The scores of archivists and librarians who have assisted me include Linda Armichand, Margaret Beckman, Lorne Bruce, Bev Buckie, Virginia Gillham, Bernard Katz, Ellen Morrison, Nancy Sadek, and Darlene Wiltsie at the University of Guelph; Kevin Rice, David Webber, and Moncrieff Williamson at the Confederation Centre; Merritt Crocket, Frankie Dindial, Mary Beth Harris, and Simon Lloyd of the University of Prince Edward Island Library; Elizabeth DeBlois of the L.M. Montgomery Institute; Marilyn Bell and Charlotte Stewart of the Public Archives in Charlottetown; Peter D. Hingley of the Royal Astronomical Society (U.K.); Alan S. Wakefield and Matthew Lee of the Imperial War Museum (U.K.); Carl Spadoni of McMaster University; Irene Aubrey, Don Carter, Anne Goddard, and Peter Rachon at the National Library of Canada; Kim Arnold at the Presbyterian Church Archives; Judith Colwell of the United Church Archives and the Maritime Conference; Marie Hammond, Anne-Marie Langlois, and Susan Lewthwaite at the Law Society of Upper Canada; Judy Ginsberg of the Osgoode Hall Archives; Ken Ryan of the St. Andrew’s College Archives; Carole Lindsay at the Toronto Star; Amanda Valpy at the Globe and Mail; Hazel Robertson at the National Library of Scotland; Ron Rybnikar at the Babson Institute Archives; Orlo Jones and Douglas Fraser at the PEI Heritage Foundation; Paul Sharkey and Karen Teeple of the City of Toronto Archives; Patricia Townsend of the Acadia University Archives; Henry F. Scannell and Aaron Schmidt of the Boston Public Library; Yuka Kajihara and Leslie McGrath of the Osborne Collection of Early Children’s Books; Brian Winter of the Whitby Museum; Brenda Dunn, Barbara MacDonald, and Tom Reddin of Parks Canada; Allan McGillivray of the Uxbridge-Scott Historical Society; Michael S. Moss and Elspeth Reid of the University of Glasgow; Anne Dondertman and Monique Flaccavento of the Thomas Fisher Rare Book Library; Carolyn Cannon and Michael Moore of the York University Library; Steven Whalen of the Uxbridge Library; Marina Englesakis at St. Michael’s Hospital in Toronto; Cynthia Murphy of the Connecticut Valley Historical Museum; Katherine Roy of PEN, Margaret Booth and Karen Tinsley of the Imperial Life Insurance Company of Toronto; John Choules, Andrew Cross, and Jim Lewis of the Archives of Ontario; Muriel Lockhart of Springfield, Massachuetts; Garron Wells of the University of Toronto; Lynne Dunlop and Marg Murray of the Tillsonburg United Church; Mary Beth Bagg and Fred Hall of the University of Indianapolis; Laura T. Neil of the Alloa (Scotland) Library; Mary Ann Welch of the University of Western Ontario Law Library; and Ken Puley of the CBC Radio Archives.
Members of the medical community assisted my understanding of forensic pharmacology, psychiatric and mood disorders, and musculoskeletal problems. Special thanks goes to Dr. Angus Beck in Prince Edward Island, and in Ontario to Dr. Michael Howitt of Guelph, and to Professors Harold Kalant, Denis Grant, and Ernest Steib of the University of Toronto. Thanks also to Dr. Alexander Watt, Dr. Ruth Tatham, Danny Lui (B.Sc.Phm), Minette Roy (RMT), Kathy James (RPT) of Guelph; to Dr. Mary McKim MacKenzie of London; to Catherine Munn and Dr. E. Kaminska of Hamilton; and to doctors in Toronto’s Clarke Institute, the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health, and Sunnybrook Hospital, including Drs. Anne Bassett, R.A. Cleghorn, Cyril Greenland, Jack Griffin, Steven Hucker, and Zindel V. Segal.
