As her honeymoon in Scotland and England drew to a close, Maud’s mind was arranging furniture in the Leaskdale manse. She was almost thirty-seven, and she wanted to feel settled in her very own place. She had felt unwanted in a succession of homes—Aunt Emily Montgomery’s in Malpeque, her father’s in Prince Albert, and even her own home in Cavendish, after she had become old enough to understand that she could live there only until her grandparents died. Her insecurity had been intensified during her grandfather’s declining years, and again after his death when her Uncle John F. Macneill attempted to claim the house. It is no wonder that longing for a home is a major theme in Anne of Green Gables and other novels. Anne Shirley’s ongoing desire is to be “of a place,” to find a permanent home where she feels wanted and secure. Maud wanted more than anything to be permanently settled as mistress of her own home and the mother of a happy family.
Throughout her honeymoon, Maud had been searching for decorations for her new home. She particularly wanted spotted china dogs like those she had admired as a child in Grandfather Montgomery’s Park Corner house. She found two sets of dogs and bought both. Her favourites were the two larger ones, antique Staffordshire china, with gold spots. She planned for them to reign over the hearth, in her mind a hallowed space in any home. She named them “Gog” and “Magog.”
There was a touch of waggish irreverence in their naming. In the Bible, Gog and Magog are the two evil kings of the north who attack the kingdom of Israel. Led by Satan himself, they fight against God. There is no record of what Ewan thought of these imaginative names in a Presbyterian manse. The manse, as it turned out, had no hearth, so Gog and Magog stood guard by Maud’s bookcase, instead. Perhaps she saw the dogs as protecting her corner of the room against too much theology.
A woman could prove she was refined, a cut above the “common herd,” if her home was attractively appointed. Most women in Maud’s era lived their lives predominantly in their homes, with little real power outside them. The decoration of their house—their one sphere of influence—was a major focus, satisfying their aesthetic needs. In a society not yet driven by consumerism, there was little money available for decorative frills in the home. Young women from cultured families used their leisure time to learn needlework and other artistic skills. Magazines were available to them in the new world of print culture: new ideas and fashions, patterns, and materials to order. For more than twenty years, Maud had been laying up her handmade items in her hope chest: crazy quilts, knitted afghans, fancy pillows, crocheted antimacassars and doilies, and fancy embroidered linens. (Much of this survives in the University of Guelph Archives, and Maud’s largest crazy quilt is in the Campbell house in Park Corner.)
Maud was in an unusual situation: her hope chest was full, but she also had her own royalty money to spend on purchasing more substantial items. She intended to buy fine china and silver, nice furniture, and to live in style, after a decade spent in a deteriorating farmhouse. Her future home might not be as big and elegant as “Page Court,” but it would be as impressive as taste would allow in a Presbyterian manse in the Ontario countryside.
Her first view of the manse, however, was somewhat disappointing. Built of pale-yellow Ontario brick, in a common L-style that she considered ugly, it was far from ideal. In addition to the absence of a fireplace and hearth, there was no indoor bathroom and toilet (though this was not unusual for the era). Another problem was that the manse was not in “move in” condition. She wanted to paint the worn floors and do some redecoration. She and Ewan had to board next door, where Ewan had lived for the past year, with two elderly spinsters. Although these two women might have “delighted Dickens,” as Maud noted, they were overly solicitous, unsophisticated, and extremely curious about the minister’s new wife.
Ewan preached on Sunday, October 1, 1911, the morning after they arrived from their honeymoon. A church reception was held the following Tuesday for the newlyweds; it was widely known in the congregation, of course, that their diffident minister had married the famous “L. M. Montgomery,” and this was a focus of immense local interest. The Uxbridge Journal reported that:
Despite torrential rain the Leaskdale church was filled to capacity Tuesday night to welcome the Rev. Ewen [sic] Macdonald and his bride, the well known writer, Miss Montgomery of Prince Edward Island. Supper was served in the basement with such opportunity for social chat and pleasantry that it was after nine o’clock before people went upstairs.… Mr. Macdonald has already won a firm hold of the people by his manly character, sound judgement and loving zeal in his high calling. With his gifted and charming wife Leaskdale may call herself happy.1
A few days later, even though the house was not quite ready and the new furniture had not arrived from Toronto, the Macdonalds moved in, sleeping on the floor on feather cushions—anything to be out of earshot of the curious old maids. On October 24, they “really” moved in. Maud had had all the wooden floors painted dark tree-green, rather than the traditional grey. Her favourite wallpaper pattern was always one with sprigs of green ferns. She described each room of the house lovingly in her diary and pasted in photographs of the furniture, the family heirlooms, and her own household “gods,” feeling that she had given her home class, in spite of its plainness.
Upstairs were five rooms: in the master bedroom she installed pearl-grey furniture, set off by a crimson rug. A second bedroom was decorated in pink with white furniture, and the third in blue with fancy Circassian walnut. A fourth room was allocated for storage, and a fifth set aside for a maid. The large landing at the top of the stairs was set up as Maud’s sewing area.
The first floor held the kitchen, the dining room, the library, and parlour. The dining room was awkward, containing an ugly stovepipe, and there was little space for her new sideboard. It was a poor location for entertaining, but handy to the kitchen at the back of the house. The parlour was brightened by creamy-yellow wallpaper and enriched with green brocade drapes, a moss-green rug, furniture in a light Hepplewhite design, and a small bookcase guarded by Gog and Magog.
