As her aging grandmother returned to Cavendish alone, twenty-year-old Maud spent a merry last evening in Charlottetown, entertaining three young men: Lou Dystant, from Bideford; Norman Campbell, brother of her former roommate, Mary; and John (Jack) Sutherland, cousin and sometime escort from college days. The next morning Maud took the boat for her new adventure at the university. Her journal entry for this year begins in big, bold caps: “HALIFAX SEPT. 17, 1895.”
Dalhousie University was located in a beautiful old city, founded in 1749. Halifax, Nova Scotia, boasted one of the largest harbours in the world, with both commercial and cultural connections to the British Isles, Europe, the West Indies and the United States. Stately buildings recalled its 150-year history, and its frequent fogs gave it the otherworldly mystery that had charmed Maud in Cavendish.
Dalhousie, modelled on the University of Edinburgh, was a progressive school that advertised itself with pictures captioned, “Dalhousie College, Halifax, The Doors of Which Are Wide Open to Women.” The debate over women and higher education continued to rage in the United States and Canada, but, in spite of public prejudice, Dalhousie was taking a firm stand. The Maritimes in general had high female literacy: in the 1891 census, Prince Edward Island had a 91 percent literacy rate for young women under nineteen, with Nova Scotia and New Brunswick at 90 and 85 percent respectively.44
Some young women went to college to prepare themselves to become cultured wives of successful men. Maud’s friend Edith England of Bideford had enrolled at Sackville College (later Mount Allison University) to study music and painting. Maud wrote condescendingly about Edith: “She has been a petted only child, surrounded by luxury all her life” (September 25, 1895). Edith, with no real aspirations, was being given an education, with no effort to earn it; Maud had worked exceedingly hard for every inch of advancement. Her goals were far more than marriage: she wanted to write “a woman’s humble name” in the halls of fame.
Maud moved into the dormitory of Halifax Ladies’ College, which offered young women a solid training course in secretarial and domestic arts. There the Ladies’ College “girls” and the Dalhousie women students were well chaperoned by imposing women who brooked no nonsense. Maud wrote about the principal: “Nature must have meant Miss Ker for a man and got the labels mixed … She is guiltless of corsets and her dress is in strict conformity with the rules of hygiene and ugliness. Her iron-gray hair is always worn in a lopsided coronet and she possesses a decided moustache. She is a ‘Girton’ product and no doubt very clever. But she has not one ounce of charm or magnetism” (December 24, 1895).45 Another matron, Miss Claxton, Maud describes as “a fussy, nervous little old maid, with a hooked nose, an inquisitive expression and a thin rattling little laugh that sets my nerves on edge.”
Young women like Maud saw few appealing female models in the world of educated women. The examples of Miss Ker and Miss Claxton seemed to support the widely held scientific belief that studying made women either “mannish” or pathetic old maids. Still, Maud was not dissuaded from her desire for education.
Ten days after arriving in Halifax, Maud took a biography of George Eliot (Mary Ann Evans) out of the library. Two biographies of Eliot had come out in the previous decade: Mathilde Blind’s in 1883 and J. W. Cross’s in 1885. The first was a biography by a leading British feminist writer, and had been reprinted in numerous editions. Many of the words, phrases, and patterns in the Mathilde Blind book appear later in Maud’s journals. Blind describes qualities in Eliot that Maud later finds in herself.
Blind’s biography begins with an introduction that gives straightforward advice to women authors, presumably inexperienced young ones. Blind quotes George Eliot as saying that the women of France have had an unusually vital influence on the development of literature: “For in France alone the mind of woman has passed, like an electric current, through the language, making crisp and definite what is elsewhere heavy and blurred.” Frenchwomen had “the courage of their sex”:
They thought and felt as women, and when they wrote, their books became the fullest expression of their womanhood. By being true to themselves, by only seeking inspiration from their own life-experiences, instead of servilely copying that of men, their letters and memoirs, their novels and pictures, have a distinct, nay unique, value for the student of art and literature. Englishwomen, on the other hand, have not allowed free play to the peculiarly feminine element, preferring to mould their intellectual products on the masculine pattern, creating absurd exaggeration of the masculine style, like the swaggering gait of a bad actress in male attire.46
Blind uses the term “The Alpine Path” to describe the difficult course that women writers must follow if they are to achieve, like George Eliot, their highest potential. Years later “L. M. Montgomery” would use the phrase as title for an autobiographical essay, attributing the term “The Alpine Path” to a poem entitled “The Fringed Gentian,” which she found in Godey’s Ladies’ Book, pasted in her scrapbook, and later copied into her journals on several occasions (October 21, 1916; January 5, 1917; November 22, 1926). The poem concludes:
Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep
How I may upward climb
The Alpine Path, so hard, so steep
That leads to heights sublime,
How I may reach the far-off goal
Of true and honoured fame
And write upon its shining scroll
A woman’s humble name.
Blind’s 1883 biography may have been the source for the phrase “The Alpine Path,” both for Maud and the poem’s author. The metaphor of a difficult journey in the quest for success recurs in her writing; for example, “Emily of New Moon” also talks about “the alpine path.”
For more formal education, Maud enrolled in Latin, French, German, Roman History, and both first- and second-year English at Dalhousie, and for Shorthand at the Halifax Ladies’ College. Of her professors, Dr. Archibald MacMechan was the most influential. An encouraging and concerned teacher, he had been trained at the University of Toronto and at Johns Hopkins University. He was a scholar with wide abilities: he published poetry, essays, scholarly editions, and critical studies. He was a pioneer in the field of Canadian Literature, and his Head-Waters of Canadian Literature (1924) remains an important milestone in the development of Canadian criticism. He argued that Canada should move beyond the colonial mould and develop its own “native literature.”
He recognized Maud’s exceptional talent, and his praise encouraged her immensely. He wrote that her first writing assignment on the prescribed subject “My Autobiography” was “particularly good and interesting.” Her second essay, titled “My Earliest Recollection,” recalled the memory of her mother lying in her coffin. Maud knew that this essay was first-rate, and she incorporated it into her journals in April 1898. MacMechan’s next assignment took her to the Halifax Public Gardens to prepare a descriptive landscape piece: rendering nature was already Maud’s forte, given her wide reading of eighteenth- and nineteenth-century landscape word-painting. In January, at the end of the semester, she got a “first” in English. Later, in 1924, after his pupil was world-famous, MacMechan praised her writing in his Head-Waters of Canadian Literature as a good example of Canadian “regionalism.”
