Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  An event farther away, but also with great impact, was the engagement of Laura Pritchard, her friend from Prince Albert. Other lives were moving ahead; Maud was unwilling at this point in her life to follow Laura’s course of action, marrying a kindly but undistinguished and dull man because he was the best available.

  In early 1895, the Toronto Ladies’ Journal accepted her poem “On the Gulf Shore” and sent her a subscription. Elated, she redoubled her efforts at writing. By this time she thought she might achieve modest success by writing out of her own experience, but she hardly expected to rival great female English writers like George Eliot or Charlotte Brontë. Although the sharp Macneill wit and the determined Woolner grit might have been unpleasant to live with in aging grandparents, those qualities would become increasingly useful to her.

  After a whirlwind year, Maud had saved almost $100 from her salary of $180, in spite of paying board (unlike many other young teachers who managed to teach in their own home districts and thus save extra money). But her $100 was not enough to finance a year at university. She would need to teach for a second year. She thought bitterly of Murray Macneill, younger than she and also very gifted, whose father happily funded all his education costs not covered by scholarships (and ministers’ sons had much support). Perhaps her grandmother was thinking about the same inequities. In the summer of 1895, she offered to add $80 to Maud’s $100. Grandmother’s contribution was a considerable outlay for a seventy-one-year-old woman from a farm community where cash was scarce, but her grandmother had some of her own money from taking in boarders. She would help her granddaughter because Hugh John either would or could not.

  Nothing in Lucy Macneill’s experience would have led her to believe that throwing scarce dollars into further education for a young woman was a good investment. Yet, despite her husband’s disapproval, she asserted herself this way. Strangely, Maud does no more than mention her grandmother’s contribution in her journal. She merely complains that her grandmother did not understand why she wanted university training so badly.

  On Maud’s last day at the Bideford school, the traditional public exam went off very well; following the well-attended final program, the pupils presented their “Dear and Respected Teacher” with an address and a little silver and celluloid jewel box. All the girls cried. Maud returned to Cavendish until it was time to depart for Dalhousie University. On September 16, 1895, it was her grandmother who again drove Maud across the Island to catch the ferry to Pictou Harbour, Nova Scotia.

  CHAPTER 4

  Climbing the Alpine Path

  As her aging grandmother returned to Cavendish alone, twenty-year-old Maud spent a merry last evening in Charlottetown, entertaining three young men: Lou Dystant, from Bideford; Norman Campbell, brother of her former roommate, Mary; and John (Jack) Sutherland, cousin and sometime escort from college days. The next morning Maud took the boat for her new adventure at the university. Her journal entry for this year begins in big, bold caps: “HALIFAX SEPT. 17, 1895.”

  Dalhousie University was located in a beautiful old city, founded in 1749. Halifax, Nova Scotia, boasted one of the largest harbours in the world, with both commercial and cultural connections to the British Isles, Europe, the West Indies and the United States. Stately buildings recalled its 150-year history, and its frequent fogs gave it the otherworldly mystery that had charmed Maud in Cavendish.

  Dalhousie, modelled on the University of Edinburgh, was a progressive school that advertised itself with pictures captioned, “Dalhousie College, Halifax, The Doors of Which Are Wide Open to Women.” The debate over women and higher education continued to rage in the United States and Canada, but, in spite of public prejudice, Dalhousie was taking a firm stand. The Maritimes in general had high female literacy: in the 1891 census, Prince Edward Island had a 91 percent literacy rate for young women under nineteen, with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick at 90 and 85 percent respectively.44

  Some young women went to college to prepare themselves to become cultured wives of successful men. Maud’s friend Edith England of Bideford had enrolled at Sackville College (later Mount Allison University) to study music and painting. Maud wrote condescendingly about Edith: “She has been a petted only child, surrounded by luxury all her life” (September 25, 1895). Edith, with no real aspirations, was being given an education, with no effort to earn it; Maud had worked exceedingly hard for every inch of advancement. Her goals were far more than marriage: she wanted to write “a woman’s humble name” in the halls of fame.

