In her journals, “Maudie” fights great odds: she is an unusually sensitive, precocious child, easily hurt, with no parents to stand up for her. She was isolated and lonely in her childhood, raised by two old grandparents who had little understanding of or sympathy for her. She was persecuted by some of her teachers and jealous cousins, scolded and berated by her relatives for her ambitious “scribbling,” but she persevered in spite of every discouragement. In fact, however, Maud’s real childhood was, for the most part, happy. Although she suffered from a sense of difference as she grew up, this difference came from being an “elite” member of the community (and a child who was better dressed and smarter than others).
Maud had read an enormous amount by the time she began rewriting and shaping her own journals. Keeping diaries was a fad in the late nineteenth century. It allowed women of intelligence and leisure to express themselves when they had no public forum. Male statesmen in the corridors of power also kept diaries, but these were naturally very different from women’s private, domestic diaries. Maud complained that Edward Gibbon, following the male Victorian model of objective, rational, controlled writing, had put none of his personality into his memoirs. She determined to map new territory for women: she would write a life history with the emotion and personality deliberately left in.
Still, all this said, there are only rare glimpses of how Maud actually thinks and feels about herself. We learn how she sees herself through the eyes of others, including her husband, her children, her husband’s parishioners, and her fans. We also hear what she does, what she thinks about others, and how she feels about everything, but we see little of what she truly thinks about herself. Maud was a very guarded and private person, even in her journals. Playfully, she pasted in a picture of herself, taken in the Leaskdale kitchen, which shows her intuitive understanding of the ways an autobiographical writer operates, and how pictures can be read as texts. She holds a fan up to conceal her face, which is in turn covered with a veil.
Towards the end of 1920, Maud indulged in a piece of self-analysis. Prompted by “Mrs. Asquith’s Autobiography,” Maud asks herself whether a truly frank and incisive self-analysis is ever possible, and she writes that she is the one person in a thousand who does know her own weaknesses and strengths. “But I could not, even in these diaries which no eye but mine ever sees, write frankly down what I discern in myself,” she admits (December 13, 1920).
In another paragraph of her journals written up at the same time, she writes that she has “not yet found anything much pleasanter than talking with the right kind of a man—except—but I won’t write it. My descendants might be shocked.” Speculating on love in that same long entry (January 31, 1920), she mentions Herman Leard—“a memory which I would not barter for anything save the lives of my children and the return of Frede.”
At this point in late January 1920, and perhaps at the time of the “fan” picture, she was recopying the 1898 section of her journals concerning Herman. Were all of her raptures about her unfulfilled love with Herman really about Herman? Or did she displace some private feelings for the attractive and virile Captain Smith, a man seen so often during Ewan’s breakdowns, onto Herman Leard? Did the poem “The Bride Dreams,” finished in February 1921, come wholly out of her imaginary life with Herman—or partly with Smith? Or did the memory fuse both?
More important, did the actual man matter? Maud did suffer from thwarted passion and unfulfilled desires, but the specific men who aroused her dream life may have been immaterial. Maud felt her every emotion with intensity, but she had learned from her self-contained British grandmother to maintain an aura of dignity and reserve. To betray your raw passions in front of people was “cheap”—and dangerous, too, for it made your weaknesses visible to your enemies. In her fiction, Maud took emotions she knew and attributed them to a spectrum of imaginary characters. In her journals, she appears to have reversed the process, taking her emotions and attaching them— sometimes arbitrarily— to suitable real-life characters.
Since Maud intended her journals to be truthful, she was unable and unwilling to falsify the emotional core of her experience, but sometimes she gives us only part of the picture in cold, hard, truthful facts. As Emily Dickinson puts it: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—.”
A case in point is the story about her love affair with Herman Leard (entry of October 7, 1897). As we know, she did not tell this tale as others have since told it—that Herman was already engaged, just as she herself was, and that they were both acting scandalously in terms of the mores of the time. She omits all mention of the existence of Herman’s girlfriend, Ettie Schurman.
Her infatuation with Herman is undoubtedly true, and her feeling of frustration—the emotional core of the story—is also true. But she shapes the story in such a way as to divert the reader from much that is culpable on her part. There are at least four reasons for her shaping the story as she did.
Her first reason was purely aesthetic. Maud wanted a narrative shape that would allow her to turn a rather sprawling story into a compelling narrative. The narrative pattern she knew best was the one in Pilgrim’s Progress. (In John Bunyan’s story, the “pilgrim” going through life has to sidestep dangerous spots like the “Slough of Despond.”) The “Herman affair” was a large pothole on her precarious road through life, but John Bunyan’s structural pattern was too one-dimensional to use, so she looked for a more complex narrative pattern.
Her second reason proceeds from the first reason, but has to do with morality. The literary convention of the two suitors made a much more complex and dramatic story, and it allowed, in addition, something of a cover-up. The account of the Herman Leard affair in her journals is designed to lay to rest any lingering stories about her. Though Herman was caressing her in the bedroom while she was engaged to Edwin, by insisting that she drew a line in lovemaking beyond which she would not go, she establishes that she had the kind of moral fibre expected in proper young women in late-Victorian society.
