Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  “I never take much interest in foreign parts. Who is the Archduke man who has been murdered?”

  “What does it matter to us?” asked Miss Cornelia [a neighbour], adding that murder was common in the Balkans, and that Island papers should not print such sensational stories.”

  By the time of the novel’s publication, most readers would have recognized the Archduke’s assassination as a localized event that set many larger forces in play, eventually leading to World War I. They would have understood the symbolism in the next chapter when Miss Oliver, the local teacher, an intense and gifted woman with an uncanny prescience, recounts a dream she has had the previous night:

  “far in the distance, I saw a long, silvery, glistening wave breaking.… I thought, ‘Surely the waves will not come near Ingleside’ … before I could move or call they were breaking right at my feet— and everything was gone—there was nothing … where the Glen had been. I tried to draw back—and I saw that the edge of my dress was wet with blood.”

  The image of the “blood red tide” that rolled up on the shores of Prince Edward Island expressed how the war had been felt by women.

  As the book opens, Rilla, a pampered, fun-loving young teen, is looking forward to a party. When she hears her teacher’s dream, she merely worries that the dream might portend a storm that will spoil the evening. The sharp and intense Miss Oliver responds with a light sarcasm that Rilla would have missed: “ ‘Incorrigible fifteen,’ said Miss Oliver dryly. ‘I don’t think there is any danger that foretells anything so awful as that.’ “

  Over the course of the novel, the red tide invades peaceful Prince Edward Island, destroying people’s sense of protected isolation in Canada. It carries their sons and brothers and husbands to Europe. The women cope bravely. Rilla herself assumes the care of an orphaned war baby. She and the other women throw themselves into the war effort through organizing Red Cross auxiliary units, just as Maud had. Rilla’s two beloved brothers leave to become soldiers. One of Anne’s sons, Jem, returns triumphantly, but the other, the sensitive and poetic Walter, does not. Just before Walter is killed, he writes the moving poem that takes his name round the world—a poem that echoes John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” the most famous poem to come out of World War I. At the end of the novel, Anne’s other son Jem returns, saying:

  The old world is destroyed and we must build up the new one.… we’ve got to make a world where wars can’t happen.

  Rilla is a sentimental novel in one sense. Maud tries hard to shore up people’s belief that the war was truly a fight against evil. When Walter’s last letter arrives after his death, it tells them that he has died that others may fulfill their lives in freedom and happiness. It urges them to “keep the faith.” This echo of the war rhetoric is what Maud wants to believe—indeed, what she must believe: that this war was one that would end all wars.

  As a woman who read history books constantly, Maud was well aware of mankind’s repetitive engagements in war. When Captain Smith swept into Leaskdale in fall 1919, telling first-hand tales of his heroism in war, they were exciting to hear, but Maud could fit these into the context of her historical reading. In December 1919, for instance, she had finished reading Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the third time. In April 1921, she finished rereading George Grote’s twelve-volume History of Greece for the second time. In October 1921, she finished rereading Justin McCarthy’s A History of Our Own Times. In May 1922, she was reading another kind of history, William Lecky’s two-volume History of European Morals. (She had read his History of Rationalism in 1917.) By 1924, she stated that she believed that all events were governed by the Darwinian concept of “blind impersonal Chance,” not by a deity. Her doubts about the role that God and religion played in human affairs were already beginning to show as she wrote the first draft of Rilla of Ingleside in the first eight months of 1920.

  She brings ambiguity into the novel through her symbolic use of the “Piper.” This mythic figure had appeared first in Rainbow Valley, leading the boys out of the sylvan glade of childhood towards their future in European battlefields. When the image of the Piper appears again in Rilla, he seems to be the same Scottish bagpiper whose music instills bravery in soldiers, pumping them up with courage, and leading them valiantly into battle. Walter, for instance, has been a gentle, poetic boy who shies from aggression, fearing both war and death, but this admirable Piper gives him resolve, purpose, and courage.

