As a young man, Stuart had been embarrassed if people found out that his mother was the famous “L. M. Montgomery” and he kept this a secret during his training. Mid-life, as a very busy doctor who was pestered by people interested in his mother, he sometimes revealed resentment of the burdens that being her son had placed on him. To a few, he expressed an annoyance that she had expected such perfection from her children. When pressed to comment on her shortcomings, he named her “pride” and her tendency to worry, but he clearly admired and loved her. There was a profound bond between him and his mother, and he spoke of the deep affection that she engendered in everyone who knew her. Shortly before his death, he reflected that in a long career practising and teaching medicine he had probably saved only five or six babies that no other doctor could have—a small contribution to the overall “sum of human happiness,” he said, compared to his mother’s enormous one through her life and her novels.
Stuart and Ruth achieved what his mother had wanted all her life—a home that was always open to friends and guests and young people (some of whom Stuart had delivered). He and Ruth adopted three children, and they cherished their “chosen children” as much as Matthew and Marilla loved their own little “Anne.”
At his funeral, the large chapel was filled beyond overflowing with medical colleagues, friends, and patients. Everyone remembered Stuart’s storytelling ability and his keen sense of humour, and lamented the passing of a man who, like his mother, was a unique and unforgettable personality.
Luella’s story
Luella Macdonald came to the last part of her life—a life filled with unimaginable difficulties and personal tragedy—as a very strong and philosophical woman who had transcended bitterness. She was a woman of much intelligence and intellectual curiosity, and a plucky soul as well. She was well-read and wise, funny and frank. She said what she thought, and she met everything head on. She recovered from two serious strokes in her early retirement years and resumed a full and active life after learning to drive and speak all over again.
Luella had raised her two children by herself, taking a job in an aircraft factory to support them, and her tales of her struggles were heart-rending. At times, she had nobody to watch the children, and no money to hire help. She did her best to “child-proof” the house and left the children locked in it while she worked. Her eyes moistened as she described how the children would cry when she left in the morning. In an era before government social assistance and enforced child support, she said there were many abandoned or widowed women (and fathers who had lost their wives) who had to make choices like hers: leave your children without proper supervision—or go without food.
Luella retained a soft spot in her heart for Chester all her life, despite the way he had treated her. She thought of him as someone to be pitied, and she had come to the opinion that there had been a genetic problem from the beginning. She believed that when he came into life, defeat was already sitting there, just waiting to knock him about. She said there were “signs of compulsive lying from time to time.” She picked up many negative feelings from him about his father, but “never about his mother.” He “had a brilliant mind but somewhere along the line nothing happened to give him any direction for living.… he was a ‘mucker,’ ” she said. When I asked her if the rumours I had heard that Chester had taken his own life were true, she said she didn’t know, and then added, sorrowfully but without bitterness, that it would “have been the honourable thing to do—he brought lots of misery into the world, to lots of people.” Misfortune pursued some of Chester’s first family into the next generation, and Luella’s account of the tragedies (accidental death, alcoholism, mental illness, homicide, and suicide) are too terrible to detail. Luella was proud that her daughter, also named Luella, became a nurse, and she spoke of her daughter and grandchildren with great affection.
Joy Laird’s story
According to Mr. Justice Douglas Latimer, the Crown Attorney for Halton County from 1968 until his retirement, Joy Laird became the best legal secretary in the entire area. If she had been able to afford the study of law herself, he said that she would have been an excellent lawyer. He described her as very hard-working, reliable, and smart, with a wonderful memory. In her adult years she had a serious no-nonsense demeanour, but she also enjoyed socializing, and had a quick and ready wit. She had an excellent manner with clients, and she mixed regularly and easily on a social basis with the most influential families in the area. She had excellent taste and brought class and natural dignity to the position she occupied.
Joy began her career with the Dale and Bennett law firm in Georgetown, the oldest in the area, as secretary to Sybil Bennett, a very prominent lawyer (the first female Q.C), and a second cousin of Prime Minister R. B. Bennett. Sybil Bennett thought so highly of Joy—who kept the firm running when the partners were otherwise occupied—that she purchased Joy’s first car for her as a gift. When the Dale and Bennett law firm was put up for sale, Joy Laird, then a senior secretary in the firm, called Douglas Lattimer and urged him to buy it, which he did the year before he was called to the bar in 1972. She all but ran the firm until he graduated and could take over. The firm then became Dale, Bennett, and Latimer.