Her third reason had to do with her own complicated psychology, and the art of displacement. In 1920, when she recopied the Herman story into her entry of October 7, 1897, her marriage to Ewan was unfulfilling— intellectually, emotionally, and physically. She could not have lovers in real life, but she could collect other men in imaginary positions of romance in her “waking dreams,” her “dream lives,” and (of course) in her fiction. But she could never say that a married woman might still feel unmentionable longings; those would have to be displaced into “story.”58
The fourth reason is related to how she perceived the trajectory of her own life. Wishing to give shape and continuity to the story of her life, Maud looked again and again for a controlling narrative or life-myth. She wrote in an entry dated October 7, 1897, and recopied in early 1920: “Some lives seem to be more essentially tragic than others and I fear mine is one of such.”59
Knowing that she was world-famous in 1920 enabled Maud to reveal some of the really “secret” aspects of her inner life. She was able to admit, now that she had made it up the “Alpine Path,” that her inner self often felt insecure. She writes of giving a speech to the Women’s Canadian Club in Chatham, Ontario, When I rose from my seat on the platform to begin my readings the whole large audience rose to its feet. The tribute thrilled me— and yet it all seemed as unreal as such demonstrations always seem to me. At heart I am still the snubbed little girl of years ago who was constantly made to feel by all the grown-up-denizens of her small world that she was of no importance whatever to any living creature. The impression made on me then can never be effaced—I can never lose my “inferiority complex.” That little girl can never believe in the reality of any demonstration in her honour. (December 11, 1920)
This is a very telling comment, but her journals do not have many other such overt revelations. Her life is truly a game of smoke and mirrors.
Maud filled ten volumes of these handwritten journals—nearly five thousand pages and more than one and a half
million words in total—by the time of her death. She stated in April 16, 1922, that she would like to see her journals published in one hundred years without any omissions, but, if her heirs wanted, they could publish an abridged version after her death (as a “good financial proposition”), so long as they cut out “anything that would hurt or annoy anyone living.” She also wrote:
I desire that these journals never be destroyed but kept as long as the leaves hold together. I leave this to my descendants or my literary heirs as a sacred charge and invoke a Shakespearean curse on them if they disregard it: There is so much of myself in these volumes that I cannot bear the thought of their ever being destroyed. It would seem to me like a sort of murder. (April 16, 1922)
Maud creates the same intimacy with readers of her journals that she does in her fiction. When her journals were first published, starting in 1985, reviewers and readers felt they now truly knew the real Maud: a tormented, unhappy, judgmental woman who lived a life of terrible frustration. However, the people who still remembered the woman herself in the late 1970s and early 1980s—as their relative, their minister’s wife, their employer, their friend—recalled yet another Maud Montgomery. She was an empathetic person who was deeply interested in others and sympathetic to them; a very witty conversationalist who liked to socialize, tell stories, gossip; a lively woman who liked to attend movies, discuss books and ideas, and take joy in the beauty of the natural world around her. She was full of jokes and the ability to see the funny side of anything. Many people who knew her simply could not believe what they read in her journals, and one maid even accused the editors of her journals of completely fabricating them.60
Maud’s journals show her compulsion to write, her love of words, her sense of humour, her varying moods and passions, her intellectual engagement with the world around her, and her sly ways of recording her triumphs without exposing the pride she had been taught to regard as a sin. However, they contain little that is embarrassing, and when there are damaging stories, they are there only because there is no way to avoid them.
One reaction to her journals needs to be recorded, however—that of Maud’s first daughter-in-law, a very astute woman, who read Maud’s first nine handwritten journals in the early 1980s before they were published, and then remarked to this effect: “So many pages, so much information, but when all is said and done, she has not really revealed a lot about her inner self, what she is really, really thinking and feeling down deep.”
That said, there is no question that after 1919, Maud’s journal did become her best friend. Using her “gift of wings,” she was able through her journal to enter a private discursive space where she could communicate—on her own terms—with future generations. To a future great-granddaughter, she wrote:
I lived a hundred years before you did; but my blood runs in your veins and I lived and loved and suffered and enjoyed and toiled and struggled just as you do. I found life good, in spite of everything. May you find it so. I found that courage and kindness are the two essential things. They are just as essential in your century as they were in mine.… I hope you’ll be merry and witty and brave and wise; and I hope you’ll say to yourself, “if Great-great-Grandmother were alive today, I think I’d like her in spite of her faults.” (April 16, 1922)
Escaping the fetters of time, she managed to escape from the loneliest place on earth, a life lived in “the solitude of unshared thought” (March 29, 1935).
