Maud was fourteen years old in 1889, when she started keeping little “diaries” in assorted notebooks. Thirty years later, she decided to copy these diaries into uniform legal-size ledgers, pasting in pictures, making a record of her life. These journals would become an essential part of her life—as joyful companions, as therapy, and finally as compulsion.
By the end of 1919, Maud had become a very lonely woman. Although she had her children, Frede’s death and Ewan’s illness had left her feeling isolated, and again mourning the early loss of her own parents. Her journal gave her a fellow traveller in an increasingly troubled terrain. She wrote in her journals that, “It is the lonely people who keep diaries.… When I have anybody to ‘talk it over with’ I don’t feel the need of a diary so strongly. When I haven’t I must have a journal to overflow in. It is a companion—and a relief.” Her journals were “the other side of a conversation that began in reading” (an observation coined by historian Nick Whistler). She could record what she was reading and add her mental musings about it, as well as jotting down phrases and aphorisms she especially liked. Finding comfort in her journal brought dignity to a life disturbed by personal loss and crushing loneliness.
As a minister’s wife—and as a very judgmental person—her more frank private thoughts had to be carefully hidden from view. Her tendency to sarcasm and irony needed management. She wrote, “Temperaments such as mine must have some outlet, else they become morbid and poisoned by ‘consuming their own smoke,’ and the only safe outlet is in some record as this” (February 11, 1910). The journal kept the two sides of her persona—the public and the private—well enough connected that she did not implode.
She also wanted her journal to be a social record of an era that was undergoing rapid transformation. After World War I, Maud realized that massive social changes were underway, and she realized that her own life was straddling this divide. As an amateur historian, she wanted to preserve the memory of the old, and record her life’s trajectory into the new.
As she created these journals, she found another use for them—she could once again visit her childhood through the mere act of recopying and rethinking the story of her life. She used her early journals to spin her early memories of rural community life into new novels and stories.
Her novels required happy endings—that was expected by her publishers and readers—but there were deeper soundings in her own life, and her journals provided the counterpoint for her sunny novels. When Maud began the project of writing out her own life’s record, she did it partly to bring sanity and control back into her life, but she also wanted a record of what her life had really been like—the darker side that was largely kept private. The journals became her space for self-display and self-examination.
By 1919, when she started recopying her journals, Maud’s books were famous all over the English-speaking world.57 She knew that she was an author whose life would be scrutinized by later biographers. If she wrote her own life in her journals, she hoped to have some control over how her story would eventually be told. There were grievances she wanted to air, and other things she wanted to conceal (or reshape). She had succeeded against enormous odds in her professional and personal life, and she wanted the world to see how admirably she had negotiated her way through innumerable minefields.
When the massive re-copying project started in 1919 progressed, Maud saw that there were minefields of another kind in the actual process of writing up a journal. When diaries become the place to express the repressed side of a personality, they are likely become an unbalanced repository. Maud noticed this when she reread what she had written in periods of sadness and gloom, saying that her journals gave:
… the impression of a morbid temperament, generally in the throes of nervousness and gloom. Yet this, too, is false. It arises from the fact that of late years I have made my journal the refuge of my sick spirit in its unbearable agonies. The record of pain seems thus almost unbroken; yet in reality these spasms came at long intervals.… Between these times I was quite tolerably happy, hopeful and interested in life. (February 11, 1910)
Maud was, however, a person of many moods, and the mood she was in when she recopied an old diary entry into her journal could affect its retelling. She often looked back on things recorded long ago and saw them in a different light. Sometimes she would even change her take on certain events already recorded in her finished journals—for instance, the pages that tell of her courtship with Ewan are razored out and replaced so neatly that the alteration is hard to spot in the handwritten volumes.
She began her recopying with the month of September 1889, when she was not quite fifteen. In other words, all the journal entries (which are the reconstruction of material from her earlier notebooks and notes) are written in retrospect, by a woman in her mid-forties. Her journals may appear to be a seamless, continuous narrative of a life, written easily in dated entries, as her life itself unfolds, but her process is far more subtle than one of making artless jottings that miraculously transform themselves into an engrossing narrative. Still, while she may shape her narrative, she tells us that she intended “as far as in me lies, to paint my life and deeds—ay, and my thoughts— truthfully, no matter how unflattering such truth may be to me. No life document has any real value otherwise.” She added that “the worst as well as the best must be written out— and the best as well as the worst, since we are, every one of us, whether we own to it sincerely or not, angel and devil mixed up together …” But shaping, pruning, shading, and amplifying would be any writer’s prerogative.
