Ewan’s initiative with the missionary drew attention. “It was worth travelling a good way to see the love and respect of the people for their minister, and the minister’s pride at the generosity of his loyal people,” wrote a Toronto lawyer named Mr. John A. Paterson, K.C., describing the country parson’s magnificent effort in a 1914 publication called The Presbyterian. For a time after Ewan undertook this missionary activity, it did look as if he might rise beyond the role of country parson: some of Maud’s spotlight was temporarily diverted to him. In June 1914, he had the pleasure of welcoming “his” missionary. All went well, until the young missionary came to visit and turned out to be rather a dull fellow. He had no personal charm, and no understanding that he should make an effort to connect with those who were paying his salary.
It was fortunate that Maud had kept her own finances separate from Ewan’s after her marriage—a departure from the custom of the time. She might give him money for his missionary project, but he could not take her money without her agreement. As a man of the old school who believed that God vested all authority in males, Ewan was initially troubled by her independence—this was not his idea of wifely submission as set forth in the Bible—yet he also understood that he had married an exceptional woman. He enjoyed the trips and conveniences that her income made possible. He recognized her abilities in planning and organization. He reluctantly came to see that she had been right about the ill-advised missionary project. More and more, Maud made the real decisions in the family, although she always pretended to defer to Ewan in the process.
Despite tensions in this marriage, Maud was content. Ewan was a good and kindly man. Her book sales were still strong, although they were dropping off from the highs of Anne of Green Gables: in book royalties alone, she made $3,599 in 1912, $3,959 in 1913, $2,817 in 1914, and $3,586 in 1915 (when Ewan still made $900 a year).18 She had gained the admiration and appreciation of the parishioners in Leaskdale and Zephyr. She had met and become a part of Toronto’s elite literary world. Although Toronto was not Edinburgh, or London, or Boston, these were times of growing Canadian nationalism, and Maud felt that she was on the ground floor of an edifice that would eventually develop into a great Canadian literature. She underlined a section from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” about his pride in his native land:
Breathes there a man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
In 1914 she seemed on top of the world. No one could have known that she—and the world—were rushing madly into a future that would soon change everything they knew.
CHAPTER 8
The darkening plains
On August 5, 1914, Maud wrote in her journal, “England has declared war on Germany.” Like most North Americans, Maud had paid scant attention a few months earlier when she had read that a Serbian had shot the Archduke of Austria and his duchess. The previous century had been filled with many assassinations and political skirmishes, but the fighting was usually localized. People in Canada, and indeed everyplace else, expected this war to be over quickly, perhaps in months, or even weeks. No one foresaw that it would spread, devouring an entire generation of young men.
On that August in 1914, Maud could not have imagined how much the war would eventually affect her husband, her community, and her own life. The war would also have a significant effect on the atmosphere in which writers worked: it would transform literary styles, alter the subjects deemed appropriate for literature, and create a new kind of reading public.
The “Great War” was to drag on for four years, killing more than 10 million young men worldwide and drawing sixteen nations and their colonies into conflict. Some 628,736 Canadians served in the war, and 66,573 were killed, with another 138,166 wounded. Many were maimed for life from gas attacks and other injuries. Over 10,000 men from the Toronto area alone were killed.
Against this international backdrop of death and destruction, Montgomery’s smaller world suffered its own pain and catastrophic events. On August 13, 1914, only eight days after the war was declared, Maud suffered the first of her personal tragedies: her second baby, Hugh Alexander, died at birth. She was overwhelmed with sorrow, and with so much grief close at hand, the Kaiser of Germany seemed far away. Little Hugh (named after her father and Ewan’s) was quietly buried in Zion Cemetery, outside Uxbridge. She wrote in her journals with the same power about her sorrow as she had written about her pleasure after Chester’s birth.
By August 31, 1914, Maud’s fierce discipline sent her back to her desk. She found herself in the grip of a lethargic depression and had to force herself to work. She finished Anne of the Island on November 20, ten days short of her fortieth birthday. “Never did I write a book under greater stress,” she recorded on November 20, 1914. Yet, in the writing, her spirits had recovered, and in spite of everything, she wrote in her journal: “Life is much richer, fuller, happier, more comfortable for me now than it was when I was twenty. I have won the success I resolved to win twenty years ago. It is worth the struggle …” (November 20, 1914).
Anne of the Island (1914)
Anne of the Island had been conceived as the saga of Anne’s college years, but when Maud was planning it back in August 1913, she found it increasingly difficult to re-enter the mental frame for this book—it seemed to belong to another century and life. As her spadework progressed, Anne’s happy college years did not have any room for the death of her baby, Hugh. But once she started, the act of writing the book was pleasurable, giving her escape from her sorrowful present. Still, it lacked what Anne of Green Gables had: the sense that she was living it, feeling every emotion, as she wrote it.
