Maud’s life was like a three-ring circus. As a minister’s wife, she was a Sunday School teacher, a tireless organizer for the many women’s church organizations, and a director of young people’s plays and educational programs. As a fundraiser, her abilities as a public performer kept her in wide demand in neighbouring communities. As a professional woman, she was involved in the newly founded Canadian Authors Association and was a stalwart member of the Canadian Women’s Periodical Association. Time-management was a necessary skill. She wrote every morning for a set block of time. Her inner life may have been tempestuous, but her public life was always disciplined and controlled. She was the consummate professional.
A narrator in one of her later novels would say, “Life cannot stop because tragedy enters it. Meals must be made ready though a son dies and porches must be repaired even if your only daughter is going out of her mind.”61 Only two weeks into the new year of 1920, at age forty-five, her journal offers a glimpse into the tension between her inner and outer world:
A missionary meeting this afternoon and one of Stella’s letters full of growls and complaints spoilt today. I led the meeting and tried to put a little life and inspiration into the programme but the sight of that circle of stolid, fat, uninteresting, narrow old dames would have put out any poor little fire of my kindling. They just sucked all the animation out of my soul. (January 13, 1920)
She finished this numbing day as she usually did—by turning to books to improve her frame of mind. She reread a book that was “excruciatingly funny and the laughter it gave me was a boon. It flooded my drab soul with a rosy light and entirely headed off the fit of nervous crying with which I had expected to end the day” (January 13, 1920).
At the same time that Ewan had been suffering so intensely from his first mental breakdown in fall 1919, Maclean’s Magazine carried an article entitled “The Author of Anne.” It stated: “She is a woman of personal charm and winsomeness, as broad-minded and practical as she is imaginative, with a keen sense of humour, happy in the keeping of her home and the interests of the parish.”62 This is the public woman people saw, reacted to, and admired, and it was all genuine—every bit as genuine as the woman who dissolved in private tears at the end of discouraging days, or who wrote sharply about the dull and narrow-minded women in her husband’s parish. She carried on with dignity, no matter what she grumbled in her journals. The private Maud stayed well hidden when the public Maud went on stage.
In February 1920, Maud saw the Mary Miles Minter silent movie of Anne of Green Gables. People wanted more “Anne” books, but if she wrote them, Maud knew that would only increase Page’s sales of the earlier ones. Instead of more “Anne,” then, Maud was planning a new heroine who would reflect the social change wrought by World War I.
Maud felt the accelerating wheels of progress in both positive and disorienting ways. The war had spurred science and technology, speeding up the transmission of information. She read about new ideas, and introduced her Sunday School classes to names and theories. Newspapers were becoming more sophisticated and influential, and they had introduced “women’s pages.” The production of knowledge was moving into the universities. Occupations were becoming defined and professionalized, and women were starting to move into public forums and professions. Cars increased people’s mobility, and airplanes were now finding all kinds of commercial uses. Women’s daily lives were being altered by the development of electric appliances—refrigerators, stoves, washing machines, and irons. As the world spun forward, people began feeling unsettled by what came to be known as “future shock.” All this called for a new focus in fiction.
Maud wanted to write a book about how the war changed women’s lives, moving them from the private spaces in their homes into public spaces. Women’s wartime success in working outside of the domestic sphere had contributed to voting enfranchisement and opened the door to professions that had always been exclusively male. Maud wanted her novel to focus not on fighting men, but on the support women had provided to soldiers, and their sacrifices and suffering at home. Captain Smith had made the war vivid from a man’s point of view, but she had experienced women’s pain on the home-front in her own community. War was bravery on the European front, but it was also courage at home.
In March 1919, shortly before Ewan’s first serious breakdown, Maud had started plotting Rilla of Ingleside, her tenth novel. She was feeling constrained by the popularity of her former books, knowing that readers expected more of the same. Although she would have to use the old containers of domestic romance, she determined to pour into these some serious new themes, written from a female perspective, including women’s suffering and grieving, as well as their learning to perform in a public forum. Continuing with the tale of the Blythe and Meredith children of Rainbow Valley, she now moved the young men from their pastoral childhood in Prince Edward Island into the trenches in Europe. She wanted to retire Anne, who was now the staid and proper wife of a doctor, with little dramatic potential; the new heroine was Anne’s youngest daughter, Rilla, who undergoes a complex maturation alongside the inevitable transformation of the old pre-war world.
Rilla is also about the maturing of Canada as a nation. Canada’s soldiers—like Captain Smith, Maud’s half-brother Carl, and the young men of Leaskdale—had fought bravely alongside men from Great Britain, the “mother country.” Now Canada could proudly take its place in the world, moving from thinking of itself as a colony to seeing itself as an emerging, strong nation.
The novel opens with a scene in the living room of Gilbert and Anne Blythe’s house. After a morning of housework, their maid, Susan Baker, sits down for an hour of “repose and gossip.” She opens her copy of the Daily Enterprise and she sees big black headlines about the assassination of Archduke Ferdinand in Sarajevo. Susan, however, is after some more interesting “local gossip,” and says:
“I never take much interest in foreign parts. Who is the Archduke man who has been murdered?”
“What does it matter to us?” asked Miss Cornelia [a neighbour], adding that murder was common in the Balkans, and that Island papers should not print such sensational stories.”
By the time of the novel’s publication, most readers would have recognized the Archduke’s assassination as a localized event that set many larger forces in play, eventually leading to World War I. They would have understood the symbolism in the next chapter when Miss Oliver, the local teacher, an intense and gifted woman with an uncanny prescience, recounts a dream she has had the previous night:
“far in the distance, I saw a long, silvery, glistening wave breaking.… I thought, ‘Surely the waves will not come near Ingleside’ … before I could move or call they were breaking right at my feet— and everything was gone—there was nothing … where the Glen had been. I tried to draw back—and I saw that the edge of my dress was wet with blood.”
The image of the “blood red tide” that rolled up on the shores of Prince Edward Island expressed how the war had been felt by women.
