Maud Montgomery knew, even as a young girl, that no path other than becoming a writer could satisfy her desire to express what her imagination generated. While the forms of that work would not be clear for another decade, it became evident early on that her efforts would be intimately tied to the landscape in which she lived. She began keeping journals when she was eight (eventually destroying the earliest ones) and later copied and revised those she kept from age fourteen on, knowing that, with her increasing fame, even the details of her youth would be sought out by the public someday. The stakes thus became higher than simply using her journal to record and make meaning of events around her. She used her entries to cultivate a way of being in the world, enacting what she valued about the crafting of good literature—the honing of precise, original writing and of the narrative techniques involved in telling a good story. She had learned the importance of a well-told tale or recitation early in her childhood, having come from a family that prided itself on its literary tastes, its level of education, and its many gifted storytellers; she even had a great uncle (Cousin Jimmie Macneill), who composed and recited hundreds of his own poems, none of which he ever wrote down.
A bookshelf at Green Gables, containing early primers (including Latin Prose Composition) and a fan that might have been needed on a warm day at church or at a concert.
She also immersed herself in the poetry available to her as a child—“Longfellow, Tennyson, Whittier, Scott, Byron, Milton, Burns,” she writes in The Alpine Path—and could recite many of their poems from memory; they, in turn, helped shaped the beauty of her own writing and its lyrical evocation of the natural world. “Poetry pored over in childhood,” she writes, “becomes part of one’s nature more thoroughly than that which if first read in mature years can ever do. Its music was woven into my growing soul and has echoed through it, consciously and subconsciously, ever since.”
Likewise, many of her characters are notable for their interest in literature and their ability to craft good stories—Anne Shirley tended to drive Marilla to distraction with her dramatic recounting of events real and imagined (unlike Matthew, who loved a good Anne story), and she even starts a story club so she and her friends can cultivate their fiction-writing skills. The protagonist of The Story Girl (whom Montgomery modeled on herself) is the central force of the novel through her eclectic and seemingly endless store of tales, and Captain Jim, of Anne’s House of Dreams, enlivens every gathering he attends with his extraordinary renderings of past experiences.
However, it’s in Emily of New Moon that Montgomery reveals how the need to write and write well—particularly about the natural world—can define a life. For Emily, the character with whom Montgomery most identified, writing and “the flash” were intimately connected. “The flash,” which “couldn’t be described,” characterized a moment when Emily found herself
Very, very near to a world of wonderful beauty. Between it and herself hung only a thin curtain; she could never draw the curtain aside—but sometimes, just for a moment, a wind fluttered it and then it was as if she caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—and heard a note of unearthly music.
That brief glimpse of the beyond propelled her to write. In one passage, she sees a mesmerizing scene, “the evening . . . bathed in a wonderful silence—and there was a sudden rift in the curdled clouds westward, and a lovely, pale, pinky-green lake of sky with a new moon in it,” and she knows it would “hurt her with its beauty until she wrote it down.”
Of course, for this sensitive, high-strung girl, writing is also a way to get revenge on her mean-spirited relatives and take the sting out of their insults. But more often the focus for Emily is to capture on paper that essence of beauty. To do it justice, the word choices had to be exactly right, along with the rhythm of each sentence. Even when she didn’t have paper and pen, she soon found she could write in her head, which might make her late for a meal and her Aunt Elizabeth cross, but if she had found just the right sentence, little else seemed to matter.
Maud Montgomery believed Emily of New Moon (1923) to be “the best book I have ever written.” She had made the same declaration after finishing The Story Girl in 1911 (“my own favourite among my books,” she wrote in The Alpine Path, “the one that gave me the greatest pleasure to write, the one whose characters and landscape seem to me most real”), and again after Anne’s House of Dreams (1917). But five years later, Emily takes precedence: “I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it, and I hated to pen the last line and write finis.” This connection with Emily, and her ability to catch a glimpse of ideal beauty on the other side of a curtain, appears first in Montgomery’s journal in 1905. “It has always seemed to me, ever since I can remember, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty.” A thin veil separates her from it, just as the curtain does in the novel, but when the wind causes it to flutter, there’s a glimpse of what lies beyond, and “those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.”
To a child with a lively imagination, any beautiful, wild thing could become much more—a flower to be woven into a garland, a place where fairies had gathered at night, a sight so stunning that she would have to labor to find the right words to describe it.
She repeats this again, modified only slightly, in The Alpine Path, suggesting that twelve years after the 1905 journal entry, she was still acutely aware of the fact that she could approximate beauty in her life and her work, having first found its form in the Prince Edward Island landscapes—“the most beautiful place in [North] America, I believe”—but that the ideal lay just beyond, creating the kind of difficult and necessary goal that any serious artist strives to attain.
