An early Maclean’s article in 1919, entitled “The Author of Anne,” stated that Maud was “a mother who mothers her children personally; they have always been considered before her books …” This was not quite true.70 An objective observer would probably have seen her actual time allotment otherwise: her writing came first, her church work second, and her boys third. Ewan and her housework would likely have vied for number four. She loved her boys immensely, but with so many demands on her time, she was not able to enjoy them much. Loving children is not the same as enjoying them; children who are enjoyed feel secure in their parents’ love. Her children were left to find their own amusements, something easily done in a small, safe, rural area like Leaskdale. Even when she did things with them, her mind was preoccupied by other matters. Maud puts in small anecdotes about her sons in her journals; while these reflect great affection, the reality is that she spent relatively little time with them due to the heavy load she carried—a rather sad state of affairs for a woman who had wanted children so badly.
Towards the end of his life, Stuart still recalled trying to attract his mother’s attention when he was a child. He told of pushing wildflowers under the door when she was writing in the study. That brought his mother to the door to acknowledge the flowers and thank him, only to disappear behind the closed door again. Another time, when he was older, he memorized a poem she loved, Sir Walter Scott’s The Lady of the Lake (some fifty pages of very small print). This had more of an impact. Oddly, Maud does not mention this feat in her journals, yet for Stuart, it was one of the most vivid memories of his childhood, one of those events that bonded him to his mother in a way nothing else could. He knew how much she liked reciting poems and had often heard her recite long sections from Scott’s poem. Like his mother, he had an exceptional visual and aural memory and could memorize very easily. Years later, he still remembered the look of surprise on her face as he started reciting, and her mounting excitement as he continued, page after page, canto after canto. About halfway through his recitation he forgot a line, and his mother quietly prompted him. He said that he never forgot his astonishment that she knew the poem so well that she could prompt him at any place. He got extra attention for those efforts, for a very long time.71
As the boys were growing up, a pattern had been emerging. Stuart favoured his mother, not only in looks but also in personality and disposition. Chester took after his father. Maud consequently worried a great deal about Chester. Sunny little Stuart charmed the community with his smile and his recitations at church events. He had his mother’s sense of timing and showmanship when reciting on the stage. He created no disturbances at home or school, and he made friends easily. Chester was just the opposite. From the beginning, something seemed amiss.
When Stuart reached his sixth birthday in 1921, Maud wrote assessments of her two sons. Stuart she characterized as smart and lovable, Chester as having some troubling qualities. “There is the same curious little streak of contrariness in him that there is in Ewan … its presence has always made him an exceedingly difficult child to train.… [H]e is a blunt reserved little fellow while Stuart, with his angel face and joyous pervasive smile, is the friend of all the world” (October 7, 1921).
Chester, in his ninth year, was already creating trouble in school. He was undeniably bright, and, like Stuart, he usually led his class. Chester had also inherited his mother’s good memory, and he was an excellent reader, but his failure to socialize well with the other students produced constant mayhem. His mother initially blamed his troubles on inexperienced teachers. She remembered that when she had been teaching, she had been able to keep all the students in line.
However, according to Chester’s former classmates in Leaskdale— interviewed in the early 1980s before the Montgomery journals were published and people’s memories became tainted by what they had read in the journals— Chester was always getting into trouble at school. The students loved “to get him going” because he created such a lively uproar. Children teased and tormented him because he would react angrily to provocations and retaliate by lunging at offenders, and his clumsy attempts to catch his skinny, fast-footed classmates created a comic delight. They all said, independently, as adults looking back, that he was by nature a “loner.” He wanted desperately to be accepted, but he was socially inept and ostracized.
Chester’s classmates also recounted that he began showing precocious interest in girls long before anyone else, but the result was that the girls banded together to tease him. Girls would taunt him at recess, and he would erupt and chase them. Disturbances in class were also common, with kids throwing surreptitious spitballs at him to get a reaction. Failing a provocation, he would act up to become the centre of attention. The teacher would say, without even turning, “Is that you, Chester?” He often “got the strap” (a rubber belt about fifteen inches long, one quarter of an inch wide, with which the palm of the hand would be struck several times). As soon as he was old enough to walk the distance by himself, he was frequently sent home from school by exasperated teachers. Something seemed amiss with this boy.
