The well-connected Marjory MacMurchy was immensely helpful to Maud in providing an entrance into Toronto society; among other things, she arranged for Maud to give talks to organizations and literary groups. Marjory was a journalist, an occasional novelist (with a series of books between 1916 and 1920), a social activist, a crusader for women’s and children’s rights, an early member of P.E.N., and the long-time president of the Canadian Women’s Press Club.5 Marjory had first known Maud as a member of the executive of the Women’s Press Club in the Atlantic region. On a visit to the Island in 1910, she had interviewed and written an article on the best-selling author of Anne of Green Gables. Marjory had then welcomed Maud and Ewan upon their arrival in Toronto following their honeymoon. Marjory’s extended family of jurists, doctors, teachers, and activists were important members of the Toronto elite, and through Marjory, Maud learned who was important in the Toronto cultural, business, and social worlds, and she began to move among them.6 Yet, Maud’s entree into Toronto’s cultural life meant that she had to put extra effort into her church work at home, in order to remain “visible” in the performance of her duties as a minister’s wife. And getting to Toronto—by horse and buggy over dirt roads to Uxbridge, and then by train—took considerable planning and effort.
She soon began to get a sense of the families in Leaskdale. Sober, intelligent, and successful farmers, they shared the Scots-Presbyterians work ethic Maud knew so well from Prince Edward Island. Mr. and Mrs. George Leask—descendants of the Scottish family for whom the village was named—lived in a large and impressive red-brick house near the manse.7 Other substantial houses and farms belonged to members of the Mustard family, Hugh and James. Their forebears had also come from Scotland, settling in Scott Township in 1832; their descendants would become prominent doctors, educators, theologians, and nurses.8 Ten or twelve other families held property on the grid of side roads around the village: the Shiers, Lyons, Lapps, Cooks, Colwells, and others.
Ewan’s parish was a double charge: Leaskdale and Zephyr. The small village of Zephyr was some eleven miles away—a long trip with a horse and open buggy when the rutted dirt roads were either muddy, dusty, or icy, or in a sleigh in winter when the snow was blowing in streaks across the flat, icy fields. Most members of the Zephyr congregation were also successful and sober people. But the church, a modest frame structure built in 1881, was beleaguered by several troublesome families, truculent members who often caused friction. Ewan’s amiable tact would be invaluable. In Zephyr, there was a Methodist church as well as the Presbyterian one, and there was some antagonism between them.9 Since churches were the main social organization—and organizing force—in a community, the two denominations in Zephyr created a less unified community than in Leaskdale.
The Macdonalds spent their first Christmas dinner at the home of the Hugh Mustard family. The gathering included Hugh’s brother, the Reverend John A. Mustard, who was visiting with his wife and son. By a strange twist of fate, this was the same “Mr. Mustard” who years earlier had been Maud’s teacher in Prince Albert. John Mustard, so disparaged as a hapless suitor in Maud’s early diary, was now an exceptionally successful minister in Toronto. He was seven years older than Maud and three years older than Ewan. He was trim, fit, robust, and distinguished-looking (his thick black hair had turned a striking silver-white). Maud’s comments in her private diary are less than kind about the “same slow John Mustard” who, she says, still presents commonplace incidents as “awfully funny.” She adds with a pinch of mischief that his jolly wife could “talk enough for two” and that, though pretty, she is very “fat.”10
The Macdonalds had their own guests at Christmas, too, including Maud’s dearly loved cousin Frede, now finishing her degree at Macdonald College near Montreal. To be equitable, Frede’s sister Stella had also been invited.
Stella Campbell was now, at thirty-two, an aging “spinster.” Most of her siblings at Park Corner had left, but Stella was forced to live on in her childhood home—which she would have left in a flash if she had been able to find a man willing to marry her. Her unhappiness manifested itself in temper-tantrums, sulks, bossiness, hypochondria, and rudeness. Although Stella could be fun when in a good mood, she was generally unhappy, and her noisy, aggressive presence could quickly fill a household with tension. She and her brother George fought constantly, and George had a temper as explosive as Stella’s own. Stella often pushed George beyond his limits: he would roar angrily out of his home, and return in an even worse temper. Stella took out her frustrations on her mother (Maud’s beloved Aunt Annie) and Ella (George’s pretty and gentle wife).