  However, as the story progresses, the Piper of Rainbow Valley morphs into a more mysterious figure in Rilla. He resembles the deadly “Pied Piper” of the children’s fairy tale—the Piper who pipes to innocent children, leading them away from their parents into a cavern. When the door closes behind them, they disappear from earth and are never seen again. This latter Piper, from the Underworld, has fooled them with his seductive music.

  Maud’s reading of Gibbon demonstrated all too clearly how the religious concepts of Good and Evil had been used throughout history to mobilize people to fight. Why should innocent boys from rural Canada have had to die in European trenches to fight God’s war? She had started to see religion more as a social organization than anything else, and she thought that the real power lay in science and knowledge, not in a literal and omnipotent God sitting on high. Like so many other reflective people of her era, she was conflicted and confused. But she knew that people had to continue to believe the war rhetoric, or they would think that their sacrifices had been in vain. Certainly, evil was real.

  The shifting Piper imagery betrays her confusion, as does her conclusion to the novel. At the end, Rilla, has grown into a mature woman. She has shed her symbolic childhood lisp in the process, but in the last chapter, she suddenly slips back into her insecure, dependent, lisping childhood self as soon as her soldier-lover comes home and proposes to her. Many find it a frustrating, unsatisfying conclusion for a serious novel. The message is what Maud’s readership wanted to hear—that the war had defeated barbarism and evil, once and for all, and that women could now happily revert to being wives and mothers. Rilla’s returning lisp marks symbolically the end of women’s performance on public stages. They retreat into domesticity.

  When Maud had begun planning Rilla it was about six weeks after Frede’s death, and when she finished it, on August 24, 1920, the dedication was to “Frederica Campbell MacFarlane, who went away from me when the dawn broke on January 25th, 1919—a true friend, a rare personality, a loyal and courageous soul.”

  Maud heard from the Island in April 1920 that her Uncle John F. Macneill was tearing down the house that she had been raised in. After the publication of Anne of Green Gables, tourists had descended on Cavendish, with hordes of sightseers trespassing all over the Macneill homestead, peering into the windows of the empty house and trampling all over his planted fields—from Uncle John F.’s point of view, a maddening invasion of his property. People came to his door and pestered him with inquiries about his famous niece.

  Maud’s crusty Uncle John F. did not believe that Anne of Green Gables was that great a novel in the first place. He came from a family of naturally gifted storytellers, and this novel sounded just like the rest of the stories told by his family. Any one of them could have put it onto paper, he said, no doubt believing what he said. Maud’s adulation by the reading public goaded him to end the trespassing and intrusions. He tore down the now decrepit “old home.”

  The news that the house was being razed caused Maud no end of distress. She had always been deeply attached to houses and places, and to that home especially. To someone already feeling the discomfort of too much change in her world, this was a powerful blow. The irony did not escape her, either. Her books had brought the coveted tourism to PEI, and now invading tourists were destroying what she valued most: the peaceful Cavendish she loved, and her old home.

  No one would have suspected, however, as she worked on her manuscript of Rilla of Ingleside, that there was so much turmoil in her life. She had, for
instance, been in Boston from May 17, 1920, until around July 9, 1920, to face Lewis and George Page in the court battle to stop their distribution of Further Chronicles of Avonlea. While that court case dragged on, they continued to sell all the books they could, effectively thumbing their noses at her.

  She came home from her Boston session in a ragged state, and she steadied herself in her long and lonely hours back at home by continuing to copy her diaries into her journals. Ewan was often in bed in those days, suffering from his attacks of melancholy. Somehow, though, she finished Rilla in August 1920.

  Maud was restless after the war ended, and she would have liked living in a bigger city where there was more intellectual stimulation. Ewan was still “preaching for the call” at other larger churches. One place he had tried for— the Columbus-Brooklyn parish near Whitby (where Captain and Mrs. Smith lived)—had a much larger and less drafty manse, features Maud wanted. She thought he might get it. But in the end, J. R. Fraser, an old friend who had helped Ewan settle in at Leaskdale in 1910, suddenly resigned his Uxbridge position and got the charge instead of Ewan. Ewan became more depressed as he repeatedly tried unsuccessfully for other churches.

