canonical English, Scottish, and American writers, as well as a few new Canadian ones. Maud had access to her grandmother’s monthly Godey’s Lady’s Book, a potpourri of reading material ranging from quality fiction to discussions of household management and even to fashionable clothing patterns (the same patterns used by local dressmakers from Cavendish to British Columbia, and Boston to San Francisco). Maud recalled examining the fashion plates with dreamy fascination.
When her Uncle Leander, now a minister in Saint John, New Brunswick, came home, he brought current reading material with him, some of it fiction. The people in Cavendish also had access to the new and important books from Great Britain and the United States through their local public lending library, which had been established in the 1850s.
Other reading material available to Maud was more “child-friendly”: Little Katey and Jolly Jim, Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women, and the “Pansy” books by Isabella Macdonald Alden. The Nelson boys let her read their copy of Hans Christian Andersen’s selected tales (which one of the boys had won as a prize while boarding at the Macneills). She also had occasional access to a children’s magazine called Wide Awake that introduced major British, American, and Canadian writers.
The Macneills also possessed two weightier volumes, entitled “Histories of the World,” which Maud read several times: these started with the story of the Garden of Eden, progressed through the “Glory that was Greece and the Grandeur that was Rome,” and ended with Queen Victoria’s reign, presented as the pinnacle of civilized life on the planet. Maud also loved a missionary book about the Pacific Islands, with its pictures of “cannibal chiefs with their extraordinary hair arrangements” (January 7, 1910). Books such as these were imbued with the belief that British colonization was the only way to civilize the world, and those who were not white Christians were primitive, inferior, and “heathen.” Some of the better-resourced churches on Prince Edward Island sent missionaries out to foreign countries, and one of the few acceptable ways for a woman to find adventure and travel was to become a missionary, or the wife of one. (Two of Maud’s Aunt Emily Montgomery’s female relatives went into foreign missionary service.)
Other kinds of literature were found in the reasonably well-stocked Macneill library as well, including Scottish classics such as Robert Burns’s poetry and Sir Walter Scott’s novels—Maud read Scott’s novels over and over as she was growing up, and there are many references to them in her own writing. Like her own family stories, these encouraged the romanticizing of her Scottish heritage.29
Another book of great interest to Maud was John Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress (1678), with its beautifully engraved nineteenth-century illustrations. She internalized its message that human life was a temporary sojourn in a sinful vale of tears. The first part of this allegory (the story was originally written for adults, but often read by children) followed the protagonist, Christian, as he bravely made his way through a landscape at once symbolic and dangerous, on his route to Heaven. The second part depicted his weak wife, Christiana, making the same journey. Maud had reservations: “I never liked Christiana’s adventures half so well as Christian’s … she had not half the fascination of that solitary intrepid figure who faced all alone the shadows of the dark valley and the encounter with [the monster] ‘Apollyon.’ “(January 7, 1910, appearing again in Emily of New Moon). The overt message in the contrast between the journeys of Christian and Christiana is that women can follow the lead of a strong man who has forged ahead, but females lack the courage, brainpower, and stamina to persevere on their own. These stories reinforced the patriarchal stories that Maud would have been familiar with from the Bible, teaching that women, weaker than men, should “obey” their husbands, and fixing the female place in life as subordinate.
There was other religious reading material as well, such as the best-selling sermons of the famous American preacher Dr. DeWitt Talmadge; Maud liked these for their “vivid word-painting and dramatic climaxes” (January 7, 1910). She also read The Memoirs of Anzonetta Peters, a book written by a minister that claimed to be the autobiography of a very devout dyig child. Anzonetta records her righteous sayings before being gathered to the bosom of God in a dramatic and sentimental death. When Maud became seriously ill with respiratory problems as a small child, she tried to imitate Anzonetta, and she wrote in her diary that she wished she were “in heaven now, with mother and George Whitefield and Anzonetta B. Peters.” She comments later, “I did not really wish it … but I believed that I ought to wish it and so I tried to” (January 7, 1910). Maud’s penchant for pathos and sentimentality may have had some origin in these popular religious texts.
One idea that Maud absorbed from her devotional reading and religious training was that pleasure and fun were inherently sinful. Later she recalled how, as an impressionable and precocious young child, she made herself drink from a cup she hated just because it seemed sinful to drink from one she liked. It is no surprise that what she called “spiritual struggles” began to preoccupy her.
