Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Murray and Maud were not kindred spirits. Maud kept hearing of Murray’s amazing progress in the academic world. Scholarships pursued Murray and hung themselves around his neck: following graduation from Dalhousie, he went to Cornell (which offered him a slightly better scholarship than had Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Clark). Math came to him so easily that he spent most of his time reading history and politics, or attending art galleries and cultural events, though he professed he could never learn to like poetry. To fill out his education, the young Murray made grand tours of Europe and Britain. To make matters worse, his achievements appeared to be largely effortless: he complained that math offered no challenge and was boring. Maud knew she was every bit as clever as Murray in her own field and that, had she been a boy, her proud clan would have seen that she got the best education.49

  Maud was bitter that after a single year in university, where she had been happy, admired, and immensely productive, she had to go back to the hard, dreary, underpaid, and undervalued work of country school teaching. Still, her whole orientation in life was to make the best of whatever circumstances occurred. Like grandmother’s Woolner family, she sized up the situation, considered her options, and laid careful plans to make her name in literature.

  Returning to Cavendish for the summer of 1896 was a letdown, but Maud revelled in the sanctuary of her little upstairs room in the old home, aloof from the household below. Another pleasure was “Lovers’ Lane,” the heavily shaded and fragrant path beside the freshwater stream that tumbled along year after year. The sound of the water calmed her frayed nerves. Breezes swept in off the ocean and over the fields, buzzing and humming insects added variation, and frogs made their strange music. The moist air and the smell of balsam soothed her. Her rambles were full of visual beauty, perfumed and spicy fragrances, a caressing atmosphere, and comforting sounds.

  “Lovers’ Lane” had special associations for Maud, backing on the school area where she had played as a child. Children had fished, cooled their milk in the brook, plotted, laughed, and shared secrets there for years. When an older Maud wanted a “passport back to fairyland,” she only had to walk through “Lovers’ Lane” to feel herself a renewed spirit. Like the Sea-Kingdom of Undine, the lane fed Maud’s imagination with wild, passionate, and often undirected images of longing. It also soothed her.

  But if “Lovers’ Lane” stayed the same, the rest of her world was changing. Laura Pritchard had married in Prince Albert. Maud felt the call of romance and sexual desire in many of her moods. Yet, she clung tremulously to the stability of the repressed lifestyle she knew, with her grandparents’ regularity of habits and the community’s resistance to change. In her dreams, she craved escape—romance, love, fame. Tensions were building. In a picture of Maud with her Uncle John’s children and Fanny Wise (the pretty young teacher boarding with the John F. Macneill family) Maud looks cross and unhappy; so do Uncle John’s children. Only Fannie Wise looks at peace with herself.

  That fall, a new teaching opportunity came up in the community of Belmont. Its teacher, Maud’s cousin Edwin Simpson, had saved enough money living at home to leave for university. He took a special interest in Maud and helped her secure the position he was vacating. Maud had been actively searching for a position again, and this one came to her easily.

  Belmont was a small community on the Malpeque Bay, about thirty miles from Cavendish. It was near the part of the Bay where Maud’s original Montgomery forebears had settled nearly one hundred and twenty years earlier. Maud called it a pretty place, because of the Bay, but expressed “a creepy crawly presentiment” that the inhabitants might not be as attractive.

  During her visits to Park Corner, Maud had become acquainted with Ed. Both his parents were Simpsons and related to each other. This Simpson family produced six children: Fulton, Edwin, Alfred, Burton, Milton, and Sophy. Ed was two years older than Maud, good-looking, and brilliantly talkative.

  At Park Corner, Ed had once walked Maud home from a Literary Society meeting and they’d talked about books all the way. She wrote, “I don’t know whether I like Ed or not. He is clever and can talk about everything, but he is awfully conceited—and worse still, Simpsony” (March 26, 1892). The Macneills of Maud’s generation generally disliked the Simpson clan, thinking them windy, pompous, and full of themselves. Ed, however, was much attracted to the witty, clever Maud.