As the book opens, Rilla, a pampered, fun-loving young teen, is looking forward to a party. When she hears her teacher’s dream, she merely worries that the dream might portend a storm that will spoil the evening. The sharp and intense Miss Oliver responds with a light sarcasm that Rilla would have missed: “ ‘Incorrigible fifteen,’ said Miss Oliver dryly. ‘I don’t think there is any danger that foretells anything so awful as that.’ “
Over the course of the novel, the red tide invades peaceful Prince Edward Island, destroying people’s sense of protected isolation in Canada. It carries their sons and brothers and husbands to Europe. The women cope bravely. Rilla herself assumes the care of an orphaned war baby. She and the other women throw themselves into the war effort through organizing Red Cross auxiliary units, just as Maud had. Rilla’s two beloved brothers leave to become soldiers. One of Anne’s sons, Jem, returns triumphantly, but the other, the sensitive and poetic Walter, does not. Just before Walter is killed, he writes the moving poem that takes his name round the world—a poem that echoes John McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields,” the most famous poem to come out of World War I. At the end of the novel, Anne’s other son Jem returns, saying:
The old world is destroyed and we must build up the new one.… we’ve got to make a world where wars can’t happen.
Rilla is a sentimental novel in one sense. Maud tries hard to shore up people’s belief that the war was truly a fight against evil. When Walter’s last letter arrives after his death, it tells them that he has died that others may fulfill their lives in freedom and happiness. It urges them to “keep the faith.” This echo of the war rhetoric is what Maud wants to believe—indeed, what she must believe: that this war was one that would end all wars.
As a woman who read history books constantly, Maud was well aware of mankind’s repetitive engagements in war. When Captain Smith swept into Leaskdale in fall 1919, telling first-hand tales of his heroism in war, they were exciting to hear, but Maud could fit these into the context of her historical reading. In December 1919, for instance, she had finished reading Edward Gibbon’s The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire for the third time. In April 1921, she finished rereading George Grote’s twelve-volume History of Greece for the second time. In October 1921, she finished rereading Justin McCarthy’s A History of Our Own Times. In May 1922, she was reading another kind of history, William Lecky’s two-volume History of European Morals. (She had read his History of Rationalism in 1917.) By 1924, she stated that she believed that all events were governed by the Darwinian concept of “blind impersonal Chance,” not by a deity. Her doubts about the role that God and religion played in human affairs were already beginning to show as she wrote the first draft of Rilla of Ingleside in the first eight months of 1920.
She brings ambiguity into the novel through her symbolic use of the “Piper.” This mythic figure had appeared first in Rainbow Valley, leading the boys out of the sylvan glade of childhood towards their future in European battlefields. When the image of the Piper appears again in Rilla, he seems to be the same Scottish bagpiper whose music instills bravery in soldiers, pumping them up with courage, and leading them valiantly into battle. Walter, for instance, has been a gentle, poetic boy who shies from aggression, fearing both war and death, but this admirable Piper gives him resolve, purpose, and courage.
However, as the story progresses, the Piper of Rainbow Valley morphs into a more mysterious figure in Rilla. He resembles the deadly “Pied Piper” of the children’s fairy tale—the Piper who pipes to innocent children, leading them away from their parents into a cavern. When the door closes behind them, they disappear from earth and are never seen again. This latter Piper, from the Underworld, has fooled them with his seductive music.
Maud’s reading of Gibbon demonstrated all too clearly how the religious concepts of Good and Evil had been used throughout history to mobilize people to fight. Why should innocent boys from rural Canada have had to die in European trenches to fight God’s war? She had started to see religion more as a social organization than anything else, and she thought that the real power lay in science and knowledge, not in a literal and omnipotent God sitting on high. Like so many other reflective people of her era, she was conflicted and confused. But she knew that people had to continue to believe the war rhetoric, or they would think that their sacrifices had been in vain. Certainly, evil was real.
The shifting Piper imagery betrays her confusion, as does her conclusion to the novel. At the end, Rilla, has grown into a mature woman. She has shed her symbolic childhood lisp in the process, but in the last chapter, she suddenly slips back into her insecure, dependent, lisping childhood self as soon as her soldier-lover comes home and proposes to her. Many find it a frustrating, unsatisfying conclusion for a serious novel. The message is what Maud’s readership wanted to hear—that the war had defeated barbarism and evil, once and for all, and that women could now happily revert to being wives and mothers. Rilla’s returning lisp marks symbolically the end of women’s performance on public stages. They retreat into domesticity.
When Maud had begun planning Rilla it was about six weeks after Frede’s death, and when she finished it, on August 24, 1920, the dedication was to “Frederica Campbell MacFarlane, who went away from me when the dawn broke on January 25th, 1919—a true friend, a rare personality, a loyal and courageous soul.”
Maud heard from the Island in April 1920 that her Uncle John F. Macneill was tearing down the house that she had been raised in. After the publication of Anne of Green Gables, tourists had descended on Cavendish, with hordes of sightseers trespassing all over the Macneill homestead, peering into the windows of the empty house and trampling all over his planted fields—from Uncle John F.’s point of view, a maddening invasion of his property. People came to his door and pestered him with inquiries about his famous niece.
Maud’s crusty Uncle John F. did not believe that Anne of Green Gables was that great a novel in the first place. He came from a family of naturally gifted storytellers, and this novel sounded just like the rest of the stories told by his family. Any one of them could have put it onto paper, he said, no doubt believing what he said. Maud’s adulation by the reading public goaded him to end the trespassing and intrusions. He tore down the now decrepit “old home.”
The news that the house was being razed caused Maud no end of distress. She had always been deeply attached to houses and places, and to that home especially. To someone already feeling the discomfort of too much change in her world, this was a powerful blow. The irony did not escape her, either. Her books had brought the coveted tourism to PEI, and now invading tourists were destroying what she valued most: the peaceful Cavendish she loved, and her old home.
No one would have suspected, however, as she worked on her manuscript of Rilla of Ingleside, that there was so much turmoil in her life. She had, for instance, been in Boston from May 17, 1920, until around July 9, 1920, to face Lewis and George Page in the court battle to stop their distribution of Further Chronicles of Avonlea. While that court case dragged on, they continued to sell all the books they could, effectively thumbing their noses at her.
She came home from her Boston session in a ragged state, and she steadied herself in her long and lonely hours back at home by continuing to copy her diaries into her journals. Ewan was often in bed in those days, suffering from his attacks of melancholy. Somehow, though, she finished Rilla in August 1920.
Maud was restless after the war ended, and she would have liked living in a bigger city where there was more intellectual stimulation. Ewan was still “preaching for the call” at other larger churches. One place he had tried for— the Columbus-Brooklyn parish near Whitby (where Captain and Mrs. Smith lived)—had a much larger and less drafty manse, features Maud wanted. She thought he might get it. But in the end, J. R. Fraser, an old friend who had helped Ewan settle in at Leaskdale in 1910, suddenly resigned his Uxbridge position and got the charge instead of Ewan. Ewan became more depressed as he repeatedly tried unsuccessfully for other churches.
