32. This trait is frequently attributed to people with mood disorder, based on the intensity of their feelings of anger and humiliation.
33. See Mollie Gillen, The Wheel of Things, p. 29, for a description of Prince Albert.
34. Taken from the letter to Pensie Macneill, dated August 26, 1890, in Bolger, p. 86.
35. See Bolger, letter of October 18, 1890, p. 94.
36. See Bolger, pp. 37–47, for the entire piece.
37. In a typical ad, young girls in long skirts are shown walking towards a school building, and the copy reads: “School days are danger days … it takes years to recover lost virility. Sometimes it is never recovered.…” The ailments forecast for “school girls” are “headaches, faintness, slight vertigo, pain in the back and loins, irregularity, loss of sleep, tendency to avoid the society of others.”
38. They had been whisked away so suddenly that Maud wasn’t even given a chance to say “goodbye” to them. Possibly her Grandmother Macneill observed and overreacted to some display of the natural curiosity that children feel about the opposite sex at a certain age.
39. His obituary read, in part: “By the death of Senator Montgomery a strong link between the past and the present has been severed. The Honourable gentleman, has for several years, been one of the most venerable figures in the political arena in Canada. In respect to this Province, he was the most aged and most active politician in active life. His career as a man extended to the time when our community was in its veriest infancy, and as a politician it reached away beyond the time at which the boon of responsible self-government was secured to Prince Edward Island. He was born at Princetown on the 19th day of January 1808, the sixth son of Daniel Montgomery, Esq., a native of Argyleshire [Scotland], and [was] for thirty-five years a member of the House of Assembly for Prince County. When thirty years of age he was elected a member of the Legislature … and since that time … He continued to hold the office of President of the Legislative council until 1873, when he was called to the Senate of Canada …”
40. Senator Montgomery left $100 to each of his daughters: Jane, wife of Charles Crosby; Nancy, wife of Donald Campbell; Elizabeth, wife of A. G. Fogland of Massachusetts; Mary, wife of Duncan McIntyre (Hugh John’s former business partner); Margaret, wife of Robert Sutherland; and the same amount to Maud’s father, Hugh John, in Prince Albert. This was a fairly typical will: one son would be selected to inherit the farm, and the other children would be given a token amount.
41. Reprinted in Bolger’s The Years Before “Anne,” pp. 140–42.
42. The legislative record shows that she was paid substantial supplements, but not what these had to cover.
43. Affective mood disorder (often referred to as manic-depression or bipolar disorder) is believed to affect about 10 percent of the world’s population, and it may have been responsible for Alexander Macneill’s varying and explosive moods.
44. See the article by Margaret Conrad, “The Neglected Majority,” p. 41, in Prentice and Trofimenkoff.
45. Girton, a residential college for women established in 1869, was part of the University of Cambridge in England.
46. See Mathilde Blind, George Eliot, pp. 1–2.
47. In the 1917 biographical sketches published in Everywoman’s World (reprinted in The Alpine Path in 1975; see p. 60), Maud compresses her successes into a one-week period and adds John Milton to the list of books she bought. She did a long paper on Milton’s “Comus” at Dalhousie, and she may have been confusing the contexts in which she read him. She inscribes her copy of Longfellow, “L. M. Montgomery, Feb. 22, 1896”; her heavily underlined Whittier is inscribed “Lucy M. Montgomery, February 22, 1896”; a collection of Wordsworth’s poems is dated 1897; apparently her copy of Byron did not survive, for the copy of Byron she left to her son is marked as a gift from G. B. MacMillan on Christmas 1912.
48. This article can be found in the Norton Critical Edition of Anne of Green Gables, p. 272, or in Bolger’s The Years Before “Anne,” p. 161. In it, she says that women were first admitted to Dalhousie in 1881.
49. The year Maud was slogging away at Bedeque in a country school, Murray took a year of maths at the Sorbonne, then a year at Harvard. In 1899 he took a bicycle tour of France; he toured France, Belgium, Switzerland, Holland, and Scotland again in 1910. In 1901 he travelled to Scotland to see the Glasgow Exhibition. In 1907, he brought his young wife to the Island in an elegant touring car, and came again in 1909. All his movements were tracked by the PEI papers even though he was not, technically, an Islander. By 1902, he was lecturing in Mathematics at McGill, and by 1907, he was offered the Chair of Mathematics at Dalhousie, where he had a long and distinguished career. One of his three daughters married Lord Beaverbrook’s son.