I cannot remember the time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be an author.
—THE ALPINE PATH
Despite its many pleasures, writing was also a tough pursuit, a “long, monotonous struggle,” writes Montgomery in The Alpine Path, “a hard and steep path.” Yet she chose to continue along it—perhaps channeling the advice of Anne Shirley’s beloved teacher, Miss Stacy, that “I could learn to write well,” as Anne relates it to Marilla, “if I only trained myself to be my own severest critic.” For Montgomery that meant submitting work for publication, beginning when she was still in her teens. In those early years, rejections arrived far more often than acceptances, and even when a piece was published (the earliest appeared in print when she was sixteen and still living with her father in Saskatchewan), a check rarely followed. The first real money didn’t arrive until 1895, when she was taking courses at Dalhousie College in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and a total of three checks appeared in one week: $5 for a letter written in verse; $12 for a poem; and $5 for a story, which sent her immediately into town to buy “five volumes of poetry . . . something I could keep for ever in memory of having ‘arrived.’”
Heartened by this sense of arrival, she picked up her pace of writing and submitting, and the next several years brought increasing success, with a growing list of publications, mostly for the Sunday school and children’s/young adult market. As she writes in The Alpine Path:
I have grubbed away industriously all this summer, and ground out stories and verses on days so hot that I feared my very marrow would melt and my gray matter be hopelessly sizzled up. But oh, I love my work! I love spinning stories, and I love to sit by the window of my room and shape some ‘airy fairy’ fancy into verse.
Though Maud Montgomery couldn’t see the beach from the room where she worked in Cavendish, she knew by heart the way the sea wore away the red cliffs.
Not only did her early years ground her in the landscape and literature that she would rely on for the rest of her life, they also helped her establish a sense of discipline, a dogged determination to generate work for publication, despite circumstances over which she often had little control. Such fortitude was especially necessary during the year she spent teaching in Belmont. She was boarding with a family in a house that was always cold, working long hours to meet the needs of her students, and struggling to keep herself healthy (“I seem to have constant colds—the result of doing two teachers’ work all winter and being half frozen most of the time”). She held fast to a daily schedule, waking early to write before the fires were stoked, the family members had risen, and the school had to be opened. “I am sitting here half frozen,” she notes in her journal, “for another cold snap is on and the mercury is down to 20 degrees below zero [C; minus 4 degrees F]. I have just finished my hour’s writing at my new story and my fingers are so cold and cramped I can hardly hold the pen.”
A bedroom at Silver Bush. “From my earliest recollection,” Montgomery wrote in her journal on March 2, 1901, “a visit to Silver Bush was the greatest treat in the world.”
She would cite this experience again in The Alpine Path as a way to remind people who admired her literary gifts that serious writing required an equally serious practice. “I am inclined to wonder, with some inward amusement, how much they would have envied me on those dark, cold, winter mornings of my apprenticeship.” For five months, she writes, “I got up at six o’clock and dressed by lamplight . . . I would put on a heavy coat and sit on my feet to keep them from freezing.” And yet how she could transcend the frigid setting. “Sometimes it would be a poem in which I could carol blithely of blue skies and rippling brooks and flowery meads! Then I would thaw out my hands, eat breakfast and go to school.”
References to this steady practice—the necessary daily ritual, the required focus, the wall she had to erect, at least temporarily, between herself and her immediate surroundings—appears often in her journals. “I have been writing as steadily as possible under rather uninspiring conditions,” she writes in 1898, having moved back to Cavendish to care for her grandmother after her grandfather’s death.
How I love my work. I seem to grow more and more wrapped up in it as the days pass and other hopes and interests fail me. Nearly everything I think or do or say is subordinated to a desire to improve in my work. I study people and events for that, I think and speculate and read for that.
This dedication to writing was further honed in 1901 after a friend recommended her for a temporary job with a newspaper in Halifax, working as a copyeditor for the Daily Echo. The hum of office activity, the need to meet immediate deadlines, and the push to write about topics she wouldn’t ordinarily have pursued, helped fine-tune her practice, though it seemed to surprise her when she discovered that she could block out all the newsroom noise and chaos and make time for her own work during lulls in the demands on her. The net result was that she earned more money from her own writing during this period than she did as an employee of the Daily Echo.