Early in 1921, Maud had given a series of talks to publicize the forthcoming Rilla of Ingleside—first in Toronto, then in London, Ontario, where she gave readings and lectures at the Canadian Club, the Girls’ Canadian Club, and the Women’s Press Club. A London journalist, one of the Blackburn family who owned the London Free Press, expressed a general impression: that L. M. Montgomery was “too full of humour and philosophy” to ever feel blue. It was an irony Maud felt worth recording in her journal.
Maud tells of the trip to London in her journals, but she does not mention the striking coincidence that Captain Smith lectured in London the same night she was there, close to where she was. Possibly they drove down together, since they were in frequent contact. When she returned home, she found that Ewan had bought a new car, the Grey-Dort, to replace their Chevrolet.63
It was this July in 1921 that the Macdonalds and the Captain Smith family made their long-planned tandem trip to Prince Edward Island. Captain Smith went about the Island showing the eleven reels of the silent movie (The Empire’s Shield) in a two-hour-long production, talking about his war service to the mother country.64 This was reported in the Island newspapers, but again Maud does not mention it in her journals at all.
Things went better for Ewan once he was in Prince Edward Island with his own family. After first visiting John and Margaret Stirling, then Ewan’s sisters at Kinross, then Maud’s old Prince of Wales College chums in and near Charlottetown, Ewan and Maud and the boys drove on to Cavendish, visiting Alec and May Macneill, and Ernest and Myrtle Webb and their children. The next stop, at Park Corner, brought back all the old remembered happiness for Maud in that house. Chester and Stuart engaged in boisterous fun with the rollicking new generation of merry Campbell cousins, Ella’s and the late George’s children.
On the way home, the Macdonalds stopped over in Saint John, New Brunswick, staying with Maud Estey Mahoney, one of Maud’s former students from Bideford. Maud, as a celebrity passing through Saint John, consented to let a local journalist come to interview her. Chester and Stuart were obstreperous while she was being interviewed, but it never occurred to Ewan to distract them or take them out for a walk. He just grew impatient to end the interview. Maud had been revitalized by the trip, but Ewan was turning “morose and cranky” again as they approached home.
After finishing the Rilla manuscript on her return, Maud wrote in her journals on August 24, 1920, that she would never write another book in the Anne series.
I am done with Anne forever—I swear it as a dark and deadly vow. I want to create a new heroine now—she is already in embryo in my mind—she has been christened for years. Her name is “Emily.” She has black hair and purplish gray eyes. I want to tell folks about her.
This story, which had been incubating for quite some time, marked Maud’s serious attempt to ditch the “Anne” series. “Anne” had begun to feel like an incubus that hung around her neck, thanks largely to Page.
In addition, Maud noticed that all her books were now being marketed only for children, including Anne of Green Gables. The rapidly increasing literacy rate in North America was creating a huge marketplace for “children’s literature,” and there were not enough books to fill the demand. Many books with a child protagonist were now being moved down into the children’s literature shelves, with altered cover art and illustrations. The pictures on the covers of all of Maud’s books show how the heroines grew ever younger as time advanced.
Maud had not written her books specifically for children; they had been written for a general popular audience. It was a happy coincidence that they were equally successful with children. After writing Anne of Green Gables, Maud had indeed told her correspondent Ephraim Weber in 1907, before it was published, that she had written a novel for juveniles—“ostensibly for girls”—and in 1908 she had sent a copy of Anne to her cousin, Professor Murray Macneill, with the same message. At the time she made these remarks, she was downplaying her writing career to show “womanly modesty.” Later, when attitudes towards women writers changed, Maud would boldly assert the truth—that she had not written Anne for children, but for herself and other adults. After all, hadn’t sophisticated men like the Honourable Earl Grey and Mark Twain been delighted with Anne of Green Gables? Frustrated by being pigeonholed as a children’s writer, Maud wrote in her journals:
I want to write … something entirely different from anything I have written yet. I am becoming classed as a “writer for young people” and that only. I want to write a book dealing with grown-up creatures—a psychological study of one human being’s life. I have the plot of it already matured in my mind. The name of the book is to be “Priest Pond.” (August 24, 1920)
Her next book had some “Priests” in it, but it started out with a young heroine, too. This novel would be about a little girl’s having the world—her world—all against her. Maud wanted to show how women had to fight against cultural expectations that curtailed their aspirations. Throughout the war, she had seen women move into the public sphere. The Victorian ideology that women should be mere “angels in the house” no longer defined them. Women had shed their white angels’ wings during the war, taking up dirty jobs in fields, in factories, in business—places where only poor, working-class women had been before, and then in terrible conditions. Maud’s books were moving in the direction of portraying serious themes, and her creative energies were surging.
On August 20, 1921, Maud wrote the first chapter of her new novel, Emily of New Moon. It dealt with the upbringing of a young girl who wants to become a writer. Emily was the new heroine designed to replace Anne. Still, there were many similarities between Anne and the new Emily. Each has been orphaned, and ends up with two elderly caretakers, one stern and the other sympathetic. Each girl has to struggle to be loved and to be valued. Both girls came out of Maud’s own multi-faceted personality, and were much indebted to Maud’s memories of her own childhood. Yet Anne and Emily are dramatically different.
The 1908 Anne is an engaging little waif, with her focus on finding a home where she will be loved and secure. Maud features Anne’s winsome talkativeness and her response to the beauties of nature in Avonlea (Cavendish). But when Maud dreams up Emily, she wants to show a talented, ambitious girl who knows that she wants to be a writer in spite of all the impediments to authorship a young woman faced in the late-nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries.
Maud wrote Anne in the 1904–1905 period, when, buoyed up by her courtship with Ewan, she accessed her relatively happy childhood. When Maud was brooding up Emily in 1919–20, and writing the first draft in 1921–22, she was revisiting her childhood through a new lens, and she was once again reconfiguring her childhood in her journals. Emily of New Moon was written in six months—a phenomenal burst of élan—and perhaps reflects the energizing effects of Smith’s admiration of her achievements, intelligence, and personality.65 Serious Emily, always watchful of others, is a very different child from the impulsive and talkative Anne. When her father dies, Emily is reluctantly claimed by her mother’s Murray clan, who feel it their “duty” to raise her. In the first third of Anne of Green Gables, the anxious Anne waits to see if the Cuthberts will adopt her. In Emily of New Moon, Emily likewise waits, while the relatives all try to shift the responsibility for Emily onto others in the clan. But Emily, hiding under the table, overhears it all. Instead of being damaged for life by what she hears, she is angered to the point of indignation, and bursts out from under the table—much to the shock of those adults who have been discussing her.