Maud hoped that an extended trip to Ontario at Christmas might give Park Corner some peace, and perhaps Stella a new lease on life. In hopes of promoting romance, Maud also invited an old beau of Stella’s—Irving Howatt, now a barrister in the west (Edmonton)—to visit Leaskdale over Christmas. (Maud does not mention this in her journals. The romance did not work out, despite Maud’s efforts to promote it by lending large amounts of money to Stella, some of which Stella then funnelled to Irving Howatt in unsecured loans.) After Christmas, Stella asked Maud if she could stay the entire winter. Maud, caught off guard, was appalled, but she felt unable to face a row with her cousin. With apprehension, she acquiesced—but persuaded Frede to speak to Stella beforehand on the proper behaviour expected in someone else’s house. Maud did need a housekeeper now that she was pregnant as well as very busy. She offered Stella a salary for housework, hoping that remuneration would signal to Stella that she “should not presume too much.” As Maud put it, “I made a virtue of necessity and hoped against hope” (September 22, 1912).
Maud hoped in vain. Stella became a tyrant. It was not long before she grew impossibly bossy, insulting Ewan and embarrassing Maud before the parishioners. (Remembering Stella years later, Leaskdale old-timers recalled discreetly that people did not warm to her as they had to her sister, Frede.)
But Stella, hard-working and capable, did the cooking and housekeeping. Food preparation was a full-time job in itself, and then there was the washing, ironing, and housekeeping when that was done. Stella’s help was valuable. The Macdonalds fetched their fresh milk and cream daily from the Leasks, across the road, and churned their own butter. Maud kept her own hens for eggs and dressed chickens for meat. In the Leaskdale community, there was a “beef ring” in which a different farmer would slaughter each week and distribute fresh meat to each family in the ring, but generally meats had to be canned, pickled, salted, dried, or cured in smokehouses, and then reconstituted in recipes. Maud had salted herring shipped up from Prince Edward Island each year. Making fresh bread was a daily chore.
Whatever her other faults, Stella was a very good cook, like all the Campbells. She made excellent desserts, the one thing easy to vary in family menus: Maud’s handwritten recipe book contained pages and pages of cookies, cakes, and pies, balanced by only a few recipes for meats or vegetables. Houses were very cold then, lacking insulation, and people needed energy from food to keep warm. Even the Macdonalds’ carrots were candied. One maid remembered Ewan saying to his wife quite often: “Maudie, when are you going to make some plum pudding?” Like most Scots, the Macdonalds always had cooked oatmeal for breakfast, often with bacon and eggs. The Macdonald household indulged in one luxury many others did not: on their cereal they put thick, fresh cream. What they did not use, they churned into butter. (Generally, farmwives saved most of their cream to sell.) Stella grew “fat as a seal.” Despite her pregnancy, Maud grew thinner.
Maud planned her meals and housework each weekend, and gave Stella the daily schedule a week in advance, as she would do with all her maids. (Her first maid, Lily Reid, recalled being handed a weekly schedule of “washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, Wednesday for baking and extras, Thursday for upstairs cleaning, Friday for downstairs, and Saturday to make all preparations for Sunday.”) Washing was done either on a washboard, or in a machine with a paddle that was manually agitated, and it was hung t
o dry on an outside line, even in the freezing cold. Most women ironed on kitchen tables padded with blankets, but Maud was more modern and bought an ironing board. Two irons were kept in rotation, one heating on the wood-fuelled cook stove while the other was in use. Ironing required extreme care, since an overheated iron would scorch and instantly ruin valuable clothes or linens, especially when cotton was starched to give it more body.
Stella “is an odd compound,” Maud reflected: “She would work her fingers to the bone for you, complaining bitterly of it all the time and furiously resentful if she is not allowed to do it. She insults and derides you to your face, but behind your back she is the most loyal of friends and would defend you against the world. But everyone who ever has to live with her will be miserable—there is no doubt of that” (September 22, 1912).