50. Maud may have picked up her term “kindred spirits” from Schreiner’s book, in Chapter 7: “ ‘My dear friend,’ said Bonaparte, taking off his hat, ‘I came not to sup, not for mere creature comforts, but for an hour of brotherly intercourse with a kindred spirit.’ ”
51. Lucy Lane Clifford is also the author of a horrifying children’s story, oft-anthologized now, called “The New Mother.”
52. According to the 1880 Meecham Atlas of PEI, Cornelius Leard had one hundred acres to Alexander Macneill’s fifty acres.
53. In the 1975 Terry Filgate documentary of Maud’s life, Herman is wrongly depicted as a loutish hick.
54. Psychiatric literature details how the heightened sexuality of the manic phase in people with mood disorder can alter behaviour: first and foremost, people become more active sexually, and this may result in promiscuous sex, fed by biochemical changes. But there are numerous other permutations of a manic phase: they may believe that people are in love with them who are in fact often indifferent; or they may become incestuous like Lord Byron. Manic-depression (bipolar disorder) is believed to have affected some of the world’s most creative minds: Lord Byron, Charles Dickens, Virginia Woolf, Vincent van Gogh, Sir Isaac Newton, to name just a few. Biographies show that this disorder can powerfully undermine stability in their personal lives. But the manic phase can also help drive the creative process.
55. See Maud’s entries of April 8 and July 10, 1898.
56. The Leard family says Herman died of appendicitis.
57. The story of the Herman Leard/Maud Montgomery/Ettie Schurman love-triangle came to me from two independent sources. Shortly after Montgomery’s first journal was published in 1985, Mrs. Constance Carruthers, a nurse and local historian on the Island, gave me both an oral and a written account of the story and the social environment in Bedeque. Her mother had been a good friend of Pril Munsey, and had told her of the tragic romance between Herman Leard and Ettie Schurman. In May 1993, I visited Doris Munsey Haslam, the daughter of Ettie Schurman, in a nursing home in Charlottetown, and heard the same story of her mother’s engagement to Herman Leard, followed by his death, and then told of her mother’s subsequent marriage to Mr. Munsey, followed by her mother’s death after giving birth to her (Doris) and Pril. The University of Toronto historian Michael Bliss, whose wife was related to Doris Haslam, also knew the story.
58. For an account of this two-suitor convention, see Helen M. Buss’s article “Decoding L. M. Montgomery’s Journals.”
59. Only because Herman was such a popular young man, and his death was felt as such a tragedy by the community, did memory of him linger longer than Maud would have expected. The local story of Ettie Schurman lays to rest the suggestion that Herman Leard died of a broken heart over Maud, as some readers of the journals have speculated.
60. For the full text of “The Bride Dreams,” see the University of Guelph website www.lmmrc.ca.
61. Alexander held the mortgage on his daughter Annie Macneill Campbell’s farm.
62. Scrapbook of Reviews, p. 195.
63. When Maud’s son, Dr. Stuart Macdonald, read these sentiments in the 1980s, he observed quite sharply to me that his mother was simply romanticizing her father, ignoring obvious shortcomings
, as abandoned children typically do.
64. See the treatment “the double” in Robert Louis Stevenson’s Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde (1886).
65. See Scrapbook of Reviews, p. 25, in the article by Christian Richardson, dated summer 1911: “Now ‘Anne’ was not my first [book] at all, but ‘Kilmeny of the Orchard,’ … How did I come to write it [Anne of Green Gables]? Well, you see, I was just a little magazine hack, and had to write what the publishers wanted.… One order came for a serial of just seven chapters. I tried ‘Anne’ first, but soon saw I could not make it what he wanted. Then I wrote ‘Kilmeny.’ Later I took up ‘Anne,’ and—it just wrote itself.… It was only after ‘Anne’ made a hit that the publisher raked up ‘Kilmeny’ … and got me to pad it out … and make a book out of it.” See also an article entitled “How I Began,” p. 72.
