Maud’s diary descriptions of the “young fry’s” junkets are vivid social history. They show the problems of mobility in pre-macadam and pre-automobile days. Rain made the red soil on the Island turn greasy—not just muddy, but as slippery as axle-grease. In the dark, the landmarks vanished. In winter, the snow-covered dirt road itself vanished, and veering off the road at night was an ever-present danger. It was possible to unwittingly stray onto the snow-covered bay where the ice could plunge horse, sleigh, and occupants to an icy death in the sea. In a field, stumps might break sleigh-runners, leaving one stranded in sub-zero temperatures. If a horse broke through deep-crusted snow or ice, it could flounder and get stuck. Uneven terrain could tip the sleigh and its occupants into drifts. Smash-ups could be fatal.
Attending family festivals and several marriages, Maud became better acquainted with the Montgomery clan. It was, overall, a happy visit, which cemented a lifetime of close connections with Aunt Annie Campbell’s clan. On June 8, she went reluctantly home to Cavendish.
Fame was beginning to reach Maud in small ways. In the summer of 1892 she learned that the lieutenant-governor of the Northwest Territories had admired her newspaper piece on Saskatchewan and had asked her Grandfather Montgomery for her photograph and anything else she had written since. If she hoped that this recognition might persuade her well-to-do Grandfather Montgomery to help fund her further education, however, she was wrong.
Nate Lockhart, her old chum (and, for a time, a childhood boyfriend), came home from Acadia University for a brief period, but he remained strangely and disturbingly aloof. Miss Hattie Gordon, beloved teacher and friend—and the only person in Cavendish sympathetic to Maud’s ambitions to become a writer—left Cavendish for Oregon, the home of her parents. Murray Macneill, son of Uncle Leander, came over again for a summer vacation, irritating Maud with his supercilious attitude. More to her liking was a visit from her old chums Wellington and Dave Nelson, not seen since they’d left her grandparents’ home after boarding with the Macneills. Following their visit, she wrote a long entry in her journal, which dipped back to the many happy hours they shared, and concluded: “… one day the boys went away suddenly for good and all. But youth forgets speedily.”38
Behind the scenes, Maud’s grandmother wrote the negligent Hugh John again and asked him to contribute some money towards Maud’s education, but he was little help. At last, Grandmother promised the balance for Maud’s education herself. Maud could now take the entrance exams for Prince of Wales College. She was thrilled.
She had missed much of her year in Prince Albert when she had been kept at home by her stepmother. As a result, she needed another year of preparation. She was once again anchored in the structured life provided by her grandmother’s steady routine and temperament. Maud studied, she read every book in the Cavendish lending library, and she practised her writing continuously (producing poetry, literary sketches, and journal entries). At school, she tangled with a red-haired classmate, Austin Laird, and teasingly wrote a poem about “The Boy with the Auburn Hair.” He sulked; after two months, his dignity still prevented him from addressing Maud directly. This tiff may be the model for Anne and Gilbert’s feud in Anne of Green Gables, a decade later.
Nate Lockhart, home again in June 1893 to visit, informed Maud condescendingly that she “had a fair intellect” and if she could take a college course, she “might attain to some success in the world of letters.” The comment rankled, and years later, when she was world-famous, she noted smugly that Nate had become an “obscure” lawyer on the prairies.
The month of June also brought a letter from Mr. Mustard, her former teacher in Prince Albert. Now a fledgling minister in Ontario, he wrote that he was “seriously thinking of retiring and becoming a sort of college recluse and celibate” (June 8, 1893). She wrote tartly in her journal that it would be no great loss to the world if he did retire from it. But to him she wrote a polite response. Already her public utterances were very different from her private musings. (The newly minted Reverend John Mustard gave up his hopes of marrying Maud, as well as his notions of celibacy: in 1896 he married Catherine Agnes McFarlane of Thamesville, Ontario, beginning a long and happy married life.)