Having a cousin as helper seemed normal to the community women, since they could see that Maud spent much time in church activities. The extra help also meant that Maud could return to writing. Every morning she shut herself in the library and worked for two hours. She had never been quite as busy as she was now. In January 1912 she resumed work on Chronicles of Avonlea. Her publisher, L. C. Page, was hounding her for more “Anne,” so she gathered a group of stories she had written before her marriage, changed their setting to that of “Avonlea,” and brought “Anne” in as a spectator, commentator, or minor actor in each story. She cobbled these stories together and sent a group of them to the publishing company in late March to make a selection of the best. They returned their selection and she signed a contract on April 26, 1912; the book was in print in late June, just three months later. (She did not realize at the time that Page had retyped and retained copies of the extra stories rejected for this volume, something that would cause much trouble later on.)
In January 1912 Maud also found time to catch up with writing in her old diary, abandoned, except for rough notes, at the time of her grandmother’s death. Now she wrote out a long, retrospective entry on her final days in Cavendish, giving her comments on most of the people there, her marriage and honeymoon, and her arrival in Leaskdale. She also found time to maintain her correspondence with her long-time pen-pals, George Boyd MacMillan and Ephraim Weber, whose lively, intelligent letters helped fill an intellectual void that her husband and community did not.
When Maud and Ewan went on their expected rounds that winter, taking evening tea in parishioners’ homes, she always carried her bag of needlework. She could knit and crochet, without even watching her flying fingers. Her skills at “fancy-work” were much admired by the farmwives, themselves adept at basic needlework. To these women, she was “Mrs. Macdonald,” and she seemed to be one of them. Her life as a world-famous writer was largely out of sight.
In February 1912, however, it was as “L. M. Montgomery” that Maud was invited to the Hypatia Club in the nearby town of Uxbridge. This group had been formed in 1907 by seven women (Mrs. Beal, Mrs. Sharpe, Mrs. Gould, Mrs. Urquhart, Mrs. Vickers, Mrs. Willis, and Mrs. Chinn) to discuss books and authors. The meeting was held at the home of Mrs. I. J. Gould. Maud and Mrs. MacGregor (the writer “Marian Keith”) were invited as honoured authors. A newspaper write-up of this February 1912 meeting praised a “Club Magazine” compiled on the occasion and read by Dr. Horace Bascom, a local medical doctor. This “showed much talent on the part of the contributors,” with news items, health notes, advertisements, and jokes, but the “chief interest was centred in the short stories written especially for it by the authoresses. The object of the Club is to promote a study of English Literature and they are fortunate in having associated with them, as a member, Mrs. McDonald [sic] of Leaskdale,” continued the newspaper. The Hypatia Club would be a great pleasure to Maud during her fifteen years at Leaskdale, and she contributed innumerable items to their program.11
In March 1912, Maud read a paper on Longfellow’s “Attitude to the Sea” at the Zephyr Presbyterian Guild.12 Two days before that, she and Ewan had been to the Zephyr Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting. In May she gave them a lengthy paper on Ralph Connor’s The Sky Pilot.
Maud was in her element as mistress of the manse in Leaskdale and as literary celebrity in the larger communities of Uxbridge and Toronto. Little time elapsed between finishing Chronicles of Avonlea in March and starting The Golden Road on April 30, 1912. In this sequel to The Story Girl, Maud again modelled the teller of tales on herself, though declaring that many of the stories were ones she had heard from her Great-Aunt Mary Macneill Lawson, now eighty-nine years old. (Mary Lawson would die in October 1912.)13
Looking back at her youth with the detachment of distance, Maud began to realize what a rich childhood she had enjoyed, growing up in a unique rural community with a strong oral culture. She knew that with developments in communication and transportation the sense of safe isolation, which Cavendish had retained, was fast disappearing. Maud continued writing this nostalgic story of childhood in Prince Edward Island through her pregnancy. Maud felt overstretched at times, but she had an extraordinary ability to compartmentalize her life. She made a schedule for her writing every morning, and kept faithfully to it. When things became too oppressive, she drew on her ability to “shut the door of my soul on the curiosity and ignorance by so many and retreat into a citadel of dear thoughts and beautiful imaginings” (April 4, 1912). No one guessed that when she re-emerged, refreshed and renewed, she found many of them tiresome.14
Maud took enormous pleasure in small things: seeing trilliums in the spring woods, growing flowers and vegetables in her summer garden, preparing desserts for church socials, telling a story and making everyone laugh, looking at farmers harvesting crops, watching a winter sunset throw purple and mauve shadows over the snow, skimming over the rolling hills in a sleigh pulled by “Queen” (the Macdonalds’ black mare), reading inside while a storm howled outside, and most of all, listening to the purring of her cat Daffy. It was Maud’s basic nature to see the world as a luminous place, and she wrote glorious passages about it in her diary. When people wondered how she managed to do so much, she laughed that her cat rested for her.