  Maud moved into the dormitory of Halifax Ladies’ College, which offered young women a solid training course in secretarial and domestic arts. There the Ladies’ College “girls” and the Dalhousie women students were well chaperoned by imposing women who brooked no nonsense. Maud wrote about the principal: “Nature must have meant Miss Ker for a man and got the labels mixed … She is guiltless of corsets and her dress is in strict conformity with the rules of hygiene and ugliness. Her iron-gray hair is always worn in a lopsided coronet and she possesses a decided moustache. She is a ‘Girton’ product and no doubt very clever. But she has not one ounce of charm or magnetism” (December 24, 1895).45 Another matron, Miss Claxton, Maud describes as “a fussy, nervous little old maid, with a hooked nose, an inquisitive expression and a thin rattling little laugh that sets my nerves on edge.”

  Young women like Maud saw few appealing female models in the world of educated women. The examples of Miss Ker and Miss Claxton seemed to support the widely held scientific belief that studying made women either “mannish” or pathetic old maids. Still, Maud was not dissuaded from her desire for education.

  Ten days after arriving in Halifax, Maud took a biography of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) out of the library. Two biographies of Eliot had come out in the previous decade: Mathilde Blind’s in 1883 and J. W. Cross’s in 1885. The first was a biography by a leading British feminist writer, and had been reprinted in numerous editions. Many of the words, phrases, and patterns in the Mathilde Blind book appear later in Maud’s journals. Blind describes qualities in Eliot that Maud later finds in herself.

  Blind’s biography begins with an introduction that gives straightforward advice to women authors, presumably inexperienced young ones. Blind quotes George Eliot as saying that the women of France have had an unusually vital influence on the development of literature: “For in France alone the mind of woman has passed, like an electric current, through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred.” Frenchwomen had “the courage of their sex”:

  They thought and felt as women, and when they wrote, their books became the fullest expression of their womanhood. By being true to themselves, by only seeking inspiration from their own life-experiences, instead of servilely copying that of men, their letters and memoirs, their novels and pictures, have a distinct, nay unique, value for the student of art and literature. Englishwomen, on the other hand, have not allowed free play to the peculiarly feminine element, preferring to mould their intellectual products on the masculine pattern, creating absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire.46

  Blind uses the term “The Alpine Path” to describe the difficult course that women writers must follow if they are to achieve, like George Eliot, their highest potential. Years later “L. M. Montgomery” would use the phrase as title for an autobiographical essay, attributing the term “The Alpine Path” to a poem entitled “The Fringed Gentian,” which she found in Godey’s Ladies’ Book, pasted in her scrapbook, and later copied into her journals on several occasions (October 21, 1916; January 5, 1917; November 22, 1926). The poem concludes:

  Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep

  How I may upward climb

  The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep

  That leads to heights sublime,

  How I may reach the far-off goal

  Of true and honoured fame

  And write upon its shining scroll

  A woman
’s humble name.

  Blind’s 1883 biography may have been the source for the phrase “The Alpine Path,” both for Maud and the poem’s author. The metaphor of a difficult journey in the quest for success recurs in her writing; for example, “Emily of New Moon” also talks about “the alpine path.”

  For more formal education, Maud enrolled in Latin, French, German, Roman History, and both first- and second-year English at Dalhousie, and for Shorthand at the Halifax Ladies’ College. Of her professors, Dr. Archibald MacMechan was the most influential. An encouraging and concerned teacher, he had been trained at the University of Toronto and at Johns Hopkins University. He was a scholar with wide abilities: he published poetry, essays, scholarly editions, and critical studies. He was a pioneer in the field of Canadian Literature, and his Head-Waters of Canadian Literature (1924) remains an important milestone in the development of Canadian criticism. He argued that Canada should move beyond the colonial mould and develop its own “native literature.”

