Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Maud urged him to see a doctor, but he wrote back that a doctor couldn’t help him. (He was right—there was no medical treatment for depression in that period.) Perhaps he was counselled; perhaps some theologian told him that he was committing the “unpardonable sin” of doubt. At any rate, this idea took hold of his mind. In the theological terms of Presbyterians, the unpardonable sin was a failure to put all one’s trust in God. Believing himself shut out from complete faith, Ewan, now an engaged man, must have felt trapped in a future profession and a life. It is hard to fathom the depths to which his disturbed and disordered mind led him. He left Glasgow in the spring, sometime around March 4, 1907, when he sent a strange, blank, message-less postcard to Maud.68 There are no records in Glasgow of his academic performance at Trinity College beyond his matriculation signature, and no records to show he completed any work whatsoever.69

  When Ewan went off to Scotland, his successor in the Cavendish church was another eligible bachelor, John Stirling. Stirling had a chiselled and ruggedly handsome face, a very sharp mind, and a refined manner. He came from a “good family” and was stable as a rock. All considered, with the benefit of hindsight, he was a much more promising man than Ewan.

  Ewan returned from Scotland to Prince Edward Island at the end of March a sadly deflated man. After a lot of trouble in finding a charge, he accepted a less than desirable position in another small rural community, the remote Bloomfield-O’Leary parish, a very long way from Cavendish. Only rarely did he visit Maud. In his depressed state, he must have worried about his engagement and whether he himself was suitable for marriage. But he admired Maud too much to play the role of a cad and back out, as he had from his first engagement. Ewan was apparently doing satisfactorily in his new position when Anne of Green Gables was released and became an astonishing success.

  Maud’s sudden fame may have inspired Ewan to attend the Presbyterian General Assembly off the Island, apparently looking for better opportunity on the mainland, as so many other ambitious young ministers did. For instance, the Reverend Edwin Smith, who had inducted Ewan as a minister in Cavendish, had already resigned (as recounted in the Patriot on May 1, 1909, p. 8), and had left the Island for greener pastures, and perhaps greater adventure, along with thousands of young people in other walks of life. According to the Charlottetown Patriot, in September 1909 Ewan resigned at Bloomfield, to the regret of his parishioners. He headed to a double-charge parish in Ontario, where he would live in Leaskdale, Ontario, patiently waiting for Maud to be free to marry.

  The bitterness between Maud, her grandmother, and John F. Macneill’s family began to take its toll. Lucy Macneill came from an extremely long-lived family. Her sister Margaret lived to be nearly one hundred, and as a clan, the Woolners were normally very long in the land. But her son’s estrangement preyed on her mind, and, as she failed, Maud’s grandmother fell into periods of weeping and sadness.

  There were problems at John F. Macneill’s house, too. His lovely daughter Kate had caught pneumonia and died in 1904 at the age of twenty. Maud had liked her. But Maud did not like the other daughters—Maud’s former playmate, Lucy, and Annie, the youngest. Lucy had incurred Maud’s anger for a perceived transgression, probably by tattling on Maud’s flirtatious behaviour, and Maud cut off all association with her, later reporting in her journals that Lucy had married beneath herself. As for Prescott, when his grandmother tartly told him he could wait to have her house after she died, he snapped, “You may live ten years yet.”70 Prescott developed health problems in 1906 and went into painful decline with tuberculosis of the spine, dying before his grandmother.

  Maud’s use of language is deadly, and she wrote damning descriptions of most of her Uncle John’s children—Prescott, Frank, Lucy, and Annie. She was more kind to Ernest, the one son she liked, and the one who would indeed eventually inherit the farm. Of Lucy, she wrote:

  Lucy was their oldest daughter … I kept on believing Lucy to be my true friend until I had unmistakable evidence of her falseness and deceit. When once my eyes were opened I investigated the matter thoroughly and a sickening tale of underhand malice and envy was revealed.… She had not stopped with distorting facts and insinuating malicious opinions. She had employed absolute falsehood.… Lucy was false to the core.71