Her most treasured family heirloom was the “Woolner jug,” which she used to hold potpourri. This decorative jug, brought by Maud’s great-grandmother from England to Canada, had been filled with blackcurrant jam made from her English garden. Later, the jug’s function was to hold cream—and for Maud’s grandfather to entertain visitors with stories about its history. This prized object now provided a link to Maud’s distinguished ancestors, showing that she came from a “family with traditions.” She placed the jug on a small curved table to catch visitors’ attention, which would often lead to her telling its story.2
Because this was a minister’s house, it contained a library. Ewan’s library was unusual in that it was shared with a working novelist. For the first time in her life, Maud had bookcases for all her books as well as a new desk, full of cubbyholes, where she could store her writing utensils. Above this desk she hung copies of the paintings of “Anne,” “Kilmeny,” and “The Story Girl” that had decorated the covers of her books. On the other walls hung enlarged and tinted photos of “Lovers’ Lane” and other Cavendish scenes. It was in this room that she would get back to work—but not until the new year.
A minister and his wife were expected to visit in all the homes of parishioners, and to receive in their own. On October 11, 1911, Maud advertised in the “Personals” column of the Uxbridge Journal:
Mrs. E. Macdonald will be at home at the Manse, Leaskdale, on the afternoon and evening of Thursday, Nov. 2 and Friday, Nov. 3, and thereafter in the afternoon and evening of Tuesday each week.
Maud liked the look of Leaskdale. She described it to George MacMillan as “a very pretty country place—would be almost as pretty as Cavendish if it had the sea …” (65). Leaskdale was a tiny village—a grouping of some ten to twelve houses, with a church, blacksmith, general store, and a mechanic’s garage. The church was small, but it was an attractive red-brick structure. It was located partway up a hill, across the road from the manse. The surrounding fertile farmland held beautiful rolling hills and forests reminiscent of Prince Edward Island. Beyond Leaskdale proper there were small rivers and lakes, in addition to other locations with red soil (also like that in Prince Edward Island). Seven miles to the south lay Uxbridge, with a rail connection to Toronto.
Maud was not as pleased when describing her husband’s parishioners. She asked her diary: “Is this the kind of people I must live among?” (September 24, 1911). She had fondly cherished the eccentricities of all her Cavendish kinfolk back home, but was less tolerant of the same kind of people in Leaskdale. After receiving in her home for the first time, she wrote: “To all I try to be courteous, tactful and considerate, and most of them I like superficially. But the gates of my soul are barred against them. They do not have the key” (October 24, 1911). This was the initial reaction of a very private woman, in whom reserve was an instinctive and protective mechanism against judgmental clansmen. She had enjoyed her fame as a writer in a community where she was already known, but now it made her the object of curious and prying eyes among strangers. What Ewan’s parishioners actually met in Maud, however, was a friendly, witty, gracious, and refined woman with a poised social presence. They took her into their hearts, and in time she grew very fond of most of them.
Maud knew how important it was for a minister’s wife to work with her husband. As Mrs. Lynde in Anne of Green Gables remarks, “sound doctrine in the man and good house-keeping in the woman make an ideal combination for a minister’s family.” But as an unpaid helper, the minister’s wife was also expected to provide leadership for women’s activities in the church. Men may have done the preaching and decision-making, but women were the real workers, organizing fundraising events; preparing decorations and refreshments for social events, meetings, and funerals; gathering or making all the items to be sent to foreign missions; and helping those in the community who were sick or the victims of bad luck.
Leaskdale women were delighted to discover that the famous “L. M. Montgomery” was accessible, prepared to help in all these activities. She could give fascinating talks on books, could recite dramatic poems and passages for fundraising church programs, and was a superb cook and housekeeper. She quickly gained their respect. Only a month after Maud’s arrival as a new bride in Leaskdale, the Macdonalds began working with the Young People’s Guild in the church. On November 16, 1911, the social part of the program included a duet, a dialogue, a reading by “Mrs. Macdonald,” and ended with a floral contest and refreshments. Maud’s intent was to give young people practice in conducting these meetings and performing in them. She made fun out of learning social graces and other skills in a public forum.3
When Maud moved to Leaskdale, she energized the entire community. She had more than professional elocutionary skills; she was a natural entertainer who loved telling stories and jokes. She was also skilled at drawing others out. Her smile was warm and encompassing. Her chit-chat brightened every social occasion, at church or in homes. Years later, one of the parishioners would remember that “her conversation was frequently pointed up with, ‘That reminds me’ and off she would go with some ‘yarn’ for there was always a funny side to things. Because she was witty and gay, young and old enjoyed her company. Rarely one missed hearing some tale about her beloved Island or its people.”4
She was soon elected to official positions, given her organizational skills and other abilities. She noted in her diary that the women’s mission society had three different branches: the Foreign Missions (for China, India, etc.), the Home Missions (for the Canadian west and north, among native peoples), and the Missions Band (organized to involve young children in mission-mindedness). Maud had some private reservations about the proselytizing aspects of missions, but approved strongly of their medical and educational functions. She was expected to take a leadership role in all aspects of the meetings (which consisted of hymn-singing, standard prayers, business reports, the reading of a chapter from a missionary’s often dull memoirs, another hymn, collection, and refreshments). None of the members guessed that she complained in her private diary about these time-consuming meetings. But she did enjoy “making things go” and she quickly grew into her new role.
There was soon an excuse to slow down her busy pace: in early November, she discovered that she was pregnant. One of her main reasons for marrying had been to have children. Nearly thirty-seven, she was thrilled that a baby was coming.
At the end of November, there was more happiness. Daffy, her cat, had been shipped from Prince Edward Island. She had not intended to bring him, but she had found that she missed him too much. To her, a house without a cat was incomplete. Dehydrated and frightened after three days riding in a crate, Daffy was delighted to see his mistress again. He found more freedom in this home than he had in her grandmother’s house: he lay on Maud’s writing table as she wrote, on the dining table as she ate, on her lap or curled up beside her when she read, on her bed as she slept, and he even claimed his very own chair in the parlour.