On April 16, 1922, she finished copying her childhood diaries into the formal journal ledgers, and from that point on she made daily jottings on pads or pieces of scrap paper, dating these and giving enough information to remind her of the events once she was ready to expand them into a journal entry. At several particularly troubled periods in her life, she stopped writing altogether, but she always resumed when she found her footing again in a few years. There was usually enough time-lag that she could select what was worth recording and shape things in her mind. Because her entries were written from notes, and because her memory was so good, her journal entries always have great immediacy. But it is always important to consider how the time-lag affects their reliability, and adds to the overall complexity of her journals.
Real life is untidy, unshaped, with loose ends. Her journals have no loose ends, no pointless stories, no catalogues of the boring effluvia of life, no people of importance to her narrative who have not been introduced. Each descriptive or narrative unit always becomes part of a unified whole.
As an artist, Maud had a strong instinct for literary shaping operating at both an unconscious and a conscious level. Each of the ten early recopied journal ledgers took on a shape of its own. For instance, her second volume gives a fierce resumé of her distresses in childhood, which shifts the reality of the relatively happy childhood of the first volume into a myth of symbolic orphanhood. But the myth would remain an important fixture in her own self-image. Anne of Green Gables was the glorious result of her mostly happy childhood, as described in Volume One, but Emily of New Moon grew out of the later myth of the orphaned, unloved child, fighting obstacles the whole way to success.
When she began recopying Volume Three of her journal sometime between 1920 and 1921, she was finishing the retrospective of her life in Cavendish. She began this third volume as if it were a book in its own right, not a continuous narrative of a life. The shape of her journal, with its blank pages from one to five hundred, had already begun to interact with—and perhaps mediate—the way she was shaping the story of her own life. She described a “curious feeling of reluctance” as she began the new volume. With the benefit of hindsight, she comments on Volumes One and Two of her earlier journals.
The first volume seems … to have been written by a rather shallow girl, whose sole aim was to “have a good time” and who thought of little else than the surface play of life. Yet nothing could be falser to the reality. As a child and young girl I had a strange, deep, hidden inner life of dreams and aspirations, of which hardly a hint appears in the written record. This was partly because I had not then learned the art of self-analysis … and partly because I did not then feel the need of a confidant in my journal. I looked upon it merely as a record of my doings which might be of interest to me in after years … (February 11, 1910)
She vows to achieve a better balance in Volume Three.
As Maud, now in her forties, wrote up her childhood, a new character, “Maudie,” began to emerge. Maudie resembled aspects of all her heroines, but was far more complex than either Anne, Emily, Valancy, or Marigold. Maud’s writerly instincts told her that emphasizing early hardships would make adult achievement more impressive. This is an autobiographical technique long used by writers, politicians, and other successful professionals. But this involved a certain amount of refiguring the actual facts.
In her journals, “Maudie” fights great odds: she is an unusually sensitive, precocious child, easily hurt, with no parents to stand up for her. She was isolated and lonely in her childhood, raised by two old grandparents who had little understanding of or sympathy for her. She was persecuted by some of her teachers and jealous cousins, scolded and berated by her relatives for her ambitious “scribbling,” but she persevered in spite of every discouragement. In fact, however, Maud’s real childhood was, for the most part, happy. Although she suffered from a sense of difference as she grew up, this difference came from being an “elite” member of the community (and a child who was better dressed and smarter than others).
Maud had read an enormous amount by the time she began rewriting and shaping her own journals. Keeping diaries was a fad in the late nineteenth century. It allowed women of intelligence and leisure to express themselves when they had no public forum. Male statesmen in the corridors of power also kept diaries, but these were naturally very different from women’s private, domestic diaries. Maud complained that Edward Gibbon, following the male Victorian model of objective, rational, controlled writing, had put none of his personality into his memoirs. She determined to map new territory for women: she would write a life history with the emotion and personality deliberately left in.
