The first evening that Ewan came to call for his letters, Maud—who normally did her writing in the privacy of her upstairs bedroom as soon as it was warm enough in spring—was suddenly positioned in the kitchen, apparently admiring the last rays of light and ready to engage him in cheerful conversation. By her account he entered just as she had finished the first lines of this first full-length novel, to be named Anne of Green Gables. She put her writing aside to chat with the amiable minister. Her new duties as church organist provided matter for discussion.
Perhaps it is true that her basic idea for the novel—as she claimed in one account—originated from a newspaper clipping about a couple requesting an orphan boy to help them, but instead being sent a young girl by mistake. What is certain, however, is that the narrative flowed smoothly out. The main character in this novel was as lively as Maud herself, and resembled her in other ways. The heroine, Anne Shirley, was an unwanted orphan, just as Maud had felt herself to be when she revisited her childhood in January 1905. The first third of the novel presented Anne—a child of wildly fluctuating moods—as the most lovable creature imaginable. She would find love and acceptance in her new home, and then she would sacrifice herself at the end by doing exactly what Maud had done when she’d come home to stay with her grandmother. At the novel’s conclusion, a more mature Anne would sit, as Maud had so often done, looking out her window, wondering what was around the “bend in the road.” The novel was a version of Maud’s own emotional and spiritual autobiography, a blend of her childhood as it was and as she had reconfigured it in the entry of January 1905, followed by the high brought about by the happy anticipation of Ewan’s impending move to Cavendish. Only the facts and names were changed. Maud manufactured a history for Anne in order to obscure her heroine’s origin in her own life. (Anne is the orphaned daughter of two schoolteachers who died of a fever, and her subsequent life includes misery and abuse in various homes and an orphanage until she is adopted by the Cuthberts.) In fact, Anne was a creative rendition of the volatile and lovable child Maud herself had been—not an orphan, but one carefully raised by a loving and supportive grandmother and a difficult, judgmental grandfather whose harsh words had made Maud feel like a charity case at times.
In May 1905 Maud had published a story called “The Hurrying of Ludovic.” In this story, a courtship fails to advance because sluggish Ludovic Speed will not propose to his lady, the thirty-something Theodora. Ludovic is characterized by his “unhesitating placidity” and his eyes “with a touch of melancholy in them” as he shambles down the long road to visit the ever-hopeful Theodora. He has “a liking for religious arguments: and talks well enough when drawn out.” Theodora plots to get this “big, irritating goose” to propose after fifteen years of courting. There were about fifteen months between the time Ewan was inducted as the Cavendish minister and the time Maud sent this story off for publication. The Canadian Magazine published it in May 1905, the month that Ewan strategically moved to Cavendish and started actively courting her. Fifteen months may have seemed like fifteen years to a woman like Maud, who was thirty and had been hopefully encouraging the clueless new minister since the day he preached for the call in spring 1903.
Before she wrote Anne of Green Gables, Maud had been doing better and better financially. Her yearly income from writing was already climbing towards the astonishing sum of $500 a year from short stories and poems. (For comparison, Ewan’s salary in his triple-charge parish was $765 in 1909, and ministers were well paid professionals.)
Maud wrote her Anne manuscript in a flowing hand that seemed to skim the story off a teeming brain. Luckily for Maud, her aging Uncle Leander and his wife did not come to the Island for their usual two months of summer vacation that year. In the absence of this interruption, Maud wrote Anne of Green Gables with manic energy throughout the entire year of 1905, apparently completing the book by January 1906. There was no time to write in her journals in that period—and not much need, either, since they were, on the whole, the place where she vented her unhappiness, and in this period, her life was looking more promising, with a suitor on the scene.