When the housekeeper, Ellen, tells Emily she should consider herself lucky to get a home any place, she adds the frank assessment that Emily is not of much importance to anyone. Emily retorts in indignation, “I am of importance to myself. “This is an extraordinary assertion in an era when young girls were socialized into domesticity, subordinating their identity to their husbands and family.
Like Anne, Emily is raised by surrogate parents, only in Emily’s case they are two sisters, Aunt Elizabeth and Aunt Laura. Also in the house is Cousin Jimmy, their brother. Elizabeth is as stern as Marilla, Laura as indulgent as Matthew, and poor Jimmy is a testament to Elizabeth’s fierceness: he is brain-damaged because when he was a child, the bossy Elizabeth pushed him head first down a well.
In her journals Maud acknowledges that Emily’s inner life is partly hers—a rare admission. Maud details the psychological hardships that Emily suffers in a restricted, contained, and confined life, drawing heavily from her own memories. Heir to the entire clan’s criticism, Emily longs for her dead father’s unconditional love, and she suffers terribly from her clan’s ridicule of her writing ambitions.66
Despite all the repressive forces in this surrogate family, Emily survives. At the beginning of the novel, she writes letters to her dead father, but at the end of the novel she is writing for herself. Her last words at the end of Emily of New Moon are written in her diary: she says that she is going to keep a diary so that it may be published when she dies.67
Even Anne’s and Emily’s boyfriends are quite different. Anne’s boyfriend is Gilbert Blythe, a name suggesting happiness. Emily’s first male admirer is an older man named Dean Priest, double-barrelled, imposing clerical name. Dean comes into her life, offering her the kindness, protection, and fellowship she lost when her father died—exactly what the newly minted Ewan had offered Maud in 1903 to 1904, shortly after the death of her own father.
In the first book of the Emily trilogy, Dean Priest seems wholesome and exciting when he meets Emily and offers her his companionship. However, his characterization shifts to something sinister, like the Piper in Rilla. In the two Emily sequels, Dean Priest morphs into a creepy personality nicknamed “Jarback Priest” (because of his deformed back). It was in November 1921, when Maud was in the middle of writing the first novel in the Emily sequence, that she was herself experiencing a physical repulsion to Ewan, which she described as making her feel “degraded and unclean.” Dean Priest also begins to exude a disturbing sexual aura in the novel.
Emily shares another important trait with the young Maud: she has immense imaginative talent. Emily differs from Anne, however, in having a mystical power that she calls “the flash”—“the wonderful moment when soul seemed to cast aside the bonds of flesh and spring upward to the stars” (Chapter 8). It is then that her soul can see “behind the veil” of surfaces to transcendent beauty and realities beyond (reminiscent of the novel Zanoni). Maud models Emily’s “flash” on a feeling she described herself having in a series of 1917 articles which are gathered into The Alpine Path, and again in her journals in January 1905 (which period was recopied and possibly rewritten in the early 1920s):
It has always seemed to me, ever since I can remember, that, amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I seemed to catch a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile. (January 2, 1905)
Anne, Emily, and the young Maud(s) of the journals all flowed out of the same pen, from the same fluid reservoir of memory. Maud’s fertile imagination needed only the germ of a feeling or idea to begin sketching out a character. She would brood up her character, then methodically plot out actions for each chapter of a book. She sometimes did this out loud while working or walking—many people remember her talking to herself as she walked. This was not seen as odd; they knew she was plotting her books. When the “spadework” was done, Maud began writing the book. She envisioned scenes in her mind as she wrote with great intensity and speed, laughing out loud at smart retorts made by her characters who were, in some cases, saying things that she herself would be too reticent and polite to say. She was dead to the immediate world around her when she was writing, but she probably lived more intensely in that “dead” state than in any other.
Once she dreamed up her characters, and plotted out the book’s chapters, she slipped into a watching mode—watching them live out their lives on her own private screen. In Leaskdale, one little boy, Fred Leask, played with Stuart around the time that Emily was being written. He remembered how he and Stuart could do anything “while Mrs. Macdonald was writing”—steal cookies, slide down the stair banister, race through the house chasing each other. Fred described how Mrs. Macdonald would look into space, smiling or chuckling as if she were watching actual people, then bounce in excitement and laugh softly as she scribbled down what she was seeing. “She was off in another world,” he recalled in the early 1980s, “and her pen really flew.”
Maud had written her first chapter of Emily on August 20, 1921. She finished the entire first draft on February 15, 1922. By August 1922 she was reading the proofs.
It is the best book I have ever written—and I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others—not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it, and I hated to pen the last line and write finis. Of course, I’ll have to write several sequels but they will be more or less hackwork I fear. They cannot be to me what this book has been. (February 15, 1922)
While Maud was writing Emily of New Moon, her lawsuits with Page continued to simmer. At the same time, the Pickering affair was boiling up into the lawsuit against Ewan, and Ewan was doing his best to find another parish.
On March 25, 1922, Maud wrote in her journal that the Leaskdale women had arranged a program with a tribute to her. They would have known that Ewan was trying out for another church, and they undoubtedly had heard bits of Lily’s gossip about Smith. The women, who were very fond of Maud, would have been outraged that any rumours were circulating about a minister’s wife, and especially one they loved and respected.
The community did not want the Macdonalds to leave because they genuinely liked Ewan and they loved Maud. She made their church work interesting and fun as well as profitable, and brought a sparkle to every gathering she was in. There was much appreciation for her efforts with the young people of the parish. She taught them public performance skills through the Young People’s groups and she told them of inventions, ideas, and other currents in the world outside their isolated area. (In the early 1980s some remembered her telling them about Freud and Einstein.) A young woman, Margaret Leask, wrote the tribute, presented it, and saved it for posterity. It read, in part:
Dear Mrs. Macdonald,
The members of the guild decided that since this was to be “Canadian Authors” night, it would be a most fitting time to pay tribute to you as a Canadian Authoress and also to show in some degree our appreciation of the wonderful interest which you take in our welfare. As an Authoress, celebrated throughout the world, we are proud to know you and honoured in having you as leader of our activities. Your leadership is a source of inspiration to all of us, and under your leadership the meetings are both interesting and instructive. The outside world knows you as a brilliant writer, but we know you not only as a writer, but as a woman who has deservedly won our respect and admiration …
Later, Maud caught a glimpse on Ewan’s face that she interpreted as anger over her tribute. She felt that Ewan was jealous of her work, and she commented on his attitudes in her journals (March 25, 1922), deftly deflecting attention from other areas of his anxiety:
Ewan’s attitude toward women—though I believe he is quite unconscious of this himself—is that of the mediaeval mind. A woman is a thing of no importance intellectually—the plaything and servant of man—and couldn’t possibly do anything that would be worthy of a real tribute.
