96. Towards the end of the nineteenth century, the province had been feeling increasingly isolated from the mainland. By 1904, citizens and politicians lambasted Ottawa for looking after the western provinces while doing little for the Island’s isolation in winter (Examiner, May 4, 1904); for most of 1904 and 1905, the Island papers put pressure on Ottawa to fund a tunnel to the mainland. In 1909, the government had purchased the icebreaker Earl Grey to get through the ice on the Northumberland Strait, which eased the sense of isolation.
97. On August 2, 1931, Maud pasted the 1903 “nymph-of-the-sea” picture into her journals after commentary on Herman Leard. By 1931, she likely did not want to admit that her first glimpse of Ewan—when he was young and full of promise—was really what had prompted the picture. She preferred to link it to Herman, by then constructed as the man she had really loved, but could not marry.
98. Maud developed the negative in her own darkroom, then hid it away for the next twenty-eight years. Then she had it printed to put in her journals, which were themselves locked away for publication long after her death. She selected her audience as the generations yet unborn who would read her journals and ponder the beauty in youthful hope, the evanescence of life, and the permanence of dream—and see the contrast between the young Maud and the aged one where her life had become in Anne’s phrase, “a graveyard of buried hopes.”
PART TWO: THE LEASKDALE YEARS
1. Ewan Macdonald spelled his name Ewen, but Maud always wrote “Ewan.” It appears both ways on their joint tombstone.
2. When Maud was growing up, her grandfather, the family storyteller, would relate how the jug had come to his wife’s grandmother from her sister, Harriet Kemp, who had been engaged to a sailor who had had the jug made for her on an 1826 voyage, but drowned on the way home. The jug was brought to his heartbroken fiancée, who could not bear to look at it. She gave it to Maud’s Great-Grandmother Woolner, who carried it to Canada. The shards of this jug are now in the L. M. Montgomery Collection at the University of Guelph Archives.
3. In the early 1980s several of these “young people” from her classes commented on how much they had learned from her.
4. Margaret Mustard, L. M. Montgomery, p. 9.
5. P.E.N. is a worldwide fellowship of writers (poets, essayists, novelists), established in 1921, working to promote a culture of reading, and to defend free speech.
6. Marjory’s father, Alexander MacMurchy, LL.D., an immigrant from Kintyre, Argyleshire, Scotland, in 1840, was a prominent figure in the educational circles of Toronto. He was active in charity work and for twenty-eight years was principal of the Toronto Collegiate Institute (known as the Jarvis Street Collegiate), where Maud often spoke. He also edited the Canadian Educational Monthly and was a senator at the University of Toronto. Marjory’s brothers, J. Campbell and Angus (solicitor for the C.P.R.), were prominent lawyers. Her sister, Dr. Helen MacMurchy, was a medical doctor who worked successfully in public health in an era when women were still not welcomed in the medical professions. She served as inspector of hospitals and orphanages, and authored Infant Mortality (1910), and a series of Federal Department of Health publications, including The Canadian Mothers’ Book. Her new theories on child-rearing show up in the Marigold books, and she served in them as a model for the “lady-doctor.” In 1949, when she was eighty-seven, Dr. Helen MacMurchy was honoured in the United States as one of the ten leading physicians in the world. Another sister, Bessie, worked in foreign missions.
7. The first Leask, Peter, had been born in Aberdeenshire, Scotland, in 1822, and emigrated to Canada with his family in 1841. His sons, George and James, moved to Scott Township (Leaskdale’s location), and built a sawmill and gristmill. By 1847, George Leask had built the large brick house across from the manse and lived there until he died at age ninety-five. He was postmaster for fifty years, a school trustee for almost thirty years, and such a devout member of the Presbyterian congregation that he had donated the land for the church.
8. The first of the Mustard clan came from Cromarty, Rosshire, Scotland, to settle in the sparsely settled Markham area in 1801. John’s father, Alexander Mustard, emigrated from Scotland to Scott Township about 1832, four years before Maud’s family came to Prince Edward Island. Two of John’s brothers, Hugh and James, were extremely prominent farmers and mainstays of the Presbyterian congregation of Leaskdale. The contemporary Dr. [James] Fraser Mustard [b. 1927], C.C., M.D., Ph.D., F.R.S.C., LL.D.—medical scientist, educator, innovative thinker, environmentalist, and co-founder of the Canadian Institute for Advanced Research—is the grandson of James Mustard of Leaskdale.
