Maud’s grandfather’s death closed the book on Bedeque. It ended, in a dignified way, the tortured affair of Herman. In life, Grandfather Macneill had given Maud the love of word and story; in death, he gave her the freedom to write.
Although Alexander Macneill was seventy-eight, his death was unexpected. Maud wrote, “The shock was terrible.” Then she added, “[I]n all truthfulness, I cannot say that I have ever had a very deep affection for Grandfather Macneill.… Nevertheless, one cannot live all one’s life with people and not have a certain love for them” (April 8, 1898). Perhaps a more honest and (and less gracious) version of Maud’s feelings appears in her semi-autobiographical novel, Emily of New Moon. There Emily’s stern maiden aunt reflects on her father: she “involuntarily remembered the ashamed, smothered feeling of relief when old Archibald Murray died—the handsome, intolerant, autocratic old man who had ruled his family with a rod of iron all his life and had made existence at New Moon miserable with the petty tyranny of invalidism that closed his career” (Chapter 6).
Maud had acknowledged that there was much to admire about her grandfather, citing his “rich, poetic mind, a keen intelligence and a refined perception” (January 7, 1910)—but as she looked at her grandfather in his coffin, her grief was tempered by her many memories of fearing his stinging sarcasm. Seeing her grandfather in his coffin made her recall her youthful mother’s still sadder funeral in that same room.
I was very young at the time—barely twenty months old—but I remember it perfectly. It is almost my earliest recollection, clear cut and distinct. My mother was lying there in her coffin. My father was standing by her and holding me in his arms. I remember that I wore a little white dress of embroidered muslin and that father was crying. Women were seated around the room and I recall two in front of me on the sofa who were whispering to each other and looking pityingly at father and me. Behind them, the window was open and green hop vines were trailing across it, while their shadows danced over the floor in a square of sunshine.
I looked down at the dead face of the mother whose love I was to miss so sorely and so often in after years. It was a sweet face, albeit worn and wasted by months of suffering. My mother had been beautiful and Death, so cruel in all else, had spared the delicate outline of feature, the long silken lashes brushing the hollow cheek, and the smooth masses of golden-brown hair.
I did not feel any sorrow for I realized nothing of what it all meant. I was only vaguely troubled. Why was mother so still? … I reached down and laid my baby hand against mother’s cheek. Even yet I can feel the peculiar coldness of that touch. The memory of it seems to link me with mother, somehow—the only remembrance I have of actual contact with my mother. (April 8, 1898)
Maud’s allusion to “shadows” that “danced … in a square of sunshine” were surely not part of her genuine memory as a small child. They are the writer’s artistic touch, added later. But they catch the life Montgomery would live— a watchful one, with a constant shifting between brilliant sunshine and deep shadows.
Alexander Macneill’s women did not bury their troubles when they buried him. The consequences of his will were a torture to his widow and an outrage to Maud. He had apparently left the writing of his will until he was too infirm to wield a pen. Written by another hand, it misspelled words and names, including his own wife’s, and was signed “Alex M. McNeill [sic]” in a shaky, stiff signature. In the will, he left all his farm real estate to his estranged son, John F. Macneill. To his “beloved wife, Lucyan [sic]” he left only his personal property, “all monies, mortgages[,] household furniture.”61 Nothing was left to his sons Leander or Chester, but he bequeathed one hundred dollars each to his living daughters, Annie and Emily; he left nothing to Maud, even as a token of affection, despite the fact that she was his late daughter Clara’s only child, and despite her lack of other prospects. She would be out of a home to live in as soon her grandmother died—or as soon as John F. claimed the house and Maud’s grandmother was sent to live with another daughter.
Although Alexander Macneill had been executor of his own father’s will—a model in its protection of the widow’s ownership rights and other powers, not surprising given Speaker Macneill’s legal training—he failed to use his father’s will as a guide for his own. His will does not specify who will inherit the actual house where his widow lives; arguably, the house was more in the category of “real estate” than “personal property.” On the basis of this will, John F. could (and did) claim the barn; he could (and did) claim the horses and carriages, leaving his mother and Maud without conveyance. Maud suspected that next he would claim the house (and, in time, he did). The will either manifested Alexander Macneill’s chauvinism, insensitivity, lack of foresight, or his cruelty—or, perhaps as Maud tartly put it, his foolishness. However, at first John F. Macneill made no attempts to oust his mother from her home. For the time being, Maud and her grandmother had a place to live.