Of the many lawyers contacted, I particularly acknowledge the help of James Innes Stewart, Q.C., president of the 1939 graduating class at Osgoode Hall, and I also appreciate information from Jacie Horwitz, Kenneth Foulds, W.H.C. Boyd, Roy Clement Sharp, W. G. C. Howland, David Ongley, Rupert Parkinson, Mervin Mirsky, Samuel Lerner, Gregory T. Evans, and William Parker. Thanks also to Celia Bobkin of Blake, Cassels, and Graydon.
Others who furnished specific, useful information for this project are Anne Adams, Hans Beck, Michael Bliss, Ruth Compton Brouwer, Donna Campbell, Virginia Careless, Beth Cavert, Carolyn Collins, Peter Coues, Joanne Craig, David Donaldson (Prestwick Golf Club, Scotland), Owen Dudley Edwards (Scotland), Elizabeth Epperly, the Right Honorable Archibald George, Earl of Eglinton and Winton (of London, U.K.), Carole Gerson, Judy Grant, Jack and Linda Jackson Hutton, Bernard Katz, G. Douglas Killam, Jennifer Litster (Scotland), Klaus Martens (Germany), Kevin McCabe, the Honorable Pauline M. McGibbon, Janice Dickin McGinnis, Lena C. McLure, Heather Murray, Ian Ross Robertson, John Robert Sorfleet, Roger W. Straus, J.R. (Tim) Struthers, Clara Thomas, Barbara Wachowicz (Poland), Gavin White (Scotland), and James W. Wilson, O.B.E. (of Skelmorlie Castle, Ayrshire, Scotland).
I also thank the following people for contributing to my work and research: Yoshiko Akamatsu (Japan), Marian Badgery, Kathy Belicki, Sue Bennett, Jane Waterston Bregha, Keith Brewer (U.S.A.), Susan Brown, Helen Buss, Elspeth Cameron, Lynn Campbell, the Rev. Mary Campbell, Norman and Elaine Campbell, Joan Brown Carter, Ronald Cohen, J.T.H. Connor, Barbara Conolly, Gwendolyn Davies, Marie C. Davis (Zimmerman), Margaret Anne Doody (U.S.A.), Rae Fleming, Carol Gaboury (U.S.A.), Irene Gammel, Virginia Gillham, Billie Godson, Beverley A. Hayden, Marian Hebb, Lynne Hoehamer, Huifeng Hu (China), Yuka Izawa (Japan), Marlene Kadar, Clarence Karr, Phyllis Keeling, Michael Kennedy, Catherine Kerrigan (Scotland), Deirdre Kessler, Don Kuiken, Eleanor Lamont, Marjory Lang, Margaret Laurence, Ruth Law, Jean Little, Ami Lonnroth (Sweden), Margaret MacKay (Scotland), the Rev. Eoin MacKay, Asim Masoud, Mary McDonald-Rissanen (Finland), Ron McKeen, Bill McNeill, John Moldenhauer, Allan L. Montgomery, Kenneth H. Montgomery, Graeme Morton, Heather Murray, Elaine Kalman Naves, Perry Nodelman, Jason Nolan, Mariam Montgomery Perkins (U.S.A.), Ormande Pickard (U.K.), Anna Pisulewska-Zelazny (Poland), David Rehak (Czech Republic), Laura Robinson, Sami Roodi (Iran), Catherine Sheldrick Ross, Malcolm Ross, Paul Salmon, Judi Saltman, Shelley Sanders, Tim Sauer, Ivan Sayers, Carol Shields, Wayne Skinner, Edith Smith, Kay Smith, Glenys Stow, Leon Surette, Clara Thomas, Paul and Hildi Tiessen, William Toye, Fred Turner, Jonathan Vance, Christyl Verduyn, Sandy Wagner, Douglas Waterston, Nick Whistler, Jane E. Wilson, Joanne Wood, Dr. John Woodger, Emily Woods, Christie Wooster (U.S.A.), Lorraine York, and Alan R. Young. I thank Chris Lee of Guelph, my late husband Gerald J. Rubio, and my son-in-law, Tony Collins of McMaster University, for endless and patient computer assistance.