66. We cannot be positive when Maud first started planning Anne of Green Gables. There were normally three distinct stages to her writing a novel: planning it (doing the “spadework” in which she blocked out each chapter); writing it in long-hand; revising and typing it. When she says that she “wrote” Anne in the “fall and winter” we do not know which stage of writing she refers to. On May 2, 1907, she wrote Ephraim Weber that she had written a book during the previous fall and winter but kept it a secret because she was afraid she would not find a publisher. (She may well be imprecise about timing in this account to Weber.) She says she sent it to the L. C. Page Company in Boston and after a wait of two months heard from them in April 1907, accepting it. In summer 1911, an article by Christian Richardson (p. 25, Scrapbook of Reviews) says that she worked on Anne all one winter (probably between May 1905 and May 1906). Another account, essentially the same, is on p. 72 of the clipping scrapbook. On p. 40, she writes in the 1912 Toronto World that “ ‘Green Gables’ was written three years before it was published and ‘Avonlea’ was written the last of those years. ‘Kilmeny’ was a serial written a couple of years before ‘Green Gables.’ …” Maud was notoriously careless about dates, and on April 18, 1914, she says in her journals that she had begun Anne ten years earlier (which would be 1904, not 1905), right after Ewan moved to Cavendish (which was May 1905). This could be accurate, too, if by that she means she tried blocking it out, but it appears from the small amount of writing in her journals that she wrote Anne all through 1905.
67. Maud was well-versed in Scottish literature, with a particular love for Sir Walter Scott’s novels and Jane Porter’s Scottish Chiefs which romanticized the Highlanders.
68. This card is now in the Ryrie-Campbell collection at UPEI.
69. In the 1980s, Professor Gavin White, of Glasgow’s Trinity College, said that any student like Ewan who was performing poorly would have been counselled, but there is no record of that, and if he was, it did not help him.
70. This is reported later, in Maud’s entry of January 28, 1912.
71. See the entry of January 28, 1912. Maud continued to be angry about her uncle’s “selfishness, bad temper, and tyranny.”
72. Lucy—who lived until 1974—was well liked by other relatives and neighbours. Maud’s damning descriptions are a good example of the way she wrote people off, bitterly and irrevocably.
73. Recounted in her journal entry of August 16, 1907.
74. To Weber, in the letter of May 2, 1907, she implies that she sent it to only one publisher, the Page Company, and they accepted it promptly within two months. This does not square with her many later statements that she sent it variously to five or six publishers, and then left it lying around in a hatbox.
75. For the cover illustration of Anne, he used a glamorous picture of a young woman which had already appeared in The Delineator. It does not look like the illustrations of Anne in the book.
76. A comparison of these early editions is available in the Norton Critical Edition of Anne of Green Gables.
77. The vacillations of mood disorder are not the same as insanity. In insanity, people lose touch with reality. In mood disorder, they retain the ability to distinguish between what is normal and what is abnormal, but they feel very miserable and out of control, and their rollicking emotions can affect their judgment and willpower.
78. Margaret Ross was a pretty and gracious woman from a “good” Island family. Her sister married Dr. D. C. Harvey, a distinguished professor at Dalhousie University.
79. From 1904 until 1911, Lord Albert Henry George Grey, the fourth Earl Grey, was a very effective Governor General of Canada. He donated the “Grey Cup” to the Canadian Football League, but his greatest interest was in culture. A career diplomat trained in law at Cambridge University, he had been in the British Parliament and had served as Administrator of Rhodesia. His father had been the Private Secretary to Queen Victoria and her husband.
80. Quoted from a letter from Prof. Ian Ross Robertson to me, dated July 12, 1992, from notes he made in 1970, when the Macphail papers were in private hands.
81. Andrew Macphail’s father, William McPhail, born in Inverness-shire, Scotland, in 1830, came to Canada with his parents, and to the Island in 1844. His father, a teacher, was School Inspector for Charlottetown and Queen’s County until 1882, when he became Supervisor and Steward of Falconwood, the Island’s large mental hospital. Andrew changed his spelling to the more fashionable Scottish “Macphail.”