Maud dared not raise religious questions with her grandparents, who would have be
en angered by childish scrutiny of standard doctrine. Sadly, they denied her the confidence that comes to a child who is listened to, no matter how puerile and quaint its questions (though Maud told herself that if her mother had been alive, she would have listened). Instead she was left to brood darkly, morbidly affected by the terrifying sermons she had heard and by her religious reading.
The sounds of battle
By age twelve, Maud was already beginning to manifest the kind of drive and complexity that made her into anything but an ordinary person. A photograph of Maud in 1886 shows her standing on the threshold of puberty. She’s becoming as judgmental as her grandfather, and she knows from him how to put withering force behind a disdainful or appraising look. She’s still young and lovable, but she is wired with energy and possibility. She knows she is the smartest girl in the school. This photograph shows Maud with the most genuine self-assurance she will ever know. Here she appears to feel her strength much more than her vulnerability. She looks confident that she is on the path to an exciting destiny.
When this picture was taken, Maud had not yet learned that being a female in the nineteenth century was to be harnessed to the agendas of others— as wife, mother, and housekeeper, and as caretaker of the elderly. When she grew up, Maud would add several additional obligations to this list: serving her publisher and public as a producer of books, her community as a minister’s wife, and a large extended group of relatives and others as a financial resource or support. But in this photograph, she is still her own confident person.
The age of twelve is often seen as a watershed time for young girls. They are developmentally ahead of boys, but about to discover the handicap of their gender. As young girls grew up in Maud’s time, they discovered that their “scope for imagination” receded. Women were expected to hitch their wagon to their husbands’ stars and live their lives vicariously through husband and children. Those not able to find a husband would be pitied and despised. Girls in Prince Edward Island were lucky in that they were ensured a basic grade-eight education equal to a young man’s, but their future, nevertheless, was marriage.
The late nineteenth century had seen much debate about the role of education in women’s lives. If young women attended Prince of Wales College to become teachers, and many did, they were expected to resign their positions as soon as they married. Acadia and Dalhousie Universities in Nova Scotia, and Mount Allison in New Brunswick, had shown leadership in admitting and graduating women in Canada, and a very small number of gifted and determined women were entering professions. Nevertheless, a general conviction persisted in Prince Edward Island and elsewhere that women had less brain capacity than men, and that giving women too much education was bad for both their mental and physical health.
The belief that it was in a woman’s interests to be denied higher education was founded on the best scientific knowledge of the era. In 1873, the year before Maud’s birth, Dr. Edward H. Clarke’s book Sex in Education, or a Fair Chance for Girls argued that women’s bodies were a battleground in which two organs—the brain and the ovaries—struggled for dominance. Higher education, he said, would cause the ovaries to atrophy, with a potential result being the end of the human race. His book went through seventeen editions, and the magazines and newspapers of the era reflected these beliefs.
Advertisements and essays in Charlottetown papers, as well as books imported from cultural centres like Edinburgh, Boston, and London, constantly referred to women as the “weaker sex.” Patent medications frequently advertised themselves for women who had weakened themselves through education and learning. Women were cautioned in the publications about the dangers of seeking to overdevelop their minds lest the strain damage them. “Let wives and mothers and sisters … discover the precise arts that charm most easily the masculine mind,” insisted one typical article in the Charlottetown Examiner, “and practice them, let them make their homes bright and cheerful, their conversations enticing, and not too intellectual” (February 4, 1882).
Although Maud was growing up in a society that had low intellectual expectations of women, she had already gained the same local education as the young men around her. Bright and ambitious, she fumed when her male cousins patronized her because she was a girl. And her frustrations over the inequity would grow: if any of them wanted a university education and showed aptitude, it would be granted to them—but not to her. And yet she could also see that she had far more ability than most of her male cousins.