  Cavendish might have seemed idyllic, but it had the same passionate hatreds in it that fuelled wars on a national scale elsewhere. Until Maud’s journals were published, it was assumed that she knew only the rosy and romantic sides of life, but her devastating character sketches of people in the journals demonstrate otherwise.72

  Despite the tensions with Uncle John’s family, Maud kept up her publishing efforts. She wrote and wrote, and read and read, while taking long walks to relieve her own anxieties. She suffered increasingly from headaches. It appears that Maud circulated Anne of Green Gables to publishers throughout 1906, as soon as she had it typed. She reported later that the novel was rejected by five publishers—in order, Bobbs-Merrill of Indianapolis; MacMillan of New York; Lothrop, Lea & Shephard of Boston; Henry Holt of New York; and L. C. Page Company of Boston—and then it lay in a hatbox for a considerable time before she reread it, liked it herself, and sent it out again to the L. C. Page Company of Boston.73 They wrote a letter accepting the novel on April 8, 1907, typed up a contract for the book by April 22, 1907, and Maud received it by post and signed it on May 2. In at least one speech during the 1930s, Maud said that Anne of Green Gables got special attention at the Page Company because a friend of hers from Summerside was a reader there and lobbied for the book.

  Perhaps this history of the multiple rejections is accurate, perhaps not. The mail service was admittedly faster then. But if the handwritten manuscript was finished in January 1906, it had to be revised and typed, activities that normally took Maud several months; and if it was then sent to five publishers, one after the other, they would have had to return it almost without reading it, if we are to believe her story of its journeys—which in some tellings had the rejected manuscript reposing in her old hatbox until she had half forgotten it and found it during spring cleaning. Whatever the truth was, Maud was undeniably persistent in the face of manuscript rejection. As soon as any short story, poem, or other manuscript came back, she sent it out again.74

  Maud expected Anne of Green Gables to be released in fall 1907, and wrote both of her correspondents, Ephraim Weber and George Boyd MacMillan, to that effect. Page apparently encountered delays with the internal artwork.75 In January 1908, she again wrote MacMillan that she expected it soon. On March 2, 1908, Maud wrote to Ephraim Weber that she had been busy for a month correcting the proofs of Anne of Green Gables, and it was to be out shortly (“around the 15th,” presumably of April). On April 5, 1908, she told Weber that she was expecting the novel any day, and that Page had sent advance publicity for it. On June 12, 1908, Anne of Green Gables was entered for copyright by L. C. Page under the number A-209449, and on June 20, her own copy arrived from Boston. By June 30, L. C. Page had announced that Anne was in a second printing. (The true first impression of the first edition of Anne of Green Gables bears an April 1908 date, and has two garbled sentences in it; Page soon corrected these errors and passed off the June impression as a first impression, first edition.)76 Reviews and letters about Anne began to pour in. Five months after the book was published, Maud reported having received sixty-six reviews.

  Long before Anne was published, Maud was regularly written up in Island papers as a gifted poet and short-story writer. By mid-summer 1908 there were further write-ups about the success of Anne of Green Gables. The Examiner carried a long and laudatory review on July 10, 1908. The Patriot followed with a long, favourable review on July 13. On July 29, 1908, the Summerside Journal raved:

  Anne of Green Gables, the latest literary effort of Miss L. M. Montgomery, of Cavendish, has made an instantaneous hit. The story throughout is most entertaining and the quaint and delicious sayings of Anne are bound to become household words. The book could only have bee
n written by a woman of deep and wide sympathy. The humorous touches are most captivating. Beyond doubt, Anne of Green Gables is well worth reading. If you wish to see how really clever an Island girl can be just get this book. (p. 5)

  Major papers in the United States also carried glowing reviews of the novel. The sales were phenomenal. Soon fans from all over the United States began to descend on Cavendish, wanting to meet Maud. The book was reprinted each month for the rest of the year, and almost as frequently the following year. By 1914, it had gone through thirty-eight impressions, and was still selling well.