Maud looked forward to Christmas and the return to Cavendish, with her tales of university life. Her journal records sore disappointment: “My fare would not cost any more than my board here but grandma wrote that she thought I had better not go home for fear the roads might be bad for getting to the station etc.” Maud added, “I know what that means. Grandfather doesn’t want to be bothered meeting me or taking me back” (December 23, 1895). She was perhaps petulant: her seventy-five-year-old grandfather might have had legitimate worries about travel by horse and sleigh in the dead of winter, when huge drifts could obscure the roads, even if he only had to drive to the nearest railroad station.
Maud’s sketches of Miss Ker and Miss Claxton were written during this holiday, and her account of a small confrontation with Miss Claxton is vintage Montgomery, dramatizing her ability to deliver arch or sarcastic comments with impeccable and saccharine politeness:
I went into the teachers’ parlour and seeing Miss Whiteside and Miss Tilsley there alone, as I supposed, I said, “Isn’t this a lovely morning, girls?” Up popped Miss Claxton from a low chair where she had been squatted unseen. “You should not call us girls,” she piped frigidly. “It is not respectful.” “Oh, I beg your pardon, Miss Claxton,” I said politely. “I did not see you there. Of course I would never refer to you as a girl.” Miss Claxton liked it very little, for she does not relish an allusion to her age anymore than ordinary people, but she had to take it, for my apology was perfectly courteous in tone and matter and she had no excuse for resenting anything in it. (December 24, 1895)
Christmas, which Maud had expected to be very dull, was a “rather pleasant one” after all—pleasant for Maud, who was practising her writing.
Everything at Dalhousie excited her: lectures, repartee, operatic productions, walks, lively novels, academic competitions (in which she excelled). It all brought a surge of physical and mental activity. She pasted into her scrapbook a picture of a handsome, craggy stag, expressing sexual energy in a subtle way. She giggled with the girls, flirted with the boys, attended many parties, prepared “papers” for club meetings, “buckled to” her studies with “all due grit,” and gave music lessons to make money. And, of course, she wrote.
But this manic upswing began to manifest itself in sleeplessness, a problem that would recur throughout her life. When Maud awoke, unable to sleep, she wrote. The harvest from her feverish brain was astonishing. She sent poems and stories away to magazines and entered whatever local contests she could find.
February and March 1896 brought success: three pieces were accepted, earning her a total of twenty-two dollars (for comparison, in 1889–90, Dalhousie had charged students six dollars tuition for each course they took in a year). First was a five-dollar prize for best entry in a contest sponsored by the Halifax Evening Mail: a response to the question “Which has the more patience under the ordinary cares and trials of life—man or woman?” She made two submissions to the contest. Both entries were about gender, but from different angles. The first is a succinct parable about a Guardian Angel (male) who wheedles a gift for women from the Benign Giver (also male): the gift is not justice, but instead a “long-suffering, all-forgiving divine patience” to deal with men. Serious, but with a gently sarcastic undertone, this witty allegory did not answer the contest’s question. Maud submitted another entry under the name “Belinda Bluegrass”: a witty, lighthearted poem on male and female varieties of patience. It makes the same point as her first entry: women are socialized to be patient with men. The “Belinda Bluegrass” poem won first prize and the parable won honourable mention for literary merit.
In her journal, Maud writes that she had “small interest” in the contest until a friend prodded her to enter—the standard female disclaimer of the era, implying that a “proper” woman is so modest that she would move into the public domain only after someone else’s urging. But the disclaimer is hardly convincing, given that she woke up in the night with the second poem almost formulated in her brain—female modesty notwithstanding, the contest was clearly very much on her mind, and she wanted to win.
Five days later, Golden Days, a magazine from Philadelphia, sent her five dollars for a short story called “Our Charivari.” In another three weeks, another well-known magazine, The Youth’s Companion, accepted her poem “The Fisher Lassies”—for twelve dollars! A year’s tuition at the Prince of Wales College had been seven dollars in 1893, and she had made twenty-two dollars from her writing in one month in 1896. Flush with cash and ambition, she bought elegant bound copies of Tennyson, Longfellow, Whittier, and Byron, as a self-reward for having arrived. She particularly enjoyed Whittier and Longfellow, committing many of their poems to memory, and underlining the books heavily, particularly the poems about nature.47
She loved seeing her name in print. Continued success brought another three-dollar cheque in April from Golden Days for her poem “Apple Picking Time.” She must have chuckled over the story of her success reaching the ears of the “grim cats” in Halifax Ladies’ College, her arrogant cousin Murray Macneill, who was also at Dalhousie, and eventually all of the village of Cavendish. Pique and pride must have squeezed her grandfather in equal measure. There was no more eloquent statement to a parsimonious Scotsman than that made by money.
Maud was ready to take on wider challenges. Among her many pieces for the Dalhousie college paper was a remarkably mature article entitled “A Girl’s Place at Dalhousie College.”48 This was picked up by the Halifax Herald for a special supplement on Dalhousie. It sets forth all the traditional arguments about why women should not be educated, and refutes them. After giving examples of women’s success at Dalhousie and elsewhere, she argues that the real worth of an education is not to prepare a woman for a specialized career, but to broaden her mind and increase her powers of observation.
The year at Dalhousie was invaluable in building her confidence: was she (as the Charlottetown Examiner had called her) a “young George Eliot”? The comparison was heady. By April 1896, when she finished her college year, having published in real, paying magazines and having placed first in her class in English, she knew the year had been worth the effort.
There are interesting points of comparison between Maud’s career and that of her first cousin, Murray Macneill, son of her mother’s brother, Leander. Born in January 1877, Murray was two years younger, but he would be graduating from Dalhousie with his B.A. that spring; unlike Maud, he had lost no time having to work to finance his education. A brilliant polymath, he had started studying at Dalhousie in fall 1892, at age fifteen, and completed the course with little effort. Maud reflected bitterly that Murray would go on for graduate training while she would have to go back to exhausting country school teaching after her single year of freedom.