Anne of Green Gables was written in the most positive and forward-looking part of Maud’s life, and it is her most sparkling novel. Anne is a fictional character, of course. Yet, she is as much the result of the coming together of a real man and a real woman as if she were a real flesh-and-blood child. Lucy Maud Montgomery is certainly the “mother” who conceived, carried, and delivered Anne. But Ewan played—literally—a seminal role in the production of this book: he was the catalyst that pulled Maud out of a period of depression, providing the energy to take on a full-scale book. His attentions sustained her spirits so that she wrote with a “wingèd” pen, producing the entire novel in approximately ten months, in longhand, between spring 1905 and early 1906.66
Maud’s “gift of wings” had finally enabled her to take flight, thanks to the astonishing effect of the dimpled and rosy-cheeked Ewan. In spite of—or perhaps because of—the afflictions in her life, Maud had written her first novel, the one that would make her famous throughout the English-speaking world.
Anne of Green Gables (1908)
Anne of Green Gables is only one of many novels about orphans written in this era, but it has outshone all of them. Part of the book’s power comes from the way Maud draws on her own emotional experience, and reconfigures her own past. Anne is a sensitive and very bright orphaned child who has had disastrous experiences in homes where she was unloved and exploited. By accident, she is sent to the home of two elderly people, brother and sister, who had asked for a boy to help them on their farm. Matthew Cuthbert loves little Anne from the start, but dominant, rigid Marilla plans to return her to the orphanage since she isn’t what they’d asked for. When Anne wails, “You don’t want me because I’m not a boy,” she is expressing Maud’s lifelong sorrow.
One third of the way through the book, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert decide to keep Anne because their sense of duty tells them they can do something for this little waif. Marilla trains her to behave in acceptable ways, and as she grows up Anne enriches their lives and endears herself to the entire community. As the novel ends, she is a young woman poised to take flight. But then death claims Matthew. Because aging Marilla can stay in her home only if someone stays with her, Anne curtails her ambitions in order to repay to Marilla her debt of gratitude.
Anne and Marilla are as different in temperament as emotional little Maud and her Grandmother Macneill had been. When Anne comes to Avonlea (a community like Cavendish), she is a little chatterbox given to extravagant language and excessive emotions. She is either in the “depths of despair” or overexcited with her enthusiasms. She is impulsive and gets into all kinds of funny scrapes. Her most noteworthy trait is her fertile imagination. Staid, sensible Marilla guides Anne into curtailing her wild, romantic excesses of words and actions. Anne wins Marilla’s love, just as Maud did her grandmother’s, as she matures.
Matthew and Gilbert play supportive roles in the novel that mimic Ewan’s role in real life. Ewan was as much taken by Maud’s charming talk as Matthew is by Anne’s. Matthew is as kind and nonjudgmental as Ewan was. And Ewan Macdonald, as suitor, was waiting in the wings, just like Anne’s beau, Gilbert Blythe. In Ewan’s attentions, Maud finally found what Anne sought: to be loved and valued.
Maud’s own community of Cavendish had known her as an impulsive and sometimes otherworldly child, as a difficult-to-control and flirtatious teen, and as a moody young woman who seemed suspiciously off-balance at times. Maud took all the difficult qualities of the child she had been, things that would have been the subject of community gossip, and she turned them into endearing traits in little Anne. By the time Ewan Macdonald appeared on the scene, Maud, approaching twenty-nine, had new self-understanding. In creating Anne so like herself, she was creating a new way of seeing the difficult child she had been as a lovable, engaging one. Perhaps she even hoped to counter village gossip and give people (and possibly
this new minister) a way of understanding her. Maud made a great many superficial alterations in the fictional transformation—Anne was given red hair to symbolize anarchy (and perhaps a Scots-Irish heritage), whereas Maud had brown hair. Anne came to an elderly, unmarried brother and sister, not to elderly grandparents; Anne was sent to the Cuthberts by mistake, whereas Maud stayed with her grandparents because her mother had died and her grandmother had a strong sense of duty.
Some of the more literal-minded people in the local community fell to looking for models as soon as Anne was published. A few saw elements of the youthful Maud in her creation. However, others claimed that they themselves were the model for lovable Anne. Ellen Macneill, a little orphan girl who had been adopted by Pierce Macneill and his wife, wanted a piece of Anne’s immortality and went to her grave claiming to be the model because she, too, was adopted. However, of this rumour, circulating during her lifetime, Maud wrote “The idea of getting a child from an orphan asylum was suggested to me years ago as a possible germ for a story by the fact that Pierce Macneill got a little girl from one.” But, she added in total exasperation on January 27, 1911: “There is no resemblance of any kind between Anne and Ellen Macneill who is one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable.”