  Early in 1921, Maud had given a series of talks to publicize the forthcoming Rilla of Ingleside—first in Toronto, then in London, Ontario, where she gave readings and lectures at the Canadian Club, the Girls’ Canadian Club, and the Women’s Press Club. A London journalist, one of the Blackburn family who owned the London Free Press, expressed a general impression: that L. M. Montgomery was “too full of humour and philosophy” to ever feel blue. It was an irony Maud felt worth recording in her journal.

  Maud tells of the trip to London in her journals, but she does not mention the striking coincidence that Captain Smith lectured in London the same night she was there, close to where she was. Possibly they drove down together, since they were in frequent contact. When she returned home, she found that Ewan had bought a new car, the Grey-Dort, to replace their Chevrolet.63

  It was this July in 1921 that the Macdonalds and the Captain Smith family made their long-planned tandem trip to Prince Edward Island. Captain Smith went about the Island showing the eleven reels of the silent movie (The Empire’s Shield) in a two-hour-long production, talking about his war service to the mother country.64 This was reported in the Island newspapers, but again Maud does not mention it in her journals at all.

  Things went better for Ewan once he was in Prince Edward Island with his own family. After first visiting John and Margaret Stirling, then Ewan’s sisters at Kinross, then Maud’s old Prince of Wales College chums in and near Charlottetown, Ewan and Maud and the boys drove on to Cavendish, visiting Alec and May Macneill, and Ernest and Myrtle Webb and their children. The next stop, at Park Corner, brought back all the old remembered happiness for Maud in that house. Chester and Stuart engaged in boisterous fun with the rollicking new generation of merry Campbell cousins, Ella’s and the late George’s children.

  On the way home, the Macdonalds stopped over in Saint John, New Brunswick, staying with Maud Estey Mahoney, one of Maud’s former students from Bideford. Maud, as a celebrity passing through Saint John, consented to let a local journalist come to interview her. Chester and Stuart were obstreperous while she was being interviewed, but it never occurred to Ewan to distract them or take them out for a walk. He just grew impatient to end the interview. Maud had been revitalized by the trip, but Ewan was turning “morose and cranky” again as they approached home.

  After finishing the Rilla manuscript on her return, Maud wrote in her journals on August 24, 1920, that she would never write another book in the Anne series.

  I am done with Anne forever—I swear it as a dark and deadly vow. I want to create a new heroine now—she is already in embryo in my mind—she has been christened for years. Her name is “Emily.” She has black hair and purplish gray eyes. I want to tell folks about her.

  This story, which had been incubating for quite some time, marked Maud’s serious attempt to ditch the “Anne” series. “Anne” had begun to feel like an incubus that hung around her neck, thanks largely to Page.

  In addition, Maud noticed that all her books were now being marketed only for children, including Anne of Green Gables. The rapidly increasing literacy rate in North America was creating a huge marketplace for “children’s literature,” and there were not enough books to fill the demand. Many books with a child protagonist were now being moved down into the children’s literature shelves, with altered cover art and illustrations. The pictures on the covers of all of Maud’s books show how the heroines grew ever younger as time advanced.

  Maud had not written her books specifically for children; they had been written for a general popular audience. It was a happy coincidence that they were equally successful with children. After writing Anne of Green Gables, Maud had indeed told her correspondent Ephraim Weber in 1907, before it was published, that she had written a novel for juveniles—“ostensibly for girls”—and in 1908 she had sent a copy of Anne to her cousin, Professor Murray Macneill, with the same message. At the time she made these remarks, she was downplaying her writing career to show “womanly modesty.” Later, when attitudes towards women writers changed, Maud would boldly assert the truth—that she had not written Anne for children, but for herself and other adults. After all, hadn’t sophisticated men like the Honourable Earl Grey and Mark Twain been delighted with Anne of Green Gables? Frustrated by being pigeonholed as a children’s writer, Maud wrote in her journals:

  I want to write … something entirely different from anything I have written yet. I am becoming classed as a “writer for young people” and that only. I want to write a book dealing with grown-up creatures—a psychological study of one human being’s life. I have the plot of it already matured in my mind. The name of the book is to be “Priest Pond.” (August 24, 1920)

  Her next book had some “Priests” in it, but it started out with a young heroine, too. This novel would be about a little girl’s having the world—her world—all against her. Maud wanted to show how women had to fight against cultural expectations that curtailed their aspirations. Throughout the war, she had seen women move into the public sphere. The Victorian ideology that women should be mere “angels in the house” no longer defined them. Women had shed their white angels’ wings during the war, taking up dirty jobs in fields, in factories, in business—places where only poor, working-class women had been before, and then in terrible conditions. Maud’s books were moving in the direction of portraying serious themes, and her creative energies were surging.

  Emily of New Moon (1923)

  On August 20, 1921, Maud wrote the first chapter of her new novel, Emily of New Moon. It dealt with the upbringing of a young girl who wants to become a writer. Emily was the new heroine designed to replace Anne. Still, there were many similarities between Anne and the new Emily. Each has been orphaned, and ends up with two elderly caretakers, one stern and the other sympathetic. Each girl has to struggle to be loved and to be valued. Both girls came out of Maud’s own multi-faceted personality, and were much indebted to Maud’s memories of her own childhood. Yet Anne and Emily are dramatically different.

  The 1908 Anne is an engaging little waif, with her focus on finding a home where she will be loved and secure. Maud features Anne’s winsome talkativeness and her response to the beauties of nature in Avonlea (Cavendish). But when Maud dreams up Emily, she wants to show a talented, ambitious girl who knows that she wants to be a writer in spite of all the impediments to authorship a young woman faced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.

  Maud wrote Anne in the 1904–1905 period, when, buoyed up by her courtship with Ewan, she accessed her relatively happy childhood. When Maud was brooding up Emily in 1919–20, and writing the first draft in 1921–22, she was revisiting her childhood through a new lens, and she was once again reconfiguring her childhood in her journals. Emily of New Moon was written in six months—a phenomenal burst of élan—and perhaps
reflects the energizing effects of Smith’s admiration of her achievements, intelligence, and personality.65 Serious Emily, always watchful of others, is a very different child from the impulsive and talkative Anne. When her father dies, Emily is reluctantly claimed by her mother’s Murray clan, who feel it their “duty” to raise her. In the first third of Anne of Green Gables, the anxious Anne waits to see if the Cuthberts will adopt her. In Emily of New Moon, Emily likewise waits, while the relatives all try to shift the responsibility for Emily onto others in the clan. But Emily, hiding under the table, overhears it all. Instead of being damaged for life by what she hears, she is angered to the point of indignation, and bursts out from under the table—much to the shock of those adults who have been discussing her.

  When the housekeeper, Ellen, tells Emily she should consider herself lucky to get a home any place, she adds the frank assessment that Emily is not of much importance to anyone. Emily retorts in indignation, “I am of importance to myself. “This is an extraordinary assertion in an era when young girls were socialized into domesticity, subordinating their identity to their husbands and family.

  Like Anne, Emily is raised by surrogate parents, only in Emily’s case they are two sisters, Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura. Also in the house is Cousin Jimmy, their brother. Elizabeth is as stern as Marilla, Laura as indulgent as Matthew, and poor Jimmy is a testament to Elizabeth’s fierceness: he is brain-damaged because when he was a child, the bossy Elizabeth pushed him head first down a well.

  In her journals Maud acknowledges that Emily’s inner life is partly hers—a rare admission. Maud details the psychological hardships that Emily suffers in a restricted, contained, and confined life, drawing heavily from her own memories. Heir to the entire clan’s criticism, Emily longs for her dead father’s unconditional love, and she suffers terribly from her clan’s ridicule of her writing ambitions.66