Despite all the repressive forces in this surrogate family, Emily survives. At the beginning of the novel, she writes letters to her dead father, but at the end of the novel she is writing for herself. Her last words at the end of Emily of New Moon are written in her diary: she says that she is going to keep a diary so that it may be published when she dies.67
Even Anne’s and Emily’s boyfriends are quite different. Anne’s boyfriend is Gilbert Blythe, a name suggesting happiness. Emily’s first male admirer is an older man named Dean Priest, double-barrelled, imposing clerical name. Dean comes into her life, offering her the kindness, protection, and fellowship she lost when her father died—exactly what the newly minted Ewan had offered Maud in 1903 to 1904, shortly after the death of her own father.
In the first book of the Emily trilogy, Dean Priest seems wholesome and exciting when he meets Emily and offers her his companionship. However, his characterization shifts to something sinister, like the Piper in Rilla. In the two Emily sequels, Dean Priest morphs into a creepy personality nicknamed “Jarback Priest” (because of his deformed back). It was in November 1921, when Maud was in the middle of writing the first novel in the Emily sequence, that she was herself experiencing a physical repulsion to Ewan, which she described as making her feel “degraded and unclean.” Dean Priest also begins to exude a disturbing sexual aura in the novel.
Emily shares another important trait with the young Maud: she has immense imaginative talent. Emily differs from Anne, however, in having a mystical power that she calls “the flash”—“the wonderful moment when soul seemed to cast aside the bonds of flesh and spring upward to the stars” (Chapter 8). It is then that her soul can see “behind the veil” of surfaces to transcendent beauty and realities beyond (reminiscent of the novel Zanoni). Maud models Emily’s “flash” on a feeling she described herself having in a series of 1917 articles which are gathered into The Alpine Path, and again in her journals in January 1905 (which period was recopied and possibly rewritten in the early 1920s):
It has always seemed to me, ever since I can remember, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I seemed to catch a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile. (January 2, 1905)
Anne, Emily, and the young Maud(s) of the journals all flowed out of the same pen, from the same fluid reservoir of memory. Maud’s fertile imagination needed only the germ of a feeling or idea to begin sketching out a character. She would brood up her character, then methodically plot out actions for each chapter of a book. She sometimes did this out loud while working or walking—many people remember her talking to herself as she walked. This was not seen as odd; they knew she was plotting her books. When the “spadework” was done, Maud began writing the book. She envisioned scenes in her mind as she wrote with great intensity and speed, laughing out loud at smart retorts made by her characters who were, in some cases, saying things that she herself would be too reticent and polite to say. She was dead to the immediate world around her when she was writing, but she probably lived more intensely in that “dead” state than in any other.
Once she dreamed up her characters, and plotted out the book’s chapters, she slipped into a watching mode—watching them live out their lives on her own private screen. In Leaskdale, one little boy, Fred Leask, played with Stuart around the time that Emily was being written. He remembered how he and Stuart could do anything “while Mrs. Macdonald was writing”—steal cookies, slide down the stair banister, race through the house chasing each other. Fred described how Mrs. Macdonald would look into space, smiling or chuckling as if she were watching actual people, then bounce in excitement and laugh softly as she scribbled down what she was seeing. “She was off in another world,” he recalled in the early 1980s, “and her pen really flew.”
Maud had written her first chapter of Emily on August 20, 1921. She finished the entire first draft on February 15, 1922. By August 1922 she was reading the proofs.
It is the best book I have ever written—and I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it, and I hated to pen the last line and write finis. Of course, I’ll have to write several sequels but they will be more or less hackwork I fear. They cannot be to me what this book has been. (February 15, 1922)
While Maud was writing Emily of New Moon, her lawsuits with Page continued to simmer. At the same time, the Pickering affair was boiling up into the lawsuit against Ewan, and Ewan was doing his best to find another parish.