Everyone on campus knew Murray. Maud was resentful that he ignored her, his poor country cousin. In her scrapbook Maud pasted a newspaper clipping: “Murray McNeill, son of the Rev. L. C. McNeill, Saint John, is one of our best students. He toiled not, neither did he spin, but First Classes always came his way.” The Convocation Roster for 1896 shows that twenty-eight students received B.A.s (five of them women), and Murray, nineteen years old, won the top graduation prize. At no place in her journals does Maud note that Murray won the William Young Gold Medal when he graduated from Dalhousie, in 1896. The second-best award was the Avery Prize, and it went to another student.
Years later, when Maud wrote Anne of Green Gables, she calls the most prestigious prize “the Avery Scholarship,” immortalizing the name of Dalhousie’s Avery Prize, the award that Murray did not win. In 1908 she sent Murray a copy of Anne after it became a best-seller. He then held the “Chair of Mathematics” at Dalhousie. What did he think when he read the description of the “fat, funny, little upcountry boy with a Bumpy forehead and a patched coat” who had won the “mathematics prize”? Murray’s specialty had been mathematics. He had a protruding forehead (a distinctive Macneill forehead like his father’s) that could easily have been called “bumpy” by an unkind satirist. And from the perspective of sophisticated Halifax, New Brunswick was certainly “upcountry.” But it is certain that Murray never wore a patched coat. Murray, a sophisticated reader of literature (but without Maud’s talent for writing it), must have sniffed over this gratuitous piece of mischief on Maud’s part.
Murray and Maud were not kindred spirits. Maud kept hearing of Murray’s amazing progress in the academic world. Scholarships pursued Murray and hung themselves around his neck: following graduation from Dalhousie, he went to Cornell (which offered him a slightly better scholarship than had Harvard, Yale, Columbia, and Clark). Math came to him so easily that he spent most of his time reading history and politics, or attending art galleries and cultural events, though he professed he could never learn to like poetry. To fill out his education, the young Murray made grand tours of Europe and Britain. To make matters worse, his achievements appeared to be largely effortless: he complained that math offered no challenge and was boring. Maud knew she was every bit as clever as Murray in her own field and that, had she been a boy, her proud clan would have seen that she got the best education.49
Maud was bitter that after a single year in university, where she had been happy, admired, and immensely productive, she had to go back to the hard, dreary, underpaid, and undervalued work of country school teaching. Still, her whole orientation in life was to make the best of whatever circumstances occurred. Like grandmother’s Woolner family, she sized up the situation, considered her options, and laid careful plans to make her name in literature.
Returning to Cavendish for the summer of 1896 was a letdown, but Maud revelled in the sanctuary of her little upstairs room in the old home, aloof from the household below. Another pleasure was “Lovers’ Lane,” the heavily shaded and fragrant path beside the freshwater stream that tumbled along year after year. The sound of the water calmed her frayed nerves. Breezes swept in off the ocean and over the fields, buzzing and humming insects added variation, and frogs made their strange music. The moist air and the smell of balsam soothed her. Her rambles were full of visual beauty, perfumed and spicy fragrances, a caressing atmosphere, and comforting sounds.
“Lovers’ Lane” had special associations for Maud, backing on the school area where she had played as a child. Children had fished, cooled their milk in the brook, plotted, laughed, and shared secrets there for years. When an older Maud wanted a “passport back to fairyland,” she only had to walk through “Lovers’ Lane” to feel herself a renewed spirit. Like the Sea-Kingdom of Undine, the lane fed Maud’s imagination with wild, passionate, and often undirected images of longing. It also soothed her.
But if “Lovers’ Lane” stayed the same, the rest of her world was changing. Laura Pritchard had married in Prince Albert. Maud felt the call of romance and sexual desire in many of her moods. Yet, she clung tremulously to the stability of the repressed lifestyle she knew, with her grandparents’ regularity of habits and the community’s resistance to change. In her dreams, she craved escape—romance, love, fame. Tensions were building. In a picture of Maud with her Uncle John’s children and Fanny Wise (the pretty young teacher boarding with the John F. Macneill family) Maud looks cross and unhappy; so do Uncle John’s children. Only Fannie Wise looks at peace with herself.
That fall, a new teaching opportunity came up in the community of Belmont. Its teacher, Maud’s cousin Edwin Simpson, had saved enough money living at home to leave for university. He took a special interest in Maud and helped her secure the position he was vacating. Maud had been actively searching for a position again, and this one came to her easily.
Belmont was a small community on the Malpeque Bay, about thirty miles from Cavendish. It was near the part of the Bay where Maud’s original Montgomery forebears had settled nearly one hundred and twenty years earlier. Maud called it a pretty place, because of the Bay, but expressed “a creepy crawly presentiment” that the inhabitants might not be as attractive.
During her visits to Park Corner, Maud had become acquainted with Ed. Both his parents were Simpsons and related to each other. This Simpson family produced six children: Fulton, Edwin, Alfred, Burton, Milton, and Sophy. Ed was two years older than Maud, good-looking, and brilliantly talkative.
At Park Corner, Ed had once walked Maud home from a Literary Society meeting and they’d talked about books all the way. She wrote, “I don’t know whether I like Ed or not. He is clever and can talk about everything, but he is awfully conceited—and worse still, Simpsony” (March 26, 1892). The Macneills of Maud’s generation generally disliked the Simpson clan, thinking them windy, pompous, and full of themselves. Ed, however, was much attracted to the witty, clever Maud.
Ed’s parents, although living in Belmont, were both descended from the original Simpsons and Macneills who settled Cavendish. Through intermarriage over five generations, the blood had grown increasingly “congested.” When Alexander Macneill railed against cousins marrying cousins, he could point to bad results. The Simpson family was a prime example. Intellectually, the offspring ranged from brilliant to mentally defective; emotionally, they ranged from normal to totally unhinged.
When Maud went to Belmont, she stayed temporarily with the Simpsons. She wrote, “Mrs. Simpson—who was also a Cavendish Simpson and married her cousin as a matter of course—seems like a kind, mild woman, but of a somewhat melancholy disposition.” Maud’s identification with “melancholy” in the Simpson family should have warned her to stay away from romantic entanglements with them; she knew by now that she herself was also given to moody, depressive spells. But in her experience, eccentric and mentally imbalanced people were common and did not necessarily stand out as abnormal. The Simpson family was kind to her, not only because she was a relative, but also because she was a new teacher.
Ed’s interest in Maud increased. Her willing imagination transformed him into a darkly handsome Byronic hero. And he had promise. When he graduated from the Prince of Wales College, he was described in the college paper as “Editor-in-Chief of the College Observer … in debate he was a Hercules. Notwithstanding his many scruples, Ed will, without doubt, be a star in the legal professions.”