Montgomery acknowledges that the prototype for Anne’s home with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert was that of Maud’s Great-Uncle David Macneill, a “notoriously shy” man like Matthew. He lived with his Marilla-like sister, Margaret, and they raised the illegitimate daughter of their niece, Ada Macneill, a young schoolteacher who was considered by the community to have been “badly used.” This niece’s child, Myrtle Macneill, was a great comfort to them, and in 1905 she married Ernest Webb. Ernest and Myrtle inherited David and Margaret’s farm and raised their children there. It is now a provincial park, with the “Anne of Green Gables House” and the adjoining “Lovers’ Lane” open to the public. Myrtle Macneill Webb and Maud were good friends all their lives, but neither ever claimed that Myrtle was the model for Anne, despite the fact that she was raised in the house that was the model for “Green Gables” and she had done for her elderly surrogate parents what the fictional Anne did for the Cuthberts.
Maud would never admit that her heroine Anne was partly based on the child she herself had been, or at least one of the complex little girls who lay inside her. She rightly thought this was irrelevant and that people would use the idea to discredit her creativity. Over her lifetime, Maud created heroines very different from Anne, and yet each of them is in some way drawn out of the complex person that she was. Nothing made Maud angrier than hearing people say that they knew the originals of her characters, as if all she had to do was to transcribe them from life to make a book. She admitted that her characters had some resemblances to people in real life, but it was her imagination that made them live in fiction.
The book takes its power from Maud’s ability to word-paint landscapes, her skill at characterization, her understanding of how human beings interact in a small community, her trenchant social criticism, her sense of irony, and her sly erudition. Most of all, it is energized by her sense of humour. Readers laugh at the honesty of children, and the foolishness of adults. The book also captures with realism and nostalgia the tranquil nineteenth-century rural life that would disappear after World War I. Maud succeeded in capturing the culture, the history, and the times of her own people—and perhaps even much of the country of Canada—in her first book.
When the Muse descended on Maud Montgomery in that spring of 1905, coming in the company of the kindly Ewan Macdonald, a good-looking but unimaginative suitor, the effects flowed both ways. Ewan’s attentions energized Maud, but in turn her high spirits also stimulated Ewan, who was by nature a bit phlegmatic. For a man like Ewan, whose childhood had been poor and culturally deprived, whose education had been endless hard work, and whose emotional life had been flat, Maud must have seemed like a creature of fancy ready to fill the void. Maud was undeniably a lady in manners, deportment, and dress. He must have been flattered that she would consider a romance with him, a somewhat backward and stiff Highlander. That Ewan chose her over other aspiring women, given her rather plain looks and near spinsterdom, certainly delighted Maud. She used every charm she knew to win him when he came for the mail and she had a chance to talk to him, amusing him with her sparkling wit and stories about the community and her activities in it and the church. Later, in her journals, she would tell this story in a very different way, even razoring out and replacing the pages that originally described their courtship. She would make it sound as if Ewan sought her, and she merely accepted him because there was no better, her “Hobson’s Choice”—which was, of course, at least partly true.
Inspired and invigorated by finding love, Ewan became a very competent minister in Cavendish. He gave interesting sermons. People liked him. Maud gave him entertaining walks through the cemetery, narrating entertaining stories of the departed. He moved into action and mobilized the community to clean up the graveyard where a century’s collection of ancestors lay, including Maud’s mother and the rest of the family. (This beautifying project would be used later in Anne of Avonlea, where Anne encourages the “Avonlea improvement Society”—an idea generated by the popular press of that day, which was devoting much coverage to landscape and garden developments.) As his tenure wore on, and his courtship infused him with energy, his ambition surged. He began to think that he might become an even more successful minister if he took more training.