Her Uncle John F. Macneill’s sons, Prescott and Frank, grew up hearing their autocratic father patronize his gentle wife, and learned disrespect for females as a result. They were younger than Maud, but felt superior to her. Little surprise that Maud did not like either of them: “Prescott was meanness and pettiness incarnate … Frank, the second son, was a good-looking, empty-headed, conceited youth” (January 12, 1912). Her Uncle Leander’s sons, closer to her age, were only slightly better in her view. The summer of 1887 was one of many in which Uncle Leander’s family came for a long vacation in the “old” home. Maud’s grandmother, who adored Leander (her first-born son), expected Maud to wait on his family as willingly as she herself did. Her sons looked down on Maud as the “poor country cousin” who should tend to the extra work when they visited. Maud liked her cousin Fred fairly well, but she loathed Murray, his older brother, who was undeniably brilliant—and fully aware of his intellectual gifts. “Unless a girl bowed down and worshiped him he had no use for her,” Maud wrote after she was famous (January 7, 1910). Gender relations soured what might otherwise have been a happy time for her.
When Maud clashed with her cousins, her uncles, or her grandparents, she thought of the parents who might have defended her. She was sure that they would have valued her intellectual gifts, even if she was a girl.
The winter that she turned twelve, her father sent the exciting news from the west that he was going to wed again. When he married a younger woman named Mary Ann McRae in 1887, Maud began to fantasize about going to live with her father and her “new” mother. Out came pen and paper, and loving letters flowed westward, with pressed flowers enclosed.
In 1887, a big change was afoot in Cavendish. School trustees hired the first female schoolteacher. Women teachers were paid less, and the local trustees opted for economy—and perhaps for adventure—in hiring a woman. The “lady-teacher,” Miss Izzie Robinson, faced a daunting responsibility: running different levels of classes with some fifty pupils, ranging from little girls in pinafores to young men almost as old as she was, and much bigger.
Miss Robinson asked to board at Maud’s grandparents’ house, as other teachers before her had done. This time Lucy Macneill balked. Perhaps, like many older women, she was prejudiced against female teachers. Perhaps she simply wanted respite from the extra work created by boarders. More likely, she took the measure of Izzie’s personality and saw that this female teacher’s pushy manner would irritate her cranky husband. But Izzie argued her case strongly and moved into the Macneill household.
Once there, Izzie soon became the target of Alexander Macneill’s sarcastic barbs (which he called “bars”). Maud was not yet thirteen, but the escalating friction between Grandfather and Izzie stayed with her for life. This was to be Maud’s first opportunity to observe male prejudice against women escalating into a major clash. The throwing of barbs became cruel and aggressive, especially when used by a highly articulate and intelligent older man against an inexperienced young woman. Few young female teachers, feeling insecure in their first teaching position, would have been able to summon up humour when they were the toad under Alexander Macneill’s well-sharpened verbal harrow.
At first Maud expected the praise from Izzie Robinson that she had become accustomed to receiving from other teachers. She recited her compositions to Miss Robinson and was disappointed by the tepid response. She entered the Montreal Witness school composition, where she won honourable mention for a story about Cape Le Force, one of her grandfather’s favourite tales. Miss Robins
on had not promoted this competition much in the school, and she may have resented Maud’s success. When the feud with Maud’s grandfather intensified, the nettled Miss Robinson resorted to the tactic of taking out her frustrations on vulnerable young Maud, humbling her in public and mocking her with a “venomous sneer” (January 7, 1910). Her grandfather’s self-indulgent harassment of Miss Robinson cost Maud much of a year’s schooling and resulted in her being wounded in subtle but deep ways.
When the relationship between Izzie and Maud grew too damaging, her grandparents withdrew her from school, arranging for her to stay with her Aunt Emily and Uncle John Montgomery in Malpeque. Maud adored her Uncle John, her father’s cousin, probably seeing in him an alternate father-figure. He was a school trustee and member of Parliament, and he had the Montgomery jollity that could turn any gathering into a festive occasion. Aunt Emily, a busy mother and housewife, now expecting another baby, likely agreed to take Maud because she needed some help.
Over-sensitive Maud was already rubbed raw by her grandfather and Izzie Robinson. She had resented the way Leander’s sons treated her as a servant, and she had no intention of becoming her Aunt Emily’s drudge, either. Emily had been raised in Alexander Macneill’s judgmental household where angry, snappish words were a form of control. Predictably, Maud clashed with yet another adult who used sarcasm as a putdown. Aunt Emily found Maud stubborn, balky, and moody—a volatile child with emotional needs she could not meet. In the end, Maud remained in Malpeque for only three months, March until May, 1888. The outcome of this unhappy visit was that Maud disliked her Aunt Emily for the rest of her life, and vice versa. Maud’s extended family of intense and outspoken people would provide fertile ground for future fiction.30
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