Despite her pleasure in her new home, Maud enjoyed escaping from Leaskdale for meetings in Toronto. On December 6, 1911, she accepted an invitation to a Canadian Women’s Press Club in Toronto, where she and Marian Keith (another novelist) were honoured at a reception. On December 7, Maud went to another reception at the National Club and stayed at Marjory MacMurchy’s home for the night.
The well-connected Marjory MacMurchy was immensely helpful to Maud in providing an entrance into Toronto society; among other things, she arranged for Maud to give talks to organizations and literary groups. Marjory was a journalist, an occasional novelist (with a series of books between 1916 and 1920), a social activist, a crusader for women’s and children’s rights, an early member of P.E.N., and the long-time president of the Canadian Women’s Press Club.5 Marjory had first known Maud as a member of the executive of the Women’s Press Club in the Atlantic region. On a visit to the Island in 1910, she had interviewed and written an article on the best-selling author of Anne of Green Gables. Marjory had then welcomed Maud and Ewan upon their arrival in Toronto following their honeymoon. Marjory’s extended family of jurists, doctors, teachers, and activists were important members of the Toronto elite, and through Marjory, Maud learned who was important in the Toronto cultural, business, and social worlds, and she began to move among them.6 Yet, Maud’s entree into Toronto’s cultural life meant that she had to put extra effort into her church work at home, in order to remain “visible” in the performance of her duties as a minister’s wife. And getting to Toronto—by horse and buggy over dirt roads to Uxbridge, and then by train—took considerable planning and effort.
She soon began to get a sense of the families in Leaskdale. Sober, intelligent, and successful farmers, they shared the Scots-Presbyterians work ethic Maud knew so well from Prince Edward Island. Mr. and Mrs. George Leask—descendants of the Scottish family for whom the village was named—lived in a large and impressive red-brick house near the manse.7 Other substantial houses and farms belonged to members of the Mustard family, Hugh and James. Their forebears had also come from Scotland, settling in Scott Township in 1832; their descendants would become prominent doctors, educators, theologians, and nurses.8 Ten or twelve other families held property on the grid of side roads around the village: the Shiers, Lyons, Lapps, Cooks, Colwells, and others.
Ewan’s parish was a double charge: Leaskdale and Zephyr. The small village of Zephyr was some eleven miles away—a long trip with a horse and open buggy when the rutted dirt roads were either muddy, dusty, or icy, or in a sleigh in winter when the snow was blowing in streaks across the flat, icy fields. Most members of the Zephyr congregation were also successful and sober people. But the church, a modest frame structure built in 1881, was beleaguered by several troublesome families, truculent members who often caused friction. Ewan’s amiable tact would be invaluable. In Zephyr, there was a Methodist church as well as the Presbyterian one, and there was some antagonism between them.9 Since churches were the main social organization—and organizing force—in a community, the two denominations in Zephyr created a less unified community than in Leaskdale.
The Macdonalds spent their first Christmas dinner at the home of the Hugh Mustard family. The gathering included Hugh’s brother, the Reverend John A. Mustard, who was visiting with his wife and son. By a strange twist of fate, this was the same “Mr. Mustard” who years earlier had been Maud’s teacher in Prince Albert. John Mustard, so disparaged as a hapless suitor in Maud’s early diary, was now an exceptionally successful minister in Toronto. He was seven years older than Maud and three years older than Ewan. He was trim, fit, robust, and distinguished-looking (his thick black hair had turned a striking silver-white). Maud’s comments in her private diary are less than kind about the “same slow John Mustard” who, she says, still presents commonplace incidents as “awfully funny.” She adds with a pinch of mischief that his jolly wife could “talk enough for two” and that, though pretty, she is very “fat.”10
The Macdonalds had their own guests at Christmas, too, including Maud’s dearly loved cousin Frede, now finishing her degree at Macdonald College near Montreal. To be equitable, Frede’s sister Stella had also been invited.
Stella Campbell was now, at thirty-two, an aging “spinster.” Most of her siblings at Park Corner had left, but Stella was forced to live on in her childhood home—which she would have left in a flash if she had been able to find a man willing to marry her. Her unhappiness manifested itself in temper-tantrums, sulks, bossiness, hypochondria, and rudeness. Although Stella could be fun when in a good mood, she was generally unhappy, and her noisy, aggressive presence could quickly fill a household with tension. She and her brother George fought constantly, and George had a temper as explosive as Stella’s own. Stella often pushed George beyond his limits: he would roar angrily out of his home, and return in an even worse temper. Stella took out her frustrations on her mother (Maud’s beloved Aunt Annie) and Ella (George’s pretty and gentle wife).
Maud hoped that an extended trip to Ontario at Christmas might give Park Corner some peace, and perhaps Stella a new lease on life. In hopes of promoting romance, Maud also invited an old beau of Stella’s—Irving Howatt, now a barrister in the west (Edmonton)—to visit Leaskdale over Christmas. (Maud does not mention this in her journals. The romance did not work out, despite Maud’s efforts to promote it by lending large amounts of money to Stella, some of which Stella then funnelled to Irving Howatt in unsecured loans.) After Christmas, Stella asked Maud if she could stay the entire winter. Maud, caught off guard, was appalled, but she felt unable to face a row with her cousin. With apprehension, she acquiesced—but persuaded Frede to speak to Stella beforehand on the proper behaviour expected in someone else’s house. Maud did need a housekeeper now that she was pregnant as well as very busy. She offered Stella a salary for housework, hoping that remuneration would signal to Stella that she “should not presume too much.” As Maud put it, “I made a virtue of necessity and hoped against hope” (September 22, 1912).
Maud hoped in vain. Stella became a tyrant. It was not long before she grew impossibly bossy, insulting Ewan and embarrassing Maud before the parishioners. (Remembering Stella years later, Leaskdale old-timers recalled discreetly that people did not warm to her as they had to her sister, Frede.)