In Anne of the Island, Anne sets off to “Redmond College.” The story is loosely based on Maud’s own year at Dalhousie. Maud had herself lived in Halifax Ladies’ College, under the watchful eye of grim old maids, but Anne and her friends rent a charming little house, “Patty’s Place,” from two older women (aged fifty and seventy) who decide to cut loose from their circumscribed life to sightsee together in Europe. The “household gods” who come with this cottage are Gog and Magog, china dogs modelled on the ones Maud purchased on her honeymoon. These pagan deities seem appropriate in the house owned by two spunky older women who have flouted convention by refusing to marry and procreate. As Anne and her roommates at “Patty’s Place” laugh and study together, Maud creates a world in which young women enjoy each other’s fellowship instead of being pitted against each other in the search for desirable mates. There is a strong sense of female community and solidarity in this book. Men enter these young women’s world as potential suitors to be discussed and laughed over—just as Maud had done with Frede and Nora Lefurgey.
The book chews over some of the contemporary attitudes about female education. Older women remark that younger women just go to college to get a man, but Maud gives this a new twist: her college girls see marriage as a fate to be put off as long as possible. They acknowledge that they must eventually settle down, but they intend to have a good time beforehand. Maud depicts higher education for women as both improving and enjoyable, an activity that only old fuddy-duddies would disparage. At the end, the novel appears to reaffirm the prevalent view that a woman’s duty is to marry and procreate, not to seek an education, but at the same time it offers new views on the subject. This is a typical strategy we find in Maud’s novels: affirm the status quo, so conservative readers will not be upset, but suggest subtle and attractive alternatives to other readers.
The suitors themselves are creative variations on young men Maud had known. Anne has to choose between suitors: Gilbert Blythe shares some of the characteristics of Maud’s friend from Saskatchewan, Will Pritchard; Royal Gardner has a tendency to manage other people’s lives, not unlike Ed Simpson.
Anne of the Island seems a book out of sync with the troubled times, and in one sense it is. In it, Maud is returning to a lost world for consolation. However, judging from its
lively sales during the war, thousands of readers found it comforting. Maud was good at sensing the public mood. Part of her continuing popularity arises from her ability to recreate happy and recognizable worlds where people have fun together. But Anne of the Island also prepared young women for what was coming: learning to take responsibility for themselves instead of depending exclusively on men.
Maud’s spirits improved after she finished writing Anne of the Island, though she complained of frequent fatigue. Still, exhaustion was better than the debilitating depressions that had beset her before her marriage. Frede came for Christmas again that year, and together she and Maud analyzed the war news: “We flayed the Kaiser every day and told Kitchener what he ought to do …” (January 1, 1915).
Immediately after Christmas 1914, Maud heard from her half-sister, Ila, in Saskatchewan—one of the three children born to her father during his second marriage to Mary Ann—that her half-brother Carl had enlisted. The war was coming closer to home, affecting her own family as well as her community. Patriotic fervour was spreading, especially in newspapers and in the pulpits. The newspapers urged Canadians to feel a duty to the “Empire” and to Great Britain (the “dear old mother country”), as well as a duty to uphold the values of the civilized world against the forces of the Kaiser and the German army. Ministers urged patriotism as a means to save Christian values from the “forces of Evil.”
Religion had been losing its hold on people in the first part of the twentieth century. By World War I, the power of the ministry was already in decline, even in rural parishes like Leaskdale. Religion had always provided a source of shared assumptions about social order that located and bonded people in time and space. The late nineteenth century’s assault on religion—in the name of “higher criticism” and scientific inquiry—had greatly weakened the Church’s authority. Increased literacy had enabled people to read more and think critically about their own culture and history, and with the rapid development of science, the clergy no longer held the only keys to the “great unknown.”
To the clergy, the war now provided a way of demonstrating the materiality of evil: it was embodied in the German Kaiser (who was “raping little Belgium”). Those who fought against Germany were soldiers of the Lord saving the world for future generations. The soldiers who “went west” or “over the top” were likened to Jesus, dying so that others might live. Serving in war was the supreme “self-sacrifice.” Even if this war was not fought over religion, the language and rhetoric of religion was used to mobilize people to fight.
“There were few stauncher supporters of the war than Canada’s clergy. For them, the atrocities committed by the enemy demanded that the Allied nations become agents of divine retribution, cleansing the earth of those who defiled Christendom with their crimes,” writes historian Jonathan Vance.19Ministers preached that enlisting was “a duty of conscience, of religion.” Like so many wars of ancient history—and modern times—this one was depicted as a holy war against “Evil” and “Evil-doers.”
