Her journal entries describing her newborn are extremely moving: they capture the amazement a new mother feels over her first baby. “There is nothing on earth so unutterably sweet,” she wrote touchingly, “as a sleeping baby.” And Chester was a contented baby—again, a blessing in a first child.
Maud dismissed her earlier worries, which included a frightening dream at the time of Chester’s birth:
I dreamed that I wakened in the night, sat up, and looked over the footboard.… On the floor … lay a big empty black coffin, with a man standing at the foot and another at the head. As I fell back on the bed, overcome with the horror of the sight, the men lifted the coffin and laid it on my bed across my feet.… That dream haunted me. From that hour, I saw that hideous empty coffin waiting for me at the end of my months. (September 11, 1912)
All her life, Maud had had vivid dreams. She felt in them a psychic power, not uncommon in a Scottish culture that believed in “second sight.” She mulled over her dreams, believing that they sometimes foretold the future. She wrote off this dream, however, for Chester had not died, nor had she. But she did not forget the portentous black coffin associated with his birth.
Part of her joy over her new baby was in sharing it with Frede, who had come to Leaskdale to help after Chester’s birth. Frede stayed through the summer. Another bonding: Frede not only liked Ewan and had encouraged his and Maud’s courtship, but she also shared intensely in the baby-worship. With their similar outlooks on life, Frede and Maud together found fun in everything. Frede, like Maud, had the famed Macneill memory and could quote poetry for every occasion. They also composed poetry together, in high spirits. In the 1970s and 1980s, people still remembered how the whole Macdonald home rang with laughter when Frede was visiting—laughter shared by Ewan and anyone else present. It was a joyous household, aside from Stella’s presence. Still entrenched in the manse, it looked as if she might stay forever. She assumed a proprietary air with respect to Maud, Ewan, and the house. Ewan suffered in silence, unwilling to reply in kind to her bullying.
Frede and Maud conferred. Frede agreed to tell Stella how much she was needed at home, a lie that Stella somehow believed. Stella departed on August 21, 1912, and she was not missed. Frede, who had graduated as valedictorian from Macdonald College, was looking forward to her first job at Red Deer College in Alberta. She stayed on in Leaskdale until December 1912. After she left, Maud hired Lily Reid, a young widow from a nearby farm, to help with the housework.
The easygoing Ewan had been finding life with such a talented, vibrant, and energetic wife at times exhausting. In a house that was overrun with women—Maud, the nurse, Frede, Stella—he remained in the background, leaving all baby and child management to his wife. As Maud rhapsodized over her new baby, Ewan began to see that fatherhood could marginalize him further. When Maud departed for Toronto to visit friends in their first year, he felt a little too happily abandoned. As soon as Maud had recovered from childbirth, she went straight back to her writing. Ewan saw that she could block everything out when writing—everything except the baby, of course.
There were other pressures for Ewan. He began to sense that his powerhouse of a wife was hoping he would do well as a minister so that they could eventually move to a bigger community with a better manse, ideally in Toronto, where her book life was. He was annoyed when Maud received fan letters addressed to “L. M. Montgomery,” rather than to “Mrs. Ewan Macdonald.” (He once became testy over this, but later apologized.) According to the accounts given by the Macdonalds’ maids, however, during these initial years the manse was a happy household. These women remembered Maud and Ewan arguing “with spirit,” but the arguments were amicable, and sometimes just in fun. Maud did not write about this in her journals. Nor did she say, as the maids did, that she won all the arguments of any substance and, in the country phrase, she increasingly “wore the pants in the family.”
Maud continued to develop her connections with Toronto’s bustling literary society, usually under the aegis of Marjory MacMurchy. Marjory was not a true “kindred spirit”—she was too absorbed in her own multifaceted career to be a close friend—but she was happy to be the link between Maud and the Toronto book world. The staid colonial society of Toronto found Maud’s Prince Edward Island storytelling refreshing. She was greatly admired in literary circles as a native-grown Canadian talent with an international audience. (By this time, Anne of Green Gables had been translated into Polish, Dutch, and Swedish, as well as being sold throughout the English-speaking world.)