Maud had written about Ewan in 1921:
Poor fellow, he is good and kind and never did willful harm or wrong to anyone in his life. Yet he is most miserable. (May 18, 1921)
Yes, poor Ewan. Very little was going right in his life either, and whether or not he was jealous of his wife, or merely disappointed in himself, he certainly had cause to feel ineffectual amid the powerful forces swirling around him. Maud could transmute her turbulent emotions into art, but Ewan had no such release, except to bury them deep within himself and brood. In those hidden fastnesses of his mind, problems festered, and the medicines prescribed to flush out his anxiety only added to his woes.
As 1922 ended, Maud wrote about another advance in technology that was beginning to make its way into the homes of ordinary people: the radio. Dr. Shier, the Macdonalds’ doctor in Uxbridge, had one, and had told them that on a recent Sunday he had actually heard sermons being preached in Pennsylvania and Chicago over this new device. Maud commented again on how life was speeding up after the war. More and more events were crowded into each week. Home was becoming the base from which you operated your life, not a private sanctuary in which you lived your life. She ceased hearing in memory many of the sounds of childhood—the birds, the wind, and in her particular case, the sound of the sea—because there was the constant inner voice telling her what had to be accomplished before day’s end. The world was, indeed, changing.
Maud’s activities in the Toronto book world helped release her from tedium and worries at home. She had always believed deeply in public service, and that those with ability should use their gifts to better others. She frequently promoted the books of less established writers in speeches. She had given of herself unstintingly in her role as minister’s wife, and she put an equal amount of effort into promoting the Canadian book trade as a speaker, organizer, and idea-person on executive committees. The success of her books allowed her publishers, McClelland and Stewart, to invest in other young Canadians, and she gave John McClelland promotional blurbs to use in his advertising. She also wrote reviews of other writers’ books. Newspaper accounts of her speeches recount her telling her audiences repeatedly to “buy Canadian books and magazines.” She also wrote encouraging personal letters to other new Canadian writers.
Canada had performed well in the war, and was now in a period of nationalistic enthusiasm. Back in 1910, Maud had written in a PEI newspaper about the fledgling industry of Canadian literature, saying a period of “sturm and drang” was needed for Canada to develop a sense of itself and a national literature. She recopied this article in her journals after the war ended:
I do not think our literature [in 1910] is an expression of our national life as a whole. I think this is because we have only very recently—as time goes in the making of nations—had any national life. Canada is only just finding herself. She has not yet fused her varying elements into a harmonious whole. Perhaps she will not do so until they are welded together by some great crisis of storm and stress. That is when a real national literature will be born. I do not believe that the great Canadian novel or poem will ever be written until we have had some kind of baptism by fire to purge away all our petty superficialities and lay bare the primal passions of humanity. [Quoted in her journals on August 27, 1919, slightly abridged from an article she earlier wrote for the Toronto Globe that was reprinted in The Island Patriot, January 6, 1910.]
The Great War had been this catalyst. In the 1920s, Canadians began to position themselves on the world stage of nations and national literatures. Historian Carl Berger says of this period: “the desire for a national culture that would reflect the character of Canada in imaginative literature, art and history became a master impulse in the intellectual life of the twenties.”68
Maud was irked in March 1921 when her American publisher, Frederick Stokes, wrote her complaining that there was not enough American experience in Rilla of Ingleside. She stated angrily in her journals that she “wrote of Canada at war—not of the U.S.” (March 5, 1921). Like many Canadians, Maud bristled at what they saw as American cultural imperialism, and she had enough stature to refuse to alter her book.
A great deal of Canadian resentment had been developing against the United States: for one thing, its copyright laws allowed Canadian writers to be exploited. The copyright situation for Canadian authors had long been vexing. To begin with, the United States had not joined the Berne Convention that bound it to respect copyright registered in other countries. Maud had herself been caught by this when Lewis Page threatened to locate and re-publish the stories she had already published in Canadian magazines, using them in Further Chronicles of Avonlea. Canadian authors were justifiably furious over this, given that American publishers could pirate their work without compensation. Canadian writers banded together to address this issue.
The result was the official founding of the Canadian Authors Association (CAA) in 1921. A magazine called The Canadian Bookman, first published in January 1919, fostered the CAA and became its spokesman. In 1921, over one hundred Canadian authors and academics attended a founders’ meeting in Montreal on March 11 and 12. They established a copyright committee and hired lobbyists to send to Ottawa. Maud was too busy with her parish and family duties to attend this meeting, but she followed events with great interest. Active in the Toronto branch of the CAA, she was elected its vice-president in early fall 1921. Eight months after its founding, it boasted eight hundred members. Maud gave speeches in the fall to promote the CAA message: buy Canadian books and support Canadian authors.
It was in this period that Maud did a great deal to promote Frederick Philip Grove’s new book, Over Prairie Trails, for McClelland and Stewart. She wrote Grove several encouraging letters in the 1920s. Grove did not return the admiration: in 1926, he wrote his friend, Professor Arthur Leonard Phelps, “I’ve often wondered how a woman like Mrs. Macdonald [Lucy Maud Montgomery] can write the books she does write: not that those books may not have their readers who profit from them: I have found that out. But how a woman who judges so accurately can stand writing that stuff. For she does have a remarkable scent.” (Since Maud admired and encouraged Grove’s novels, he naturally admired her ability to discriminate.)
Maud was also involved in new promotional development. The CAA organized the first “Canadian Bookweek” for November 19 to 26, 1921. The motto was “More Readers for Canadian Authors” and the object “To suggest to every Canadian that he buy more Canadian books.” For weeks before the event, she wrote publicity items and letters on behalf of the CAA, and when the time came, she stayed with her friend Mary Beal in Toronto for the week. Maud had promised to appear as part of the program, and she frankly confessed that she wanted to escape from the manse for a few days.
