According to newspaper accounts, Maud mesmerized her audiences, and the newspaper reporters strained for the language to describe her. She “skillfully [blended] homely touches and the heroic.” For this speech, she wore her floor-length gown (the purple cut-velvet gown) and she was “a lovely figure, poised, serene, yet engagingly animated, as she stood in the place of honour and her fresh, sweet voice unfolded tales of the romance and unique beauty of her beloved native island …”23 Maud never used notes when she spoke, and she always kept people laughing.
On November 12, Maud addressed the Mission Circles and Auxiliaries and the Canadian Girls in Training of the United Church at Goderich. Once again, she told of her childhood, and of her determination to become a professional writer. Then she leaped into the critical fray: “To read some books today, one would think there were no good people in the world. I never cater to the prevailing taste for these books. I believe there is a place for sex books, but only a genius should write them.” She may have had Morley Callaghan in mind, for she did not think him a genius, no matter how much Deacon and the “old-boy network” praised him. But of course she did not mention names.24Soon after, Maud spoke in Sudbury at the Women’s Canadian Club annual banquet, addressing some 120 people, the largest audience ever gathered by the club, according to the local paper. She warned people that a writer’s life was not an easy one. Then she added her oft-cited line that “perseverance, patience, and postage stamps” are necessary for a writer—rejection slips were many and often. She said that Anne of Green Gables had been rejected five times, and accepted the sixth.
At this event, her readings from her “mailbag” were chosen to make a very specific set of points in areas where she felt her reputation was under attack.
First, she cited a letter from a young man, a divinity student, who wrote her that she proved one “could write novels and still be a Christian.” Maud laughed over self-righteous people in private, but she knew many in her audience would see it as a compliment, an illustration that her books were morally sound stories, not trashy, sentimental “novels.” Unsophisticated listeners would have heard the praise for the morality of her books, but more thoughtful listeners might have felt some of Maud’s own bemusement at the young man’s priggishness. Another letter she read was from a monk in Tibet thanking her for Anne of Green Gables—again, demonstrating the moral seriousness in her novels, and also that her readers were not just women and children, but important and thoughtful men.
Next, she told of a “Mohammedan girl in India” who was so inspired by her books that she persuaded her father to allow her to be educated, and she had just matriculated for study at Cambridge University. Another letter was from a Mother Superior in Australia, who wrote, “I do not need to read your books before putting them into the girls’ library.” And the last letter was from a teacher who asked the names of the wives of Henry the Eighth on a test and found this answer: “Catherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, and Anne of Green Gables.” That always brought a laugh.
Maud knew her small town audiences well. In Sudbury, she won applause for saying: “I have no sympathy for the so-called realists who seem to think that the only things real are sex, obscurity, and filth. I have tried to write books that will bring a little happiness, a little cheer into other lives.”25 She would not have taken this swipe in Toronto, where it would have been reported in the local papers, further sealing her fate among the male critics as a reactionary and a sentimentalist. And she would never have told this rural audience that she railed in her journals about the prudish Mrs. Grundys who would not allow her to write of young girls and their love affairs as they “really were.”26
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On November 26, 1935, the day after finishing the first draft of Anne of Windy Poplars, Maud attended a huge reception at Government House (Chorley Park) in honour of the new Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir. Tweedsmuir was otherwise known as John Buchan, an immensely prolific and versatile writer, well known for his popular fiction. Over one thousand of Toronto’s important society people attended this function, and on November 27, 1935, the Globe published most of their names. Maud’s name was not included—a surprise, because she would normally have been near the top of any list of important Canadians. She would have read the newspaper account, and she summed the affair up crustily in her journals, saying that she found “a very moderate pleasure” in Buchan’s fiction, adding that he was a small “weazened-faced man” and “nothing to look at.” It was a far cry from her Earl Grey reception, or even the Stanley Baldwin one. Sadly for her, her years of being lionized in public were starting to pass.27