Administrators at Guelph who have greatly facilitated my work over the years are Margaret Beckman, G. Douglas Killam, Wayne Marsh, David Murray, Michael Ridley, and Helen Salmon. Finally, I thank my agents at Westwood Creative Artists (Toronto): first Jan Whitford and then Jackie Kaiser.
ENDNOTES
INTRODUCTION
1. Montgomery’s letter to Ephraim Weber, dated November 10, 1907, p. 58.
2. Letter to Mrs. L. O. Ekeberg, from E. S. Macdonald, dated September 24, 1960.
3. Journal entry of November 10, 1908.
4. Peterborough Examiner, May 2, 1942.
PART ONE: THE PEI YEARS
1. Maud was named “Lucy” after her grandmother and “Maud” after a daughter of Queen Victoria. In childhood, she was called “Maudie” to prevent confusion with her grandmother’s name. As late as 1896, Maud signed her name in her copy of Whittier as “Lucy M. Montgomery,” but she used the name “Maud” in adulthood, preferring it to both “Lucy” and “Lucy Maud.” The name “Maud” reflected the pleasure in poetry of colonial Prince Edward Island, recalling Tennyson’s 1855 poem “Maud” and John Greenleaf Whittier’s “Maud Muller” (circa 1856), a ballad about a romance that would have been but for the social disparity between a poor country lass and a prominent judge, and Maud underlined many lines in this poem in her book. (The most prominently underlined was “For of all sad words of tongue or pen, / The saddest are these: ‘It might have been.’ ”) She always published under the name “L. M. Montgomery,” a publishing convention that obscured a female author’s gender since authorship was regarded as more appropriate to men. In popular culture, she has commonly been called “Lucy Maud.”
2. “The Gay Days of Old: A Well-known Author’s Reminiscences of Her Girlhood on a Canadian Farm,” Farmers’ Magazine, circa 1920, found on p. 176 of Scrapbook of Reviews.
3. Walter C. Ault, p. 198.
4. Topics presented by the villagers in the Cavendish Literary Socie
ty programs between Maud’s twelfth and seventeenth years suggesting the range of interests in this rural community include: “Which is the greater poet, Byron or Burns?” “Should capital punishment be abolished?” “Which is mightier, the Pen or the Sword?” “Which has greater influence on mankind, oratory or music?” “Which is the better form of government: monarchy or republicanism?” Programs were presented on “The English Revolution of 1688,” “The Life and Writings of Sir Walter Scott,” “The Works of George Eliot,” “The Elizabethan Period,” and “The Principal Events in the Reign of Queen Victoria.” Evening programs often began with a formal debate or paper and then the topics were opened to discussion.
5. See “The Flyting Betwixt Montgomery and Polwart,” The Poems of Alexander Montgomerie, pp. 99–132, written circa 1629 in Scotland, as an example of traditional Scottish flyting in verse.
6. See Michael Kennedy, The Island Magazine, Volume 39 (1996), p. 39. See also the entry on “Montgomery” in Malpeque and Its People. The Montgomerys came around 1770, but the discovery of the ship register of the Edinburgh appears to confirm the date as 1771.
7. See Michael Kennedy, The Island Magazine, Volume 39 (1996), p. 42. McShannon had many other spellings, like O’Senóg, MacShenaig, McShinnocht, etc.
8. See Mark Girouard, p. 110.
9. James W. Wilson, O.B.E., the current owner of the Montgomery castle in Skelmorlie, Scotland, the ancestral seat of the Montgomerie clan, found a large oil portrait of the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton in the sheds when he was restoring the grounds. He believed the portrait was painted circa 1852 by Catterson Smith, one of Ireland’s finest portrait painters, when Lord Eglinton was Lord Lieutenant, i.e., governor, of Ireland. After having the painting restored, Mr. Wilson presented it to the Prestwick Golf Club, which the thirteenth Earl had founded in 1851. Although women were not allowed in this all-male club, Mr. Wilson arranged for my daughter, Jennie, and me to view and photograph the picture. We confirmed a distinct resemblance between Donald Montgomery and the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton.