Maud went to Charlottetown in July 1893 to write her week-long entrance exams. Two weeks later, she learned that she had ranked fifth out of two hundred and sixty-four candidates. Students’ grades and test scores were always printed in the newspapers, which made for a competitive climate. How other people’s children performed was a subject of endless gossip, and those who did poorly were publicly embarrassed, as were their families. Maud did not say if either grandfather was impressed, but there was no offer of financial help.
A month later, Maud learned that Grandfather Montgomery had died. She wrote no sad effusions in her journal. It had taken three days for the news to reach her, and she did not attend the funeral, held at Park Corner some thirteen miles away. But the rest of the Island paid homage. The Charlottetown Examiner of August 1, 1893, praised him and summarized his distinguished career.39
Bypassing Hugh John, the Senator left his 275 acres of prime farm land to his youngest son, James, with the provision of a portion of the property to the late Cuthbert’s son, and, in the event that son should die, to Hugh John’s son, Donald Bruce, the colicky baby Maud had helped pacify in Prince Albert. Although Maud was older than Bruce, she was a female grandchild and thus not in line for any inheritance. Her grandfather gave no thought to the talented and ambitious granddaughter who needed his help the most, although he himself had basked in public recognition of her talents.40
Maud knew that the Macneill farm would be willed to her Uncle John F. Macneill, despite the bad blood between father and son. Her own father had a new family to look after, so she would not get much, if anything, from him. She would be on her own financially. Unless she succeeded in her studies at Prince of Wales College and worked as a teacher to maintain herself until she was established as a writer, she faced a bleak future.
On September 4, Maud travelled to Charlottetown to begin her studies. Interestingly, it was her grandmother—not her grandfather—who drove her the distance of twenty-five miles over dirt roads. Almost as soon as she arrived, poetry began welling up in Maud. She submitted a poem, “The Violet’s Spell,” to The Ladies’ World in New York; it was accepted for publication some two weeks later, and she received two subscriptions to the magazine in payment.
Maud arranged lodging at a boarding house at 187 Fitzroy Street. Her roommate there was Mary Campbell of Darlington, PEI, and they would remain lifelong friends. Other roomers included a quarrelsome wife and her oft-drunken husband—again, good copy for the journal. Boiled mutton was served day after day, and the kitchen and food were unsanitary. The landlady, Mrs. MacMillan, skimped on heating oil and the house was often below freezing. But Maud and Mary Campbell and their many friends—most notably her tall, handsome Sutherland cousins—kept busy with fun and work. They enjoyed extracurricular activities, in addition to other diversions: the opera, boating trips, and public lectures (notably the preaching of the evangelist B. Faye Mills, who drew 2,700 people under one roof with a lecture on the importance of people recognizing their emotions). Another friend, Ida, “got converted” at the church revival meeting, but Mary Campbell was restrained from coming out by fear of what Maud herself calls her “sarcastic tongue and unfailing and unsparing raillery” (May 6, 1894).
Maud studied English, French, Greek, Latin, Agriculture, Mathematics, Geometry, Algebra, Trigonometry, Chemistry, Horticulture, Roman History, Hygiene, and School Management—a double load, so that she actually completed two years of college in one. Her favourite teacher, Professor Caven, a “whiskery” and “tobacco-y” old man, praised her writing and gave her public “puffs” about it. (He may have been the eventual model for the likeable Mr. Carpenter in Emily of New Moon.) Conditions for studying in the MacMillan boarding house were trying, and the succession of fun-loving friends was a distraction, but Maud’s
excellent memory served her well for exams, in December and again in May. With a little cramming, she ranked sixth out of one hundred and twenty students in her finals, despite the fact she’d taken on double the usual number of courses. Forty-nine students failed.