Maud’s grandfather’s death was in other ways a blessing. Maud could now return to a home she loved and devote herself full time to writing. She was not like the many nineteenth- and early twentieth-century women writers (in Canada and other countries) who had to toil with their pens all night to earn money for their families’ upkeep—women like the nineteenth-century Susanna Moodie. Maud’s mental energy was boundless, but her physical stamina was not: she had always been very susceptible to colds, flu, and other infections whenever she went without sufficient sleep.
Virginia Woolf’s famous 1928 treatise A Room of One’s Own states that women writers were disadvantaged by not having “wives” to take care of practical matters for them. (Like most male writers in history, William Wordsworth had a wife to pamper and feed him—plus, in his case, a gifted sister for companionship.) Maud saw she would now have exactly what she needed: the comforts of home, her quiet grandmother’s non-intrusive companionship, the stabilizing force of her grandmother’s routine, a room to write in where there were no minefields of sarcasm or sexy young men straying into her private space offering chocolates and affection. She would return the “debt of gratitude” to a grandmother who had made sacrifices for her. Maud had found stability, space, and respect—all under the rubric of “doing her duty.”
The village post office had always been in the Macneill kitchen, and this was another benefit. She could submit stories and poems, and any rejection slips sent in return could be kept secret. The post office also offered an ongoing window on life in Cavendish, as well as an opportunity to hear regular gossip from the steady stream of mail-fetchers. In her time away, Maud had learned to see her community in greater perspective, and she was ready to mine it for literary subject matter.
Maud was still only twenty-three years old. Ever her organized grandmother’s child, she planned out routines for writing and stuck with them. Her discipline with her writing would become legendary. Now she had time and space to learn more about the book, magazine, and newspaper markets.
She had more time for reading, too. She helped select books for the Cavendish Lending Library and subjects for discussion at the Cavendish Literary Society. She read biographies of women writers and discovered that many had led lives as circumscribed as her own. She reread the Brontë sisters’ stories about dark and brooding human passions, and Jane Austen’s cool analyses of sexual politics. She admired George Eliot’s novels, which set women within complicated social networks. And she remembered the Mathilde Blind biography, arguing that women should write about women’s preoccupations, their means of getting what they wanted, and their talk about their lives. Blind had said of Eliot’s early years: “Such was the place where the childhood of George Eliot was spent. Here she drew in those impressions of English rural and provincial life, of which one day she was to become the greatest interpreter. Impossible to be in a better position for seeing life …” Maud had only to think of the Macneill kitchen and post office where she had heard so many stories, the natural landscape she knew so intimately, and her affection for her “own people.” She hoped to immortalize Cavendish in literature, as Jane Austen, the Brontës, and George Eliot had all done before her, writing of the areas that they, as women, knew best. She would anchor herself in her community, and create a history for a rural society already in rapid transition; just as Sir Walter Scott, James M. Barrie, and Charles Dickens had done from a male perspective.
In 1890s periodical literature she had read the essays of reformist women and reactionary men who took different sides on “The Woman Question.” She would record the lives of women and children on her beloved Island. “To dwell among my own people” and to write their story became her goal. Later, around 1920, she wrote fondly of them:
They live in a land where nature is neither grudging nor lavish; where faithful work is rewarded by competence and nobody is very rich and nobody very poor, where everybody knows all about everybody else, so there are few mysteries; … where the wonderful loveliness of circling sea and misty river and tree, fairy-haunted woods is all around you; where the Shorter Catechism is not out of date; where there are still to be found real grandmothers and genuine old maid aunts; where the sane, simple, wholesome pleasures of life have not lost their tang; where you are born into a certain political party and live and die in it; where it is still thought a great feather in a family’s cap if it has a minister among its boys; where it is safer to commit murder than to be caught without three kinds of cake when company comes to tea; where loyalty and upright dealing and kindness of heart and a sense of responsibility and a glint of humour and a little decent reserve—real solvents of any and all problems if given a fair trial—still flower freely.… Such are my people.62
After Maud moved back home to Cavendish in May 1898, she literally wrote “with a passion.” She sent out floods of stories and poems, and when many of them came back, she simply sent them to other magazines. Her persistence and diligence paid off, and the acceptances grew steadily.
At this same time, she experienced more turbulence in her personal life. Her sense of isolation from her own age group once again began to trouble her. On January 16, 1900, she received another devastating telegram: “Hugh J. Montgomery died to-day. Pneumonia. Peacefully happy and painless death.”