10. This tournament cost an estimated £40,000 (around $10,000,000 in 2007 dollars). See Ian Anstruther, The Knight and the Umbrella: An Account of the Eglinton Tournament, 1839. See also Mark Girouard, The Return to Camelot: Chivalry and the English Gentleman, Chapter 7, on the Eglinton tournament, pp. 87–110, and Alan Young, pp. 186–87.
11. Girouard, pp. 108, 110.
12. One, Alexander Montgomerie, had been a court poet in the reign of James VI. Even Maud’s father wrote poetry, and one of his poems is preserved in the L. M. Montgomery Collection at the University of Guelph. The Scottish Collection at Guelph contains other Montgomerie clan materials. Several generations of Scottish Montgomerie men were given to excessive romanticism, and ran through their fortunes quickly, but they were also talented and energetic, and repaired their fortunes in the second half of their lives, as described in The Knight and the Umbrella. A nineteenth-century Lady Eglinton is credited with starting the Ayrshire cottage lace industry when she brought back a baby’s christening robe from France in 1814. Maud mentions that a sixteenth-century Lady Eglinton was responsible for setting up linen and woollen manufactures in Ireland and encouraging the making of tartans there. Maud was herself an exceptionally skilled needlewoman.
13. For an account of the Macneill clan, see Harold H. Simpson’s Cavendish: Its History, Its People. The name Macneill was spelled variously as McNeill, McNeil, McNeal, and MacNeill.
14. In 1783, when Speaker Macneill was two years old, the Island population was 1,200 people. By 1820, when he was thirty-five and serving in the provincial legislature, there were 15,000 people. By the time of his death, in 1870, four years before Maud’s birth, there were almost 100,000 inhabitants. From that time on, the Island exported well-educated young people to Canada and the United States. Not until the middle of the twentieth century would the Island regain the population it had had in Maud’s childhood.
15. “Working farmers” were below the “gentry” in the rigid English class system, according to Dr. Ormand Pickard, local historian and curator of the museum in Dunwich, England.
16. The Woolners were a long-lived family whose descendants fanned out across North America, many becoming successful professionals in the twentieth century.
17. In 1913, L. M. Montgomery published The Golden Road, using tales that came from her Great-Aunt Mary Macneill Lawson. The first tale is about lovers Ursula Townley and Kenneth MacNair, who eloped to the dismay of their clan. Ursula’s father, like Maud’s great-grandfather, Speaker Macneill, boasted he “knew every man, woman and child” on the Island. He opposed the marriage because there was bad political blood between the families, as was the case with the Montgomerys and Macneills. Kenneth was a young sea-captain from the next settlement; similarly, Hugh John had spent some time at sea. Ursula, like Clara Macneill, was married in “sea-green silk.”
18. See The Memorials of the Montgomeries, which describes this typical feature.
19. “The Gay Days of Old,” Farmers’ Magazine, p. 176, in Scrapbook of Reviews.
20. See the entry of January 2, 1905.
21. When you were around Lucy Macneill, recalls Jennie Macneill, wife of Lucy’s grandson John Macneill, “you stayed on your best behaviour.”
22. Luella Reid Macdonald, Maud’s first daughter-in-law, described how in the 1930s Maud had frequently talked about her deep affection for her Grandmother Macneill, describing what a wonderful woman she had been. Luella was later shocked to read in the journals Maud’s critical comments about her grandmother.
23. Red Scrapbook, 1910–12, p. 21.
24. The Scottish position on education was formalized historically in Scotland’s Second Education Act of 1696: all children, rich and poor, male and female, were to be given access to free education. In England, public education was only mandated by law in 1870, nearly two hundred years later. See Mary Rubio, “Scottish-Presbyterian Agency …” in L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture.