Two days later she was off to Windsor, Ontario, where she gave two addresses. Then she travelled to Leamington. There she had the startling experience of having her mind go blank ten minutes into her talk, but she recovered quickly. This was a frightening event for the woman who spoke so easily. On December 12, she gave a fifteen-minute talk on her books over a radio program in Toronto called “For You, Madame.” This talk (apparently no longer extant in the sound archives of Ontario) was part of a remarkable year of advancement for women. At the end of 1935, the Globe announced that more programs were produced for women “than ever before in the history of radio,” noting that “at one time these offerings always opened with a cup of flour and ended with a spool of thread,” but “now they include national and international affairs, music, literature, science and education.”28 Maud was proud of the fact that her novels had an empowering effect on female readers, even though she herself was not a public crusader. She encouraged change quietly through the subtle force of the pen.29
For Christmas in 1935, Maud put up a small tree. She remained determined and hopeful about her new life. The Macdonald family had a dinner together, a set of nicely wrapped presents, and a warm fire in their fireplace. Ewan was a little melancholy, but not out of touch with reality. Maud spoke of her “tired and anxious heart,” but wrote in her journal that things could have been “much worse.” After Christmas, she had a small fall and sprained her wrist (while hanging up her O.B.E.), but it was more demoralizing than damaging. At least there had been no real disasters following their move; life was markedly better than it had been the previous Christmas at Norval, when a miasma of misery had settled over the entire house of Macdonald. In many ways she felt optimistic, but she could not ignore ominous rumblings in the distance.
At the end of November 1935, The Toronto Daily Star had carried the headline: “JEWS FORCED TO RUN IN CIRCLES TILL DEATH IN REICH.” The article stated that “almost three years after the Hitler regime came to power, the Jews of Germany are being hounded to death in a cold pogrom as horrible and cold-blooded as anything history has ever seen.” Drawing on information in the London Times, the article told of the Jews’ loss of citizenship and property, the tortures in concentration camps, and the savage ferocity of the anti-Semitic fanatics.30 Many people discounted such accounts as unbelievable. Maud’s last diary entry in 1935 ended: “I cannot and will not believe that the world will ever repeat the madness of 1914. But it is a ‘mad world, my masters,’ and no one can ever predict what madmen will do.” A student of history and a victim of circumstance, Maud knew far too much about “madness”—both personal and collective—to look to the future without justified fear.
Maud was now using a young and able literary agent in New York City named Ann Elmo. Having sold her book rights to Page in 1919, Maud received no royalties for the new 1934 talking movie of Anne of Green Gables. However, the enterprising Miss Elmo suggested resuscitating Anne as a heroine for another novel, to piggyback on the popularity of the movie. Maud found a segment of Anne’s earlier life that was not yet covered, and this became Anne of Windy Poplars. Propelled by the need for money, Maud wrote it in record time, between May and December 1935. In this novel, she makes creative use of her dealings with Isabel Anderson.
Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)
In Anne of Windy Poplars, while Gilbert is at medical school, Anne mov
es to Summerside, PEI, to become the high school principal. Here she faces many challenges. First is the organized hostility from those who had promoted another candidate for her position. Second, she must win the cooperation of a sour vice-principal, who dislikes her before meeting her. Anne has an innate sense of how to win people over and persuade them to co-operate; much of the book’s interest is in watching this happen. The rest is episodic, filled with eccentric characters in the community.
Most characters in this book have a chapter devoted to them and then disappear, but one character keeps recurring throughout the novel—the vice-principal, a young woman named Katherine Brooke. She is a strange creature, rude and remote, a puzzle to Anne. Katherine is twenty-eight, but looks as if she were thirty-five. Although she is a very capable teacher, she is sour, sarcastic, and unpopular. She boards in a “gloomy house” and dresses dowdily. Her pupils live in fear of her sarcasm. She has no friends, wants none, and is described as “repellent,” a term Maud used for Isabel in her journals.
Anne confesses that she would quit trying to win her over but for her sense that, under all Katherine’s rude aloofness, she is starved for friendship. Anne feels sorry for her, even when Katherine insults her openly, telling her: “I can’t pretend things. I haven’t your notable gift for doing the queen act … saying exactly the right thing to every one.”31 She attacks Anne for having more happiness and friends than she can fully appreciate, whereas if she, Katherine, were to die, she says no one would mourn her.