Maud was paralyzed. She did not write about her father’s death in her diary until May 1, 1900, when sunshine had started to coax life back into the landscape. Then she wrote about her feelings:
No words to describe how I felt! For weeks I only wished to die. The news was a thunderbolt from a clear sky. Only a short time before I had had a letter from him written in the best of health and spirits. The next was that brutal telegram.… How we loved each other! … We always remained near and dear in spirit.… Have you left your “little Maudie” all alone? That was not like you.63
But the urge to write returned eventually. The force of an upswinging mood comes vigorously through as she moves through her grief to eulogize her father, and then focuses on her own position: “Well, I must henceforth face the world alone. Let me see what my equipment for such a struggle is.” Then she enumerates: she has youth, a superficial education, three hundred dollars (her father left her two hundred in his will), no training for anything save teaching, and no influence. But she has “something else—my knack of scribbling.” Then a proud announcement: “Last year I made exactly ninety-six dollars and eighty-eight cents by my pen!”
Certainly her income from writing had been climbing. She kept account books, and she recorded her sales from writing. Collating the amounts she recorded in her financial ledgers (now in the University of Guelph Archives) with the listing of stories and poems in the Preliminary Bibliography of stories and poems compiled by Rea Wilmshurst, calculations indicate: $4 in 1895, $72 in 1896, $80 in 1897, $90 in 1898, $73 in 1899, $89 in 1900.
By 1900, after two years at home, writing constantly, she still was not doing much better financially than she had when teaching at Bideford in 1894–95. But there was an upward progression. She was feeling more free and cheerful, and, living at home, was able to keep what she made instead of paying it out for room and board.
In January 1901, she became depressed again. January was always a bad month for her, and the anniversary of her father’s death seems to have activated another bout of depression. Even the death of remote and aged Queen Victoria in 1901 felt like “a very decided shock.” When Maud’s old friend Edith England in Bideford became “a bundle of nerves” on the death of her father (who had paid for her education), Maud described this as “arrant nonsense.” A strange lapse of sympathy this is, coming from one who was often a bundle of nerves herself, especially when feeling vulnerable.
As always, Maud recovered as the weather warmed and she could get out to garden and walk. During the summer of 1901 she produced a sizeable number of stories and poems. A new Presbyterian church was being constructed, giving the whole community an uplift. Maud ended the summer in such a good frame of mind that she took the initiative of planning a trip to Halifax to see the September Exhibition.
Hearing of this plan, Lottie Shatford, one of Maud’s acquaintances from Dalhousie who now worked for the Halifax Echo and knew that they needed a proofreader over the winter, recommended Maud to the editor. Maud accepted the job, and arranged for her Uncle John F. Macneill’s eldest son Prescott to stay in the Cavendish house with her grandmother. Her “visit” to Halifax turned into an extended stay from September 1901 to June 1902.
Experience in a newspaper would seem useful for someone wanting to be a writer. Furthermore, Maud was paid five dollars a week, more than she had made in teaching. It turned out that she could find time to continue writing, often while actually working in the Echo office. She wrote a series of bright news articles, mostly for the women’s pages of the Echo, which was the evening edition of the Chronicle. During her nine months in Halifax, Maud published steadily: twenty-two poems for a total of $67, and seventeen stories for a total of $123—a grand total of $190. In the same period she made about $180 in salary. She had made more by her pen than by her newspaper work.
In spite of this success, she again suffered from an episode of depression in January. She now knew there was something wrong with her that was independent of location. In Belmont, she had been able to blame the dreary company and a cold, bleak landscape. But in Halifax, in the middle of a humming newspaper office, depression again robbed her of all forms of pleasure and made her life hellish for six weeks. In her diary, she dismissed Lottie Shatford, the friend who had obtained the job for her, as not being “a kindred spirit.”
When she was “down” she felt that she had to pretend to be her fun-loving self. This was a terrible struggle, and she began seeing herself as wearing a “mask of gaiety.” Another pervasive reading of her life took hold: the idea of the double self, one face for the public world, and a very different face in private.64 Maud realized that it was easier to conceal her moods in the privacy of her own home than in a newspaper office. And living in rooming houses with a grungy view (at 23 Church Street, and then later at 25 Morris Street) was hardly the same as living in beautiful Cavendish. Moreover, there were problems brewing at home between her grandmother and Prescott.
Maud had suffered such excruciating homesickness that when she was offered the option of keeping her job at the Echo, after a summer break, she declined. Instead, she returned home as eagerly and precipitously as she had left. She knew that her grandmother truly needed her now. Predictably, her Grandmother had fared poorly with Prescott, a selfish lad with his father’s personality. Prescott, twenty-two, wanted to marry; and he needed a house.
More trouble was on the horizon in the wake of Alexander’s “foolish” will. John F. decided to claim the house, given that the will had not specified Lucy Macneill’s residence in it for the rest of her life. John F. saw no reason why his mother could not do what a widow often did, which was to go to live with a married child—not with him, but with daughter Annie at the Campbell farm, or with Emily, now a widow with a partly grown family at Malpeque.