25. Ian Ross Robertson, Acadiensis, Autumn 1990.
26. Marjory MacMurchy, Scrapbook of Reviews, p. 50.
27. Maud paid her difficult grandfather few compliments during her lifetime, but when a journalist reported that “She supposes she inherits her love of writing from her father. He and his brothers all wrote poetry …,” she changes the word “father” to “grandfather” in her clipping book, following her practice of correcting magazines, newspapers, and books which get things wrong. See Christian Richardson, “A Canadian Novelist,” on p. 25 in Scrapbook of Reviews. On p. 19 of the same scrapbook, she admits many of the stories in The Story Girl were her grandfather’s.
28. These Campbell cousins consisted of: Clara, three years younger than Maud; Stella, five years younger; George, seven years her junior; and Frederica, born when Maud was nine. They had the ebullience found in her fictional children, particularly in The Story Girl.
29. Maud gives slightly differing accounts of how many books were in her home in her formative years. In the first round of articles about her after Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, she told interviewers that her family had full sets of Sir Walter Scott’s and Dickens’s novels, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, the complete poetry of Burns, and Milton’s Paradise Lost, as well as the popular literature of E. P. Roe and the Pansy books. As a new and unknown author, she was probably embellishing her family’s library holdings. A later journal entry on January 7, 1910 (recopied after 1919) is more selective: Dickens’s Pickwick Papers, Scott’s Rob Roy, Bulwer-Lytton’s Zanoni, and John A. Clark’s The Memoirs of Anzonetta Peters. In another article from this time she talked of reading Talmadge’s Sermons, Paradise Lost, Pickwick Papers, Scott’s Ivanhoe and Quentin Durward, and Campbell’s poems. By the 1920s, when she was famous, she was more interested in highlighting her achievement by showing early deprivations. She said that her grandparents were too strict to allow “novels” in the house. This differing account may reflect a specialized use of the term “novel” as a
derogatory name for “racy” French fictions, while serious historical fiction, like that of Walter Scott, would have been termed “romances,” a less derogatory term.
30. Given Maud’s many later unflattering references to her Aunt Emily, it is worth noting that Lucy Palmer (Haslam), the young teacher at Malpeque’s Fanning school during this period, comments in her diary on what a “nice” woman Mrs. John Montgomery was. (The Lucy Palmer Haslam diary is held by Professor Michael Bliss and his wife.) Ruth Campbell, raised by Maud’s Aunt Emily, called Emily “very determined” but “a good person” in an interview in 1980. Ruth Campbell noted that in her childhood she never knew that L. M. Montgomery was Emily’s niece; Maud’s books were not in the house, nor were they mentioned. Once later Aunt Emily picked up A Tangled Web, then slammed it shut with the words, “I’m ashamed I know her.” Another time, Ruth mentioned Maud’s name and was told, “Never say that name around here.” A story lingers in the Campbell family that Aunt Emily said Maud was sent home to Cavendish because the Fanning school was too crowded to admit her. However, the Palmer diaries show that Maud did attend Malpeque school during her stay: in one entry, Miss Haslam says she “signed Maud Montgomery’s autograph book” today. After Ruth married Maud’s cousin Jim Campbell of Park Corner, she discovered with surprise that he talked of “Aunt Maud” with enormous affection.
31. Maud’s character assignations should always be regarded with caution. Her views, distorted by her personal overreaction, are intensified by her command of language. Many people condemned in her journals were remembered kindly by others. However, her Uncle John F. Macneill was not. One relative recounted, “We were all scared of him.” Even in old age, he was a man feared by children. His wife, by contrast, was remembered as “a lovely lady.” Her good-natured disposition was passed down to many of their children, including Ernest, the son who inherited the farm. Maud hoped Ernest would re-establish the good name of the Macneill clan, sullied, in her opinion, by her uncle. Ernest’s son, John Macneill, eventually inherited both the Alexander Macneill and the John F. Macneill property, and still lives there. When he was born, Maud wrote happily: “A letter came today …, saying Ern Macneill’s wife had a son. So perhaps the old place may remain in the Macneill name yet.” (August 7, 1930)
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