  Ed’s parents, although living in Belmont, were both descended from the original Simpsons and Macneills who settled Cavendish. Through intermarriage over five generations, the blood had grown increasingly “congested.” When Alexander Macneill railed against cousins marrying cousins, he could point to bad results. The Simpson family was a prime example. Intellectually, the offspring ranged from brilliant to mentally defective; emotionally, they ranged from normal to totally unhinged.

  When Maud went to Belmont, she stayed temporarily with the Simpsons. She wrote, “Mrs. Simpson—who was also a Cavendish Simpson and married her cousin as a matter of course—seems like a kind, mild woman, but of a somewhat melancholy disposition.” Maud’s identification with “melancholy” in the Simpson family should have warned her to stay away from romantic entanglements with them; she knew by now that she herself was also given to moody, depressive spells. But in her experience, eccentric and mentally imbalanced people were common and did not necessarily stand out as abnormal. The Simpson family was kind to her, not only because she was a relative, but also because she was a new teacher.

  Ed’s interest in Maud increased. Her willing imagination transformed him into a darkly handsome Byronic hero. And he had promise. When he graduated from the Prince of Wales College, he was described in the college paper as “Editor-in-Chief of the College Observer … in debate he was a Hercules. Notwithstanding his many scruples, Ed will, without doubt, be a star in the legal professions.”

  Coming from a family that included successful lawyers, Maud took note. Marrying a lawyer would enable her to afford enough household help to pursue a writing career. And she did want to marry, eventually: a single woman was a social pariah, and she wanted children; she also wanted the physical and emotional affection of a man. As she assessed this attentive cousin, she was still decompressing from the stimulating, heady Halifax year. She felt a terrible loneliness. She ignored Ed’s annoying personal mannerisms—a perpetual moving, twitching, lifting, or tapping of feet and fingers—focussing instead on his brilliant discourses. Apparently, Ed judged that Maud had an intelligence adequate to the sizable task of appreciating his own.

  At this time, Maud’s Great-Aunt Mary Lawson (her grandfather’s sister) was a temporary resident in the Simpson house. Widowed and childless, she lived around with relatives, as poor relations were forced to do. She was generally welcomed for her fine storytelling abilities. She turned human observations into non-malicious anecdotes, and harmless gossip into an art form. Like all good storytellers, Aunt Mary Lawson had learned to read body language and to analyze personality. To Maud, who had seen how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers transformed human social interaction into novels about domestic manners, Aunt Mary Lawson was the model of an able storyteller.

  Maud shared a bedroom with her Aunt Mary Lawson. Maud and Aunt Mary bonded quickly and of course began to gossip about the odd personalities of some of the Simpson progeny: Ed was undeniably talented, if pompous and self-important; Fulton was a giant in size and likewise in emotional imbalance; Alf had the Simpson trait of dominating all conversation, but was otherwise pleasant; Burton was quiet and withdrawn, an aberration among loquacious, self-absorbed Simpson males; and the daughter, Sophy, was a “lifeless mortal,” retreating from her merely slow-witted self into periods of withdrawn and silent sulks (October 21, 1896).

  This compendium of oddities might have remained simply an entertaining mix had not the three eldest Simpson boys all started courting Maud at once. Ed’s absence was his best suit, for his “Simpsony” traits were diluted through distance; and Maud, who loved corresp
onding and missed the stimulation of university, enjoyed his letters, even if they were stilted and turgid. The other Simpson sons were still at home. The giant Fulton, later described as “sulky, jealous, meddlesome, querulous” (January 2, 1897), tried to attract her attention. When his brother Alf offered her rides, Fulton became angry and agitated, taking on a wild and “unearthly” look.

  As soon as possible, Maud left this household, ostensibly to board closer to the school, with the Simon Fraser family. They were kind, and they served a clean if unexciting table. Elsewhere in Belmont, she found the people “rough, poor, and illiterate” (November 7, 1896).