Maud’s polished refinement and her sparkling wit made her a favourite at Toronto social gatherings. At one private tea, Maud was herself the guest of honour in a group that included M. O. Hammond (she had already been in contact with him in his role as arts and literary editor and photographer at the Globe); the Venerable Archdeacon Cody (Henry John Cody, an Anglican canon who became Ontario’s minister of education and then president of the University of Toronto from 1932 to 1945); literary anthologist and gadfly John Garvin and his wife Katherine Hale (a minor novelist who had nonetheless climbed high in literary social circles); and several distinguished professors at the University of Toronto (all male). Maud was intrinsically reserved, and this slight shyness made her likeably modest and unassuming. But she was also very poised, and she could rise to occasions well. Toronto saw her as a fresh personality, at once quaint and sophisticated, dignified and unaffected.
The Toronto visits were, however, a decidedly solo venture. Ewan would have been totally out of his milieu in the Toronto literary world, even if he had wished to seek the social enticements of Toronto without appearing to neglect his congregation. And there was no doubt that Maud enjoyed her independent outings. Except in the periods when she was tied to her home with small, nursing babies, Maud could escape into another role in Toronto, enjoying her own celebrity, rather than deferring to her husband before his parishioners.
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In Leaskdale, Maud had far less access to community gossip, and this she missed. In the presence of their minister’s wife, women remained on their best behaviour and talked about “non-combustible” topics. In Cavendish, Maud had profited from the best location in the community for hearing local news—her grandparents’ home, with the post office in its kitchen. Here in Leaskdale, she was cut off from the gossip that had fed her fiction. She could not even make a confidential friend of any of her husband’s parishioners without arousing the jealousy of others. At Uxbridge, in the Hypatia Club, she found one new friend, Mary Beal (Mrs. Norman Beal). A gifted, socially prominent, and well-to-do woman, raised in Uxbridge, she was the daughter of one of the founding members of the club, but now lived in Toronto.
In February 1913, the Hypatia Club put on a dramatic presentation that followed a script they had used before. The “Goddess of Fame,” played by Mary Beal, summoned a series of women who acted out the parts of historical women who deserved the “laurel wreath of fame”: the Dowager Empress of China, Ruth (of the Bible), Laura Secord (Canadian heroine in the War of 1812), Helen of Troy, Jenny Lynd (the Swedish “nightingale”), Pandita Ramabai (female revivalist in India), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poet), Mrs. Winsloe (who pleaded the merits of her soothing patent medicine for infants), Hypatia herself (as a Grecian oracle), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marie Antoinette, Flora Macdonald (who saved the life of Bonnie Prince Charlie), Shakespeare’s “Portia,” “Madame Butterfly” from Puccini’s opera of that name, Queen Victoria, Miriam (of the Bible), Madame Emma Albani (Canadian opera singer), Florence Nightingale, Pauline Johnson (a famous half-native Canadian poet who performed on the stage, transforming herself from white to native), Miss Canada, and a generic “Mother.” Maud came as herself, along with “Anne of Green Gables.” The laurel crown was given to the generic, idealized “Mother,” who played, no doubt, the role of the Victorian “angel in the house.” The group raised $241 for library purchases that year.
For all such outings Maud could safely leave Chester in the care of Lily Reid,
the manse’s maid since Stella’s departure. Lily’s two young children, Edith and Archie, were cared for by Lily’s mother.15
A daily stint of writing remained an inviolate part of Maud’s morning routine. By May 1913, she had finished The Golden Road, which picked up and continued the story of the King family and their friends. Its heroine, “the Story Girl,” continues to recount old folk tales and myths, sharing this role now with the “Awkward Man,” a dreamy recluse who is also a writer. In place of the hellfire sermons of the The Story Girl, Montgomery offers the equally terrifying experience of confronting a “witch,” old Peg Bowen. There are many echoes of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: sweet Cecily, like Alcott’s sweet Beth, will not live beyond the golden road of childhood.