82. Macphail’s other book titles include Essays in Puritanism (1905), which deals with Jonathan Edwards (1703–1758), John Winthrop (1588–1649), Margaret Fuller (1810–1850), Walt Whitman (1819–1892), and John Wesley (1703–1791). Essays in Politics (1909) covers politics, tariffs, and government in Canada, Great Britain, and America. Essays in Fallacy (1910) deals with women in the United States and women’s suffrage in general, as well as with education and theology. Dr. Macphail’s interests were broad and his opinions widely sought. When Mark Twain died, The Daily Examiner engaged Macphail to write the obituary and ran it on April 26, 1910, under the headline (in caps): “DR. ANDREW MCPHAIL WRITES AN OBITUARY.” Twain’s name itself only appears in the subheading.
83. Essays in Fallacy, p. 99.
84. See Examiner, September 10, 1909, p. 1. On March 30, 1909, before the publication of his Essays in Fallacy, the Charlottetown Patriot carried on page 3 the cryptic note that Dr. Andrew McPhail [sic] is “declared to have recently come in to the public eye as a champion of women’s rights. He was recently elected President of the Montreal Golf Club.”
85. A Boston paper in 1910 quotes Maud as saying what a woman of her era would be expected to say, “I am a quiet, plain sort of person, and while I believe a woman, if intelligent, should be allowed to vote, I would have no use for suffrage myself. I have no aspirations to become a politician.” Then she added the cliché: “I believe a woman’s place is in the home.” See Red Scrapbook #1, p. 13.
86. See “The Movements of the Vice Regal Party,” in The Daily Patriot, September 14, 1910, p. 1.
87. In Anne of Green Gables, Mrs. Lynde warns Marilla that orphans put strychnine in wells. In Kilmeny of the Orchard, Maud tags the villain as a “foreigner.”
88. In England, the London Times ran the story in the midday edition on September 15, 1910.
89. See the article by Christian Richardson, “A Canadian Novelist,” in Scrapbook of Reviews, p. 25.
90. Neither Canadian nor American literatures had evolved into a university course of study at that time. Literature meant the “Classics.” MacNaughton, from Scotland and educated at Aberdeen, Cambridge, Heidelberg, Berlin, and Edinburgh, taught at Queen’s College, the University of Toronto, and McGill. In 1919, the Globe called him “one of the most prominent figures in the educational life of Canada” (May 16, 1919).
91. Earl Grey’s letter, dated September 27, 1910, is in the National Archives. The reference to “young Macphail” is to Jeffrey, Dr. Macphail’s son. Andrew Macphail also had a daughter, Dorothy, who was thirteen at the time of this visit. Many years later Dorothy (Mrs. Lindsay) recounted to Professor Ian Ross Robertson that her father had brought
Maud into her bedroom to meet her, but they found her asleep with Anne of Green Gables open on her bedcovers. She said her father told her that this “pleased Miss Montgomery.”
92. He was not a prolific scholar, but he was a legendary teacher and personality, fondly remembered with awe by his students, one of whom called him a “volcano of a man.” MacNaughton did manage to write a tribute to Earl Grey after Lord Grey died, probably at Macphail’s urging, for it was published in Macphail’s University Magazine (1917). He describes the trip they took in some detail, adding: “… Miss Montgomery, too, another ornament of the Island, whose delicious idyll ‘Anne of the Green Gables,’ [sic] found much favour in his eyes. He took care that we should meet her.”
93. One thinks, for example, of Professor Stephen Leacock’s humorous sketches which obtained much praise from his McGill and other literary colleagues.
94. She apparently did not know the difference between a wholesale and retail price when she signed her first contract with him, for she had written her pen-pal Ephraim Weber on May 2, 1907, that the book would be published “on the 10% royalty basis.” Later she would learn that Page had almost halved her royalties by this trick in phrasing. He also specified that he would not pay any royalties on the first 1,000 copies.
95. See “Miss L. M. Montgomery, Author of Anne of Green Gables,” in The Republic, November 19, 1910, p. 5. (in Red Scrapbook #1, p. 15).
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