  When the book became an instant best-seller, Maud’s fragile temperament found sudden fame disorienting. To make matters worse, in July 1908 their house roof caught fire, a portentous event that devastated her nerves. By October she complained of feeling “deadly tired all the time.” Ten days later she complained about uncontrollable hyperactivity in her brain: “vexing thoughts began to swarm through it like teasing gnats.” She had bouts of unexplained weeping, and she began reliving every failure in her life (all symptoms of depression). Her behaviour upset her elderly grandmother even more.

  Uncle Leander and his family were again at the family farm. He was a reader, and to his credit, he was impressed by Anne of Green Gables—and even more so by the way the book was selling. He began to treat Maud with new respect, deeming her intelligent enough to discuss men’s topics: politics, literature, history. Her Uncle John F. Macneill read the novel too; he is reported to have sneered that “anyone could have written it.”

  Maud dedicated Anne of Green Gables to the memory of her father and mother. One of her greatest disappointments was that her late father would never know that she had “arrived.” Mary Ann McRae Montgomery did live to hear of the book’s phenomenal success. If she resented her stepdaughter’s fame, however, she did not have long to do so. The Charlottetown Examiner reported on April 19, 1909, that “Mrs. Mary Montgomery, who made a fortune in real estate speculation, died at Prince Albert, Sask.” She was forty-six. This was one death Maud did not lament.

  Still, amid all this emotional upheaval, Maud was pushing herself to write. L. C. Page had set her to writing a sequel, Anne of Avonlea, a continuation of Anne’s story, even before Anne of Green Gables came out, and the new book was published in 1909 to immense sales. Page now urged her to get on with another book. She cobbled together Kilmeny of the Orchard for publication in 1910, basing it on material published earlier. At the end of 1909, when she was trying to write The Story Girl, she turned once again to herself as a partial model for her heroine, Sara Stanley.

  Sara, the “Story Girl,” has an absent father and lives with relatives in Prince Edward Island. She is a local legend for her ability to tell spellbinding stories. Sara actually tells many of Maud’s own set-pieces. The cousins Sara lives with—Dan, Felicity, and Cecily—exhibit the happy qualities of the Campbell cousins, George, Clara, and Stella. Sara’s chief admirers are two young boys, relatives from Toronto. In the year before she married a minister, Maud had fun writing mock-sermons for the characters in her book to deliver, with farcical seriousness.

  By January 1910, as she wrote The Story Girl, Maud spiralled towards a complete breakdown. “I thank God I do not come of a stock in which there is any tendency toward insanity,” she writes on February 7, 1910.77 Maud did not lose touch with reality (as in insanity), but her mood swings into depression were debilitating, and they disrupted her life. Maud describes in 1910 how she had a month of nervous prostration: “an utter breakdown of body, soul, and spirit.” The symptoms she describes include sleepless nights, and dreadful mental restlessness when she walked the floors with a fury, like a caged tiger. Talking to people coming to their house for their mail was a torture. She could not read or write or think. People noticed her distraught appearance.

  I wanted to die and escape life! The thought of having to go on living was more than I could bear. I seemed to be possessed by a morbid dread of the future. No matter under what conditions I pictured myself I could only see myself suffering unbearably.… I had no hope. I could not realize any possible escape from suffering. It seemed to me that I must exist in that anguish forever. This is, I believe, a very common symptom of neurasthenia. (February 7, 1910).

  She added that when she felt that way she could understand why people committed suicide to escape their feelings of torture. Her words are a classic description of a person’s feelings in a severe depression.

  With her newly found fame, she now developed many worries about her fiancé: his sinking moods, his irregular performance, his awkwardness in polite society, his narrow range of knowledge, and, worse, his lack of intellectual curiosity for anything outside of his profession. The man who had been so solicitous before now seemed incapable of understanding or comforting her in any way. She told him of her despondent spirits, and he suggested that she give up her writing. He was unable to see that her writing was an integral part of her spirit and sense of self, and that it was, in fact, what sustained her. He simply thought it made her nervous.

