Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  No words to describe how I felt! For weeks I only wished to die. The news was a thunderbolt from a clear sky. Only a short time before I had had a letter from him written in the best of health and spirits. The next was that brutal telegram.… How we loved each other! … We always remained near and dear in spirit.… Have you left your “little Maudie” all alone? That was not like you.63

  But the urge to write returned eventually. The force of an upswinging mood comes vigorously through as she moves through her grief to eulogize her father, and then focuses on her own position: “Well, I must henceforth face the world alone. Let me see what my equipment for such a struggle is.” Then she enumerates: she has youth, a superficial education, three hundred dollars (her father left her two hundred in his will), no training for anything save teaching, and no influence. But she has “something else—my knack of scribbling.” Then a proud announcement: “Last year I made exactly ninety-six dollars and eighty-eight cents by my pen!”

  Certainly her income from writing had been climbing. She kept account books, and she recorded her sales from writing. Collating the amounts she recorded in her financial ledgers (now in the University of Guelph Archives) with the listing of stories and poems in the Preliminary Bibliography of stories and poems compiled by Rea Wilmshurst, calculations indicate: $4 in 1895, $72 in 1896, $80 in 1897, $90 in 1898, $73 in 1899, $89 in 1900.

  By 1900, after two years at home, writing constantly, she still was not doing much better financially than she had when teaching at Bideford in 1894–95. But there was an upward progression. She was feeling more free and cheerful, and, living at home, was able to keep what she made instead of paying it out for room and board.

  In January 1901, she became depressed again. January was always a bad month for her, and the anniversary of her father’s death seems to have activated another bout of depression. Even the death of remote and aged Queen Victoria in 1901 felt like “a very decided shock.” When Maud’s old friend Edith England in Bideford became “a bundle of nerves” on the death of her father (who had paid for her education), Maud described this as “arrant nonsense.” A strange lapse of sympathy this is, coming from one who was often a bundle of nerves herself, especially when feeling vulnerable.

  As always, Maud recovered as the weather warmed and she could get out to garden and walk. During the summer of 1901 she produced a sizeable number of stories and poems. A new Presbyterian church was being constructed, giving the whole community an uplift. Maud ended the summer in such a good frame of mind that she took the initiative of planning a trip to Halifax to see the September Exhibition.

  Hearing of this plan, Lottie Shatford, one of Maud’s acquaintances from Dalhousie who now worked for the Halifax Echo and knew that they needed a proofreader over the winter, recommended Maud to the editor. Maud accepted the job, and arranged for her Uncle John F. Macneill’s eldest son Prescott to stay in the Cavendish house with her grandmother. Her “visit” to Halifax turned into an extended stay from September 1901 to June 1902.

  Experience in a newspaper would seem useful for someone wanting to be a writer. Furthermore, Maud was paid five dollars a week, more than she had made in teaching. It turned out that she could find time to continue writing, often while actually working in the Echo office. She wrote a series of bright news articles, mostly for the women’s pages of the Echo, which was the evening edition of the Chronicle. During her nine months in Halifax, Maud published steadily: twenty-two poems for a total of $67, and seventeen stories for a total of $123—a grand total of $190. In the same period she made about $180 in salary. She had made more by her pen than by her newspaper work.

  In spite of this success, she again suffered from an episode of depression in January. She now knew there was something wrong with her that was independent of location. In Belmont, she had been able to blame the dreary company and a cold, bleak landscape. But in Halifax, in the middle of a humming newspaper office, depression again robbed her of all forms of pleasure and made her life hellish for six weeks. In her diary, she dismissed Lottie Shatford, the friend who had obtained the job for her, as not being “a kindred spirit.”

  When she was “down” she felt that she had to pretend to be her fun-loving self. This was a terrible struggle, and she began seeing herself as wearing a “mask of gaiety.” Another pervasive reading of her life took hold: the idea of the double self, one face for the public world, and a very different face in private.64 Maud realized that it was easier to conceal her moods in the privacy of her own home than in a newspaper office. And living in rooming houses with a grungy view (at 23 Church Street, and then later at 25 Morris Street) was hardly the same as living in beautiful Cavendish. Moreover, there were problems brewing at home between her grandmother and Prescott.