  Although the Frasers gave her an upstairs room, with a view of beautiful Malpeque Bay, the old farmhouses were neither insulated nor heated during the night, and her room proved unbearably cold. By mid-November, Maud would rise to find snow blown onto her pillow from the leaky window. The Frasers did not go to church, and so lacked the normal reason for weekly bathing; Maud complains of the Fraser men’s lack of hygiene. She always kept herself immaculately clean, even though this meant washing herself in a frigid room in a hand basin, uncovering only a part of her body at one time. Periodic forays into the Fraser kitchen—the only warm room in the house—were the only way she had of warming her hands. Later, the kindly Mrs. Fraser prepared a room with a warm stovepipe running through it, which made bathing and writing more comfortable.

  Maud’s only consolation in this “dead-and-alive existence” was writing in her journal, and that had to be kept under lock and key, since the Frasers poked through her things when she was out. “I wonder how some people live at all—they seem to get so little out of life. It must be a bare, starveling existence for a vast number,” she wrote on December 17, 1896. In this atmosphere, Maud’s diary records her vision of an increasingly bleak world, which mirrored her own growing sense of loneliness and despair.

  Whenever she heard from Ed in Halifax, the memory of her Dalhousie year sent her into a deeper low than she had ever experienced. She began to brood obsessively on the barrenness of her life. Maud had always used laughter to defuse low spirits, but the Frasers were too prosaic for repartee. In her short stay with the eccentric Simpsons, she had at least enjoyed laughing at them with Great-Aunt Mary Lawson.

  Maud was beginning to feel the symptoms of a full-blown depressive episode: she had previously suffered from sleeplessness, but this recurred alongside an inability to feel pleasure in anything. For Christmas, she went to Bideford to visit Edith England, home from Sackville College and engaged to a brilliant young man preparing for law. Again, Maud felt excluded from the happy, forward march of others’ lives.

  In February, Aunt Mary Lawson left the Simpson household. Maud had visited the Simpsons through the winter, but with Aunt Mary’s departure, she lost the last salubrious force in her battle against loneliness and depression. On February 2, 1897, in one of Ed’s lengthy, stylistically tedious but clever epistles he stated that he loved her and wanted them to become engaged. She deliberated. Her heart felt no stirrings, but she lived in a society where women often made marriages for other reasons. She began to think she could perhaps tolerate Ed.

  As she sank into depression in the first quarter of 1897, the spectre of the disintegration of her personality spooked her. Suicide was frequently and graphically reported in Island newspapers—one particularly gruesome form of suicide was to drink carbolic acid or Paris Green (a rat poison) and suffer a horrible death as tortured loved ones looked on. Other imbalanced people murdered family or friends, or went on sprees shooting animals. Mental breakdown was common, and the provincial insane asylum, Falconwood, built in 1879, was well supplied with inmates.

  By March, Maud complained of feeling “fearfully tired,” a symptom of depression. She recognized her own abnormal state, and wrote about it in her journals. This helped her recognize repetitive patterns, and she identified specific activities that helped her deal with depression. Long, vigorous walks provided some relief, but walking was difficult in the winter. Lively company also lifted her spirits, as did keeping a regular, structured routine. Given her pleasure in language, the act of writing sometimes edged her into a better mood. The paucity of stimulation shows in Maud’s journals; when she had nothing to write about but hoped that the act of writing would give her a lift, she resorted to mechanical exercises. One typical example was a long, flat description of her room in the Fraser house. In a deep depression, she was entirely unable to write, either on her creative work or in her journal. She formed the habit of making notes for her journal, and writing these up later when her spirits improved.

  In April 1897, Laura Pritchard wrote her from Prince Albert that her brother, Will, had died after an attack of influenza. Maud and Will had corresponded periodically ever since their Prince Albert friendship, and she had retained a spot in her love-starved heart for him. Now, hearing of his death, Maud opened the ten-year letter that he had given her to open in 1901—why keep it after he was dead? In her journal, she reported that it was a love letter.