But Stella, hard-working and capable, did the cooking and housekeeping. Food preparation was a full-time job in itself, and then there was the washing, ironing, and housekeeping when that was done. Stella’s help was valuable. The Macdonalds fetched their fresh milk and cream daily from the Leasks, across the road, and churned their own butter. Maud kept her own hens for eggs and dressed chickens for meat. In the Leaskdale community, there was a “beef ring” in which a different farmer would slaughter each week and distribute fresh meat to each family in the ring, but generally meats had to be canned, pickled, salted, dried, or cured in smokehouses, and then reconstituted in recipes. Maud had salted herring shipped up from Prince Edward Island each year. Making fresh bread was a daily chore.
Whatever her other faults, Stella was a very good cook, like all the Campbells. She made excellent desserts, the one thing easy to vary in family menus: Maud’s handwritten recipe book contained pages and pages of cookies, cakes, and pies, balanced by only a few recipes for meats or vegetables. Houses were very cold then, lacking insulation, and people needed energy from food to keep warm. Even the Macdonalds’ carrots were candied. One maid remembered Ewan saying to his wife quite often: “Maudie, when are you going to make some plum pudding?” Like most Scots, the Macdonalds always had cooked oatmeal for breakfast, often with bacon and eggs. The Macdonald household indulged in one luxury many others did not: on their cereal they put thick, fresh cream. What they did not use, they churned into butter. (Generally, farmwives saved most of their cream to sell.) Stella grew “fat as a seal.” Despite her pregnancy, Maud grew thinner.
Maud planned her meals and housework each weekend, and gave Stella the daily schedule a week in advance, as she would do with all her maids. (Her first maid, Lily Reid, recalled being handed a weekly schedule of “washing on Monday, ironing on Tuesday, Wednesday for baking and extras, Thursday for upstairs cleaning, Friday for downstairs, and Saturday to make all preparations for Sunday.”) Washing was done either on a washboard, or in a machine with a paddle that was manually agitated, and it was hung to dry on an outside line, even in the freezing cold. Most women ironed on kitchen tables padded with blankets, but Maud was more modern and bought an ironing board. Two irons were kept in rotation, one heating on the wood-fuelled cook stove while the other was in use. Ironing required extreme care, since an overheated iron would scorch and instantly ruin valuable clothes or linens, especially when cotton was starched to give it more body.
Stella “is an odd compound,” Maud reflected: “She would work her fingers to the bone for you, complaining bitterly of it all the time and furiously resentful if she is not allowed to do it. She insults and derides you to your face, but behind your back she is the most loyal of friends and would defend you against the world. But everyone who ever has to live with her will be miserable—there is no doubt of that” (September 22, 1912).
Having a cousin as helper seemed normal to the community women, since they could see that Maud spent much time in church activities. The extra help also meant that Maud could return to writing. Every morning she shut herself in the library and worked for two hours. She had never been quite as busy as she was now. In January 1912 she resumed work on Chronicles of Avonlea. Her publisher, L. C. Page, was hounding her for more “Anne,” so she gathered a group of stories she had written before her marriage, changed their setting to that of “Avonlea,” and brought “Anne” in as a spectator, commentator, or minor actor in each story. She cobbled these stories together and sent a group of them to the publishing company in late March to make a selection of the best. They returned their selection and she signed a contract on April 26, 1912; the book was in print in late June, just three months later. (She did not realize at the time that Page had retyped and retained copies of the extra stories rejected for this volume, something that would cause much trouble later on.)
In January 1912 Maud also found time to catch up with writing in her old diary, abandoned, except for rough notes, at the time of her grandmother’s death. Now she wrote out a long, retrospective entry on her final days in Cavendish, giving her comments on most of the people there, her marriage and honeymoon, and her arrival in Leaskdale. She also found time to maintain her correspondence with her long-time pen-pals, George Boyd MacMillan and Ephraim Weber, whose lively, intelligent letters helped fill an intellectual void that her husband and community did not.
When Maud and Ewan went on their expected rounds that winter, taking evening tea in parishioners’ homes, she always carried her bag of needlework. She could knit and crochet, without even watching her flying fingers. Her skills at “fancy-work” were much admired by the farmwives, themselves adept at basic needlework. To these women, she was “Mrs. Macdonald,” and she seemed to be one of them. Her life as a world-famous writer was largely out of sight.
In February 1912, however, it was as “L. M. Montgomery” that Maud was invited to the Hypatia Club in the nearby town of Uxbridge. This group had been formed in 1907 by seven women (Mrs. Beal, Mrs. Sharpe, Mrs. Gould, Mrs. Urquhart, Mrs. Vickers, Mrs. Willis, and Mrs. Chinn) to discuss books and authors. The meeting was held at the home of Mrs. I. J. Gould. Maud and Mrs. MacGregor (the writer “Marian Keith”) were invited as honoured authors. A newspaper write-up of this February 1912 meeting praised a “Club Magazine” compiled on the occasion and read by Dr. Horace Bascom, a local medical doctor. This “showed much talent on the part of the contributors,” with news items, health notes, advertisements, and jokes, but the “chief interest was centred in the short stories written especially for it by the authoresses. The object of the Club is to promote a study of English Literature and they are fortunate in having associated with them, as a member, Mrs. McDonald [sic] of Leaskdale,” continued the newspaper. The Hypatia Club would be a great pleasure to Maud during her fifteen years at Leaskdale, and she contributed innumerable items to their program.11
In March 1912, Maud read a paper on Longfellow’s “Attitude to the Sea” at the Zephyr Presbyterian Guild.12 Two days before that, she and Ewan had been to the Zephyr Women’s Christian Temperance Union meeting. In May she gave them a lengthy paper on Ralph Connor’s The Sky Pilot.