  Maud had suffered such excruciating homesickness that when she was offered the option of keeping her job at the Echo, after a summer break, she declined. Instead, she returned home as eagerly and precipitously as she had left. She knew that her grandmother truly needed her now. Predictably, her Grandmother had fared poorly with Prescott, a selfish lad with his father’s personality. Prescott, twenty-two, wanted to marry; and he needed a house.

  More trouble was on the horizon in the wake of Alexander’s “foolish” will. John F. decided to claim the house, given that the will had not specified Lucy Macneill’s residence in it for the rest of her life. John F. saw no reason why his mother could not do what a widow often did, which was to go to live with a married child—not with him, but with daughter Annie at the Campbell farm, or with Emily, now a widow with a partly grown family at Malpeque.

  There was only one problem: Lucy Macneill did not want to be pushed out of her own home in which she had raised all her children. She was a very respected member of the community and the church. She also wanted to provide a home for Maud.

  Maud knew that it would be more difficult for her uncle to claim the house if she were living there with her grandmother. Maud was a formidable opponent in any battle. And, as far as clan battles went, this was to be an epic one. Maud and her grandmother eventually won, but the atmosphere was poisoned between Grandmother Macneill and her son for the rest of their lives. John F. was so angry that he ceased speaking to his mother and Maud.

  Meanwhile, Maud again settled into her grandmother’s methodical routine. By walking through old haunts she revived childhood memories; talking to old friends (even those she had outgrown intellectually), she felt the comfort of shared experience. In 1902, a contact in Philadelphia named Miriam Zieber, who wanted to create a literary club of pen-friends, put her in touch with two other writers. One was Ephraim Weber (1870–1956), an Alberta teacher, writer, and homesteader, with whom Maud began a lifelong correspondence. The next year she would begin a similar one with George Boyd MacMillan (1880–1952), who became a professional journalist with the Alloa Journal in Scotland. Maud quickly dropped the uninteresting Miss Zieber, but stayed in touch with each of the two men, gaining a sense of connection with other professionals. These pen-pals were stimulating and sympathetic intellectual companions who made no emotional demands on her.

  Life at home with her aging grandmother picked up when a new teacher, named Nora Lefurgey, came to the Cavendish school in the fall of 1902. Unlike Lottie Shatford, Nora was a “kindred spirit,” sharing intellectual interests and values. Nora was a reader with an excellent memory, and, like Maud, she loved to quote poetry and favourite passages from writers like Scott, Burns, Wordsworth, and others. Nora possessed a strong and irrepressibly positive life force, and she energized those around her—just what Maud needed. They became such fast friends that in January 1903 Nora moved from the John Laird house, where she was boarding, to live with Maud and her grandmother.

  Maud and Nora began a joint diary in February. In these diaries, like two giddy, adolescent girls, they tease each other about potential suitors. In fact, most of the young men in Cavendish who had not inherited farms, but who had any ambition and energy, had already left the Island to se
ek their fortunes. Maud and Nora accused each other of chasing those who remained. It is strange to compare this shared diary—silly and shallow—with some of Maud’s lugubrious entries in her private journal of the same period. It is stranger still to compare them with the polished but lighthearted fiction and poems Maud was steadily publishing through this period.

  The joint diary, for all its affected silliness, at times gives a better sense of what was happening in the community in 1903 than Maud’s journal does. On May 17, Maud wrote:

  All this week I have simply had a fiendish cold. Nora has pretended to have one, too, and made it an excuse not to go to prayer-meeting Thursday night. But I went for I wanted to get a good look at our new “supply.” Who knows but that he is the “coming man.”

  On June 21, she wrote again in an exaggerated tone:

  This morning we had a Highlander to preach for us and he was “chust lovely” and all the girls got stuck on him. My heart pitty-patted so that I could hardly play the hymns. It’s weak yet so I shall stop short.