Over time Katherine is softened by Anne’s friendship. Katherine admits she’s never had a friend, that she has never belonged anywhere, and that she hates teaching. She also dislikes men. She wants nothing more than to be like other people, but she is unable to. Anne helps Katherine become a happier person.
Many of the other characters in this novel also share traits with Maud and her extended family. Young Elizabeth Grayson lives with her undemonstrative great-grandmother; her mother is dead and her father has gone away for business. Elizabeth longs for happiness in her imagined “Tomorrow-land.” Prompted by Anne, Elizabeth’s father comes to claim his daughter at the end of the novel, promising they will never be separated again—the very words Maud had longed to hear from her own father. Another irascible and controlling old man, Cyrus Taylor, torments his family with his sulky silent spells, taking more than a little inspiration from Maud’s Grandfather Macneill. Then there is Hazel who keeps a journal into which she pours purple prose and silly, effusive musings, as the young Maud had done. Lugubrious Cousin Ernestine, who sees only dark forebodings and negativity like the Maud of the later journals, shares identical medical problems with Maud (like lying awake nights with a pain that shoots down to her lower limbs). Another character, the nasty old Mrs. Gibson, disabled in body but manipulative in personality, refuses to let her daughters have a life of their own. (The theme of seeking to exert excessive control over adult offspring will appear more strongly in Maud’s next book, Jane of Lantern Hill.)
The most intriguing character, next to Katherine Brooke, is Miss Minerva Tomgallon; Minerva lives in a decaying Gothic house and romanticizes her dead relatives, making much of the fact that a “curse” is on her family. Despite the fact that Maud had herself become increasingly convinced through the 1930s that there was a “curse” on her own house, she makes old Miss Tomgallon into a comic character. Anne wryly observes that she is a melodramatic old woman who seems to positively enjoy the idea of this curse. However, when a bemused and skeptical Anne asks her landlords if there really is a curse on the Tomgallon family, she is told that, yes, it is true. Is this Maud’s indirect comment on the convictions expressed in her journals? In fiction, Maud examined human faults and eccentricities, including her own, turning all into humour. But in her journals—and in her life—she treated the same issues with deadly seriousness.
During the period Maud was writing Anne of Windy Poplars, Isabel Anderson continued to harass her. In July 1935, for example, Isabel insisted that Maud could help her if she “cared.” When Isabel told Maud that she wanted to travel to Prince Edward Island with her, Maud wrote a pert “Fancy that!” in her journals. Still, in November 1935, Maud allowed Isabel to come to Riverside Drive for a weekend. Isabel surprised Maud by writing her a pleasant letter of thanks after the visit, rather than a complaint. It seemed to Maud that Isabel was finally overcoming her strange infatuation and blossoming into a normal person. In fact, unbeknownst to Maud at the time, Isabel had merely found new victims for her unwelcome attentions. These included at least two unmarried men closer to her age and one older married man. These men found her weird and off-putting, and they scrambled to evade her, nimbly and successfully.
Maud’s exasperation at Isabel Anderson has such furious bite in her journals that it is astonishing to see Isabel become the inspiration for a sympathetic character in Anne of Windy Poplars. Anne is able to convince Katherine to leave the teaching profession in search of a more enjoyable life. In Maud’s journals, Isabel Anderson is presented as a highly disturbed person, a virtual pestilence who ignores all rebuffs. A reader begins to wonder if Isabel is given so much space in the journals because she is a creepy but fascinating character who offsets the surrounding entries, which say, in effect, “Ewan was dull today.” But Katherine’s transformation during the course of the novel shows what Maud may have hoped for Isabel, and why she put up with her. Maud was able to see a tortured person underneath the hostile exterior, and she genuinely wanted to help this person find a more satisfying life. Isabel, however, did not quit teaching.
Maud dedicated Anne of Windy Poplars to “Friends of Anne everywhere”: an assertion that while her books may not have stood up to modern critics, her fans everywhere still loved them.