In June 1912 the Leaskdale church celebrated its fiftieth year with a huge party and reunion—plenty of work for a minister’s wife, who was by then eight months pregnant. Attendance was so good that many could not fit into the church. A few days before her first baby was due, Maud read a paper on Paradise Lost at the Women’s Foreign Mission Association of the church. The first copies of Chronicles of Avonlea were in print by June 30, 1912. At this point, she was only a week from the delivery of her first baby.
Maud had worried that the quiet life with her grandmother in Cavendish would “unfit” her for any other kind of life. She found, on the contrary, that the busier she was, the happier she felt. With relief, she wrote that she had been free of nervous attacks the whole year. She was very contented, and by all accounts so was Ewan.
A son is born: Chester Cameron Macdonald
“It has always seemed to me that a childless marriage is a tragedy— especially in such a marriage as mine.… I want to have a child— something to link me with the future of my race,” Maud had confided to her diary on October 24, 1911. “I want to give a human soul a chance to live this wonderful life of ours. I want something of my very own—bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, to love and cherish.” Reopening her diary on January 28, 1912, Maud Montgomery Macdonald wrote: “I am to be a mother. I cannot realize it. It seems to me so incredible—so wonderful—so utterly impossible as happening to me!”
But it was also frightening. She was a diminutive and delicate woman, halfway through her thirty-seventh year, at a time when childbirth could still threaten complications leading to death. (Statistics on mortality in childbirth in 1912 are not easily available, but by 1921 the rate had dropped to 419 deaths per 100,000 cases. By 2000, the rate was less than 1 in 100,000.) Planting her spring garden, Maud wondered if she would be lying “beneath the sod” when the next spring came around. Consequently, she hired a prof
essional nurse recommended by Dr. Helen MacMurchy, Marjory’s sister, and she arranged for Dr. Horace Bascom of Uxbridge to attend the birth. Normally, experienced women from the community helped with childbirth, calling in a doctor only if there were complications (when it was sometimes too late). Maud’s preparations were unusual for the times. But she could afford it. In 1910, she had made $6,449, and $5,578 in 1911, from her books’ sales alone. (Compared to Ewan’s yearly salary of $900, this was a small fortune.)
On Sunday, July 7, 1912, just after twelve noon, baby Chester Cameron Macdonald was born, a fine, healthy baby. That Chester’s was an easy birth seemed a miracle, boding well. (Maud ascribed the ease of the birth to exercises she had been doing, as well as to a form of self-hypnosis she had been practising every night.) Motherhood brought her a new kind of joy, a pleasure beyond anything she had experienced. She had read about mothers failing to bond with their babies, and she worried that this might happen to her. After a good night’s rest following the easy delivery, and a momentary feeling of estrangement, her “whole being … [was] engulfed in a wave of love for that little blinking mite of humanity.”
Chester was all that a mother could have hoped for in a baby: he was sturdy, alert, and exceedingly cute. She watched him sleep, move, and coo to himself. She wrote rapturously about cuddling him. She described his shrieks when the nurse bathed him, until he learned it was not “a fatal affair.” She melted when he looked at her with an expression of “intelligent wonder” in his eyes, and she thrilled to the knowledge that the “little mind” was starting to develop:
I gaze at my child with an aching wonder as to what germs of thought and feeling and will and intellect are unfolding in that little soul. I can see what he is externally. I can see that he is plump and shapely and sturdy, with long-lashed dark blue eyes, chubby cheeks, lacking his father’s dimples but with dear wee waxen fingers and toes. But I cannot peep into that baby brain and discover what is hidden there. He is my child—“bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”—but his little individuality is distinct from mine. He is the captain of his own little soul and must live his own life as we all do from the very cradle. (September 22, 1912)
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