Maud was in her element as mistress of the manse in Leaskdale and as literary celebrity in the larger communities of Uxbridge and Toronto. Little time elapsed between finishing Chronicles of Avonlea in March and starting The Golden Road on April 30, 1912. In this sequel to The Story Girl, Maud again modelled the teller of tales on herself, though declaring that many of the stories were ones she had heard from her Great-Aunt Mary Macneill Lawson, now eighty-nine years old. (Mary Lawson would die in October 1912.)13
Looking back at her youth with the detachment of distance, Maud began to realize what a rich childhood she had enjoyed, growing up in a unique rural community with a strong oral culture. She knew that with developments in communication and transportation the sense of safe isolation, which Cavendish had retained, was fast disappearing. Maud continued writing this nostalgic story of childhood in Prince Edward Island through her pregnancy. Maud felt overstretched at times, but she had an extraordinary ability to compartmentalize her life. She made a schedule for her writing every morning, and kept faithfully to it. When things became too oppressive, she drew on her ability to “shut the door of my soul on the curiosity and ignorance by so many and retreat into a citadel of dear thoughts and beautiful imaginings” (April 4, 1912). No one guessed that when she re-emerged, refreshed and renewed, she found many of them tiresome.14
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, and most of all, listening to the purring of her cat Daffy. It was Maud’s basic nature to see the world as a luminous place, and she wrote glorious passages about it in her diary. When people wondered how she managed to do so much, she laughed that her cat rested for her.
In June 1912 the Leaskdale church celebrated its fiftieth year with a huge party and reunion—plenty of work for a minister’s wife, who was by then eight months pregnant. Attendance was so good that many could not fit into the church. A few days before her first baby was due, Maud read a paper on Paradise Lost at the Women’s Foreign Mission Association of the church. The first copies of Chronicles of Avonlea were in print by June 30, 1912. At this point, she was only a week from the delivery of her first baby.
Maud had worried that the quiet life with her grandmother in Cavendish would “unfit” her for any other kind of life. She found, on the contrary, that the busier she was, the happier she felt. With relief, she wrote that she had been free of nervous attacks the whole year. She was very contented, and by all accounts so was Ewan.
“It has always seemed to me that a childless marriage is a tragedy— especially in such a marriage as mine.… I want to have a child— something to link me with the future of my race,” Maud had confided to her diary on October 24, 1911. “I want to give a human soul a chance to live this wonderful life of ours. I want something of my very own—bone of my bone, flesh of my flesh, to love and cherish.” Reopening her diary on January 28, 1912, Maud Montgomery Macdonald wrote: “I am to be a mother. I cannot realize it. It seems to me so incredible—so wonderful—so utterly impossible as happening to me!”
But it was also frightening. She was a diminutive and delicate woman, halfway through her thirty-seventh year, at a time when childbirth could still threaten complications leading to death. (Statistics on mortality in childbirth in 1912 are not easily available, but by 1921 the rate had dropped to 419 deaths per 100,000 cases. By 2000, the rate was less than 1 in 100,000.) Planting her spring garden, Maud wondered if she would be lying “beneath the sod” when the next spring came around. Consequently, she hired a professional nurse recommended by Dr. Helen MacMurchy, Marjory’s sister, and she arranged for Dr. Horace Bascom of Uxbridge to attend the birth. Normally, experienced women from the community helped with childbirth, calling in a doctor only if there were complications (when it was sometimes too late). Maud’s preparations were unusual for the times. But she could afford it. In 1910, she had made $6,449, and $5,578 in 1911, from her books’ sales alone. (Compared to Ewan’s yearly salary of $900, this was a small fortune.)
On Sunday, July 7, 1912, just after twelve noon, baby Chester Cameron Macdonald was born, a fine, healthy baby. That Chester’s was an easy birth seemed a miracle, boding well. (Maud ascribed the ease of the birth to exercises she had been doing, as well as to a form of self-hypnosis she had been practising every night.) Motherhood brought her a new kind of joy, a pleasure beyond anything she had experienced. She had read about mothers failing to bond with their babies, and she worried that this might happen to her. After a good night’s rest following the easy delivery, and a momentary feeling of estrangement, her “whole being … [was] engulfed in a wave of love for that little blinking mite of humanity.”
Chester was all that a mother could have hoped for in a baby: he was sturdy, alert, and exceedingly cute. She watched him sleep, move, and coo to himself. She wrote rapturously about cuddling him. She described his shrieks when the nurse bathed him, until he learned it was not “a fatal affair.” She melted when he looked at her with an expression of “intelligent wonder” in his eyes, and she thrilled to the knowledge that the “little mind” was starting to develop:
I gaze at my child with an aching wonder as to what germs of thought and feeling and will and intellect are unfolding in that little soul. I can see what he is externally. I can see that he is plump and shapely and sturdy, with long-lashed dark blue eyes, chubby cheeks, lacking his father’s dimples but with dear wee waxen fingers and toes. But I cannot peep into that baby brain and discover what is hidden there. He is my child—“bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh”—but his little individuality is distinct from mine. He is the captain of his own little soul and must live his own life as we all do from the very cradle. (September 22, 1912)
Her journal entries describing her newborn are extremely moving: they capture the amazement a new mother feels over her first baby. “There is nothing on earth so unutterably sweet,” she wrote touchingly, “as a sleeping baby.” And Chester was a contented baby—again, a blessing in a first child.
Maud dismissed her earlier worries, which included a frightening dream at the time of Chester’s birth:
I dreamed that I wakened in the night, sat up, and looked over the footboard.… On the floor … lay a big empty black coffin, with a man standing at the foot and another at the head. As I fell back on the bed, overcome with the horror of the sight, the men lifted the coffin and laid it on my bed across my feet.… That dream haunted me. From that hour, I saw that hideous empty coffin waiting for me at the end of my months. (September 11, 1912)
All her life, Maud had had vivid dreams. She felt in them a psychic power, not uncommon in a Scottish culture that believed in “second sight.” She mulled over her dreams, believing that they sometimes foretold the future. She wrote off this dream, however, for Chester had not died, nor had she. But she did not forget the portentous black coffin associated with his birth.