A more personal echo appears at the climax, when Sara Stanley is reunited with her beloved father, absent since his daughter was eight years old. The motif recurs again later in Jane of Lantern Hill, marking Maud’s endless longing for her idealized father. Brown-bearded Blair Stanley in The Golden Road is described in terms that identify him with Hugh John.
Shortly after she finished The Golden Road in May 1913, Maud started work on her third “Anne” book. She was being urged by L. C. Page to produce more money-making “Anne” novels. The story of young college girls setting up house together and fully enjoying the warmth of friendship took her into a period of creative energy. The memories of Prince of Wales College days and the recent closeness with Frede furnished the tone for “Anne of Redmond,” later to be published as Anne of the Island.
When Chester was one year old, in July, Maud proudly took him to Prince Edward Island. Whenever she went home to visit on the Island, her arrival was major news—a striking contrast to her return from Prince Albert, when no one had bothered to meet her train. The papers reported her every movement on and about the Island, giving her a similar kind of attention to that received by Andrew Macphail. The adulation she received on the Island always recharged her. Although her life was now in Ontario, she felt that her roots would always be in the Island. She was now living through the happiest period of her life, right after Chester’s birth, with success in all areas of her professional and personal life. She was speaking the truth when she said, “I haven’t time to be because I have so much to do” (December 1, 1912).
As Maud worked feverishly on her next book, Ewan, too, showed a burst of energy. An ambitious plan to support a foreign missionary took possession of him. Many large parishes, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, particularly urban ones, counted it a distinction to support the work of “their own missionary.” It gave the parish a rallying point, and in a pre-television era, letters from a good missionary stationed in India or some other still-exotic place made wonderful entertainment when read from the pulpit. Missionaries coming home on furlough brought incredible excitement if they were good speakers. A minister who obtained his congregation’s support for a missionary underlined his own success as a pastor. In autumn 1913, Ewan Macdonald began canvassing his parishioners, pressing them to support a missionary. The necessary amount was $1,200 a year, more than Ewan’s own salary.
Maud disapproved of Ewan’s plan. She knew that cash was never a plentiful commodity, even on a successful farm. Nor did industrious Scots farmers really like being parted from too much of their hard-earned money, sympathetic as they might be to redeeming “heathens” in foreign parts. Maud felt this enterprise would be doomed to failure, and she told Ewan so. But Ewan was stubborn, and determined to assert himself in this instance.
By 1914, Ewan had engaged a young ministry student, Stuart Forbes, B.A., to travel to Honan, China. Ewan (with Maud’s help) gave considerable money to support his missionary. They also gave another $1,100 for the building fund of Knox College, also clearly coming from Maud’s funds, since Ewan’s salary was only $900 that year.
Maud must have hoped that the ambition she had witnessed in Ewan’s early days in PEI was returning, even if she disapproved of the missionary project. She had witnessed temporary bursts of energy before: for example, when Ewan spurred the improvement of the Cavendish graveyard (an act that endeared him to the community), and when he preached in two large Charlottetown churches just before he left for Scotland. He could be very effective at these times. (In fact, she would have been impressed by the account of his preaching in these prestigious churches in the Examiner, October 6, 1906, right before she accepted his proposal on October 12, 1906.)
Maud herself had embarked on a new career as a riveting platform speaker. On October 13, 1913, under the auspices of the Women’s Canadian Club, she addressed eight hundred women in Forrester’s Hall, Toronto, on the subject of Prince Edward Island. All the major Toronto newspapers carried accounts of “Mrs. Macdonald” and her speech. She copied one of these into her diary entry of November 1, 1913, obviously pleased with its characterizations:
There is something quaint and taking in her whole personality. She is quiet, with a great deal of reserve force and strength. Few writers impress one to the same degree with the conviction that she lives in a mental world of her own where Anne and Kilmeny and the Story Girl and other characters as yet unknown to her readers pursue adventures of absorbing interest. Mrs. Macdonald has a voice of admirable carrying quality.… One of the many favourable comments heard on every hand was to the effect that she was absolutely natural and unaffected.