  Such a stressful loss tilted her further towards a major depressive episode. It reminded her of other losses, most notably her mother’s death. No one really cared about her now, she felt. For a young woman who had always been surrounded by an extended family, she was getting perilously close to being orphaned as an adult. She felt adrift in a cold world.

  Ed now professed his love constantly. She associated him with happier settings: Park Corner, Prince of Wales College, Dalhousie. In May 1897, she heard that Laura Pritchard (now Mrs. Willard Agnew) had given birth to her first child, and she received the news with mixed emotions. Thinking about her own life’s journey through an uneven mental landscape, she drew on her childhood favourite, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for the language to express her depression:

  I wanted love and protection. Life at times lately had worn a somewhat sombre aspect … I was run-down and inclined to take a rather morbid view of my prospects. Hence, I was all the more tempted to grasp at what promised to lift me out of my Slough of Despond. (June 30, 1897)

  In this frame of mind Maud accepted Ed’s proposal. She wrote him that, given time, she might learn to care for him. Ed’s letters became more effusive. She began recoiling from them. She ceased to enjoy her teaching, and then even her writing, which was carved out of sleeping time, in the early morning in her icy room. Only the discipline and sense of duty that she had learned from Grandmother Macneill kept her going.

  But life was not without some uplifting moments: pushing herself to write, she continued making some sales. In March, she sold “The Prize in Elocution” to the Philadelphia Times for $8.75; in April a story to Arthur’s Home Magazine for $3; and in May “Extra French Examination” to the Philadelphia Times for $7. Her basic salary was approximately $45 per school term. Selling three stories for $18.75 was very encouraging. She had written these stories quickly, but in the grip of a depression, writing was a challenge.

  In early May she closed the school for the standard three-week holiday between terms. Her mental state was precarious. She became physically ill. Her muse grew alliterative: for herself, “sniffle, sigh, and sneeze”; for Belmont, “mist, mud, and misery” (May 3, 1897). She suffered from disturbed sleep, brooding morbidity, general irritability, fluctuating emotions with tears ready to embarrass her at the slightest provocation, severe headaches, a sense of terrible soul-loneliness and isolation, an inability to make decisions, and a perpetual “spiritlessness” and “tiredness”—all symptoms of a full-blown depression. She decided she simply could not take another year in Belmont. When Ed Simpson proposed in person on June 8, 1897, Maud accepted.

  Ed’s kiss to seal the engagement brought her no emotion. “I did not feel at all unhappy—but neither did I feel happy—certainly not as a girl should feel who has just parted from the man she had promised to marry” (June 30, 1897). Her only genuine emotion was a strong revulsion to this new fiancé, but the self-centred Ed did not observe this. By mid-June the physical and
mental repugnance she felt was overwhelming. Returning to Cavendish, she spent the rest of the summer wrestling over her promise to marry a man whose mere touch made her feel physically ill. Normally, she suffered from wildly oscillating moods; now she describes herself as feeling emotionally dead.

  Ed gave out the wrong signals as a lover when he was courting Maud: “He was far too self-conscious, too fond of saying and doing things for effect, and—in plain English—far too conceited” (June 30, 1897). His fingers constantly twitched and tapped. Did Maud’s super-sensitive radar detect something amiss other than excessive self-absorption? She wrote in her journal much later that he married twice, but had no children, “which did not surprise me”—whatever that means. Her growing reservations were sensible: in their shared bloodlines, each had ample genetic inheritance to produce psychological disorders.

  Additional problems arose. Ed told her, after their engagement, that he planned to become a Baptist minister. She had thought his plans were to become a lawyer. The Presbyterians of Cavendish had always looked down on Baptists. Furthermore, Maud had serious reservations about marrying a minister. Other professions, such as law, were equal to the ministry in social prestige, but did not make so many demands on a wife. A parson stationed in some small town or out of the way place would expect his wife to act as unpaid helper. Nor did Maud fancy a peripatetic existence. She was a person who put down deep roots.