Part of her joy over her new baby was in sharing it with Frede, who had come to Leaskdale to help after Chester’s birth. Frede stayed through the summer. Another bonding: Frede not only liked Ewan and had encouraged his and Maud’s courtship, but she also shared intensely in the baby-worship. With their similar outlooks on life, Frede and Maud together found fun in everything. Frede, like Maud, had the famed Macneill memory and could quote poetry for every occasion. They also composed poetry together, in high spirits. In the 1970s and 1980s, people still remembered how the whole Macdonald home rang with laughter when Frede was visiting—laughter shared by Ewan and anyone else present. It was a joyous household, aside from Stella’s presence. Still entrenched in the manse, it looked as if she might stay forever. She assumed a proprietary air with respect to Maud, Ewan, and the house. Ewan suffered in silence, unwilling to reply in kind to her bullying.
Frede and Maud conferred. Frede agreed to tell Stella how much she was needed at home, a lie that Stella somehow believed. Stella departed on August 21, 1912, and she was not missed. Frede, who had graduated as valedictorian from Macdonald College, was looking forward to her first job at Red Deer College in Alberta. She stayed on in Leaskdale until December 1912. After she left, Maud hired Lily Reid, a young widow from a nearby farm, to help with the housework.
The easygoing Ewan had been finding life with such a talented, vibrant, and energetic wife at times exhausting. In a house that was overrun with women—Maud, the nurse, Frede, Stella—he remained in the background, leaving all baby and child management to his wife. As Maud rhapsodized over her new baby, Ewan began to see that fatherhood could marginalize him further. When Maud departed for Toronto to visit friends in their first year, he felt a little too happily abandoned. As soon as Maud had recovered from childbirth, she went straight back to her writing. Ewan saw that she could block everything out when writing—everything except the baby, of course.
There were other pressures for Ewan. He began to sense that his powerhouse of a wife was hoping he would do well as a minister so that they could eventually move to a bigger community with a better manse, ideally in Toronto, where her book life was. He was annoyed when Maud received fan letters addressed to “L. M. Montgomery,” rather than to “Mrs. Ewan Macdonald.” (He once became testy over this, but later apologized.) According to the accounts given by the Macdonalds’ maids, however, during these initial years the manse was a happy household. These women remembered Maud and Ewan arguing “with spirit,” but the arguments were amicable, and sometimes just in fun. Maud did not write about this in her journals. Nor did she say, as the maids did, that she won all the arguments of any substance and, in the country phrase, she increasingly “wore the pants in the family.”
Maud continued to develop her connections with Toronto’s bustling literary society, usually under the aegis of Marjory MacMurchy. Marjory was not a true “kindred spirit”—she was too absorbed in her own multifaceted career to be a close friend—but she was happy to be the link between Maud and the Toronto book world. The staid colonial society of Toronto found Maud’s Prince Edward Island storytelling refreshing. She was greatly admired in literary circles as a native-grown Canadian talent with an international audience. (By this time, Anne of Green Gables had been translated into Polish, Dutch, and Swedish, as well as being sold throughout the English-speaking world.)
Maud’s polished refinement and her sparkling wit made her a favourite at Toronto social gatherings. At one private tea, Maud was herself the guest of honour in a group that included M. O. Hammond (she had already been in contact with him in his role as arts and literary editor and photographer at the Globe); the Venerable Archdeacon Cody (Henry John Cody, an Anglican canon who became Ontario’s minister of education and then president of the University of Toronto from 1932 to 1945); literary anthologist and gadfly John Garvin and his wife Katherine Hale (a minor novelist who had nonetheless climbed high in literary social circles); and several distinguished professors at the University of Toronto (all male). Maud was intrinsically reserved, and this slight shyness made her likeably modest and unassuming. But she was also very poised, and she could rise to occasions well. Toronto saw her as a fresh personality, at once quaint and sophisticated, dignified and unaffected.
The Toronto visits were, however, a decidedly solo venture. Ewan would have been totally out of his milieu in the Toronto literary world, even if he had wished to seek the social enticements of Toronto without appearing to neglect his congregation. And there was no doubt that Maud enjoyed her independent outings. Except in the periods when she was tied to her home with small, nursing babies, Maud could escape into another role in Toronto, enjoying her own celebrity, rather than deferring to her husband before his parishioners.
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In Leaskdale, Maud had far less access to community gossip, and this she missed. In the presence of their minister’s wife, women remained on their best behaviour and talked about “non-combustible” topics. In Cavendish, Maud had profited from the best location in the community for hearing local news—her grandparents’ home, with the post office in its kitchen. Here in Leaskdale, she was cut off from the gossip that had fed her fiction. She could not even make a confidential friend of any of her husband’s parishioners without arousing the jealousy of others. At Uxbridge, in the Hypatia Club, she found one new friend, Mary Beal (Mrs. Norman Beal). A gifted, socially prominent, and well-to-do woman, raised in Uxbridge, she was the daughter of one of the founding members of the club, but now lived in Toronto.
In February 1913, the Hypatia Club put on a dramatic presentation that followed a script they had used before. The “Goddess of Fame,” played by Mary Beal, summoned a series of women who acted out the parts of historical women who deserved the “laurel wreath of fame”: the Dowager Empress of China, Ruth (of the Bible), Laura Secord (Canadian heroine in the War of 1812), Helen of Troy, Jenny Lynd (the Swedish “nightingale”), Pandita Ramabai (female revivalist in India), Elizabeth Barrett Browning (poet), Mrs. Winsloe (who pleaded the merits of her soothing patent medicine for infants), Hypatia herself (as a Grecian oracle), Harriet Beecher Stowe, Marie Antoinette, Flora Macdonald (who saved the life of Bonnie Prince Charlie), Shakespeare’s “Portia,” “Madame Butterfly” from Puccini’s opera of that name, Queen Victoria, Miriam (of the Bible), Madame Emma Albani (Canadian opera singer), Florence Nightingale, Pauline Johnson (a famous half-native Canadian poet who performed on the stage, transforming herself from white to native), Miss Canada, and a generic “Mother.” Maud came as herself, along with “Anne of Green Gables.” The laurel crown was given to the generic, idealized “Mother,” who played, no doubt, the role of the Victorian “angel in the house.” The group raised $241 for library purchases that year.