  Yet he was a very kind man, a trait that, having lived with her Grandfather Macneill, Maud valued highly. She had already backed out on Ed Simpson, and she didn’t want the reputation of being a “jilt.” If she rejected Ewan, who was willing to wait patiently for her until her grandmother died, she might not find someone else. And she did like Ewan a great deal. Maud had sought out Ewan’s love when her prospects were minimal, and she would have felt it dishonourable to back out as soon as she saw a chance for success and wealth.

  In February 1910, Maud received a royalty cheque for $7,000. To put this in perspective, the prime minister of Canada made $14,500 in the same year. She had accepted Ewan when she thought he was headed towards a successful career in the ministry. Ewan’s brief blaze of glory had fizzled out after his return to the Island, but she was becoming a wealthy, famous woman. On November 19, 1910, for instance, the respected American periodical The Republic gave her a full page. The second paragraph read:

  Less than three years ago the name of L. M. Montgomery was unknown to the reading public of the United States. Today she is in the forefront of our popular authors, not only in this country but in England, Canada and Australia. It is true, of course, that the author had a modest repute for excellent apprentice work … but doubtless those who knew her best little dreamed that her bud of promise was to have so early and splendid development. (p. 5)

  Maud’s doubts about the man she was engaged to continued to grow. During her engagement, which they kept secret, she had watched, probably with frustration, as the very attractive John Stirling courted Margaret Ross of Stanley—a woman she believed to have been one of her early rivals for Ewan’s attention. In her journals Maud remained absolutely silent about this budding courtship. After the Stirlings were married in 1910, she stated with some tartness that he was one of those men that women marry for reasons other than love, and she unjustly labelled him as homely.78 John and Margaret Stirling made a happy marriage, remaining friends with Ewan and Maud throughout their lives. By 1911 Maud would look back on this earlier period and meditate on why we “seldom give our love to what is worthiest” (February 5, 1911).

  Another friend was married that year. Nora Lefurgey, the vivacious teacher who had boarded with Maud and her grandmother, married Edmund Ernest Campbell, an Island son who was by then a very successful mining engineer in British Columbia. (He appears to have been one of Maud’s older students at Belmont.) This once again reminded her of her age.

  Maud was now suffering from the excessive demands of her publisher, L. C. Page. He wanted more books as quickly as she could turn them out. She was expected to produce one book after another at breakneck speed. But at least the frantic pace of her writing kept her from thinking about other worries, like her future marriage to Ewan. She discovered that writing could often help her block out worries in her real life. It was a pleasant way to escape.

  Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), written quickly to satisfy Page,
was the expansion of a story published between December 1908 and April 1909 as “Una of the Garden” in a Minnesota-based magazine called The Housekeeper. It tells the story of a young woman bearing a curse, who cannot speak until a suitor arrives and releases her voice. Similar to fairy tales like “The Sleeping Beauty,” it also parallels Maud’s own story: Ewan’s courtship allowed her to move beyond formulaic short stories and sentimental poems. Only then was she freed from a harsh grandfather’s curse. By freeing her from the fears of becoming a pitiful and voiceless old maid, Ewan’s love made her imagination soar and her pen sing. The style of Kilmeny is different from Maud’s other novels, and in style reflects her rereading of Hans Christian Andersen’s stories shortly before expanding “Una” into a novel.

  Maud was not writing her novels in a vacuum. This was a period of great Canadian nationalism. An article in the Examiner notes that a host of other Canadian writers—Bliss Carman, Archibald Lampman, Wilfred Campbell, Frederick George Scott (father of Frank Scott, the famous jurist and poet), and Marshall Saunders were all born in 1861 and were now in their prime, creating an indigenous Canadian literature. Maud’s books were admired by the general public as part of this new burst of creativity. On one level, Anne of Green Gables tells the story of how an orphan found a happy home, but on another, it also captures the colonizing experience, especially the story of Canada’s settlement: an outsider (or immigrant) comes into a new territory, transforms it by naming it and changing it, makes it his or her own, and is rooted there—a classic pattern, but the difference was that this outsider was a little girl. Whatever the appeal, in 1910, new impressions of Anne of Green Gables continued to roll steadily off the Page presses; a British edition had been published and was already translated into Swedish and Dutch.