Maud did so well that she was selected to speak at graduation. She gave a sensation-making speech on Portia in Shakespeare’s The Merchant of Venice. The Charlottetown papers printed it prominently, giving secondary billing to the class valedictorian and to the adult speakers, including the premier and lieutenant-governor of the province. One newspaper article said that Maud’s splendid address:
was a character study such as might have come from the pen of George Eliot in her teens.… It was not only a subtle literary study; it was a literary gem.… In phrases of almost perfect art, Miss Montgomery praised the beauty of the Portian type of heart and mind and soul. Especially heart; for that was where the humanity lay, was it not? … To say that Miss Montgomery in this analysis did justice to Portia’s intellectual worth may seem a strong statement and undue praise, but it is a simple truth.41
In her writing, Maud was focusing on the role of “heart” and emotions in human behaviour. The tenets of the Scottish Enlightenment of the eighteenth century had travelled with Scottish emigrants, stressing the importance of man’s reason over his other faculties, including his emotions. The Presbyterian intellectual inheritance also emphasized the use of learning to bolster reason and good sense. Maud was a keen observer of human nature, as well as a reader of the English romantic poets, and she could already see how the mind very often chose and justified what the heart had already dictated.
Maud’s Macneill grandparents did not attend her graduation; her achievements during this year did not change her grandfather’s opposition to her obtaining a teaching licence. She passed her License Exams, gaining a First-Class Certificate. When it was time to return to Cavendish, again it was her grandmother who drove in alone to bring her and her trunk back.
Her cousin Jack Sutherland, who had squired (and kissed) her through the later part of the year, simply disappeared when the year was over. She was disappointed. Marriage between cousins was common but Maud herself had seen the bad effects of intermarriage in Cavendish, where there was, as Aunt Mary Lawson put it, “too much of one breed” in many families. She also consoled herself with the knowledge that if she wanted to pursue a writing career, marriage would have to wait. She had seen enough babies in Malpeque and Prince Albert to know how much time they required.
Maud had a difficult time obtaining a teaching position. Many graduates had been able to afford a three-year course at Prince of Wales College, while she had been there for only one year (albeit doing two years of work in that time). Positions were scarce, in spite of the fact that young men often taught only long enough to fund a university education off the Island.
A letter might procure an interview for a teaching job, but the trustees insisted on meeting the candidate before hiring. And this was a problem: Maud’s intransigent grandfather refused even to lend her the horse and buggy to attend interviews. The trains did not go into remote rural areas, so if the male head of the household refused access to the family carriage, the women were effectively grounded. Because she could not get to interviews at better schools, the only school available was at Bideford, a North Shore community of farming and fisher-folk with a local shipbuilding business. The pay in this rural school was poor for the work involved. Maud received thirty dollars for her first term, and approximately forty-five dollars for the next quarters.
On July 19, 1894, at the age of nineteen, Maud began teaching in Bideford. The school was a short walk from the Methodist parsonage, where she arranged to board. The barn-like one-room school was “bleakly situated on a very bare-looking hill.” The previous teacher had been a disaster, and students had quit attending. Maud began the year with twenty children in the class, ranging from six to thirteen years of age. But as her reputation for good teaching spread, the twenty students increased to forty-eight by October, eventually peaking at sixty. One girl began studying for entrance to Prince of Wales College. This gave Maud the extra burden of teaching at a level near her own. Many of the boys now coming to school were bigger than their diminutive teacher. A few were fully grown young men who had quit because they had not been learning under the previous teacher. Maud had to work extra hard so that the students could catch up by the next time the inspectors came around. She complained that the trustees in this district were “skinflints”; she had to use some of her money for school supplies.42
At school she was responsible for starting the stove fire each morning, stoking it all day, and putting it out at night. She also had to keep the classroom clean and neat, ordering and maintaining all supplies, teaching all students in the one room all day long with no relief. Some students came from civilized and orderly homes, but others were from rough backgrounds. She also had mentally challenged students. When she wanted students to learn a dialogue for a concert, she had to spend the evening copying it out by hand.
Maud taught well, used her quick verbal skills and her sense of humour to keep order, and she soon became popular with her students. But it was truly hard work. In the long evenings, preparing classes, grading papers, and making copies of materials in her drafty boarding house, using a candle or kerosene lamp, was a miserably cold business. More than once, Maud arose to find the water in her washbasin and jug frozen. In those days, before bathrooms and running water, the simple matter of keeping one’s person clean was hard work.