For all such outings Maud could safely leave Chester in the care of Lily Reid, the manse’s maid since Stella’s departure. Lily’s two young children, Edith and Archie, were cared for by Lily’s mother.15
A daily stint of writing remained an inviolate part of Maud’s morning routine. By May 1913, she had finished The Golden Road, which picked up and continued the story of the King family and their friends. Its heroine, “the Story Girl,” continues to recount old folk tales and myths, sharing this role now with the “Awkward Man,” a dreamy recluse who is also a writer. In place of the hellfire sermons of the The Story Girl, Montgomery offers the equally terrifying experience of confronting a “witch,” old Peg Bowen. There are many echoes of Louisa May Alcott’s Little Women: sweet Cecily, like Alcott’s sweet Beth, will not live beyond the golden road of childhood.
A more personal echo appears at the climax, when Sara Stanley is reunited with her beloved father, absent since his daughter was eight years old. The motif recurs again later in Jane of Lantern Hill, marking Maud’s endless longing for her idealized father. Brown-bearded Blair Stanley in The Golden Road is described in terms that identify him with Hugh John.
Shortly after she finished The Golden Road in May 1913, Maud started work on her third “Anne” book. She was being urged by L. C. Page to produce more money-making “Anne” novels. The story of young college girls setting up house together and fully enjoying the warmth of friendship took her into a period of creative energy. The memories of Prince of Wales College days and the recent closeness with Frede furnished the tone for “Anne of Redmond,” later to be published as Anne of the Island.
When Chester was one year old, in July, Maud proudly took him to Prince Edward Island. Whenever she went home to visit on the Island, her arrival was major news—a striking contrast to her return from Prince Albert, when no one had bothered to meet her train. The papers reported her every movement on and about the Island, giving her a similar kind of attention to that received by Andrew Macphail. The adulation she received on the Island always recharged her. Although her life was now in Ontario, she felt that her roots would always be in the Island. She was now living through the happiest period of her life, right after Chester’s birth, with success in all areas of her professional and personal life. She was speaking the truth when she said, “I haven’t time to be because I have so much to do” (December 1, 1912).
As Maud worked feverishly on her next book, Ewan, too, showed a burst of energy. An ambitious plan to support a foreign missionary took possession of him. Many large parishes, Roman Catholic as well as Protestant, particularly urban ones, counted it a distinction to support the work of “their own missionary.” It gave the parish a rallying point, and in a pre-television era, letters from a good missionary stationed in India or some other still-exotic place made wonderful entertainment when read from the pulpit. Missionaries coming home on furlough brought incredible excitement if they were good speakers. A minister who obtained his congregation’s support for a missionary underlined his own success as a pastor. In autumn 1913, Ewan Macdonald began canvassing his parishioners, pressing them to support a missionary. The necessary amount was $1,200 a year, more than Ewan’s own salary.
Maud disapproved of Ewan’s plan. She knew that cash was never a plentiful commodity, even on a successful farm. Nor did industrious Scots farmers really like being parted from too much of their hard-earned money, sympathetic as they might be to redeeming “heathens” in foreign parts. Maud felt this enterprise would be doomed to failure, and she told Ewan so. But Ewan was stubborn, and determined to assert himself in this instance.
By 1914, Ewan had engaged a young ministry student, Stuart Forbes, B.A., to travel to Honan, China. Ewan (with Maud’s help) gave considerable money to support his missionary. They also gave another $1,100 for the building fund of Knox College, also clearly coming from Maud’s funds, since Ewan’s salary was only $900 that year.
Maud must have hoped that the ambition she had witnessed in Ewan’s early days in PEI was returning, even if she disapproved of the missionary project. She had witnessed temporary bursts of energy before: for example, when Ewan spurred the improvement of the Cavendish graveyard (an act that endeared him to the community), and when he preached in two large Charlottetown churches just before he left for Scotland. He could be very effective at these times. (In fact, she would have been impressed by the account of his preaching in these prestigious churches in the Examiner, October 6, 1906, right before she accepted his proposal on October 12, 1906.)
Maud herself had embarked on a new career as a riveting platform speaker. On October 13, 1913, under the auspices of the Women’s Canadian Club, she addressed eight hundred women in Forrester’s Hall, Toronto, on the subject of Prince Edward Island. All the major Toronto newspapers carried accounts of “Mrs. Macdonald” and her speech. She copied one of these into her diary entry of November 1, 1913, obviously pleased with its characterizations:
There is something quaint and taking in her whole personality. She is quiet, with a great deal of reserve force and strength. Few writers impress one to the same degree with the conviction that she lives in a mental world of her own where Anne and Kilmeny and the Story Girl and other characters as yet unknown to her readers pursue adventures of absorbing interest. Mrs. Macdonald has a voice of admirable carrying quality.… One of the many favourable comments heard on every hand was to the effect that she was absolutely natural and unaffected.