  The young “Highlander” was named Ewan Macdonald. When this unattached young minister “preached for the call” to fill an empty pulpit, every unmarried young woman in the area took interest. To marry a minister was to marry very well indeed. As the most educated person in a rural community, the minister had instant respect and status. Ewan Macdonald’s name would appear only once again in Maud’s journals before 1906. But the record of Maud’s publications shows that with the appearance of this new minister, she began to ramp up energy in her professional writing.

  Nora finished her teaching in late July and left Cavendish for good. On September 1, 1903, the thirty-four-year-old Reverend Ewan Macdonald was inducted as minister in the Cavendish church. Maud does not even mention this event in her journal, although the entire community would have turned out for the occasion. Ewan was installed by his acquaintance from Pine Hill Seminary, the Reverend Edwin Smith, an exceptionally handsome and gifted (and newly married) minister.

  Also attending the induction was a young man who refused to get out of Maud’s life: her cousin and former fiancé, the Reverend Edwin Simpson, now himself a Baptist minister. He remarked to Maud that Ewan looked like a “boy whose mother had told him to put on his best suit” for the occasion, a comment that infuriated Maud (October 12, 1906). Ed was perhaps hoping to show how much Maud had lost when she rejected his suit; he kept turning up in Cavendish, visiting, preaching, or attending social occasions such as this induction service. However, each additional contact only repulsed Maud more.

  CHAPTER 6

  The impact of Ewan Macdonald

  Ewan Macdonald was born in Bellevue, PEI, on July 18, 1870, four years before Maud. After taking a teaching licence from Prince of Wales College, he taught school in his home district long enough to fund a degree at the Presbyterian training college, Pine Hill Divinity School, in Halifax. His father’s farm at Bellevue was at the other end of the Island from Cavendish. Ewan’s grandparents had emigrated with his father (age seven) from the Isle of Skye, Scotland, possibly escaping impoverished conditions brought on by the 1840 potato famine. A very handsome man, Alexander Macdonald (1833–1914) had married another Skye emigrant, Christie Cameron (1835–1920), after his first wife had died, leaving him a young daughter named Flora. Christie Cameron was the daughter of Ewan Cameron, a ship’s captain from Point Prim, PEI.

  Alexander and Christie Macdonald raised a large family. Their lives were concerned with survival, not with the display of fine manners. Although Ewan’s father owned land in PEI, their household was decidedly rougher than Maud’s. Furthermore, as Highlanders, the Macdonalds came from a Gaelic-speaking tradition. It is unclear whether or not Ewan’s father, who in infirm old age signed his will with an “X,” was literate in English. (Although there had been a system of public education in Scotland since 1696, it was very uneven, and often nonexistent on the islands.) Ewan’s family may have come up from poverty, but they were kindly, gentle people, not judgmental like Maud’s family. They believed strongly in education, and had intelligence and ability.

  Ewan himself was a good-looking man, with a warm and dimpled smile, good teeth (particularly valued by Maud because hers were so small and crooked), and dark but “rosy” skin. It is likely that his parents spoke Gaelic at home because Ewan retained a pronounced Gaelic accent all his life. Maud found his Gaelic accent charming, even though it might have denoted a lower social class to many of Scottish and English extraction.

  A minister needed a wife, and Ewan was looking for one, preferably with musical and social skills. He had already had one secret, failed romance: he had once been engaged to an older woman in his home community, but he had backed out, breaking the engagement. Now he was looking again for a suitable mate. At the point that Ewan became the new Presbyterian minister in Cavendish, the church also needed a new organist. Maud’s musical talents were mediocre, but she had noted the pleasant Ewan, as did several other spinsters in the area, including (as Maud believed) her friend, Margaret Ross of Stanley. The competition for the minister’s attention made the organist’s job more appealing. At twenty-nine, Maud was perilously close to the social scorn of spinsterhood. She accepted the position of church organist.

  In the same year that Ewan was inducted, Maud’s cousin Frederica (“Frede”) Campbell turned nineteen. She was nine years younger than Maud, and they had not been close friends earlier. But now that Frede was older, she and Maud discovered that they were also “kindred spirits.” Frede was exceptionally gifted academically, with a unique combination of Macneill brilliance and Campbell vitality. She had met Ewan, and admired him, and this influenced Maud.