While religion appealed to young men’s moral sense, there were other reasons they enlisted. Some were motivated by a genuine sense of patriotism and principle, outraged by the descriptions of barbarism they read in the newspapers. Many other young men rushed to sign up for the war in hopes of adventure, seeking a “piece of the action” before the war was over; people speculated that Britain and the Allied Forces would bring Germany and the Kaiser to their knees in short order, possibly in a matter of weeks. Still others were drawn to the war through recruiting rallies stage-managed to pressure them into signing their names. Ministers like Ewan assisted at these rallies, and, in many cases, conducted them.
These recruiting meetings were held in local venues, usually churches. Entire families attended them because they were informative and entertaining, and such diversions were in short supply in rural communities before the development of radio and television media. Once there, people heard visiting speakers talk of the brutality of the Germans, the savagery of enemy attacks, and the glories of serving one’s country. Women sang patriotic and inspirational songs. “Signing officers” were positioned at the exits to take signatures. Ministers hovered, too, as symbols of God’s authority. Able-bodied young men could not exit without feeling shame if they had not signed their names. Once a young man had put down his name, he was committed. Signing up was easy, even a little unreal; no one wanted to be called a “slacker.” And the war had truly stirred up deep feelings of loyalty for the “Old Country,” as well as a renewed reverence for the God of Righteousness in a world that had begun to secularize.
In 1915, Everywoman’s World asked certain high-profile authors to answer two questions about war: “What will be the outcome of the war for the world at large?” and “What will it be for women in particular?” They introduced Maud’s comments with the note that “L. M. Montgomery, writer of graceful romances, strikes a sterner note in her message to … [our] readers.” Maud felt much quiet skepticism over religion—she saw it as a social institution more than a religious one—but she retained a deep-seated reverence for the idea of God. Her comments on these two questions are interesting:
I am not one of those who believe that this war will put an end to war. War is horrible, but there are things that are more horrible still, just as there are fates worse than death. Moral degradation, low ideas, sordid devotion to money-getting, are worse evils than war, and history shows us that these evils invariably overtake a nation which is for a long time at peace. Nothing short of so awful a calamity as a great war can awaken to remembrance a nation that has forgotten God and sold its birthright of aspiration for a mess of potage.…
In regard to women, I do not expect that the war and its outcome will affect their interests, apart from the general influence upon the race. But I do hope that it will in some measure open the eyes of humanity to the truth that the women who bear and train the nation’s sons should have some voice in the political issues that may send those sons to die on battlefields … 20
Although much of this statement seems to be appropriate for a minister’s wife, there is also the hint of a quiet call for women’s suffrage. Maud was not a public crusader for women’s rights like some women activists—Nellie McClung, for example—but in her writing and speaking she often contended for women’s interests with hushed but eloquent force.
Another son: Ewan Stuart Macdonald
In March 1915, Maud was delighted to find she was pregnant with a third child. But hard on the heels of the good tidings came frightening news. In April, Maud received a telegram saying that her cousin Frede, now an instructor at Macdonald College (and regarded as one of their best teachers), was dying of typhoid fever. Maud rushed to Montreal. A miracle—as soon as Frede saw Maud, she began to recover. This was Frede’s second brush with death: in 1902, she had been so sick that one Prince Edward Island paper carried a notice that she was mortally ill. The already powerful bond between the cousins was now stronger than ever.
Maud did not start another novel during her third pregnancy in 1915. Perhaps she feared that too much stress might result in another stillborn child. Instead, she began to collect and write material for a book of poetry. She treated herself to a restorative six-week trip to the Island through June and the first half of July. It was a summer of bad weather and she was uncomfortable with her pregnancy. Her life seemed less settled because of the war, and she was often overwhelmed by wildly fluctuating mood swings. She visited her old home in the moonlight (in the dark, so her Uncle John F. Macneill would not see her) and wrote:
For a space the years turned back their pages. The silent sleepers in the graveyard yonder wakened and filled their old places. Grandfather and grandmother read in the lighted kitchen. Old friends and comrades walked with me in the lane. Daffy frisked in the caraway. Above me my old white bed waited for me to press its pillow of dreams.… I could hardly tear myself away from the spot. Perhaps the charm it had for me was not a wholesome one … It may not be well to lin
ger too long among ghosts, lest they lay a cold grasp upon you and bind you too closely to their chill, sweet, unearthly companionship. (June 27, 1915)
She was glad to return in July 1915 to her busy life in Leaskdale.
In Ontario, Maud could remember the best of the old life and write about it, but when she was back in Prince Edward Island in person, she increasingly found herself pulled in two ways: when she was with people—and this was most of the time—she enjoyed herself; but when she was alone, she was easily drawn back into the past, remembering her morbid unhappiness during periods of debilitating depressions. The resurging memories dogged and alarmed her.
On October 7, 1915, Ewan Stuart Macdonald was born. From the very first, everyone declared that he took after Maud and her family as much as Chester had taken after Ewan’s side. This delighted her, and she believed that he favoured her own late father (whom she continued to idealize). But she had little time to rhapsodize over Stuart as she had over her first-born son.
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