Nellie McClung was the guest of honour at the opening CAA dinner for some eighty people at the Arts and Letters Club. Maud sat at the head table next to McClung, along with J. M. Gibbon (President), B. K. Sandwell (National Secretary), and numerous other important people in the fledgling organization, including the Reverend Basil King, another famous Islander, author of moralistic and popular novels. (King had been the pastor in a prestigious church in Cambridge, Massachusetts, when Maud visited Page in 1911, and he and Mrs. King had hosted a reception for her.) She was delighted to see him again, but of Nellie McClung, Maud wrote snippily: “Nellie is a handsome woman in a stunning dress, glib of tongue. She made a speech full of obvious platitudes and amusing little stories which made everyone laugh and deluded us into thinking it was quite a fine thing—until we began to think it over …” (November 18, 1921).
Maud’s own speeches for many occasions were also light productions full of amusing little stories that kept people laughing. Her comment seems to have arisen from their difference in style and personality: Nellie McClung was an extrovert who sought and revelled in the public spotlight, and used her writing to advance political ideas, whereas Maud was a much more reserved and private person. Basil King made a speech she pronounced “full of good ideas, with no superfluities or frills or gallery plays” (November 18, 1921). He, of course, had been an early endorser of Maud’s own books.
The Bookweek was a huge success. Some twelve hundred people attended a reception that the Canadian Press Club gave for the CAA. Maud recounted being smothered by those praising Anne of Green Gables and asking her if “Anne was a real girl.” Later she enjoyed some plays at Hart House. She met again a friend of Frede’s, Jen Fraser, and they gossiped about Cameron MacFarlane, Frede’s husband. Maud spoke to eight hundred girls at Jarvis St. Collegiate, the school run by Marjory MacMurchy’s father, Dr. Archibald MacMurchy. She next spoke to a large group at the Parkdale I.O.D.E. At Victoria College, she “spent a very dull evening listening to a couple of literary papers by erudite authors who could not stoop to be interesting as well as erudite.” Maud had little patience for those who took themselves too seriously or lacked a sense of humour.
The week whirled by with swamped appearances, readings, and speeches: at Moulton College, with hundreds seeking autographs; at the Simpson’s department store; at the Dunn Avenue Methodist Sunday School (to 600 students); at Oakwood School (to 1,300 young people); at the School of Commerce (to 1,500); and at the Cloke Bookstore in Hamilton. She attended receptions and luncheons honouring her at Mary Beal’s house; at the National Club; and at the Business Women’s Club, where she and Mrs. Emmeline Pankhurst, the famous English suffragette, were both guests of honour. At a Women’s Press Club reception she met Lady Byng, the wife of the Governor General, sponsor of the Lady Byng Memorial Trophy for gentlemanly behaviour in hockey. She also saw two movies, Quo Vadis and Biff-Bing-Bang.
After this flattering, exhausting week of honours and socializing, Maud returned to the gruelling conditions at the manse, fearful of the state in which she might find Ewan. However, he was fine. But there was a letter full of “woes” from Aunt Annie in Park Corner. The crop had been poor that year. Maud decided to surprise her beloved aunt with a cheque at Christmas. She was extremely fond of the fatherless Campbells at Park Corner, and she continued to be their salvation in times of need.
Shortly after, at the request of Stokes, she ventured on another outing to Ohio, to read and speak in several places. There she escaped her role as minister’s wife and visited a cabaret, where she and her hosts dined, listened to “jazz music,” and watched some modern dance (which was regarded as a scandal by conservative magazines). This time she returned to find Ewan heading into another attack. It was in early December 1921 that Maud had had the unsettling dream of Ewan being hanged in the church and then resuscitated.
The outside world guessed nothing of Maud’s rich but often tortured inner life. She was to them a successful author, a dynamo in her community, a powerful speaker in public, a performer for charitable causes, a woman whose intellectual range made her a fascinating conversationalist in social gatherings, and a warm and likeable human being with a very fine sense of humour. (For example, her service to the book community during the fall of 1921 led to her being honoured by the Canadian Women’s Periodical Club in Toronto in January 1922.)
The founding of the CAA was one more sign of the changing times. There was much talk again (as there had been in the 1880s) of an evolving “national literature.” The CAA, initially dominated by older men, had expanded to contain many supporting members whose approach to literature was more enthusiastic than discriminating. For all its good work on copyright law and promoting the writing of Canadian authors, the CAA still struck some ambitious younger writers as a social club where the stuffy old guard mingled and schmoozed, proud of a handful of unimaginative poems they might have published in newspapers and magazines.
The young poet Frank R. Scott—later to be one of Canada’s most impressive legal minds and a professor whose thinking influenced, among others, Prime Minister Pierre Trudeau—emerged as a key member of the new school of young Montreal poets in the early 1920s. This group began an attack on what came to be dubbed the “Maple Leaf School”—poets who “warbled” over themes like Canada’s beautiful scenery and its patriotic affiliation to the “motherland.” (In 1927, F. R. Scott wrote a brilliantly satiric poem about the CAA entitled “The Canadian Authors Meet.” It skewered those he saw as literary wannabes who wrote sweetly sentimental and patriotic verse imitating Romantic and Victorian poetry.)
Maud had published many poems that were fairly romantic in tone. In this new climate, even Anne of Green Gables seemed a bit too positive and sentimental, too much like Pollyanna the insufferable “Glad Girl,” who resolved to be “glad” even after the worst catastrophes. At the conclusion of Anne of Green Gables, Anne believes that “God’s in His Heaven, all’s right with the world,” a view very different from the post-war outlook. After the devastation of a war that had killed millions, how could anyone believe that except sentimental, foolish young girls? Even Maud saw Anne as belonging to a time before the war.
As 1922 opened, literary styles had already begun to change. Modernism exploded in literature, as well as in visual art, architecture, music, and many other cultural fields. It signalled the dying gasp of all things Victorian and the evolution of a new fiction in Europe and North America. Young writers described the emptiness of the “modern” world. T. S. Eliot wrote his famous poem The Waste Land, a vision of a sterile, suffocating world, in 1922. Experimental writers like Virginia Woolf and James Joyce challenged traditional literary styles with their “stream of consciousness” technique. In the United States, young novelists like Ernest Hemingway pared down their style to a “virile” tautness. Antiheroes replaced conventional protagonists. Skepticism and cynicism, alienation and isolation, were frequent tones in literature.