Still, all this said, there are only rare glimpses of how Maud actually thinks and feels about herself. We learn how she sees herself through the eyes of others, including her husband, her children, her husband’s parishioners, and her fans. We also hear what she does, what she thinks about others, and how she feels about everything, but we see little of what she truly thinks about herself. Maud was a very guarded and private person, even in her journals. Playfully, she pasted in a picture of herself, taken in the Leaskdale kitchen, which shows her intuitive understanding of the ways an autobiographical writer operates, and how pictures can be read as texts. She holds a fan up to conceal her face, which is in turn covered with a veil.
Towards the end of 1920, Maud indulged in a piece of self-analysis. Prompted by “Mrs. Asquith’s Autobiography,” Maud asks herself whether a truly frank and incisive self-analysis is ever possible, and she writes that she is the one person in a thousand who does know her own weaknesses and strengths. “But I could not, even in these diaries which no eye but mine ever sees, write frankly down what I discern in myself,” she admits (December 13, 1920).
In another paragraph of her journals written up at the same time, she writes that she has “not yet found anything much pleasanter than talking with the right kind of a man—except—but I won’t write it. My descendants might be shocked.” Speculating on love in that same long entry (January 31, 1920), she mentions Herman Leard—“a memory which I would not barter for anything save the lives of my children and the return of Frede.”
At this point in late January 1920, and perhaps at the time of the “fan” picture, she was recopying the 1898 section of her journals concerning Herman. Were all of her raptures about her unfulfilled love with Herman really about Herman? Or did she displace some private feelings for the attractive and virile Captain Smith, a man seen so often during Ewan’s breakdowns, onto Herman Leard? Did the poem “The Bride Dreams,” finished in February 1921, come wholly out of her imaginary life with Herman—or partly with Smith? Or did the memory fuse both?
More important, did the actual man matter? Maud did suffer from thwarted passion and unfulfilled desires, but the specific men who aroused her dream life may have been immaterial. Maud felt her every emotion with intensity, but she had learned from her self-contained British grandmother to maintain an aura of dignity and reserve. To betray your raw passions in front of people was “cheap”—and dangerous, too, for it made your weaknesses visible to your enemies. In her fiction, Maud took emotions she knew and attributed them to a spectrum of imaginary characters. In her journals, she appears to have reversed the process, taking her emotions and attaching them— sometimes arbitrarily— to suitable real-life characters.
Since Maud intended her journals to be truthful, she was unable and unwilling to falsify the emotional core of her experience, but sometimes she gives us only part of the picture in cold, hard, truthful facts. As Emily Dickinson puts it: “Tell all the Truth but tell it slant—.”
A case in point is the story about her love affair with Herman Leard (entry of October 7, 1897). As we know, she did not tell this tale as others have since told it—that Herman was already engaged, just as she herself was, and that they were both acting scandalously in terms of the mores of the time. She omits all mention of the existence of Herman’s girlfriend, Ettie Schurman.
Her infatuation with Herman is undoubtedly true, and her feeling of frustration—the emotional core of the story—is also true. But she shapes the story in such a way as to divert the reader from much that is culpable on her part. There are at least four reasons for her shaping the story as she did.
Her first reason was purely aesthetic. Maud wanted a narrative shape that would allow her to turn a rather sprawling story into a compelling narrative. The narrative pattern she knew best was the one in Pilgrim’s Progress. (In John Bunyan’s story, the “pilgrim” going through life has to sidestep dangerous spots like the “Slough of Despond.”) The “Herman affair” was a large pothole on her precarious road through life, but John Bunyan’s structural pattern was too one-dimensional to use, so she looked for a more complex narrative pattern.
Her second reason proceeds from the first reason, but has to do with morality. The literary convention of the two suitors made a much more complex and dramatic story, and it allowed, in addition, something of a cover-up. The account of the Herman Leard affair in her journals is designed to lay to rest any lingering stories about her. Though Herman was caressing her in the bedroom while she was engaged to Edwin, by insisting that she drew a line in lovemaking beyond which she would not go, she establishes that she had the kind of moral fibre expected in proper young women in late-Victorian society.