9. Some of Zephyr’s most prominent members were English in origin, unlike the predominantly Scottish-Presbyterian Leaskdale. The English and Scottish immigrants were all from Great Britain, and were all loyal to the “mother country,” but there was some traditional antagonism between these two groups. Old newspapers show that in the early period of colonization, the Scots established dominance because they came with better educations than the English working class; this was the source of some resentment.
10. Maud’s detested stepmother, Mary Ann McRae Montgomery (1863–1909), also came from this area. She had gone to secondary school in Uxbridge with John Mustard. Her Uncle William Mackenzie still kept his estate in his native Kirkfield nearby. In 1911, the year of Maud’s and Ewan’s marriage, William Mackenzie had been knighted for his railway entrepreneurship.
11. Locally organized literary societies like the Hypatia Club were a very important feature in nineteenth- and early-twentieth-century Canadian rural communities before radio, television, and movies. Several hundred of them flourished in Ontario alone. Like the men’s Mechanics’ Institutes, they brought books and culture to citizens wanting self-education. (See Heather Murray, Come, Bright Improvement.)
12. Maud had purchased Longfellow’s poetry in 1897, and underlined it heavily.
13. See “The Old Minister in The Story Girl,” by A. Wylie Mahon, where the origins of many stories about ministers are attributed to Maud’s Uncle Leander, who told tales about the Reverend John Sprott, born in Scotland, emigrating to Canada in 1818, who was one of the “best loved and most unforgettable of the home-missionary pioneers of the Atlantic provinces.”
14. When the second volume of Maud’s collected journals were published in 1987, her remarks about the tiresome demands on a minister’s wife stirred up consternation among those who remembered the cheerful Mrs. Macdonald. One maid, Elsie, could not believe that Maud had written these journals, and initially suspected they were a fabrication by the editors.
15. Years later Lily remembered her three years in the manse as happy, with amiable banter between Ewan and Maud, whom he called “Pussy.” Ewan used to playfully flip Maud’s hair as he walked past her.
16. See Red Scrapbook #1, p. 161.
17. Margaret H. Mustard, L. M. Montgomery.
18. We will never know if her royalties had really dropped off this much, or if the Page Company had already started “creative bookkeeping” that reduced what they paid her.
19. See Jonathan Vance, Death So Noble, p. 35.
20. See Red Scrapbook #2, p. 18.
21. Canon Scott was the father of the famous Canadian jurist and poet Frank R. Scott.
22. Maud’s Red Scrapbook #2 shows Ewan’s early involvement, including writing an indignant and well-worded letter to the Globe refuting a claim that PEI had not sent its fair share of recruits to the war (see p. 57). Ewan also acted as Deputy Registrar in his area, registering citizens for “national purposes” with the Canada Registration Board.
23. Far-fetched as this plot seems, Maud pasted in one of her scrapbooks a story about a man like Dick Moore who was cured by surgery.
24. Lily Reid was the first maid after Maud’s cousin, Stella Campbell; the widowed Lily came in December 1912 and stayed until she left to remarry (Rob Shier) at the end of December 1915. Edith Meyers from Zephyr replaced her on January 1916 and stayed until December 1917,
and later became Mrs. Lyons. Then Lily Meyers, Edith’s sister, replaced her. This second Lily would stay until 1925, a very long time, causing enormous grief to Ewan and Maud with her “tattling” and “perverting” before she left. She eventually became Mrs. Will Cook, and lived into her nineties. She was replaced by Elsie Bushby in 1925; Elsie left in June 1926, and later became Mrs. Cliff Davidson.
25. Goldwin Lapp, the twenty-one-year-old son of the ex-reeve of Scott Township and a pharmacy student in Toronto, was killed January 18, 1917; Robert Brooks, one of the most progressive young farmers in the area and in Colonel Sharpe’s battalion, was killed in action on August 8, 1918; Morley R. Shier, age twenty-three, died September 6, 1918, two months and five days before the war ended. Although approximately twenty young men from the area died, she apparently chose these three especially because she knew them and their parents well, and was particularly fond of them.