On October 12, 1906, Ewan drove Maud up to visit married friends, Will and Tillie Macneill Houston. On the way, he told her of his new plans: to leave Cavendish and take additional schooling at the famous Trinity College in Glasgow, Scotland, the most prestigious centre for studying Presbyterian theology in the world. Ewan’s father had fled Scotland to escape abject poverty; now Ewan would go back, triumphant in his calling as a minister of the Lord. Ewan was not wrong in thinking that a brilliant future might stretch before him. He was highly intelligent, and also had the instincts of a “good shepherd”: he was a gentle, well-meaning man. Shrewd and low-key, he was a skilled negotiator when tempers were ruffled, a necessary trait in a minister. He was also an effective organizer and mediator when he was in top form. Energized by romance, he showed great promise.
Ewan had been increasing his presence in the newspapers, preaching in important venues, as befitted ambitious young ministers. The Examiner stated that on September 5, 1906, he preached in the prestigious St. James Presbyterian Kirk in Charlottetown. By September 25, the paper announced that the Cavendish pulpit had become vacant. (He had already announced his intention of going to Scotland.) On October 7, Ewan again preached in St. James Church in the morning service and at Zion Church in the evening. He was preaching in Charlottetown’s most notable churches, in partnership with the distinguished Reverend T. F. Fullerton, a very prominent minister who frequently made the news. This burst of activity was spectacular for Ewan Macdonald after his competent but mediocre academic career. It appeared that his trajectory was that of a successful young minister ready to climb clerical ladders.
Seen in the context of his lifetime performance, his sudden show of activity suggests that he was riding an emotional high induced by his new romance. Had this been his standard and stable mode, his career would have been very different. But he would prove to be a man whose moods rose and sank, like the energies within him, and his performance was uneven.
As they drove along, Maud considered this good-natured man who was modest, yet dedicated and seemingly ambitious. She had read in the newspapers about his preaching in important churches. Anne of Green Gables had been completed some ten months earlier and was still making the rounds of publishers. Maud had no idea that it would become an international best-seller. But she did feel warm and hopeful in Ewan’s presence. As she and Ewan drove by horse and buggy that night, the weather was ominously dark and stormy. He proposed. Maud accepted. Both were very private people by natur
e, and they agreed to keep the engagement secret.
Ewan left to begin his advanced training in Glasgow around October 20. After she accepted Ewan, Maud wrote her cousin Ed Simpson a letter that made their breakup irrevocably final. Ewan promised to wait for Maud until she was “released” from her duties caring for her grandmother. Meanwhile, she was putting jewels in her own crown. Her grandmother was in relatively good health for her advanced age, and Maud could keep writing. It was a satisfactory arrangement for everyone—except, of course, Uncle John F. Macneill, who wanted the house.
Ewan had no sooner arrived in Scotland than he began to deflate. His departure from Cavendish had been quite a send-off: the community had put on a big celebration for their minister and given him a “purse” to help with his studies. He had crossed the ocean with great confidence, but as soon as he reached the University of Glasgow, he found himself in association and competition with brilliant, cultured, and highly articulate scholars from all over the globe. In Prince Edward Island his Highland roots and heavy Gaelic accent had been a slightly negative social marker among more sophisticated English-speaking Scottish immigrants, but in Glasgow, where the theology school was full of highly educated young Scots, Ewan found himself not only regarded as a backward Highlander but also as a provincial bumpkin from Canada. In Cavendish, Maud—immersed in the literary images of the Highlanders as brave and exotic—had romanticized his Highland roots, and this had bolstered his confidence. He got no such treatment in Scotland.67 Ewan’s name is written on the Glasgow entrance roll with a strong hand, but he soon began to collapse psychologically, skipping classes. He was out of his depth with the urbane and broadly educated students at the theology school. Moreover, he lacked the social graces that would have helped him feel comfortable with the others. This earnest young man soon began to feel inadequate. Within a month, his letters to Maud took on a morbid tone. He spoke only of discouragement.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 16