There was only one problem: Lucy Macneill did not want to be pushed out of her own home in which she had raised all her children. She was a very respected member of the community and the church. She also wanted to provide a home for Maud.
Maud knew that it would be more difficult for her uncle to claim the house if she were living there with her grandmother. Maud was a formidable opponent in any battle. And, as far as clan battles went, this was to be an epic one. Maud and her grandmother eventually won, but the atmosphere was poisoned between Grandmother Macneill and her son for the rest of their lives. John F. was so angry that he ceased speaking to his mother and Maud.
Meanwhile, Maud again settled into her grandmother’s methodical routine. By walking through old haunts she revived childhood memories; talking to old friends (even those she had outgrown intellectually), she felt the comfort of shared experience. In 1902, a contact in Philadelphia named Miriam Zieber, who wanted to create a literary club of pen-friends, put her in touch with two other writers. One was Ephraim Weber (1870–1956), an Alberta teacher, writer, and homesteader, with whom Maud began a lifelong correspondence. The next year she would begin a similar one with George Boyd MacMillan (1880–1952), who became a professional journalist with the Alloa Journal in Scotland. Maud quickly dropped the uninteresting Miss Zieber, but stayed in touch with each of the two men, gaining a sense of connection with other professionals. These pen-pals were stimulating and sympathetic intellectual companions who made no emotional demands on her.
Life at home with her aging grandmother picked up when a new teacher, named Nora Lefurgey, came to the Cavendish school in the fall of 1902. Unlike Lottie Shatford, Nora was a “kindred spirit,” sharing intellectual interests and values. Nora was a reader with an excellent memory, and, like Maud, she loved to quote poetry and favourite passages from writers like Scott, Burns, Wordsworth, and others. Nora possessed a strong and irrepressibly positive life force, and she energized those around her—just what Maud needed. They became such fast friends that in January 1903 Nora moved from the John Laird house, where she was boarding, to live with Maud and her grandmother.
Maud and Nora began a joint diary in February. In these diaries, like two giddy, adolescent girls, they tease each other about potential suitors. In fact, most of the young men in Cavendish who had not inherited farms, but who had any ambition and energy, had already left the Island to seek their fortunes. Maud and Nora accused each other of chasing those who remained. It is strange to compare this shared diary—silly and shallow—with some of Maud’s lugubrious entries in her private journal of the same period. It is stranger still to compare them with the polished but lighthearted fiction and poems Maud was steadily publishing through this period.
The joint diary, for all its affected silliness, at times gives a better sense of what was happening in the community in 1903 than Maud’s journal does. On May 17, Maud wrote:
All this week I have simply had a fiendish cold. Nora has pretended to have one, too, and made it an excuse not to go to prayer-meeting Thursday night. But I went for I wanted to get a good look at our new “supply.” Who knows but that he is the “coming man.”
On June 21, she wrote again in an exaggerated tone:
This morning we had a Highlander to preach for us and he was “chust lovely” and all the girls got stuck on him. My heart pitty-patted so that I could hardly play the hymns. It’s weak yet so I shall stop short.
The young “Highlander” was named Ewan Macdonald. When this unattached young minister “preached for the call” to fill an empty pulpit, every unmarried young woman in the area took interest. To marry a minister was to marry very well indeed. As the most educated person in a rural community, the minister had instant respect and status. Ewan Macdonald’s name would appear only once again in Maud’s journals before 1906. But the record of Maud’s publications shows that with the appearance of this new minister, she began to ramp up energy in her professional writing.
Nora finished her teaching in late July and left Cavendish for good. On September 1, 1903, the thirty-four-year-old Reverend Ewan Macdonald was inducted as minister in the Cavendish church. Maud does not even mention this event in her journal, although the entire community would have turned out for the occasion. Ewan was installed by his acquaintance from Pine Hill Seminary, the Reverend Edwin Smith, an exceptionally handsome and gifted (and newly married) minister.
Also attending the induction was a young man who refused to get out of Maud’s life: her cousin and former fiancé, the Reverend Edwin Simpson, now himself a Baptist minister. He remarked to Maud that Ewan looked like a “boy whose mother had told him to put on his best suit” for the occasion, a comment that infuriated Maud (October 12, 1906). Ed was perhaps hoping to show how much Maud had lost when she rejected his suit; he kept turning up in Cavendish, visiting, preaching, or attending social occasions such as this induction service. However, each additional contact only repulsed Maud more.