Coming from a family that included successful lawyers, Maud took note. Marrying a lawyer would enable her to afford enough household help to pursue a writing career. And she did want to marry, eventually: a single woman was a social pariah, and she wanted children; she also wanted the physical and emotional affection of a man. As she assessed this attentive cousin, she was still decompressing from the stimulating, heady Halifax year. She felt a terrible loneliness. She ignored Ed’s annoying personal mannerisms—a perpetual moving, twitching, lifting, or tapping of feet and fingers—focussing instead on his brilliant discourses. Apparently, Ed judged that Maud had an intelligence adequate to the sizable task of appreciating his own.
At this time, Maud’s Great-Aunt Mary Lawson (her grandfather’s sister) was a temporary resident in the Simpson house. Widowed and childless, she lived around with relatives, as poor relations were forced to do. She was generally welcomed for her fine storytelling abilities. She turned human observations into non-malicious anecdotes, and harmless gossip into an art form. Like all good storytellers, Aunt Mary Lawson had learned to read body language and to analyze personality. To Maud, who had seen how eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British women writers transformed human social interaction into novels about domestic manners, Aunt Mary Lawson was the model of an able storyteller.
Maud shared a bedroom with her Aunt Mary Lawson. Maud and Aunt Mary bonded quickly and of course began to gossip about the odd personalities of some of the Simpson progeny: Ed was undeniably talented, if pompous and self-important; Fulton was a giant in size and likewise in emotional imbalance; Alf had the Simpson trait of dominating all conversation, but was otherwise pleasant; Burton was quiet and withdrawn, an aberration among loquacious, self-absorbed Simpson males; and the daughter, Sophy, was a “lifeless mortal,” retreating from her merely slow-witted self into periods of withdrawn and silent sulks (October 21, 1896).
This compendium of oddities might have remained simply an entertaining mix had not the three eldest Simpson boys all started courting Maud at once. Ed’s absence was his best suit, for his “Simpsony” traits were diluted through distance; and Maud, who loved corresponding and missed the stimulation of university, enjoyed his letters, even if they were stilted and turgid. The other Simpson sons were still at home. The giant Fulton, later described as “sulky, jealous, meddlesome, querulous” (January 2, 1897), tried to attract her attention. When his brother Alf offered her rides, Fulton became angry and agitated, taking on a wild and “unearthly” look.
As soon as possible, Maud left this household, ostensibly to board closer to the school, with the Simon Fraser family. They were kind, and they served a clean if unexciting table. Elsewhere in Belmont, she found the people “rough, poor, and illiterate” (November 7, 1896).
Although the Frasers gave her an upstairs room, with a view of beautiful Malpeque Bay, the old farmhouses were neither insulated nor heated during the night, and her room proved unbearably cold. By mid-November, Maud would rise to find snow blown onto her pillow from the leaky window. The Frasers did not go to church, and so lacked the normal reason for weekly bathing; Maud complains of the Fraser men’s lack of hygiene. She always kept herself immaculately clean, even though this meant washing herself in a frigid room in a hand basin, uncovering only a part of her body at one time. Periodic forays into the Fraser kitchen—the only warm room in the house—were the only way she had of warming her hands. Later, the kindly Mrs. Fraser prepared a room with a warm stovepipe running through it, which made bathing and writing more comfortable.
Maud’s only consolation in this “dead-and-alive existence” was writing in her journal, and that had to be kept under lock and key, since the Frasers poked through her things when she was out. “I wonder how some people live at all—they seem to get so little out of life. It must be a bare, starveling existence for a vast number,” she wrote on December 17, 1896. In this atmosphere, Maud’s diary records her vision of an increasingly bleak world, which mirrored her own growing sense of loneliness and despair.
Whenever she heard from Ed in Halifax, the memory of her Dalhousie year sent her into a deeper low than she had ever experienced. She began to brood obsessively on the barrenness of her life. Maud had always used laughter to defuse low spirits, but the Frasers were too prosaic for repartee. In her short stay with the eccentric Simpsons, she had at least enjoyed laughing at them with Great-Aunt Mary Lawson.
Maud was beginning to feel the symptoms of a full-blown depressive episode: she had previously suffered from sleeplessness, but this recurred alongside an inability to feel pleasure in anything. For Christmas, she went to Bideford to visit Edith England, home from Sackville College and engaged to a brilliant young man preparing for law. Again, Maud felt excluded from the happy, forward march of others’ lives.
In February, Aunt Mary Lawson left the Simpson household. Maud had visited the Simpsons through the winter, but with Aunt Mary’s departure, she lost the last salubrious force in her battle against loneliness and depression. On February 2, 1897, in one of Ed’s lengthy, stylistically tedious but clever epistles he stated that he loved her and wanted them to become engaged. She deliberated. Her heart felt no stirrings, but she lived in a society where women often made marriages for other reasons. She began to think she could perhaps tolerate Ed.
As she sank into depression in the first quarter of 1897, the spectre of the disintegration of her personality spooked her. Suicide was frequently and graphically reported in Island newspapers—one particularly gruesome form of suicide was to drink carbolic acid or Paris Green (a rat poison) and suffer a horrible death as tortured loved ones looked on. Other imbalanced people murdered family or friends, or went on sprees shooting animals. Mental breakdown was common, and the provincial insane asylum, Falconwood, built in 1879, was well supplied with inmates.
By March, Maud complained of feeling “fearfully tired,” a symptom of depression. She recognized her own abnormal state, and wrote about it in her journals. This helped her recognize repetitive patterns, and she identified specific activities that helped her deal with depression. Long, vigorous walks provided some relief, but walking was difficult in the winter. Lively company also lifted her spirits, as did keeping a regular, structured routine. Given her pleasure in language, the act of writing sometimes edged her into a better mood. The paucity of stimulation shows in Maud’s journals; when she had nothing to write about but hoped that the act of writing would give her a lift, she resorted to mechanical exercises. One typical example was a long, flat description of her room in the Fraser house. In a deep depression, she was entirely unable to write, either on her creative work or in her journal. She formed the habit of making notes for her journal, and writing these up later when her spirits improved.
In April 1897, Laura Pritchard wrote her from Prince Albert that her brother, Will, had died after an attack of influenza. Maud and Will had corresponded periodically ever since their Prince Albert friendship, and she had retained a spot in her love-starved heart for him. Now, hearing of his death, Maud opened the ten-year letter that he had given her to open in 1901—why keep it after he was dead? In her journal, she reported that it was a love letter.