26. Accounts of Sam Sharpe’s death are found in Maud’s Red Scrapbook #2, circa p. 60. He had suffered a nervous breakdown before the war, but recovered.
27. Sunset Canada, by Archie Bell, about British Columbia, published by Page (1918).
28. For instance, on November 16, 1909, Prince Edward Island’s Daily Patriot carried a huge front-page article on “The Unpardonable Sin.” A prominent divine, a Dr. Elliott, lectured on this sin in Charlottetown. He explained it as “Blasphemy Against the Holy Ghost and Continuing Rejection of [the] Holy Spirit.” If Ewan did not actually hear the sermon, he most certainly would have read about it: this was directly after he resigned from his last Prince Edward Island parish when he was preparing to move to Ontario. In the middle of the nineteenth century, Nathaniel Hawthorne had built a story, “Ethan Brand” (1850), on the concept of the “unpardonable sin.” In this story he describes the kind of madness that results when a “fixed idea” overtakes a person, something that often happens in a clinical depression.
29. The 113 parishioners in Leaskdale paid him $720 a year, for a total of $1,080. The year 1919 was one of the few times that Ewan’s salary and Maud’s royalties would be roughly the same: because of the Page lawsuit, she made only $1,006 in royalties. However, in 1918, she had received $45,725 in payments and royalties; in 1920, $21,685. According to the Canadian census of 1921, a woman could expect to earn around $300 a year from gainful employment. By 1921, Maud had made about $97,552.56 from her writing, at mid-career. Over their lifetimes, Ewan’s income comprised approximately 5 percent of their total family income.
30. It is worth noting that none of the maids thought was anything seriously mentally wrong with Ewan when they were interviewed prior to the publication of Maud’s journals. Stuart insisted that he and Chester did not notice that there was anything amiss with their father when they were younger. As a young boy, Chester used to proudly tell people he was like his father and Stuart was like his mother. What people saw of Ewan was clearly not nearly as dramatic as what Maud wrote in her journals—which indicates either that she was more astutely observant or that she heightened these descriptions for narrative effect.
31. Although the 1911 census showed that there were now 7 divorced men and 8 divorced women on the Island, the comparable Ontario figures were 189 divorced men and 227 women.
32. Maud was too much the Victorian lady to record in her journals the details of the “immorality” and the “shocking stories,” but much information about Page came to me from the late Roger W. Straus, who bought the Page firm in 1957, from his chief financial officer, Robert Wohlforth, and from Page’s literary executor and cousin, Peter Coues.
33. He would sell silent-film rights to both Anne of Green Gables and Pollyanna, starring Mary Miles Minter in Anne and Mary Pickford in Pollyanna. See Montgomery’s clipping book, pp. 131–150. See also her scrapbooks.
34. Robert Wohlforth, who negotiated the purchase ($75,000 in 1957) for both the business and the five-storey house at 53 Beacon Street, said that the Page firm was in dreadful disarray by Page’s death in 1956. No one wanted it, but Roger W. Straus was interested so they could expand their list with some titles of best-selling books, especially some for young readers, and sell foreign rights to subsidize their firm’s growth. They regarded the L. M. Montgomery titles as the firm’s greatest asset, with secondary interests in the Eleanor H. Porter titles (including Pollyanna, 1913) and two series (“Famous Leaders in Industry” and “Famous American Athletes of Today”).
35. Peter Coues’s father was a distinguished medical doctor, and his grandfather had been Surgeon-General of the United States Army. Peter grew up with status, but with far less money, and he said that he learned much about the business world from his much older cousin, L. C. Page, during their regular weekly dinners. Peter’s wife, Milly, was not invited: it was a man’s dinner and a man’s world, and they talked business. Dinner was always at 6:30, not a minute before or after. “We had a wonderful time,” recalled Mr. Coues. “He was very formal in many ways: we’d have one and one-quarter martinis in a fifteen minute period, then dinner served by an attractive maid, and we would sit at the dinner table until ten, enjoying delicious wines.” When they left the room, Page would laugh and turn off the lights, saying “I’m a thrifty man.” In the library, Page would reach behind the books for a bottle, saying “It’s going to be very cold tonight.” They would talk until very late.