Maud did not like this new cynical view, or the style of writing. Ironically, after she had worked so hard to give support to other younger writers in her speeches and in the executive of the CAA, she herself became the target of younger professional critics, who saw her style of writing as both outdated and banal. It was no longer trendy to write “regional romances,” sentimental “idylls,” or humorous novels—all tags attached to her books by various of the “new” critics. She defended her books against the charge that they were sentimental by arguing that there was a huge difference between “sentimentality” (which she loathed) and “sentiment” (which she saw as the impulse that held societies together). She praised Charlotte Brontë, one of her favourite authors, for her “absolute clear-sightedness regarding shams and sentimentalities” (September 22, 1925). Later, she would be pleased with the reviewer who wrote that her first Emily book was full of “sentiment that never gets over the line into sentimentality” (March 1, 1930).
Her trademarks as a writer were still “local colour,” with a good frosting of “purple prose” to describe beautiful natural landscapes; girl heroines who were full of passionate emotional responses to life; humorous treatment of the vagaries of human nature; an affectionate view of humanity shown in the characters’ zest for life and concern for each other; and tidy happy endings— which were labelled “sentimental” by the critics. Unfortunately, all these features were on the Modernists’ scorn list.
Maud clung resolutely to the idea that a writer should be uplifting, rather than mired in the world’s “pigstyes.” She loathed the depravity, defeat, and destruction in modernist writing. She determined that she would never show the “shadows” of her own life in her fiction, but would hide it away in her private diary. She believed that the best way to reform people was with humour, not cynicism. While Maud had increasing doubts about God’s omnipotence, she still believed that He would reward His faithful servants. With desperation, she clung to that weakening conviction.
No one in the middle of this seismic shift fully understood what was evolving. But as the early 1920s wore on, Maud saw that her style of narrative was coming under attack. She had not been disturbed over the occasionally churlish reviewer, but this was a systemic attack on the foundations of her fiction. If the disappointments in her personal life were not enough, she now faced the diminution of her celebrity in the literary world—the respect that she had laboured so hard to achieve, and which had given her such pleasure.69 As soon as Emily of New Moon was finished in 1922, Maud worked ever harder recopying her diaries into her journals, while continuing to record current events in her ongoing diaries.
Her journalizing kept her living in several time frames at once: the past was being reconfigured in her “journals” (and being relived while being transcribed on the page); the present was being lived (and being recorded in daily notes in her diary for future transfer into the journals); and the future was being anticipated in her imagination (as she worried about her husband and Chester).
Her ability to both remember and imagine were so powerful that the past and the future could fuse, squeezing out the present. Her son Stuart, in fact, commented in the 1980s that his mother lived too much of her life in the past and the future, and not enough in the present. Chester’s first wife put it another way in the 1980s: she said that Maud lived too much in fictional worlds and not enough in the real one. Both were reflecting on Maud in her last decade, not on the young or middle-aged Maud. In retrospect, others might say that because Maud was not one to live complainingly or disreputably in her real life, her imaginative world was her only safe alternative. She did not just live to write, she wrote to live. By her ability to live in several different time frames all at once, she could divert herself from discomfort in her present. Her friend Captain Smith might have been an adventurer in life, but she could be one only in her imagination.
At the end of December 1921, Maud wrote some curious passages about “dream lives” in her journals. She had just returned from a busy evening of hosting the church Women’s Guild executive, and she reports that Ewan attended and was unsociable, rather than trying to “slip away and indulge his broodings.” They had spent considerable time with the Edwin Smiths through the summer and fall, listening to Smith describe his adventures.
In the entry for December 29, 1921, Maud muses over the “dream lives” she had in her childhood. She confesses that she lives them still. She describes one from her childhood in which she imagined herself a female member of the British Parliament named “Lady Trevanion.” When someone made a “contemptuous reference” to her “as a woman,” little Maud always leapt to her feet as Lady Trevanion and, adapting “Pitt’s Reply to Walpole,” she “hurled” back:
Sir, the atrocious crime of being a woman which the honourable gentleman has, with such spirit and decency charged upon me, I shall attempt neither to palliate nor deny but shall content myself with wishing that I may be one of those whose follies cease with their sex and not one of that number who are ignorant in spite of manhood and experience. (December 29, 1921)
She describes another dream life in South Africa during the Boer War, one shared with Cecil Rhodes, a man her generation greatly admired. These “dream lives” were imagined so vividly that she claimed that she could live in them completely. She describes a current one:
It is a curious thing that all through my life when some great strain or crisis came and all my old dream lives, lived so often that they had at last grown stale and flavourless, failed to give these escapes, some new, vivid, and exhilarating dreamlife would come into being. For months I have been a member of a party seeking in the mountain deserts of South America the jewels hung on a stone god in a great underground cavern. I have gone through the most amazing adventures, risks, terrors, hardship, have found the jewels, outwitted foes and traitors and returned in triumph. How silly it all seems written down. Yet it has been a wonderful, breathless, exciting existence as lived, and seems now in retrospect as real as life I have actually lived … (August 13, 1925)
She goes on to explain that these dream lives are completely different from “stories I ‘think out.’ When thinking out a story I am outside of it—merely recording what I see others do. But in a dream life I am inside—I am living it, not recording it.”
In Maud’s journals, there is far less evidence of these “dream lives” than the above passage would suggest. Although the word “dream” appears with enormous frequency in the journals, and is used in various capacities, it is rarely used in relation to “dream lives.” More often she refers to “day-dreams.”
These references to dreaming “day-dreams” numerically cluster in three spots in her journals: during the “affair” with Herman Leard; during her romance with Ewan; and during the period when Captain Smith was living nearby and visiting often.
When Ewan was courting Maud in 1905, for instance, she says she went out for a walk and “wandered happily along.… Later on I began simply to dream. One can dream into one’s life everything that isn’t in it, so fully and vividly that for the moment the dream seems real …” (March 16, 1905). The period of their courtship is filled with references to dreams and waking dreams. These kinds of vivid nighttime dreams, “waking dreams,” and more especially “dream lives” re-emerge in the period when Smith’s visits and conversation give her a lift. But of course she never links them to him, nor the earlier ones to Herman or Ewan.
With the exception of Cecil Rhodes (1853–1902), whose picture is visible in a photograph of her room in Cavendish before her marriage, Maud is quiet about her accomplices on these “dream-life adventures,” but one can assume she was not a solitary explorer. Nor is it likely that the stodgy, depressed Ewan metamorphosed into an adventurer. It is far more plausible that Smith, an adventurer she did know, was the type of companion she found for her imaginary dream lives in this period.