Such a stressful loss tilted her further towards a major depressive episode. It reminded her of other losses, most notably her mother’s death. No one really cared about her now, she felt. For a young woman who had always been surrounded by an extended family, she was getting perilously close to being orphaned as an adult. She felt adrift in a cold world.
Ed now professed his love constantly. She associated him with happier settings: Park Corner, Prince of Wales College, Dalhousie. In May 1897, she heard that Laura Pritchard (now Mrs. Willard Agnew) had given birth to her first child, and she received the news with mixed emotions. Thinking about her own life’s journey through an uneven mental landscape, she drew on her childhood favourite, Bunyan’s Pilgrim’s Progress, for the language to express her depression:
I wanted love and protection. Life at times lately had worn a somewhat sombre aspect … I was run-down and inclined to take a rather morbid view of my prospects. Hence, I was all the more tempted to grasp at what promised to lift me out of my Slough of Despond. (June 30, 1897)
In this frame of mind Maud accepted Ed’s proposal. She wrote him that, given time, she might learn to care for him. Ed’s letters became more effusive. She began recoiling from them. She ceased to enjoy her teaching, and then even her writing, which was carved out of sleeping time, in the early morning in her icy room. Only the discipline and sense of duty that she had learned from Grandmother Macneill kept her going.
But life was not without some uplifting moments: pushing herself to write, she continued making some sales. In March, she sold “The Prize in Elocution” to the Philadelphia Times for $8.75; in April a story to Arthur’s Home Magazine for $3; and in May “Extra French Examination” to the Philadelphia Times for $7. Her basic salary was approximately $45 per school term. Selling three stories for $18.75 was very encouraging. She had written these stories quickly, but in the grip of a depression, writing was a challenge.
In early May she closed the school for the standard three-week holiday between terms. Her mental state was precarious. She became physically ill. Her muse grew alliterative: for herself, “sniffle, sigh, and sneeze”; for Belmont, “mist, mud, and misery” (May 3, 1897). She suffered from disturbed sleep, brooding morbidity, general irritability, fluctuating emotions with tears ready to embarrass her at the slightest provocation, severe headaches, a sense of terrible soul-loneliness and isolation, an inability to make decisions, and a perpetual “spiritlessness” and “tiredness”—all symptoms of a full-blown depression. She decided she simply could not take another year in Belmont. When Ed Simpson proposed in person on June 8, 1897, Maud accepted.
Ed’s kiss to seal the engagement brought her no emotion. “I did not feel at all unhappy—but neither did I feel happy—certainly not as a girl should feel who has just parted from the man she had promised to marry” (June 30, 1897). Her only genuine emotion was a strong revulsion to this new fiancé, but the self-centred Ed did not observe this. By mid-June the physical and mental repugnance she felt was overwhelming. Returning to Cavendish, she spent the rest of the summer wrestling over her promise to marry a man whose mere touch made her feel physically ill. Normally, she suffered from wildly oscillating moods; now she describes herself as feeling emotionally dead.
Ed gave out the wrong signals as a lover when he was courting Maud: “He was far too self-conscious, too fond of saying and doing things for effect, and—in plain English—far too conceited” (June 30, 1897). His fingers constantly twitched and tapped. Did Maud’s super-sensitive radar detect something amiss other than excessive self-absorption? She wrote in her journal much later that he married twice, but had no children, “which did not surprise me”—whatever that means. Her growing reservations were sensible: in their shared bloodlines, each had ample genetic inheritance to produce psychological disorders.
Additional problems arose. Ed told her, after their engagement, that he planned to become a Baptist minister. She had thought his plans were to become a lawyer. The Presbyterians of Cavendish had always looked down on Baptists. Furthermore, Maud had serious reservations about marrying a minister. Other professions, such as law, were equal to the ministry in social prestige, but did not make so many demands on a wife. A parson stationed in some small town or out of the way place would expect his wife to act as unpaid helper. Nor did Maud fancy a peripatetic existence. She was a person who put down deep roots.
When she was ready to leave Belmont, she wrote, “I will be sorry to leave—as I always am to leave an old room.… How many more am I fated to leave yet in my wanderings!” (June 30, 1897). Here was a new theme, one that would become part of her interpretative framework from then on: a belief that she was cursed to be a rootless wanderer, never permanent, always forced to move on.
She worried incessantly. Her journal records one long entry on June 30, shortly preceding her engagement to Ed; no entries follow this until October 7, 1897.
That autumn, she read Olive Schreiner’s The Story of an African Farm50(1883). This book, which had already sold some 100,000 copies, questioned the moral certainties of Christianity, and had been denounced as “blasphemous” from church pulpits across America and Great Britain. It was also a feminist book: it overturned the traditional assumption that women, as sexual beings, entrapped men; rather, the novel depicts men trapping women. The heroine of this book eventually chooses death over marrying a man by whom she is pregnant, and to whom she is sexually attracted. The book was a revelation to Maud, reading it, as she did, during her entanglement with Ed. Like Schreiner’s heroine Lyndall, she felt tortured; she was certainly close to implosion, if not verging on being suicidal.
Another young woman with Maud’s ability might simply have left the Island to clear her head, and to find a life elsewhere. Hundreds of young men and women were leaving the Island every year. The Island newspapers of the period talked about the exciting opportunities off the Island. The 1890s had seen a remarkable change in the status and freedom of women. In the 1895–96 period, even the Island papers were full of talk of the assertive “New Woman” who was transforming society. Maud could have set off to be a newspaperwoman in London, as did Sarah Jeannette Duncan of Brantford, Ontario, or an editor for an American publishing house, like Jean McIlwraith of Hamilton, Ontario. Some exceptionally adventuresome and gifted Canadian women did leave their hometowns for professional work in urban centres in Halifax, Montreal, Toronto, in the States, or in Great Britain. Maud knew a Miss Arbuckle in Summerside, PEI, who had gone to work for an American publisher, L. C. Page of Boston.
Maud was certainly talented enough to have worked her way up in the publishing world. Gifted in teaching, she could have found work in either community schools or private academies anywhere. She did not stay rooted in Prince Edward Island because she was provincial in outlook: she had already travelled to the Canadian west, Ottawa, Halifax—much farther than the norm for young women of her time. Nor did she stay because of her love of the landscape.