On March 25, 1922, Maud wrote in her journal that the Leaskdale women had arranged a program with a tribute to her. They would have known that Ewan was trying out for another church, and they undoubtedly had heard bits of Lily’s gossip about Smith. The women, who were very fond of Maud, would have been outraged that any rumours were circulating about a minister’s wife, and especially one they loved and respected.
The community did not want the Macdonalds to leave because they genuinely liked Ewan and they loved Maud. She made their church work interesting and fun as well as profitable, and brought a sparkle to every gathering she was in. There was much appreciation for her efforts with the young people of the parish. She taught them public performance skills through the Young People’s groups and she told them of inventions, ideas, and other currents in the world outside their isolated area. (In the early 1980s some remembered her telling them about Freud and Einstein.) A young woman, Margaret Leask, wrote the tribute, presented it, and saved it for posterity. It read, in part:
Dear Mrs. Macdonald,
The members of the guild decided that since this was to be “Canadian Authors” night, it would be a most fitting time to pay tribute to you as a Canadian Authoress and also to show in some degree our appreciation of the wonderful interest which you take in our welfare. As an Authoress, celebrated throughout the world, we are proud to know you and honoured in having you as leader of our activities. Your leadership is a source of inspiration to all of us, and under your leadership the meetings are both interesting and instructive. The outside world knows you as a brilliant writer, but we know you not only as a writer, but as a woman who has deservedly won our respect and admiration …
Later, Maud caught a glimpse on Ewan’s face that she interpreted as anger over her tribute. She felt that Ewan was jealous of her work, and she commented on his attitudes in her journals (March 25, 1922), deftly deflecting attention from other areas of his anxiety:
Ewan’s attitude toward women—though I believe he is quite unconscious of this himself—is that of the mediaeval mind. A woman is a thing of no importance intellectually—the plaything and servant of man—and couldn’t possibly do anything that would be worthy of a real tribute.
Maud had written about Ewan in 1921:
Poor fellow, he is good and kind and never did willful harm or wrong to anyone in his life. Yet he is most miserable. (May 18, 1921)
Yes, poor Ewan. Very little was going right in his life either, and whether or not he was jealous of his wife, or merely disappointed in himself, he certainly had cause to feel ineffectual amid the powerful forces swirling around him. Maud could transmute her turbulent emotions into art, but Ewan had no such release, except to bury them deep within himself and brood. In those hidden fastnesses of his mind, problems festered, and the medicines prescribed to flush out his anxiety only added to his woes.
As 1922 ended, Maud wrote about another advance in technology that was beginning to make its way into the homes of ordinary people: the radio. Dr. Shier, the Macdonalds’ doctor in Uxbridge, had one, and had told them that on a recent Sunday he had actually heard sermons being preached in Pennsylvania and Chicago over this new device. Maud commented again on how life was speeding up after the war. More and more events were crowded into each week. Home was becoming the base from w
hich you operated your life, not a private sanctuary in which you lived your life. She ceased hearing in memory many of the sounds of childhood—the birds, the wind, and in her particular case, the sound of the sea—because there was the constant inner voice telling her what had to be accomplished before day’s end. The world was, indeed, changing.
Maud’s activities in the Toronto book world helped release her from tedium and worries at home. She had always believed deeply in public service, and that those with ability should use their gifts to better others. She frequently promoted the books of less established writers in speeches. She had given of herself unstintingly in her role as minister’s wife, and she put an equal amount of effort into promoting the Canadian book trade as a speaker, organizer, and idea-person on executive committees. The success of her books allowed her publishers, McClelland and Stewart, to invest in other young Canadians, and she gave John McClelland promotional blurbs to use in his advertising. She also wrote reviews of other writers’ books. Newspaper accounts of her speeches recount her telling her audiences repeatedly to “buy Canadian books and magazines.” She also wrote encouraging personal letters to other new Canadian writers.