The year 1936 began well. Maud continued to be in much demand as a speaker. In the first week of January, she spoke twice: to the Women’s Auxiliary of the West YMCA, and to the Canadian Women’s Press Club. Both The Mail and Empire and the Telegram covered these events, announcing them beforehand and describing them afterwards (who poured tea, who sang, who did the “thanks,” who came as distinguished guests, and so on). On January 16, she spoke in the Deer Park United Church, and on the 30th, she went to Norval to meet with the Women’s Missionary Society. In February, she spoke in Peterborough, and attended a PEN luncheon. In March, she spoke to a large audience at Chalmers Presbyterian Church in Toronto about her background and also about standards in literature,32 and later that month she spoke to the Lip Reading Circle of deaf people. She recycled some of her speech material, varying the focus and incidents, but her spontaneous and witty delivery kept it fresh.
At a March meeting of the CAA the national secretary, Howard Angus Kennedy, complimented her out of the blue on her “indomitable will.” The comment cheered but puzzled Maud: it was not generally known that she had troubles at home. She was cheered by his comment, even if she was curious about what prompted it. Mr. Kennedy did know, of course, about Deacon’s attacks on her. Quite likely, he was signalling that he did not share Deacon’s pejorative view of her achievement.
On March 26, Maud spoke to the Young People’s Society of the Farmer Memorial Baptist Church in Swansea, a church she sometimes attended. (Her Baptist connections harked back to her girlhood days, when the Presbyterian young people of Cavendish would go to the Baptist church for social events.)
At the annual dinner of the CAA in May, Maud thanked the speaker, Dr. O. J. Stevenson of the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph, a pioneer in the teaching of Canadian literature at the post-secondary level. Dr. Stevenson spoke about the modernist credo that Canadian poetry should be “more rugged, larger in theme, broader in treatment and more virile in experience.” Discussion ensued over how poorly Canadian literature and writers were said to be regarded in England and Europe, with heavyweights such as Dr. Lorne Pierce, Dr. Pelham Edgar, Dr. O. J. Stevenson, and Mr. A. H. Robson pondering the problem. (The Canadian writer whose work was best known in England and Europe, of course, w
as L. M. Montgomery.)
On the same day, the Telegram and the Star each announced the release of a book of poetry that typified the kind of sentimental and un-virile poetry that O. J. Stevenson had disparaged in his speech. The Star panned the book. Titled Up Came the Moon, by Jessie Findlay Brown, it bore a one-page “Foreword” by L. M. Montgomery. Maud’s foreword is courteous (and very tepid), but she must have squirmed over the timing of its appearance in the context of Stevenson’s lecture attacking this kind of sentimental poetry.33 On May 26, Maud attended the annual Canadian Women’s Press Club dinner. Maud liked the CWPC meetings much better than the CAA; the membership was limited to true professionals who were working or published writers, and women controlled the agenda, giving it a different atmosphere.
Maud, Grove, and Modernism
In Maud’s speeches, she often mentioned promising new authors, and she wrote endorsements for Mr. McClelland to use in advertising his new writers.34 One of her strongest early endorsements had been for Frederick Philip Grove a decade earlier; this evolves into a comic scene in her Emily trilogy, which parodies the critical discourses of the 1920–30 period. When his Over Prairie Trails had first been published back in 1922, Maud had praised it enthusiastically in her speeches. After that, she wrote Grove a letter encouraging him to write more about western Canada, telling him he had it in him to write “the great Canadian novel.” Grove and his wife laboriously unscrambled Maud’s handwriting, deciphering words and writing them above her scrawl. Grove took her advice to heart and spent the next summer writing what turned out to be Settlers in the Marsh. Maud continued to think highly of Grove’s writing ability. Maud appears to have met Grove sometime in the mid-1920s, perhaps at a CAA or other literary function. Her reaction to the man himself was decidedly less enthusiastic than her regard for his writing. She liked people with a sense of humour, and he took himself very seriously. She also disliked his growing penchant for “tragic endings.”
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