Instead, it was at this watershed time that her mood swings began to seriously affect the choices she made in her life. Depression had led her to accept Ed’s proposal, and that decision had deepened her melancholy. Her experience with mood swings in Belmont had left her feeling out of control, and her confidence was eroded. From Belmont onward, she became increasingly afraid of being “struck down” by her dark moods. As the victim of uncontrollable depression which made her increasingly anxious, she was unable to take the risks that equally gifted women with stable moods could take. She instinctively began to seek out situations where her life would be rigorously structured and predictable. She became fearful of cutting loose from the society she knew, lest she spin out of control, with no one to look after her. School teaching was hard, but it was safer than leaving the Island. The adventures she craved would have to take place in her reading and imagination.
Not privy to any of these thoughts, Ed was quite ready to organize her life around his own. He was leaving for another year of university, and he told Maud of a teaching position coming up in Lower Bedeque. He suggested that she apply for it, and he put in a good word for her there with Alf Leard, a friend of his who was vacating the post to study dentistry on the mainland. Maud obtained Alf’s position, and moved into one of the most traumatic periods of her life.
When Maud left Cavendish for Lower Bedeque in the fall of 1897, she wrote “I feel like a prisoner who has shut the door on all possibilities,” quoting a phrase from The Love Letters of a Worldly Woman (1891), by Lucy Lane Clifford.51 She felt she was in Ed’s clutches, under his surveillance, waiting for the dreary day when he would claim her.
Lower Bedeque was a small community on the South Shore of the Island, across from mainland Canada. The farms in this area were large and fertile, and the community long settled. Maud’s teaching position would start in October. She arranged to stay with Alf’s people, the Cornelius Leard family. They had a comfortable home right across from the school building. She would room with their daughter, Helen, who was her own age. It would be a huge change from miserable, lonely Belmont.
As soon as she settled into the very sociable Leard household, her prospects began to look brighter. Their home was as tidy as her grandmother’s. Mrs. Cornelius Leard, daughter of a Baptist minister from Nova Scotia, was cheerful and efficient. The Leards were people of substance in the community. Cornelius Leard’s farm was much larger than Maud’s grandfather’s.52 As a family, they were prosperous, articulate, well-dressed, self-directed, intelligent, and refined, although not intellectual and literary in the way Maud’s Macneill family was. They were also a relaxed family who enjoyed each other’s company, playing practical jokes and sharing merriment. They were skilled in many crafts, busy and happy in creation, and active in community affairs. The cheerful, easy atmosphere in the home began to make her feel comfortable and relaxed, just as visiting the Campbells of Park Corner always did.
Maud brought her own gifts to the Leard household through her storytelling ability and wit. She could make funny stories out of almost anything, and she was full of interesting book-talk. In the appreciative audience of the Leard family, she began to blossom again.
Of the Leards’ eight children—three boys and five girls—two of the daughters, Georgina and Millie, had grown up and left home. Both lived nearby in Central Bedeque, and they dropped in often to see their parents and younger siblings. Georgina had married Thomas Moyse, raising two sons who eventually became medical doctors; Millie, universally admired and very active in church and community, raised a large family of affluent, solid citizens.
The other six Leard children still lived at home. Herman, the eldest, was the son designated to take over the prosperous farm. Born on July 2, 1870, he was four years older than Maud. The next son, Alpheus, studying for a career in dentistry, was the one Maud replaced, taking his teaching position from October 1897 until May 1898 so he could study further.
Helen was dating Howard McFarlane, the man she would eventually marry. A noted craftswoman, whose exotic and original creations were exhibited and much admired, she eventually became a leader in the Women’s Institute. The three youngest children were Calvin, Mae, and “Fed” (Frederica). Calvin, a skilled carpenter, eventually inherited the farm, doing some fox-farming when that came into vogue. Frederica, who was a young girl during Maud’s residence in the house, grew up to run a fashionable tourist business in Fernwood. Mae became the dietitian in the Prince County Hospital. The Leards were a genteel and talented family, competent in all they did.
They had none of the unbalanced intensity of the Simpsons, the lifelessness of the Frasers, or the sharp twists of her Grandfather Macneill. Maud had grown up in a family whose tone was set by complicated, volatile people like her grandfather. The Leards sailed through their lives in less turbulent barks. Maud thoroughly enjoyed living with these happy, productive people.
Pursued by memories of Ed Simpson’s intense self-absorption and nervousness, Maud immediately took note of Herman’s unaffected openness. He was courteous, good-tempered, relaxed, and at ease with people. He listened to her talk and laughed at her witticisms and jokes. This was new for Maud— her grandfather and Ed had always demanded to be the centre of attention. For once, she felt appreciated for her personality. Maud began to feel Herman had an indefinable charm, and she spoke of being fascinated by his “magnetic blue eyes” (January 22, 1898).53 Maud had come into this house in the throes of a depression, and romantic feelings were predictable for someone who was lonely, emotionally vulnerable, and unhappily engaged.
Maud’s reputation as a very successful teacher had preceded her, and her travels off the Island gave her additional glamour. Her descent from two fine old families provided a nice pedigree in a culture that took especial note of “who you were.” Although no one would have called her beautiful, she dressed attractively and stylishly and had an extraordinary amount of poise. By her own account in her journals, verified through family memories, she and Herman “talked and jested and teased each other continually and kept the house ringing with mirth and laughter.” Her depression lifted, and her spirits soared to the other extreme, helped by her new circumstances and love interest.
Maud was susceptible to Herman’s romantic overtures, and undoubtedly encouraged them by flirting—a skill at which she was very adept. Soon he was entering her bedroom on the pretext of bringing her mail. Although Maud shared this bedroom with Helen, Helen was often away on dates. Herman lingered to talk. He brought her chocolates. Ed’s kisses had left her “cold as ice,” but she soon reports in her diary that “Herman’s sent flame through every vein and fibre of my being.” Next, she was fighting to control her emotional highs just as much as she had fought to control her lows.