  He recognized Maud’s exceptional talent, and his praise encouraged her immensely. He wrote that her first writing assignment on the prescribed subject “My Autobiography” was “particularly good and interesting.” Her second essay, titled “My Earliest Recollection,” recalled the memory of her mother lying in her coffin. Maud knew that this essay was first-rate, and she incorporated it into her journals in April 1898. MacMechan’s next assignment took her to the Halifax Public Gardens to prepare a descriptive landscape piece: rendering nature was already Maud’s forte, given her wide reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape word-painting. In January, at the end of the semester, she got a “first” in English. Later, in 1924, after his pupil was world-famous, MacMechan praised her writing in his Head-Waters of Canadian Literature as a good example of Canadian “regionalism.”

  Maud looked forward to Christmas and the return to Cavendish, with her tales of university life. Her journal records sore disappointment: “My fare would not cost any more than my board here but grandma wrote that she thought I had better not go home for fear the roads might be bad for getting to the station etc.” Maud added, “I know what that means. Grandfather doesn’t want to be bothered meeting me or taking me back” (December 23, 1895). She was perhaps petulant: her seventy-five-year-old grandfather might have had legitimate worries about travel by horse and sleigh in the dead of winter, when huge drifts could obscure the roads, even if he only had to drive to the nearest railroad station.

  Maud’s sketches of Miss Ker and Miss Claxton were written during this holiday, and her account of a small confrontation with Miss Claxton is vintage Montgomery, dramatizing her ability to deliver arch or sarcastic comments with impeccable and saccharine politeness:

  I went into the teachers’ parlour and seeing Miss Whiteside and Miss Tilsley there alone, as I supposed, I said, “Isn’t this a lovely morning, girls?” Up popped Miss Claxton from a low chair where she had been squatted unseen. “You should not call us girls,” she piped frigidly. “It is not respectful.” “Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Claxton,” I said politely. “I did not see you there. Of course I would never refer to you as a girl.” Miss Claxton liked it very little, for she does not relish an allusion to her age anymore than ordinary people, but she had to take it, for my apology was perfectly courteous in tone and matter and she had no excuse for resenting anything in it. (December 24, 1895)

  Christmas, which Maud had expected to be very dull, was a “rather pleasant one” after all—pleasant for Maud, who was practising her writing.

  Everything at Dalhousie excited her: lectures, repartee, operatic productions, walks, lively novels, academic competitions (in which she excelled). It all brought a surge of physical and mental activity. She pasted into her scrapbook a picture of a handsome, craggy stag, expressing sexual energy in a subtle way. She giggled with the girls, flirted with the boys, attended many parties, prepared “papers” for club meetings, “buckled to” her studies with “all due grit,” and gave music lessons to make money. And, of course, she wrote.

  But this manic upswing began to manifest itself in sleeplessness, a problem that would recur throughout her life. When Maud awoke, unable to sleep, she wrote. The harvest from her feverish brain was astonishing. She sent poems and stories away to magazines and entered whatever local contests she could find.

  February and March 1896 brought success: three pieces were accepted, earning her a total of twenty-two dollars (for comparison, in 1889–90, Dalhousie had charged students six dollars tuition for each course they took in a year). First was a five-dollar prize for best entry in a contest sponsored by the Halifax Evening Mail: a response to the question “Which has the more patience under the ordinary cares and trials of life—man or woman?” She made two submissions to the contest. Both entries were about gender, but from different angles. The first is a succinct parable about a Guardian Angel (male) who wheedles a gift for women from the Benign Giver (also male): the gift is not justice, but instead a “long-suffering, all-forgiving divine patience” to deal with men. Serious, but with a gently sarcastic undertone, this witty allegory did not answer the contest’s question. Maud submitted another entry under the name “Belinda Bluegrass”: a witty, lighthearted poem on male and female varieties of patience. It makes the same point as her first entry: women are socialized to be patient with men. The “Belinda Bluegrass” poem won first prize and the parable won honourable mention for literary merit.

  In her journal, Maud writes that she had “small interest” in the contest until a friend prodded her to enter—the standard female disclaimer of the era, implying that a “proper” woman is so modest that she would move into the public domain only after someone else’s urging. But the disclaimer is hardly convincing, given that she woke up in the night with the second poem almost formulated in her brain—female modesty notwithstanding, the contest was clearly very much on her mind, and she wanted to win.