The flip side to Maud’s ability to dream and imagine is represented by her often tense interactions in the real world. Here, public opinion, and particularly gossip, was a constant threat. As noted, Maud rages in her journals about her housemaid, Lily—her messiness, her foolishness, her general incompetence. Rather than dwell on Lily’s gossip, Maud deflects attention to the swirl of community gossip. Of her gossipy neighbours, she writes: “They know the exact moment our washing is hung out, the number of pieces, and everything else that is done in our back yard. As to what goes on indoors, where they can’t see, I fear their agony of curiosity about it will shorten their lives” (entry dated October 18, 1921, but written later). The underlying suggestion is that Lily, who was privy to all that happened inside the manse, enjoyed satisfying their curiosity. Of course, the Macdonalds enjoyed the gossip that Lily brought back from Zephyr and were curious to hear the details. They had a good laugh when Lily informed them that some of Marshall Pickering’s Bible class students had dropped out because they didn’t want to be taught “by a perjurer.” But it is also likely that Pickering had found out the names of the Macdonald’s witnesses from Lily.
Once she starts on the subject of gossip, Maud explains that idle gossip does not necessarily start with enemies. One of the Macdonalds’ close neighbours in Leaskdale, Mrs. Alec Leask, a good friend, invented stories about the Macdonald family based on snippets of information she had picked up, including conversations overheard on the telephone party lines. On one occasion she put out the word that Maud was writing a book on “stepmothers” to be published after she died. Since Maud’s stepmother had originally lived in this area of Ontario, this idea drew much attention. (Lily may also have been involved in this tale, after hearing Maud tell funny stories about her stepmother in Prince Albert. Possibly Lily took a quick peep in Maud’s diaries when she was recopying the part about her stepmother, and assumed it was for a book.)
In another entry (June 8, 1922) Maud recounts more local gossip. Supposedly Mrs. Leask had heard in Toronto that an unnamed Canadian author had just inherited a lot of money. She decided it must be Maud, and spread the word through the community that Maud was now an heiress. Maud worried that this gossip, if believed, would suggest to the parishioners that they did not really need to pay Ewan. Such stories take their own narrative life in Maud’s journals because she is so maddened by gossip in this period. Gossip was entertainment in a small community, but it was also the means to carry out family feuds. There was no better way to “get even.” She also knew that in a rural community, a time-honoured way for adults to test the truthfulness of gossip was to repeat the stories directly to a person, and then to watch for his or her reaction.
In Zephyr, Mrs. Will Lockie continued to prick Maud with various thorns. Maud had long chafed over Mrs. Lockie’s remark that Maud kept a maid so she could “live without working,” unlike the rest of the farmers’ wives who had to work. In 1922, Mrs. Lockie further angered Maud by referring to a nurse Maud had hired for the births of Chester and Stuart: “We country women can’t get a trained nurse. We have to die,” she said on November 16, 1922. Maud says that she itched to retort, but did not dare say: “You have three children. Yet you are alive.” Maud’s only retaliation was to repeat gossip about Mrs. Lockie in her journal—that when she was younger and working as “a servant girl” she stole jam and preserves (very valuable commodities then) from her employer’s pantry. Maud took some comfort that her journals would give the last word in the Lockie-Macdonald feud.
Gossip was often indirect, and Maud reacted sharply to innuendos like this, from a friend: “Nobody ever need say anything against you or Mr. Macdonald to me.… They don’t say anything—they don’t dare to.” This, she noted, suggested that people had indeed been saying things (June 12, 1922). In better times, Maud would have laughed off these remarks. But she was raw from many other problems, including Lily’s gossip, and she was finding it harder to laugh.
By March 1922, Lily had been with Maud for four years. When she had first come in 1918, Maud’s home had been a cheerful house with little children; by now, Lily was bored with her job and generally unhappy.
To Maud, the most trying thing about Lily was her indiscretion, not her other faults. Maud demanded loyalty from employees and friends, but Lily, feeling sour, used gossip as revenge. On several occasions, Maud heard that she had told bold untruths about inconsequential matters, saying, for instance, that Maud slept in while she, Lily, did the work. Maud was livid: an outright lie, it reinforced the opinions of women who were jealous that Maud had a maid. Furious, and unable to write in her journal about the real source of her anger—Lily’s gossiping about Maud’s close friendship with Smith—Maud tells all the other stories about Lily, and gossip in general, to neutralize any stories that might linger in future years. Maud wanted to prove that where there was smoke there was not always fire—sometimes it was just the burning underbrush of gossip.
Gossip had always been a component of Maud’s books. In fact, some of her books have little plot, they just move forward through talk (which is largely gossip). Now, gossip became a major subject in the Emily trilogy, reflecting Maud’s own sense of victimization. Chapter 21 (“Thicker than water”) of Emily Climbs—written in less than five months between August 29, 1923, and January 17, 1924—shows Maud’s full fury at the power of gossip to destroy reputations. Raised in the small, closely knit community of Cavendish, where gossip regulated social behaviour, Maud would be pursued to her dying day by her grandmother’s question: “What will people say?”
After May 1923, the Smiths departed from both Maud’s journals and the Macdonalds’ lives.
Amid all the pettiness over gossip, Maud was delighted with an unexpected professional honour. At the end of January 1923, she received a letter from the Secretary of the Royal Society of Great Britain, inviting her to become a Fellow of the Royal Society—the first Canadian woman ever to be offered the honour of putting “F.R.S.A.” after her name. Now that literary tastes were changing and in some quarters her books seemed to be falling out of fashion, public recognition was especially important to her. She was proud of her long climb up “the Alpine Path.”
Spring 1923 brought a Canadian Authors Association convention celebrating a new copyright law. Maud was so pleased when Professor John Daniel of Acadia University greeted her with, “Hail, Queen of Canadian novelists!” that she recorded this in her journals. Logan, with co-author Donald French, was preparing a new study entitled Highways of Canadian Literature, to be published in 1924, and they treated her with respect. Maud’s springtime public speeches included a trip to Stratford and Mitchell, this time to speak to an audience of 150 that included many men, a new experience for her. In March, she would have another perk: The Toronto Star published a survey they had done, asking people: “Who Are the Twelve Greatest Women in Canada?” She was chosen as one, and recorded that in her journals.