She tried to dampen her romance with Herman, knowing she was engaged to Ed. She wrote dramatically, “for the sake of my self respect I must not stoop to any sort of an affair with another man” (April 8, 1898). She could not help herself, however:
If I had—or rather if I could have—kept this resolve I would have saved myself incalculable suffering. For it was but a few days later that I found myself face to face with the burning consciousness that I loved Herman Leard with a wild, passionate, unreasoning love that dominated my entire being and possessed me like a flame—a love I could neither quell nor control—a love that in its intensity seemed little short of absolute madness. Madness! Yes! (April 8, 1898)
The feelings Maud describes are consistent with clinical accounts of people gripped by a “manic” high, struggling to rein in overwhelming impulses that may at times feel overwhelming. Individuals with mood disorders are notorious for impetuous affairs of the heart that lead to extramarital affairs. However, the language she uses may also echo that in the “racy French novels” that the Charlottetown papers periodically railed against.54
Herman may have been confused by Maud’s actions, especially when she continually welcomed him into her bedroom when his family was out, but she says that she hustled him out as soon as their preliminary lovemaking reached a dangerous point. She wrote that the only reason that she did not succumb to her desire for Herman was the knowledge that he would have despised her if she did. Intercourse before marriage (especially without an avowed intention to marry) certainly laid a woman open to a man’s contempt in her culture; if it led to pregnancy, as often happened before birth control was available, it led to lifelong public shame. Maud’s lovemaking with Herman went against her own sense of morality. Brought up a strict Presbyterian in a culture that believed sexual activity outside of marriage was a very serious sin, Maud was playing with fire, and she knew it. What’s more, a betrothal was serious business in that era, and she was engaged to another man. Her behaviour could only have been construed as shamefully “loose” by the values of the time.
According to Maud’s account of her romance with Herman in her journals (which she recopied, and undoubtedly retouched and reshaped, some twenty years later when she had become world-famous), very early in the Bedeque year she decided that Herman was beneath her socially; although she was physically attracted to him, she would never consider marrying him. Later, she would claim that she discounted him because “he had no trace of intellect, culture, or education—no interest in anything beyond his farm and the circle of young people who composed the society he frequented. In plain, sober truth, he was only a very nice, attractive young animal!” (April 8, 1898). But in actual fact, Herman was considered the “best catch” in the community of Bedeque. Popular and well liked, he was a fine young man who stood to inherit the large and successful family farm. His family was different from hers, but they were in no way inferior. They produced very successful professionals—dentists, doctors, businessmen, and teachers—and were pillars of the community.
By early spring, Maud was positive that she wanted out of the engagement with Ed. Her physical caresses with Herman had intensified her awareness of her revulsion to Ed. She wrote Ed, asking to break off the engagement, after nearly a year of agonizing over it.
Ed Simpson’s response was that of a stubborn, strong-minded man. When she asked him “to release” her from her engagement, he told her that he would only under certain conditions.55 Perhaps in his own conceit he could not fathom why any woman in her right mind would reject him. Perhaps he thought that as a “weak woman” Maud could not possibly understand herself and her feelings. She wrote a series of increasingly firm letters before he would consent to liberate her from her promise to marry him.
Alf Leard was returning from his educational leave to take up the Bedeque school again, and Maud knew she would have to leave the Leard home. She was heartily tired of teaching and wanted to spend all her time writing. During the school year, with all of her emotional turmoil over matters of love, she had somehow still managed to write, likely energized by the sense of well-being that comes from a hot romantic affair. She published approximately five poems and five stories between October 1897 and April 1898, making some $25 from her writing. (Alf Leard’s salary was $56.25 for each of the four quarters of the year, but Maud was paid only $45.00 per quarter for her Bideford teaching.) She believed that if she could only write full time, she could make enough to live on.
But there was a dilemma. She could not admit to her grandparents that she was tired of teaching; she had argued for an education on the grounds that she wanted to teach. Her grandfather’s sarcasm on hearing that she now wanted to quit would have been insufferable. In addition, her relationship with her aging, cranky grandfather was so tense that she knew returning to live with him in Cavendish would be impossible. Her mood swings made her feel too vulnerable to live on her own, even if she could have afforded it. She had no place to go.
And then fate intervened. On March 6, 1898, a telegram informed Maud that her Grandfather Macneill had dropped dead the previous day. She went home for the funeral, then returned briefly to finish her term. She could now live in the Cavendish home that she loved, with her grandmother, who, despite her faults, had always been remarkably supportive. And Maud hoped to rein in her turbulent emotions once back in her grandmother’s routine-bound orbit. Since Grandmother was still reasonably fit and active, she could continue doing most of the cooking and housework, and Maud could write on a regular schedule. Others would see that she was returning the care her grandmother had given her, and she knew that the community would think exceedingly well of her for doing so. The approval of the Cavendish community was extremely important to Maud, given that she had spent so much of her adolescence feeling she did not have it.
And what about her “mad” love for Herman, the “nice, attractive young animal”? That romance ended, by Maud’s account, when she returned to Cavendish. The real end of this love story, however, came a year later, after Maud and her grandmother had settled into life together. One day in June 1899, it was reported that Herman Leard had died of the complications from influenza.56 Maud was stunned. Her attraction to him had been hard to subdue even in absence. To learn that he was dead when the memory of his physical presence was still so strong was ghoulish. Because she did not attend the funeral, Maud lacked the visual imagery to place Herman firmly under the sod. She was stricken with grief—and relief—all at once, caught in a longing that could never be satisfied, and one that would intensify in memory. She wrote much later: “I did not shed many tears.… No agony could ever equal what I once endured. It is easier to think of him as dead, mine, all mine in death, as he could never be in life, mine when no other woman could ever lie on his heart or kiss his lips.” (This comes from her diary entry of July 24, 1899, which she recopied into her journals after 1919.) Herman had loved her, she declared, “or pretended to—with a love passionate and sensual enough, of no very lofty or enduring type; but never, never as I loved him” (July 24, 1899). This last statement is a curiously discordant one; by Maud’s own account, her “love” for Herman had been rooted solely in sexual attraction. The comment not only reveals a crack in her own story, but suggests that she may have known he was trifling with her while planning to marry someone else.
Maud carried the memory of Herman in her heart long after he was buried—nourishing, burnishing, and cherishing it in a highly romantic fashion. She found gripping pathos for her diary in her account of falling in love with someone who was not “worthy” of her.
When The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery: Volume I (1889–1910) was published in 1985 (nearly ninety years after the events they recount), Maud’s account of her love affair with Herman Leard raised eyebrows of old-timers in the Bedeque area. To begin with, the Leards had been a respected family, not crude people beneath Maud’s “class.” (Maud, who had read many, many nineteenth-century British novels, did have a sense of being in a privileged class—one to which the titled Montgomerys and the literary Macneills belonged, and possibly from which the Leards were excluded.) But her account did not square with the memories of the Lower Bedeque community in another important respect—in that of her romance with Herman Leard. Descendants of third parties, as well as those of the Leard family, tell a very different story.