CHAPTER 13
Maud’s life was like a three-ring circus. As a minister’s wife, she was a Sunday School teacher, a tireless organizer for the many women’s church organizations, and a director of young people’s plays and educational programs. As a fundraiser, her abilities as a public performer kept her in wide demand in neighbouring communities. As a professional woman, she was involved in the newly founded Canadian Authors Association and was a stalwart member of the Canadian Women’s Periodical Association. Time-management was a necessary skill. She wrote every morning for a set block of time. Her inner life may have been tempestuous, but her public life was always disciplined and controlled. She was the consummate professional.
A narrator in one of her later novels would say, “Life cannot stop because tragedy enters it. Meals must be made ready though a son dies and porches must be repaired even if your only daughter is going out of her mind.”61 Only two weeks into the new year of 1920, at age forty-five, her journal offers a glimpse into the tension between her inner and outer world:
A missionary meeting this afternoon and one of Stella’s letters full of growls and complaints spoilt today. I led the meeting and tried to put a little life and inspiration into the programme but the sight of that circle of stolid, fat, uninteresting, narrow old dames would have put out any poor little fire of my kindling. They just sucked all the animation out of my soul. (January 13, 1920)
She finished this numbing day as she usually did—by turning to books to improve her frame of mind. She reread a book that was “excruciatingly funny and the laughter it gave me was a boon. It flooded my drab soul with a rosy light and entirely headed off the fit of nervous crying with which I had expected to end the day” (January 13, 1920).
At the same time that Ewan had been suffering so intensely from his first mental breakdown in fall 1919, Maclean’s Magazine carried an article entitled “The Author of Anne.” It stated: “She is a woman of personal charm and winsomeness, as broad-minded and practical as she is imaginative, with a keen sense of humour, happy in the keeping of her home and the interests of the parish.”62 This is the public woman people saw, reacted to, and admired, and it was all genuine—every bit as genuine as the woman who dissolved in private tears at the end of discouraging days, or who wrote sharply about the dull and narrow-minded women in her husband’s parish. She carried on with dignity, no matter what she grumbled in her journals. The private Maud stayed well hidden when the public Maud went on stage.
Finding new heroines: Rilla of Ingleside, Emily of New Moon, and more
In February 1920, Maud saw the Mary Miles Minter silent movie of Anne of Green Gables. People wanted more “Anne” books, but if she wrote them, Maud knew that would only increase Page’s sales of the earlier ones. Instead of more “Anne,” then, Maud was planning a new heroine who would reflect the social change wrought by World War I.
Maud felt the accelerating wheels of progress in both positive and disorienting ways. The war had spurred science and technology, speeding up the transmission of information. She read about new ideas, and introduced her Sunday School classes to names and theories. Newspapers were becoming more sophisticated and influential, and they had introduced “women’s pages.” The production of knowledge was moving into the universities. Occupations were becoming defined and professionalized, and women were starting to move into public forums and professions. Cars increased people’s mobility, and airplanes were now finding all kinds of commercial uses. Women’s daily lives were being altered by the development of electric appliances—refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, and irons. As the world spun forward, people began feeling unsettled by what came to be known as “future shock.” All this called for a new focus in fiction.
Maud wanted to write a book about how the war changed women’s lives, moving them from the private spaces in their homes into public spaces. Women’s wartime success in working outside of the domestic sphere had contributed to voting enfranchisement and opened the door to professions that had always been exclusively male. Maud wanted her novel to focus not on fighting men, but on the support women had provided to soldiers, and their sacrifices and suffering at home. Captain Smith had made the war vivid from a man’s point of view, but she had experienced women’s pain on the home-front in her own community. War was bravery on the European front, but it was also courage at home.
Rilla of Ingleside (1921)
In March 1919, shortly before Ewan’s first serious breakdown, Maud had started plotting Rilla of Ingleside, her tenth novel. She was feeling constrained by the
popularity of her former books, knowing that readers expected more of the same. Although she would have to use the old containers of domestic romance, she determined to pour into these some serious new themes, written from a female perspective, including women’s suffering and grieving, as well as their learning to perform in a public forum. Continuing with the tale of the Blythe and Meredith children of Rainbow Valley, she now moved the young men from their pastoral childhood in Prince Edward Island into the trenches in Europe. She wanted to retire Anne, who was now the staid and proper wife of a doctor, with little dramatic potential; the new heroine was Anne’s youngest daughter, Rilla, who undergoes a complex maturation alongside the inevitable transformation of the old pre-war world.
Rilla is also about the maturing of Canada as a nation. Canada’s soldiers—like Captain Smith, Maud’s half-brother Carl, and the young men of Leaskdale—had fought bravely alongside men from Great Britain, the “mother country.” Now Canada could proudly take its place in the world, moving from thinking of itself as a colony to seeing itself as an emerging, strong nation.
The novel opens with a scene in the living room of Gilbert and Anne Blythe’s house. After a morning of housework, their maid, Susan Baker, sits down for an hour of “repose and gossip.” She opens her copy of the Daily Enterprise and she sees big black headlines about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Susan, however, is after some more interesting “local gossip,” and says:
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