Justice Latimer said that Joy, twelve years his senior, knew everyone in the entire surrounding community, from the poorest to the wealthiest. Because everyone knew, respected, and trusted her, people brought their business to the firm. When he became Crown Attorney for Halton County and left the law office, Joy followed him, remaining his loyal secretary until her retirement. He could not praise her enough, and joked about how she had told him that if he ever made a mistake, to blame it on “his secretary,” because people would forgive a secretary but not the lawyer himself. Joy, he said, did not make mistakes—she was a perfectionist and a professional in every way.
Joy Laird never married, despite many would-be suitors. She was a very private person, and no one knew that she nursed a memory of her early and only love, Stuart Macdonald. She treasured the scores of letters Stuart had written her over a long period, as well as Stuart’s 1939 medical pin. Because she had been unable to afford further education, she borrowed Stuart’s advanced math and other textbooks from St. Andrew’s, working through them for self-education. She kept every clipping about him or his family, as well as his pictures of him as a gymnast at St. Andrew’s and then at the University of Toronto, performing on the high bars. But the memory of their young romance died out in the community, and she never mentioned it to anyone. Only after knowing her for many years did I begin to piece things together. My most unnerving experience was being taken to her beautifully decorated bedroom to be shown something, and to see, in a prominent place, a near life-size, incredibly realistic doll, fully dressed, looking like a real baby. It was introduced as a doll that had belonged to the Brown children, who had been killed in the radial train accident in Norval.
Joy never knew how strongly Maud had opposed her romance with Stuart. She died in 2003, the year before Volume 5 was published, giving the full story of Maud’s antagonism to Joy’s family.3
In a drive through Norval a few weeks before his sudden death in 1982, Stuart pointed out Joy’s childhood home and volunteered that his mother had been completely wrong about her—that Joy had been a very nice young woman, no matter what her father did. Stuart remarked with considerable irony that his mother should not have held other families to standards that her own family could not meet. He added bitterly that his mother should have invited Joy into their Norval and Toronto homes to see if she would fit in, and this would have enabled their romance to either go ahead or fall apart naturally. He still felt sadness and shame that he had not had the courage to insist that his mother get to know Joy before condemning her. His mother’s health problems, his own busy career, and impending war brought such trauma into their lives that other personal concerns fell aside, and then he met the lovely Ruth, a trained nurse, and married her.
Joy Laird cared for and supported he
r aging and much-loved mother all her life. She also cared for her father and her feckless, alcoholic brother until their deaths. Mercifully, she never knew that Maud had called her “that bootlegger’s spawn” in her journals (October 23, 1936), but those bitter words were seared painfully in Stuart’s mind. He knew that his mother wanted him to publish her journals eventually, as a record of her life, but those words were responsible for his keeping his mother’s journals under wraps until the end of his life. He felt embarrassment that his mother had said what she did; and he worried that people might believe his mother’s assessment of Joy.
The publication of Maud’s final journal in 2004 brought shock to the community where Joy lived. No one had imagined that “Mrs. Macdonald” had felt as she did about Joy Laird. Norval people who had been Joy’s lifelong friends— Mary Maxwell, the wife of Canon Maxwell of the Anglican church in Norval, and Joan Brown Carter, the postmistress of Norval for many years and an amateur historian—told a very different story about Joy, as did Joan Carter’s youngest daughter, Kathy (who grew up as Joy’s godchild, and thought of her as a second mother).
Kathy Carter Gastle, who was mayor of the town of Halton Hills from 2000 to 2003, remembered the Laird home as a very happy place where people were always welcome. The house was spotless and well-decorated, and Joy’s mother was a kind and cheerful woman, and a splendid cook who liked young people.