Local legend says that when Maud Montgomery arrived in their community, Herman was already seriously courting Ettie Schurman, one of the most beautiful and eligible young women in Prince County. The Schurmans were a very prominent family, with large, prosperous farms, and the match between Ettie and Herman would have been seen as very suitable by both families. Herman often went off to Baptist church events, as described in Maud’s journals, and the reason he did not take Maud with him, as might have been expected, was because he went to see Ettie.
The love affair that Bedeque remembers was not between Herman and Maud, but between Herman and Ettie. (Maud’s romance with Herman was carried on secretly, and under the circumstances, it is highly unlikely that Herman told any stories out of the bedroom.) Herman and Ettie were apparently engaged to be married in 1899, the year that Herman died. With his death, the community experienced the loss of one of its most popular young men. Over one hundred carriages carrying people from the surrounding area came to his funeral. Afterwards, Ettie grieved long and hard, and she is remembered for her sorrowful planting of blue forget-me-nots on his grave.
Much later, Ettie married a dashing war hero named Munsey who had moved from Alberta to Prince Edward Island. They had two little girls, Pril and Doris. Then, tragically, only ten years after Herman Leard’s death, Ettie Schurman Munsey died.57
Constance Carruthers, a family friend of Ettie’s children, said that when Herman took Maud, the incumbent teacher living in the Leard house, to local church socials, he would have done so out of courtesy. Mrs. Carruthers noted that by Maud’s own account in her journals Herman did not take her “with him on his trips to the ‘Corner’ or to Central Bedeque. Nor was she [Maud] invited to drive across the ice to a Summerside church with him on Sunday evenings.” These were his times for Ettie, the girl he was seriously courting and planned to marry. Ettie’s acceptance of such invitations from him, given the customs of that era, indicated that Herman and Ettie were either already engaged at that point or at the least had serious “intentions of matrimony,” both before and during the time when Maud was living with the Leards. It is inconceivable that Maud did not know of his attentions and attachment to Ettie.
As adults, Herman’s younger sisters told stories about how amused they had been to observe “Miss Montgomery,” their teacher, flitting from window to window, watching for Herman to return from events to which she had not been invited. They sensed that Maud was very fond of their brother, and that she was jealous when his attentions went elsewhere. They remembered her as being “pouty” and “moody” when Herman went out on horseback to see Ettie, but lively and fun when he was home.
Maud’s journal account of her romance with Herman mentions no other woman in his life. Maud’s attachment to Ed was known (Ed visited the family at Christmas to see Maud, and Maud did not break the engagement with Ed until spring). If Herman was already attached to Ettie Schurman at the time, then he was trifling with one person while engaged to another, just as Maud herself was doing. Perhaps Herman felt that Maud, being engaged, was behaving immorally, and so he was free to do the same. Or, perhaps he was trying to see, in good faith, which woman he liked better. If Herman was genuinely interested in Maud for awhile, Ettie won out: she was much prettier and welcomed his courtship outright.
As we read her journals, we must keep in mind that Maud was an avid consumer of all kinds of literary romance, and she probably embellished the story of her entanglement with Herman when she recopied her journals after 1919. A convention of nineteenth-century romance is the “two-suitor” plot, in which a young woman must choose between two men who offer totally different prospects.58 Polishing up the Herman “affair” years later, prior to committing it permanently to her journals, Maud may have utilized this structural convention—she is the passionate woman who has to choose between two men: one whom she loves but cannot marry because of his class, and another who is suitable, but whom she does not love. Framing her own situation in these literary terms, Maud wrote, “There was I under the same roof with two men, one of whom I loved and could never marry, the other whom I had promised to marry but could never love!” (April 8, 1898).
In fact, Maud’s account in her journals gives the impression that she rejected Herman. But local history says his heart was elsewhere and that Maud knew it. What is posterity to make of this discrepancy between Maud’s account of her thwarted romance with Herman Leard and local memories? A close reading of Maud’s version—told in a very convoluted way in her journals—reveals that Herman Leard did not actually propose to her. This section of her diaries is one of the most carefully written sections in the entire ten volumes. It is so carefully constructed, in fact, that casual readers will not even notice at first that Maud is still very much engaged to Ed when she nuzzles with Herman. Maud’s pride no doubt motivated her to tell the story as she did, implying that she rejected Herman. She would have believed that no one could gainsay her years later, particularly since she stipulated that her full journals could be published only after her own death.59
A poem written by Maud in February 1921 can be reread in light of the story of Herman Leard and Ettie Schurman. This poem is entitled “The Bride Dreams.” Recall here that Maud was small and dark, and Ettie Schurman was fair and beautiful. In the poem, a young couple has married. The bride, small and dark, records a nightmare in which she has died and been buried in her wedding gown. In the grave, she can see the living folk above. Her husband is being pursued by a wheaten-haired young woman who resembles Ettie.60
IV
Then I felt a thrill the dank earth through
And I knew—Oh, I knew
That it came from your step on our path from the dale;
Almost my heart began to beat!
Proud of her golden ring, at your side—
That slim white girl who lives at the mill,
Who has loved you always and loves you still,
With her hair the colour of harvest wheat
And her lips as red as mine were pale.
How I hated her, so tall and fair
And shining of hair—
Love, I am so little and dark!
My heart, that had once soared up like a lark
At your glance, was as a stone in my breast:
Never once did you look my way,
Only at her you looked and kissed—
My eyes were sunk in cruel decay
And the worms crawled in the silk of my vest—
(Keep me from death, Oh, my lover!)
Maud says that she finished this long poem in February 1921; and she thought it very good. The dream motif was a natural one for Maud: she had vivid dreams all her life that either reworked past experiences or were visionary dreams that she used to read the future. In February 1920—a year before she finished this poem, and at a time when the memory of her passion had been stirred up again—Maud had just finished reworking, polishing, and recopying the story about Herman Leard into her journals (see entry of March 3, 1920). Significantly, another man who appreciated her talents had entered her life by that point, and his admiration fostered another burst of creative energy—not only in the production of fiction, but also making a permanent record of her life by recopying her journals.