  Five days later, Golden Days, a magazine from Philadelphia, sent her five dollars for a short story called “Our Charivari.” In another three weeks, another well-known magazine, The Youth’s Companion, accepted her poem “The Fisher Lassies”—for twelve dollars! A year’s tuition at the Prince of Wales College had been seven dollars in 1893, and she had made twenty-two dollars from her writing in one month in 1896. Flush with cash and ambition, she bought elegant bound copies of Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, and Byron, as a self-reward for having arrived. She particularly enjoyed Whittier and Longfellow, committing many of their poems to memory, and underlining the books heavily, particularly the poems about nature.47

  She loved seeing her name in print. Continued success brought another three-dollar cheque in April from Golden Days for her poem “Apple Picking Time.” She must have chuckled over the story of her success reaching the ears of the “grim cats” in Halifax Ladies’ College, her arrogant cousin Murray Macneill, who was also at Dalhousie, and eventually all of the village of Cavendish. Pique and pride must have squeezed her grandfather in equal measure. There was no more eloquent statement to a parsimonious Scotsman than that made by money.

  Maud was ready to take on wider challenges. Among her many pieces for the Dalhousie college paper was a remarkably mature article entitled “A Girl’s Place at Dalhousie College.”48 This was picked up by the Halifax Herald for a special supplement on Dalhousie. It sets forth all the traditional arguments about why women should not be educated, and refutes them. After giving examples of women’s success at Dalhousie and elsewhere, she argues that the real worth of an education is not to prepare a woman for a specialized career, but to broaden her mind and increase her powers of observation.

  The year at Dalhousie was invaluable in building her confidence: was she (as the Charlottetown Examiner had called her) a “young George Eliot”? The comparison was heady. By April 1896, when she finished her college year, having published in real, paying magazines and having placed first in her class in English, she knew the year had been worth the effort.

&nbs
p; There are interesting points of comparison between Maud’s career and that of her first cousin, Murray Macneill, son of her mother’s brother, Leander. Born in January 1877, Murray was two years younger, but he would be graduating from Dalhousie with his B.A. that spring; unlike Maud, he had lost no time having to work to finance his education. A brilliant polymath, he had started studying at Dalhousie in fall 1892, at age fifteen, and completed the course with little effort. Maud reflected bitterly that Murray would go on for graduate training while she would have to go back to exhausting country school teaching after her single year of freedom.

  Everyone on campus knew Murray. Maud was resentful that he ignored her, his poor country cousin. In her scrapbook Maud pasted a newspaper clipping: “Murray McNeill, son of the Rev. L. C. McNeill, Saint John, is one of our best students. He toiled not, neither did he spin, but First Classes always came his way.” The Convocation Roster for 1896 shows that twenty-eight students received B.A.s (five of them women), and Murray, nineteen years old, won the top graduation prize. At no place in her journals does Maud note that Murray won the William Young Gold Medal when he graduated from Dalhousie, in 1896. The second-best award was the Avery Prize, and it went to another student.

  Years later, when Maud wrote Anne of Green Gables, she calls the most prestigious prize “the Avery Scholarship,” immortalizing the name of Dalhousie’s Avery Prize, the award that Murray did not win. In 1908 she sent Murray a copy of Anne after it became a best-seller. He then held the “Chair of Mathematics” at Dalhousie. What did he think when he read the description of the “fat, funny, little upcountry boy with a Bumpy forehead and a patched coat” who had won the “mathematics prize”? Murray’s specialty had been mathematics. He had a protruding forehead (a distinctive Macneill forehead like his father’s) that could easily have been called “bumpy” by an unkind satirist. And from the perspective of sophisticated Halifax, New Brunswick was certainly “upcountry.” But it is certain that Murray never wore a patched coat. Murray, a sophisticated reader of literature (but without Maud’s talent for writing it), must have sniffed over this gratuitous piece of mischief on Maud’s part.