The bright spot in Maud’s life was her room in the manse. The manse was a large house, and her landlady, Mrs. Estey, gave her young boarder a large room—drafty, to be sure, but with a commanding view of the ocean bay. Mrs. Estey was a good-natured and lively woman who was happy for the companionship. Maud liked her, and her little daughter, Maudie, very much. The Reverend Mr. Estey was less congenial: he was insensitive and authoritarian, too much like her grandfather. He often asked her to fill in as organist in his church. Given her mediocre musical skills, she disliked playing in public. Furthermore, when she did help, she could not attend her own Presbyterian church at Tyne Valley. Mr. Estey took her for granted and was not obliging in return—for him, a woman’s wishes meant little.
Maud presented a courageous face to the world. After her first visit home in October, she wrote two accounts of her homesickness, one in a letter to Pensie on October 28, 1894, the other in a journal entry of October 27, 1894. The stylistic differences between the two passages again reflect how she adapted her tone to her audience. To Pensie she wrote in a childish way, so that her friend, who lacked Maud’s ease with words, would feel comfortable writing back.
Leaving her home in Cavendish always brought on homesickness, making Maud vulnerable to fits of tears. She fought hard to maintain her psychological equilibrium, helped by an extraordinary ability to focus her mind on the task at hand, whether it was teaching, reading, or writing. In particular, writing helped to manage her moods. As Maud matured, she began to suffer more intensely from mood swings. Every emotion—pain or pleasure— was experienced with a fierce intensity, sometimes resulting in volatile, impulsive behaviour.43 Alternations between emotional lows and highs affected her outlook on the world, sometimes making her see it as clouded and dark, and other times as rosy and bright. All too often, the clouds began to block out the sunshine. During her Bideford years, she began to be more analytical about herself. She also began to suffer more from these mood swings, which would trouble her greatly throughout her later life.
Soon after she arrived, the local Ellerslie paper noted: “Miss M. Montgomery is proving herself a good teacher.” A little later the Bideford notes read: “Our school is doing grand work under the guiding hand of Miss Lucy M. Montgomery, who although only a few weeks in charge, is fast becoming popular with both scholars and ratepayers.” Newspaper puffs talked about her elocution skills when she was called on to perform in nearby communities. Her presence mad
e any gathering an “event.” When a Montgomery relative in a nearby community was installed as a Mason, the newspaper account cited the many recitations and songs, and noted, “Where all did [go] so well, it may seem invidious to particularize, but the recitations given by Miss Montgomery, teacher at Bideford, were so well rendered as to deserve special mention.”
There were constant rounds of social activities: church functions, private parties, Sewing Circle meetings and bazaars, magic-lantern shows, dances, and private “suppers,” where she was invited to recite. She needed transportation to these events, and the young man who drove Maud around most of this year was Lou Dystant. “[H]e does very well for somebody to drive me about” (November 13, 1894), she wrote dismissively. Lou, skimming over the brilliant snow, warmly wrapped, with cutter and horse, hoped for romance with Maud, not just friendship. Maud had no interest in marriage to a commonplace young man, and she tried to keep these friendships platonic. Her lively personality brought her unsuitable suitors who were dismissed.
During her winter at Bideford, she made trips across the frozen bay to Malpeque to visit her Aunt Emily and Uncle John Montgomery. Maud was very fond of her uncle for his warmth, kindness, and soft-spoken manner—and especially for his sense of humour, a welcome relief after her Grandfather Macneill’s sharp and hurtful wit. However, this beloved uncle, stricken suddenly, in the prime of life with a brain tumour, died in February 1895. When the news was telephoned (the earliest mention of a telephone in Maud’s journals) she was profoundly saddened. One newspaper stated that there were over one hundred sleighs in the funeral procession. Eulogies praised her uncle, John Malcolm Montgomery, who had been the local representative in the provincial legislature for four years, as an exceptional man: “He would not stoop to promote party purposes when he felt his party was in the wrong.” This was fine praise in the politicized atmosphere of Prince Edward Island. Maud nowhere comments on the tragedy of his death to her Aunt Emily, who at thirty-nine, after only thirteen years of marriage, was widowed with five children to raise by herself.
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