36. When Mr. Wohlforth bought the L. C. Page business for Roger Straus, he noted that the first two floors housed the business, but the top three floors, set up for business and social entertainment, also held living quarters for dinner parties and more intimate sleeping situations. They were a convenient location to discuss business matters privately with bright and attractive young female employees. Page could sleep over if he did not want to return home. Mr. Wohlforth recalled the wife of a retired Boston attorney telling of her brief stint of working for Mr. Page. She had just graduated from an Ivy League university and was very flattered when Page hired her to bring some “new blood” into the firm. One day he told her that he needed another person at a dinner party upstairs that night, and asked her to round out the table. After a sumptuous dinner, with expensive wines and brilliant conversation, Page detained her when the others were leaving, and then tried to seduce her. Finally, Page, a former track letterman and still very fit, chased her around a large desk. She made a grab for her coat and escaped. Later she learned that her experience was not that unusual for those invited to his private chambers. Women succumbing to his charm were well rewarded. He might cheat his authors, but he was very generous with his favourite women. His cousin said he always had “very stylish” young women working in his home and apartments as maids, and he referred to them as “my wenches.”
37. His contract with Maud specifies that he is registering the copyright in the name of “L.C. Page & Company (Inc.).” The contract says that he will pay her 10 percent on the wholesale price of each hard copy he sells (over and above the first 1,000 copies sold), and 4 percent royalty on any paper-covered or cheap hard-copy reprints. If dramatic rights are sold, he will share the fee with her half and half. If the book goes out of print for lack of sales, he will return the copyright to her.
38. Peter Coues said that L. C. Page had no children, nor are any mentioned in his will, so the paternity of the child “Mildred” is unclear. Maud observed no children when she was there, so the child’s paternity could have been a contentious point in the divorce.
39. “If you hear a lurid tale about L. C. Page,” Roger Straus quipped in 1991, “I’d say there’s at least an 80 percent chance it is true.” In the late 1980s, Page’s younger cousin, Peter Coues, a retired investment banker in Boston, said sadly and gently, with a sigh, “He was good to me and my wife, but I have heard a lot of other tales about him, and I expect most are true.”
40. See her clipping book, pp. 135–150.
41. The spelling of Page’s name is hard to read here, but it looks more like “Louis” than “Lewis.” He changed the spelling because he thought “Louis”
was more elegant, and his final will and testament in 1956 notes that his name may appear: L. C. Page, Lewis C. Page, or Louis C. Page. The letter to Carman is in the Queen’s University Archives.
42. Wanamaker’s is credited with being the first modern department store in the United States. It advertised heavily and offered refunds if customers were dissatisfied—all new business tactics. It also sold a range of merchandise, including books, and lasted as one of the most successful department store enterprises in the United States for over a century. John Wanamaker was a respected philanthropist who also became postmaster-general of the United States.
43. Later he would become the town solicitor for the village of Uxbridge. In 1932, ten years later, Greig’s sister, Florrie Greig Gould, would become the mother of Canada’s famous pianist, Glenn Gould.
44. A very learned man, Riddell established in 1916 his own archival memorial in the Law Society of Canada at Osgoode Hall, calling it the “Riddell Canadian Library.” Beginning with an initial donation of 1,665 volumes, many very rare or priceless, it grew to 9,000 volumes by the time of his death. Of his own personal authorship, Riddell’s library held some 14 monographs, 300 book reviews, and 1,258 journal articles (against Montgomery’s own lifetime production of 22 books, more than 500 poems, 500 short stories, and approximately 5,000 journal pages). His library held many books by Canadian writers, but he had none of Montgomery’s. Riddell had all the volumes of his own writing bound and consecutively numbered in gold.
45. Born in 1852, he lived to be ninety-three, sitting on the Ontario Supreme Court bench until his death in 1945.
46. See Hilary Bates Neary, “William Renwick Riddell: Judge, Ontario Publicist and Man of Letters,” A Law Society of Upper Canada Gazette, Vol. XI, 3 (Sept. 1977), p. 172.
47. Smith was admitted to the Royal Astronomy Society of London on September 10, 1919, three days before he visited the Macdonalds on September 13, and he did not keep up his membership.
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