But seven months later she was back in Cavendish, again caring for her grandmother and confronting her prospects for the years ahead. In his will, her grandfather had bequeathed his property to his son but left no provision for the lifetime tenancy of his wife, and Uncle John F. Macneill was impatient to take possession, as his son, Preston, wanted to marry and needed a house. The resulting tensions made everyone miserable, Maud’s grandmother, especially, who was stung by the treatment and insisted that she didn’t want to be farmed out to another relative. Fortunately, Maud’s very presence made ousting her grandmother unwarranted, while Maud’s willingness to provide the necessary care and companionship made her uncle’s demands seem even more cruel; the resulting bitterness between the four of them lasted the rest of their lives.
In a journal entry dated May 24, 1908, Montgomery wrote: “I am so much better now. Perhaps it is the tonic I’ve been taking . . . But I believe it is rather my escape from the bondage of cold and wet and gloom to . . . my darling lanes and woods and fields.”
However, the future had become clearer: Maud knew that she would have to find her own living arrangement as soon as her grandmother died and that it was by her pen alone that she would achieve any financial security. At the time, many things were going well for her; she had a garden, she was making new friends, she was continuing to find success with stories and poems, and she had just met Ewan Macdonald, the new Presbyterian minister in Cavendish. Too, she had the idea for a novel about a girl orphan, who was sent to a couple wanting a boy, which she quietly kept to herself, along with the drive to see it to completion. Though she knew she had the talent to create such a book, nothing quite prepared her for the instant success of Anne of Green Gables.
Perhaps equally surprising was the effect that ongoing emotional turmoil wreaked on her, a sharp contrast to the optimistic personae that she and her sturdy girl characters—Anne Shirley, the Story Girl, Emily of New Moon, Pat of Silver Bush—presented to the world. It’s in her journals that Montgomery reveals her struggles with despair, including a frightening period of “nervous prostration” that she suffered in 1910, the first of many debilitating episodes that would make daily life almost unbearable. “‘That which I feared’ has come upon me,” she wrote, “an utter breakdown of body, soul, and spirit.”
She had been cycling in and out of depression throughout the previous two years, feeling trapped by her grandmother’s demands and seemingly petty rules for the house (no guests, no burning of extra lamps at night, no heating of the upstairs room during the winter). Her journal entries suggest that only an occasional walk outside, ideally along Lover’s Lane, or the sight of bulbs in bloom on the sill—“a great comfort and sweetness to me”—could provide an antidote to the otherwise bleak winter months. As she wrote in December 1909:
This evening, as I paced the floor in the twilight, listening to poor grandmother groaning with rheumatism, I smiled rather grimly as I contrasted my lot with what the world doubtless supposes it to be. I am a famous woman; I have written two very successful books. I have made a good bit of money. Yet, partly owing to Uncle John’s behavior, partly to grandmother’s immovable prejudices I can do nothing with my money to make life easier and more cheerful for grandmother and myself. And there is so much I might do if I could—fix up this old home comfortably, furnish it conveniently, keep a servant, travel a little, entertain my friends. But as it is I am as helpless as a chained prisoner.
It was an experience that would repeat itself for the rest of her life. Ironically, the patient Ewan Macdonald, who had agreed to postpone their marriage until after her grandmother died, was also prone to mental illness, which first showed up in their early courtship and became so severe later in life that he would require hospitalization. Often she worried as much about his emotional health as she did the effects of her own periods of despair.
In the years between such bouts, though, much about her life was rich and fulfilling, with all the rewards and challenges that came with being the mother of two children, the wife of a minister with an engaged congregation, and a world-famous author with all the professional and social obligations that accompanied such status. Throughout these years, her literary output remained prolific due in part to what her biographer, Mary Henley Rubio, describes as her “extraordinary ability to compartmentalize her life” and her choice to focus on things that nourished her. As Rubio writes:
Maud took enormous pleasure in small things: seeing trilliums in the spring woods, growing flowers and vegetables in her summer garden, preparing desserts for church socials, telling a story and making everyone laugh, looking at farmers harvesting crops, watching a winter sunset throw purple and mauve shadows over the snow, skimming over the rolling hills in a sleigh pulled by “Queen” (the Macdonalds’ black mare), reading inside while a storm howled outside . . . It was Maud’s basic nature to see the world as a luminous place, and she wrote glorious passages about it in her diary.
In addition to being a spiritual center of a community and the place to mark births, deaths, and marriages, churches also provided much social and cultural life.
Several denominations can be found in the larger communities; here, a Catholic church in Summerfield, Prince Edward Island.