Kathy Carter grew up looking through her godmother’s scrapbooks. She heard a great deal about Stuart Macdonald from Joy as a fondly remembered childhood chum. Although Kathy never actually met the fabled Stuart Macdonald, he was a fixture in Joy’s stories of her own childhood. Joy had always loved children, and took her position as godmother to Kathy Carter very seriously, giving her many advantages, such as special trips that she would not otherwise have had as a youngest child in a large family. They were as close as mother and daughter until Joy’s death. At the end of her life, Joy gave Kathy a red silk pouch full of the school crests from Stuart’s letters, which she had carefully clipped off each letter before she destroyed the letter itself.
The community did not look down on the Laird family, and after Maud’s Norval journals were published, people wondered over the malice directed at them. Perhaps when Maud complained about the fact that she couldn’t imagine where Ewan’s salary went, she may have suspected that Ewan—like many other respectable men wanting their “nip”—dropped in to pick up the occasional refill for his cough syrup from Lou Laird’s little “Blue Room.” Maud gave Ewan drinks of her own homemade wine, but she would not have sanctioned his patronizing Lou Laird. Perhaps she worried that her sons were being corrupted by Lou’s liquor, too.
In Jane of Lantern Hill, Maud disapproves of parents meddling in their children’s love matches. But the writer of fiction had an objectivity that the mother of sons did not. As Maud once told Violet King, writers have no special immunity to human frailty and folly.
William Arthur Deacon
When William Arthur Deacon wrote about her books with such lofty contempt, and elbowed her out of the CAA executive, he deprived Maud of doing public service in the world of letters, as well as the celebrity status she had worked hard to achieve.
Deacon lived to a ripe old age, dying in 1977 after long service as literary editor of The Globe and Mail, from 1936 until 1961. In an unfinished manuscript about his influential career, he wrote, “Uniquely among Canadians, Miss Montgomery understood the minds and hearts of adolescent girls, about whom she wrote in a manner completely acceptable to them.” He observed that her books were popular in Japan, and he couldn’t resist remarking that this resulted in Japanese girls writing the literary editor of The Globe and Mail (e.g., Deacon himself), asking to put them in touch with Canadian pen-pals. Patronizing to the end, he added: “The P.E.I. Branch of the I.O.D.E. has shouldered this problem [italics added].”
Postscript
Readers of Maud’s journals and this biography will ponder over what ultimately brought her to such a sad end. Would different choices have enabled this gifted woman—who wrote books that have brought joy to so many adults and young people all around the world—to find more satisfaction in her own life? Maud herself was addicted to asking “what if?” (see her journal entry of November 25, 1933). In her final years, she began to suspect that she was the author of much of her own misfortune, and she combed her journals for clues. But she was equally given to quoting the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam:
The Moving Finger writes, and, having writ,
Moves on; nor all thy Piety nor Wit
Shall lure it back to cancel half a Line
Nor all thy Tears wash out a Word of it.
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
First, I am indebted to Dr. E. Stuart Macdonald for first suggesting that I write a biography of his mother. He died in 1982, and Elizabeth Waterston and I then began editing his mother’s journals, bringing them out between 1985 and 2004. The L.M. Montgomery Project, with support from the University of Guelph and the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada, continued over a thirty-year period. Elizabeth and I have had many happy years working together on a writer we admire, sharing research with many other international enthusiasts in the process. The early scholars whose research has underpinned Montgomery studies are Gabriella Åhmansson, F.W.P. Bolger, Elizabeth R. Epperly, Carole Gerson, Mollie Gillen, Elizabeth Waterston, and Rea Wilmshurst.
My own research on Montgomery began in the early 1970s. People who generously assisted me are legion, and many credited below are now dead. As my generation knows too well, the early days of the electronic age were fraught with frequent data loss, and I apologize to those whose names have been inadvertently omitted.
In the late 1980s and 1990s, three University of Guelph students helped me with the initial research for this biography, and their exceptional dedication deserves special citation. Evan W. Siddall researched and analyzed Montgomery’s publishing history, the legal entanglements, and her financial dealings, setting up timely interviews in the USA with aging parties to these affairs. Kate Wood’s invaluable research focused on retrieving the culture of Montgomery’s youth and early years from microfilmed Prince Edward Island and Ontario newspapers and books. Morgan Dennis worked on Montgomery’s later Ontario years, researching people, places, and transactions. My debt to these three people is incalculable.