Canada had performed well in the war, and was now in a period of nationalistic enthusiasm. Back in 1910, Maud had written in a PEI newspaper about the fledgling industry of Canadian literature, saying a period of “sturm and drang” was needed for Canada to develop a sense of itself and a national literature. She recopied this article in her journals after the war ended:
I do not think our literature [in 1910] is an expression of our national life as a whole. I think this is because we have only very recently—as time goes in the making of nations—had any national life. Canada is only just finding herself. She has not yet fused her varying elements into a harmonious whole. Perhaps she will not do so until they are welded together by some great crisis of storm and stress. That is when a real national literature will be born. I do not believe that the great Canadian novel or poem will ever be written until we have had some kind of baptism by fire to purge away all our petty superficialities and lay bare the primal passions of humanity. [Quoted in her journals on August 27, 1919, slightly abridged from an article she earlier wrote for the Toronto Globe that was reprinted in The Island Patriot, January 6, 1910.]
The Great War had been this catalyst. In the 1920s, Canadians began to position themselves on the world stage of nations and national literatures. Historian Carl Berger says of this period: “the desire for a national culture that would reflect the character of Canada in imaginative literature, art and history became a master impulse in the intellectual life of the twenties.”68
Maud was irked in March 1921 when her American publisher, Frederick Stokes, wrote her complaining that there was not enough American experience in Rilla of Ingleside. She stated angrily in her journals that she “wrote of Canada at war—not of the U.S.” (March 5, 1921). Like many Canadians, Maud bristled at what they saw as American cultural imperialism, and she had enough stature to refuse to alter her book.
A great deal of Canadian resentment had been developing against the United States: for one thing, its copyright laws allowed Canadian writers to be exploited. The copyright situation for Canadian authors had long been vexing. To begin with, the United States had not joined the Berne Convention that bound it to respect copyright registered in other countries. Maud had herself been caught by this when Lewis Page threatened to locate and re-publish the stories she had already published in Canadian magazines, using them in Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Canadian authors were justifiably furious over this, given that American publishers could pirate their work without compensation. Canadian writers banded together to address this issue.
The result was the official founding of the Canadian Authors Association (CAA) in 1921. A magazine called The Canadian Bookman, first published in January 1919, fostered the CAA and became its spokesman. In 1921, over one hundred Canadian authors and academics attended a founders’ meeting in Montreal on March 11 and 12. They established a copyright committee and hired lobbyists to send to Ottawa. Maud was too busy with her parish and family duties to attend this meeting, but she followed events with great interest. Active in the Toronto branch of the CAA, she was elected its vice-president in early fall 1921. Eight months after its founding, it boasted eight hundred members. Maud gave speeches in the fall to promote the CAA message: buy Canadian books and support Canadian authors.
It was in this period that Maud did a great deal to promote Frederick Philip Grove’s new book, Over Prairie Trails, for McClelland and Stewart. She wrote Grove several encouraging letters in the 1920s. Grove did not return the admiration: in 1926, he wrote his friend, Professor Arthur Leonard Phelps, “I’ve often wondered how a woman like Mrs. Macdonald [Lucy Maud Montgomery] can write the books she does write: not that those books may not have their readers who profit from them: I have found that out. But how a woman who judges so accurately can stand writing that stuff. For she does have a remarkable scent.” (Since Maud admired and encouraged Grove’s novels, he naturally admired her ability to discriminate.)
Maud was also involved in new promotional development. The CAA organized the first “Canadian Bookweek” for November 19 to 26, 1921. The motto was “More Readers for Canadian Authors” and the object “To suggest to every Canadian that he buy more Canadian books.” For weeks before the event, she wrote publicity items and letters on behalf of the CAA, and when the time came, she stayed with her friend Mary Beal in Toronto for the week. Maud had promised to appear as part of the program, and she frankly confessed that she wanted to escape from the manse for a few days.