  Subject to vacillating moods herself, Frede understood Maud, and a powerful sense of trust developed between them. With Frede, Maud could discuss her deepest fears: that she would have to leave Cavendish after her grandmother died and the house finally went to Uncle John F.; that she might not find a man to marry; that if she did, she would be too old to have the children she wanted; that she might have a mental breakdown like those regularly described in Island newspapers. With her cousin Frede, Maud found that she could “rinse out her soul” in a way not possible with anyone else.

  From 1898 onward, the “black dog” of depression had intermittently stalked Maud, resulting in sleepless nights, restless agitation, skittery thought processes; at times she even reported an inability to make sense of words on a page. Her journals provide some remarkable descriptions of these episodes, written after they had passed. Only from a distance could she shape and treat them artistically. For example on June 30, 1902, she wrote:

  [I] did not sleep until dawn. Every trouble I ever had came surging up with all its old bitterness—and all my little present day worries enlarged themselves to tenfold proportions and flew at my throat. Life seemed a horrible, cruel, starving thing and I hated it and wished I were dead. I cried bitterly in sheer heart sickness and loneliness. Anything like that wrings the stamina out of me.

  In April 1903, before Ewan had come to preach for the call, she recorded brooding, feeling constantly tired, and wanting to “fall asleep and never wake again.” Old friends like Mary Campbell (now Mary Beaton) had married and were expecting babies. The year 1903 saw still more weddings: notably the marriage of the Reverend Major MacIntosh, the Cavendish minister before Ewan, to Mabel Simpson, church organist; and the marriage of Maud’s cousin, George Campbell of Park Corner, to Ella Johnstone. In 1904 Maud’s friend Fanny Wise married R. E. Mutch, and Maud’s cousin Murray Macneill (who was now a professor at Dalhousie) married Dorothy Holmes of Halifax. Then, in 1905, Myrtle Macneill, Maud’s younger “cousin,” married Ernest Webb and Maud was also a bridesmaid at the wedding of her friend, Bertha MacKenzie, solemnized by the new minister, the Reverend Ewan Macdonald.

  Between September 1903 and May 1905, Ewan Macdonald boarded at Stanley, one of his three ministerial charges (Stanley, Rustico, and Cavendish). All the unmarried spinsters, including Maud, had their eyes on h
im. During this period, Maud made several trips to Stanley to visit Frede. Now that this unmarried minister was in the picture, Maud began romanticizing the cozy little house in New London where her parents had started housekeeping together. At home, she rummaged through her memories of past male friends: Nate Lockhart, Herman Leard, Will Pritchard. She read a packet of Will’s letters in March 1904, and felt,

  as if a cruel hand were tightening its clutch on my throat.… I don’t know why Will’s letters should have such an effect on me … they were not such as would be expected to stir up such a riot of feeling in me. But I’ve been lonely and sick at heart all day, and I just long wildly for his bright friendliness again … I cannot understand my mood at all. (March 16, 1904)

  In January 1905, she wrote poignantly in her journals of how unloved she had felt in her childhood. Although the childhood she describes was not the childhood that might objectively be recognized from her other accounts, it does reflect how she re-visioned her childhood when she was depressed. Now, in 1905, her moods cycled rapidly: she was a “winged spirit” on March 16; she was “a caged creature” March 23; the following week “a prisoner released.” But change was coming.

  On April 14, 1905, she began to have pleasant dreams. Rumours had been afloat that Ewan Macdonald was moving from Stanley to Cavendish, which meant to Maud that she had perhaps caught his eye. As soon as this move was in the wind, Maud’s spirits ascended rapidly. She started planning her first full-length book. (She had by this time published at least 168 short stories and 192 poems in periodicals.)65

  In early May 1905, Ewan moved to Cavendish, taking a room with the John Laird family. This was easy walking distance from the Presbyterian church, and the church was next to the Macneill homestead. From her bedroom window, Maud could see people walking up their lane to the post office, or hear them enter if they came into the kitchen from the back of the house from another direction.