Numerous other students did valuable early work on the LMM Project, but special thanks goes to my two daughters, who first began assisting me during their own school years: Jennie Rubio’s help included compiling books Montgomery read or quoted from, and Tracy (Rubio) Siddall organized and recorded financial and other data for assessment. Rosemary Waterston also did helpful research in many areas. Others who contributed to the Montgomery project in their student years include Nick Whistler, Marie Campbell, Rebecca and James Conolly, Benjamin Lefebvre, Leanne Wild, Rebecca Olivier, Laura Higgins, Kathy Jia, Stephanie Waterston, and Katie Waterston. Patrick Firth and Angela Lombardi prepared a bibliography for the website: www.lmmrc.ca.
Editorial assistance on this manuscript came from Amy Black at Doubleday Canada, Meg Masters, and Meg Taylor. I am also particularly indebted to Elizabeth Waterston for her advice, responses, and constant encouragement, and to my daughter, Jennie Rubio, for her experienced, vigorous, and sensitive editorial help with the final manuscript.
Relatives and acquaintances of both Montgomery and the other players in her life have been generous with help. For the PEI years, special thanks goes to the following: Ruth, George, and Maureen Campbell of Park Corner; Mrs. Wilfred (Mary) Furness, Gordon, and Sharon Furness of Vernon River; Doris Munsey Haslam of Charlottetown; Doris Stirling Jenkins of Summerside; Georgie and Bruce MacLeod of Kensington; Christine McLeod of Orwell Cove; John and Jennie Macneill of Montgomery’s Cavendish home; Dr. Lewis B. Woolner of the Mayo Clinic and Evelyn Woolner of Rustico; and Jean Macphail Weber of the Macphail Homestead Museum in Orwell. I also thank Leta Andrews, Mrs. Ralph Callbeck, Constance Carruth
ers, Anne Hart, Mrs. Hants B. Hunter, Eileen MacKendrick Leard, Louise Lowther, Helen Macdonald, George MacFarlane, Jean MacFarlane, Nancy MacFarlane, Percy MacGougan, Clayton McLure, Albert Middleton, Mrs. R.C. (Blanche) Montgomery, Helen MacFarlane Nicholls, and Dr. Lemuel Prowse.
For later years in Ontario, in addition to Montgomery’s maids, I particularly thank Harold and Wilda Clark, Margaret Mustard, and Isabel Mustard St. John of Uxbridge; Nina Pickering Lunney of Zephyr; Cameron, Fred, and Jessie Leask and Mary Stiver of Leaskdale; Luella Reid Macdonald of Brampton; Joan Carter, Robert and Elaine Laird Crawford, Kathy Carter Gastle, Marion Webb Laird, Mary Maxwell, and Margaret Russell of Norval; Catharine Agnes Hunt, Joy Leard, and Justice Douglas V. Latimer of Georgetown; David and Kay Dills of Acton; Marcella Berger, Dr. Richard Braiden, Nora Lane Braiden, L.E. “Ted” Jones, Dr. E. Stuart Macdonald, Ruth Macdonald, Lena McClure, Dr. D. McIntosh, Linda Sparks (Olive Watson), Anita Webb, and Robert L. Woolner of Toronto; David Macdonald of Kleinburg; Mike W. Chepesuik of British Columbia; R. W. Macqueen of Waterloo; Ed and Bette Campbell of Haileybury; Violet King Morgan of Guelph; Roberta Mary Sparks Richardson of Hamilton; and Eric Gaskell of Ottawa.
I also thank Emma Andrews, Mrs. Will Bacon, George and Noreen Bell, Merle Collins, J. Austin Cook, Chester Early, Norma Fitzgerald, Ruth Gallant, Evelyn Harrison, Elsie Hunter, Robert Jardine, Ken Leslie, Edna McClure, Margaret McKane, Marjorie McKee, Dorothy Watson McLean, William Steele, Ruth Wade, Winnifred Wake, and Reg Winfield, plus many members of the Leaskdale, Norval, and Guelph church and community organizations.
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