Nellie McClung was the guest of honour at the opening CAA dinner for some eighty people at the Arts and Letters Club. Maud sat at the head table next to McClung, along with J. M. Gibbon (President), B. K. Sandwell (National Secretary), and numerous other important people in the fledgling organization, including the Reverend Basil King, another famous Islander, author of moralistic and popular novels. (King had been the pastor in a prestigious church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Maud visited Page in 1911, and he and Mrs. King had hosted a reception for her.) She was delighted to see him again, but of Nellie McClung, Maud wrote snippily: “Nellie is a handsome woman in a stunning dress, glib of tongue. She made a speech full of obvious platitudes and amusing little stories which made everyone laugh and deluded us into thinking it was quite a fine thing—until we began to think it over …” (November 18, 1921).
Maud’s own speeches for many occasions were also light productions full of amusing little stories that kept people laughing. Her comment seems to have arisen from their difference in style and personality: Nellie McClung was an extrovert who sought and revelled in the public spotlight, and used her writing to advance political ideas, whereas Maud was a much more reserved and private person. Basil King made a speech she pronounced “full of good ideas, with no superfluities or frills or gallery plays” (November 18, 1921). He, of course, had been an early endorser of Maud’s own books.
The Bookweek was a huge success. Some twelve hundred people attended a reception that the Canadian Press Club gave for the CAA. Maud recounted being smothered by those praising Anne of Green Gables and asking her if “Anne was a real girl.” Later she enjoyed some plays at Hart House. She met again a friend of Frede’s, Jen Fraser, and they gossiped about Cameron MacFarlane, Frede’s husband. Maud spoke to eight hundred girls at Jarvis St. Collegiate, the school run by Marjory MacMurchy’s father, Dr. Archibald MacMurchy. She next spoke to a large group at the Parkdale I.O.D.E. At Victoria College, she “spent a very dull evening listening to a couple of literary papers by erudite authors who could not stoop to be interesting as well as erudite.” Maud had little patience for those who took themselves too seriously or lacked a sense of humour.
The week whirled by with swamped appearances, readings, and speeches: at Moulton College, with hundreds seeking autographs; at the Simpson’s department store; at the Dunn Avenue Methodis
t Sunday School (to 600 students); at Oakwood School (to 1,300 young people); at the School of Commerce (to 1,500); and at the Cloke Bookstore in Hamilton. She attended receptions and luncheons honouring her at Mary Beal’s house; at the National Club; and at the Business Women’s Club, where she and Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous English suffragette, were both guests of honour. At a Women’s Press Club reception she met Lady Byng, the wife of the Governor General, sponsor of the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for gentlemanly behaviour in hockey. She also saw two movies, Quo Vadis and Biff-Bing-Bang.
After this flattering, exhausting week of honours and socializing, Maud returned to the gruelling conditions at the manse, fearful of the state in which she might find Ewan. However, he was fine. But there was a letter full of “woes” from Aunt Annie in Park Corner. The crop had been poor that year. Maud decided to surprise her beloved aunt with a cheque at Christmas. She was extremely fond of the fatherless Campbells at Park Corner, and she continued to be their salvation in times of need.
Shortly after, at the request of Stokes, she ventured on another outing to Ohio, to read and speak in several places. There she escaped her role as minister’s wife and visited a cabaret, where she and her hosts dined, listened to “jazz music,” and watched some modern dance (which was regarded as a scandal by conservative magazines). This time she returned to find Ewan heading into another attack. It was in early December 1921 that Maud had had the unsettling dream of Ewan being hanged in the church and then resuscitated.
The outside world guessed nothing of Maud’s rich but often tortured inner life. She was to them a successful author, a dynamo in her community, a powerful speaker in public, a performer for charitable causes, a woman whose intellectual range made her a fascinating conversationalist in social gatherings, and a warm and likeable human being with a very fine sense of humour. (For example, her service to the book community during the fall of 1921 led to her being honoured by the Canadian Women’s Periodical Club in Toronto in January 1922.)
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