By 1914, she had to deal with another of the challenges on the writer’s “hard and steep path,” when she learned that L. C. Page, the Boston-based publisher who had first taken a chance on the author from Prince Edward Island, was selling reprint rights to her work without her permission and systematically cheating her on royalties. An increasingly bitter correspondence followed, as she tried to free herself from his punitive contracts and switch to a Canadian house, and he refused to negotiate or admit he owed her any payments; she eventually brought suit against him in 1918. Though she won the case and a settlement of $17,880, the victory was bittersweet, as, unbeknownst to her, he had sold the movie rights to Anne of Green Gables for $40,000. She was not to receive a penny from the 1919 silent film, nor from a second movie made in 1934.
In 1920, after his unauthorized publication of Further Chronicles of Avonlea, she was forced to sue him again, a costly litigation that dragged on for four years and necessitated several trips to Boston for long days in court. (She would ultimately have to file five separate lawsuits against him.) The experience exhausted her, dulling much of the shine from having secured a book publisher at age thirty-two, when she was the assistant postmistress of a tiny island town, living under her grandmother’s roof.
Ultimately, the joy and respite she found in writing, whether crafting lengthy journal entries or plotting out a new novel, weren’t enough to keep her from the approach of another bout of depression. Ewan’s mental illness, the pending horror of another world war, and the challenges and disappointments associated with her older son, Chester, had taken too great a toll. In a letter written in 1941, urging a nephew not to enlist (a copy of which is framed on the wall at Silver Bush), she lists some of the other worries she bears:
Chester’s wife has left him and gone home to her father . . . He has broken our hearts this past 10 years . . . My heart is broken and it is that has broken me. I have to have a nurse and can’t afford it. I am not and never [was] the rich woman I was supposed to be . . . I can hardly write—my nerves are so terrible . . . I think my mind is going. Rest from worry is what I need and I cannot get that anywhere. I am alone.
Another document, found next to her body after she overdosed on drugs the following spring, was numbered so as to appear as the last page of her journal.
I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare to think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best in spite of many mistakes.
In the end, Maud Montgomery was unable to return to the sense of fulfillment described in the final sentences of The Alpine Path: “It was not an easy ascent, but even in the struggle at its hardest there was a delight and a zest known only to those who aspire to the heights.” Lines from Keats had inspired her—“He ne’er is crowned / With immortality, who fears to follow / Where airy voices lead”—to which she wholeheartedly agreed.
True, most true! We must follow our “airy voices,” follow them through bitter suffering and discouragement and darkness, through doubt and disbelief, through valleys of humiliation and over delectable hills where sweet things would lure us from our quest, ever and always must we follow, if we would reach the “far-off divine event” and look out thence to the aerial spires of our City of Fulfilment.
Until her journals were published, few knew of Montgomery’s struggles to reconcile her inner despair with the optimism she sought to project to the people around her. As Mary Henley Rubio writes, to the outside world Montgomery was “a successful author, a dynamo in her community, a powerful speaker in public, a performer for charitable causes, a woman whose intellectual range made her a fascinating conversationalist in social gatherings, and a warm and likeable human being with a very fine sense of humor.” To readers of her novels, she was the creator of resourceful, fiercely imaginative characters, who were well equipped to deal with life’s challenges, and knew how to tap the life force in the natural world around them when the going got tough.
The cemetery in Cavendish, where visitors enter under a tall archway bearing the inscription “Resting Place of L. M. Montgomery.”
We can only wonder whether her health would have improved had she found a way to return to the landscapes of Prince Edward Island, to the delectable hills and airy spires she immortalized in Anne of Green Gables. As her writings insist, those are the places that gave her and her characters their strength. Even in winter, often the grimmest of seasons, the natural world of the island had supplied her with moments of profound peace, which she does not write about finding anywhere else. “I feel a wonderful lightness of spirit,” she writes, when outside on a moonlit winter night, “and a soul-stirring joy in mere existence . . . a joy that seems to spring fountain-like from the very deeps of my being and to be independent of all earthy things.”
Such moments come rarely . . . but when they do come they are inexpressibly marvelous and beautiful . . . as if the finite were for a second infinity . . . as if humanity were for a space uplifted into divinity. Only for a moment, ‘tis true . . . yet such a moment is worth a cycle of common years untouched by the glory and the dream.
The ellipses, which appear in the original, seem to mark those singular times when, moved by the exquisite scene in the landscape that surrounds her, she has caught a glimpse of the curtain between her and ideal beauty. She pauses the sentence and waits—the wind blows, the curtain flutters, the vision comes into focus again—and on she goes, putting more words on the page, finding new ways to bridge the worlds of nature and spirit, moving ever closer to inhabiting the place where humanity is at last “uplifted into divinity.”