She did not copy two other revealing parts of the journalists’ comments. First, on her positive influence on her audience:
The audience was as interesting in its own way as the speaker. As those listening women were drawn more closely into the mould of the speaker, as they became informed by her insistence on everything that is normal and happy and beautiful in life, their faces changed … to the look that people wear when they are living again their happiest moments.… They smiled and laughed and applauded and to all intents and purposes were girls again in their old homes. It is indeed a magical power to be able to call back all that is wholesome and lovely and unforgettable in one’s childhood and this magical gift is Mrs. Macdonald’s. The loveliness of simplicity, the greatness that is fostered in quiet lives was the subject of her address. But it was not delivered in abstract or lofty terms. It was told as a story should be told without much comment and the audience was left to find the lesson.
Second, on her topic:
The first part of the address was a lyrical, passionate praise of Prince Edward Island.… This was no ordinary geographical traveller’s tale of a familiar country, but a lover’s praise of a heart’s country. As she piled sentence on sentence to explain to inland folk the mystery and the beauty and the love of the sea, it began to be plain that those who heard this address perhaps would never forget it.16
Maud’s new acquaintances in Toronto sent her these glowing newspaper accounts. She was secretly delighted, but already she was noticing that Ewan did not share the same pleasure in her success. What did Ewan feel like when he delivered weekly sermons in front of a wife who, after her first formal public address ever—to eight hundred people in Toronto—had received rave reviews in at least seven Toronto newspapers? Ewan had been taught to believe that all gifts came from God; why, he must have brooded, did he not have speaking powers equal to those of his wife if God wanted him to succeed in the ministry? Was God set against him? He had not anticipated what it would be like to live with such a gifted and articulate wife. He could not fault Maud as a wife and helpmeet in his ministry, but her extraordinary abilities somehow diminished his. Old-timers remembering Ewan in the late 1970s all used the same term to describe him: he was “deep,” they said. He began brooding, keeping his feelings and thoughts to himself, and a number of people noticed this.
Maud was caught up in her own success, and she confided in her private diary: “I really believe I would like very much to live in a place like Toronto— there I could have some intellectual companionship, have access to good music, drama and art, and some little real social life. I have no social life here—none at all, not even as much as I had in Cavendish” (November 1, 1913). There was reason to hope that Ewan might advance up the clerical ladder, just as John Mustard had.
In November 1913, Maud found that she was pregnant again. Delighted, she hoped for a girl. This pregnancy was as difficult as the first had been easy. Constant nausea alternated with long stretches of compete mental lethargy. She recalled with alarm the severe depression she had suffered before her marriage and feared a recurrence. She continued working as best she could on Anne of the Island (she used a garden metaphor—doing “spadework”—to describe the process of planning out plot and characters for a novel or story), but the difficult pregnancy made her feel increasingly out of touch with the fictional world of her girlhood. Her life was moving on, and other shadows were emerging in the road “around the bend.”
After finishing her morning stint of work, she spent the rest of the day on her family, her house, or her community duties. Her maid, Lily Reid, commented that Maud was extra-conscientious: she was a serious person who “did more than most minister’s wives.”17 That was her nature—she was caught up in the notion of duty—and she also felt that she strengthened Ewan’s pastoral service, which would help his career.
One personal pleasure through the long, cold winter of 1914 was reading. Maud averaged at least a book a day. She read new books her publishers sent her alongside her old favourites (which she read again and again). On trips to Toronto, she purchased new books. She was an exceptionally fast reader, and blessed with a near-photographic memory. On successive readings, she underlined her favourite passages in her books (some of which have survived) and made jottings of reactions into notebooks (which are often copied into her diary, although her notebooks themselves have not survived). To her, books were the centre of a cultured person’s life. Books were also a companion—one that an intellectual husband might have been. She accumulated more and more books; when she cleaned the Leaskdale library one spring she counted 1,200. (Books bearing her inscription still turn up across Canada.)
Ewan’s initiative with the missionary drew attention. “It was worth travelling a good way to see the love and respect of the people for their minister, and the minister’s pride at the generosity of his loyal people,” wrote a Toronto lawyer named Mr. John A. Paterson, K.C., describing the country parson’s magnificent effort in a 1914 publication called The Presbyterian. For a time after Ewan undertook this missionary activity, it did look as if he might rise beyond the role of country parson: some of Maud’s spotlight was temporarily diverted to him. In June 1914, he had the pleasure of welcoming “his” missionary. All went well, until the young missionary came to visit and turned out to be rather a dull fellow. He had no personal charm, and no understanding that he should make an effort to connect with those who were paying his salary.
It was fortunate that Maud had kept her own finances separate from Ewan’s after her marriage—a departure from the custom of the time. She might give him money for his missionary project, but he could not take her money without her agreement. As a man of the old school who believed that God vested all authority in males, Ewan was initially troubled by her independence—this was not his idea of wifely submission as set forth in the Bible—yet he also understood that he had married an exceptional woman. He enjoyed the trips and conveniences that her income made possible. He recognized her abilities in planning and organization. He reluctantly came to see that she had been right about the ill-advised missionary project. More and more, Maud made the real decisions in the family, although she always pretended to defer to Ewan in the process.
Despite tensions in this marriage, Maud was content. Ewan was a good and kindly man. Her book sales were still strong, although they were dropping off from the highs of Anne of Green Gables: in book royalties alone, she made $3,599 in 1912, $3,959 in 1913, $2,817 in 1914, and $3,586 in 1915 (when Ewan still made $900 a year).18 She had gained the admiration and appreciation of the parishioners in Leaskdale and Zephyr. She had met and become a part of Toronto’s elite literary world. Although Toronto was not Edinburgh, or London, or Boston, these were times of growing Canadian nationalism, and Maud felt that she was on the ground floor of an edifice that would eventually develop into a great Canadian literature. She underlined a section from Sir Walter Scott’s “The Lay of the Last Minstrel” about his pride in his native land:
Breathes there a man, with soul so dead,
Who never to himself hath said,
This is my own, my native land!
In 1914 she seemed on top of the world. No one could have known that she—and the world—were rushing madly into a future that would soon change everything they knew.