Her third reason had to do with her own complicated psychology, and the art of displacement. In 1920, when she recopied the Herman story into her entry of October 7, 1897, her marriage to Ewan was unfulfilling— intellectually, emotionally, and physically. She could not have lovers in real life, but she could collect other men in imaginary positions of romance in her “waking dreams,” her “dream lives,” and (of course) in her fiction. But she could never say that a married woman might still feel unmentionable longings; those would have to be displaced into “story.”58
The fourth reason is related to how she perceived the trajectory of her own life. Wishing to give shape and continuity to the story of her life, Maud looked again and again for a controlling narrative or life-myth. She wrote in an entry dated October 7, 1897, and recopied in early 1920: “Some lives seem to be more essentially tragic than others and I fear mine is one of such.”59
Knowing that she was world-famous in 1920 enabled Maud to reveal some of the really “secret” aspects of her inner life. She was able to admit, now that she had made it up the “Alpine Path,” that her inner self often felt insecure. She writes of giving a speech to the Women’s Canadian Club in Chatham, Ontario, When I rose from my seat on the platform to begin my readings the whole large audience rose to its feet. The tribute thrilled me— and yet it all seemed as unreal as such demonstrations always seem to me. At heart I am still the snubbed little girl of years ago who was constantly made to feel by all the grown-up-denizens of her small world that she was of no importance whatever to any living creature. The impression made on me then can never be effaced—I can never lose my “inferiority complex.” That little girl can never believe in the reality of any demonstration in her honour. (December 11, 1920)
This is a very telling comment, but her journals do not have many other such overt revelations. Her life is truly a game of smoke and mirrors.
Maud filled ten volumes of these handwritten journals—nearly five thousand pages and more than one and a half million words in total—by the time of her death. She stated in April 16, 1922, that she would like to see her journals published in one hundred years without any omissions, but, if her heirs wanted, they could publish an abridged version after her death (as a “good financial proposition”), so long as they cut out “anything that would hurt or annoy anyone living.” She also wrote:
I desire that these journals never be destroyed but kept as long as the leaves hold together. I leave this to my descendants or my literary heirs as a sacred charge and invoke a Shakespearean curse on them if they disregard it: There is so much of myself in these volumes that I cannot bear the thought of their ever being destroyed. It would seem to me like a sort of murder. (April 16, 1922)
Maud creates the same intimacy with readers of her journals that she does in her fiction. When her journals were first published, starting in 1985, reviewers and readers felt they now truly knew the real Maud: a tormented, unhappy, judgmental woman who lived a life of terrible frustration. However, the people who still remembered the woman herself in the late 1970s and early 1980s—as their relative, their minister’s wife, their employer, their friend—recalled yet another Maud Montgomery. She was an empathetic person who was deeply interested in others and sympathetic to them; a very witty conversationalist who liked to socialize, tell stories, gossip; a lively woman who liked to attend movies, discuss books and ideas, and take joy in the beauty of the natural world around her. She was full of jokes and the ability to see the funny side of anything. Many people who knew her simply could not believe what they read in her journals, and one maid even accused the editors of her journals of completely fabricating them.60
Maud’s journals show her compulsion to write, her love of words, her sense of humour, her varying moods and passions, her intellectual engagement with the world around her, and her sly ways of recording her triumphs without exposing the pride she had been taught to regard as a sin. However, they contain little that is embarrassing, and when there are damaging stories, they are there only because there is no way to avoid them.
One reaction to her journals needs to be recorded, however—that of Maud’s first daughter-in-law, a very astute woman, who read Maud’s first nine handwritten journals in the early 1980s before they were published, and then remarked to this effect: “So many pages, so much information, but when all is said and done, she has not really revealed a lot about her inner self, what she is really, really thinking and feeling down deep.”
That said, there is no question that after 1919, Maud’s journal did become her best friend. Using her “gift of wings,” she was able through her journal to enter a private discursive space where she could communicate—on her own terms—with future generations. To a future great-granddaughter, she wrote:
I lived a hundred years before you did; but my blood runs in your veins and I lived and loved and suffered and enjoyed and toiled and struggled just as you do. I found life good, in spite of everything. May you find it so. I found that courage and kindness are the two essential things. They are just as essential in your century as they were in mine.… I hope you’ll be merry and witty and brave and wise; and I hope you’ll say to yourself, “if Great-great-Grandmother were alive today, I think I’d like her in spite of her faults.” (April 16, 1922)
Escaping the fetters of time, she managed to escape from the loneliest place on earth, a life lived in “the solitude of unshared thought” (March 29, 1935).