She did not copy two other revealing parts of the journalists’ comments. First, on her positive influence on her audience:
The audience was as interesting in its own way as the speaker. As those listening women were drawn more closely into the mould of the speaker, as they became informed by her insistence on everything that is normal and happy and beautiful in life, their faces changed … to the look that people wear when they are living again their happiest moments.… They smiled and laughed and applauded and to all intents and purposes were girls again in their old homes. It is indeed a magical power to be able to call back all that is wholesome and lovely and unforgettable in one’s childhood and this magical gift is Mrs. Macdonald’s. The loveliness of simplicity, the greatness that is fostered in quiet lives was the subject of her address. But it was not delivered in abstract or lofty terms. It was told as a story should be told without much comment and the audience was left to find the lesson.
Second, on her topic:
The first part of the address was a lyrical, passionate praise of Prince Edward Island.… This was no ordinary geographical traveller’s tale of a familiar country, but a lover’s praise of a heart’s country. As she piled sentence on sentence to explain to inland folk the mystery and the beauty and the love of the sea, it began to be plain that those who heard this address perhaps would never forget it.16
Maud’s new acquaintances in Toronto sent her these glowing newspaper accounts. She was secretly delighted, but already she was noticing that Ewan did not share the same pleasure in her success. What did Ewan feel like when he delivered weekly sermons in front of a wife who, after her first formal public address ever—to eight hundred people in Toronto—had received rave reviews in at least seven Toronto newspapers? Ewan had been taught to believe that all gifts came from God; why, he must have brooded, did he not have speaking powers equal to those of his wife if God wanted him to succeed in the ministry? Was God set against him? He had not anticipated what it would be like to live with such a gifted and articulate wife. He could not fault Maud as a wife and helpmeet in his ministry, but her extraordinary abilities somehow diminished his. Old-timers remembering Ewan in the late 1970s all used the same term to describe him: he was “deep,” they said. He began brooding, keeping his feelings and thoughts to himself, and a number of people noticed this.
Maud was caught up in her own success, and she confided in her private diary: “I really believe I would like very much to live in a place like Toronto— there I could have some intellectual companionship, have access to good music, drama and art, and some little real social life. I have no social life here—no
ne at all, not even as much as I had in Cavendish” (November 1, 1913). There was reason to hope that Ewan might advance up the clerical ladder, just as John Mustard had.
In November 1913, Maud found that she was pregnant again. Delighted, she hoped for a girl. This pregnancy was as difficult as the first had been easy. Constant nausea alternated with long stretches of compete mental lethargy. She recalled with alarm the severe depression she had suffered before her marriage and feared a recurrence. She continued working as best she could on Anne of the Island (she used a garden metaphor—doing “spadework”—to describe the process of planning out plot and characters for a novel or story), but the difficult pregnancy made her feel increasingly out of touch with the fictional world of her girlhood. Her life was moving on, and other shadows were emerging in the road “around the bend.”
After finishing her morning stint of work, she spent the rest of the day on her family, her house, or her community duties. Her maid, Lily Reid, commented that Maud was extra-conscientious: she was a serious person who “did more than most minister’s wives.”17 That was her nature—she was caught up in the notion of duty—and she also felt that she strengthened Ewan’s pastoral service, which would help his career.
One personal pleasure through the long, cold winter of 1914 was reading. Maud averaged at least a book a day. She read new books her publishers sent her alongside her old favourites (which she read again and again). On trips to Toronto, she purchased new books. She was an exceptionally fast reader, and blessed with a near-photographic memory. On successive readings, she underlined her favourite passages in her books (some of which have survived) and made jottings of reactions into notebooks (which are often copied into her diary, although her notebooks themselves have not survived). To her, books were the centre of a cultured person’s life. Books were also a companion—one that an intellectual husband might have been. She accumulated more and more books; when she cleaned the Leaskdale library one spring she counted 1,200. (Books bearing her inscription still turn up across Canada.)
Lucy Maud Montgomery Page 23