There were no programs then for identifying and working with children with behavioural problems. A relatively inexperienced young teacher would have found it largely impossible to discuss the difficulties with Chester with Canada’s most famous author of books that featured the trials of childhood. However, Maud did not need to be told about Chester’s problems (e.g., as with impulse control): she saw them, but did not know what to do. She was alarmed and admitted to punishing Chester at home. She complained that Ewan was ineffective for training and discipline. For Ewan, as for many men in his generation, child-rearing was a woman’s job.
Indeed, Ewan was no good with small children, nor did he connect with the older youngsters in his parish. Stuart remembered how his well-meaning father tried to relate to children by carrying hard candies called “humbugs” loose in his pocket. These he offered to children—who popped them in their mouths even if they had grungy pocket lint stuck to them.
Ewan left everything to Maud, including the boys’ sex education. Maud says that she made a point of answering the boys’ questions frankly and openly, and she got Chester a book about sex that explained details to him. She wrote that she was resolved not to turn sex into the “dirty” topic it had been in her youth. Her Victorian training, however, had left her exceptionally anxious over matters associated with sex.
Quite early in his development, Chester developed impulsive habits of sexual self-gratification, and he made no effort to conceal this. Maud was alarmed. She certainly did not want Chester pleasuring himself in the bedroom he shared with his younger brother, nor did she want a maid—or visitor—to see it. “I have had to talk to Chester lately about certain habits to avoid,” she wrote euphemistically on January 11, 1924, expressing irritation that Ewan would not do this. However, her talks did not stop Chester’s behaviour, which continued to cause alarm. Chester was a very impulsive child—and later an impulsive young man—who could not postpone any kind of gratification.
For a woman so given to worry, Maud now had many sources of anxiety. Were Chester’s problems with his peers related to Ewan’s apparent inability to bond strongly with anyone? She remarked in her journals that Ewan had never had a close friend in all his life. Despite the pretext of friendship between Captain Smith and Ewan, she knew that it was really her conversational ability and celebrity that prompted Smith’s frequent visits. His parishioners, and most people in general, had always liked Ewan, and thought him a good and kind man, but there was never a bond of strong friendship. As a minister, Ewan needed to maintain a certain reserve with all parishioners, but it was a fact that he, too, had always been a “loner.” Although he was sensitive and brooding himself, he often seemed to lack the capacity for deep empathy with others. His bouts of depression only increased his self-absorption.
Chester looked like his father, was built like him, and now was showing signs of being like him in other ways that were poorly understood and poorly defined. Maud fretted over what she believed to be a hereditary taint in Ewan’s family. One of Ewan’s brothers, a well-to-do rancher in Montana, at some point late in his life went missing in a state of melancholy after saying he was going to kill himself. He was never found, according to Maud’s journals.
Ewan and Chester begun to clash early in Chester’s life. Ewan was apparently tormented by the fear that he had replicated himself and all his weakness in Chester. Maud had more than a premonition that there might be future trouble with Chester. She guessed that if Chester were going to inherit his father’s melancholy, it would be manifested at puberty. This was a family whose problems were only beginning.
Ewan had remained anxious over himself since his first serious mental episode in 1919. In October 1921, he had driven himself down to Warsaw, Indiana, to visit his brother, a very successful medical doctor, hoping to get advice about his mental condition. After Ewan’s return from Indiana, he had a particularly bad “melancholy” spell. He fixated on the idea that he was an “outcast from God,” a soul lost to Satan and eternal damnation. In one of these depressions, he told Maud that he contemplated suicide. (When Maud reads Lecky’s History of European Morals, she comments on suicide in her journals, picking up his ideas. Seen in her entry of May 10, 1922.) What little peace of mind Maud still had was lost with that admission: suicide would brand their children with shame for their entire lives. On November 1, 1921, Maud wrote in her journal that when he was ill, Ewan was “a personality which is repulsive and abhorrent to me …” Yet, at Christmas that year, Maud reported that Ewan was perfectly normal for the first time since 1918. These sudden and disorienting ups and downs seemed her new reality.
Finances were also a worry. Maud had been surprised that her October 1921 payment from her U.S. publisher, Stokes, was the smallest she had yet received from them. She blamed it on the financial depression in the United States at that time, and worried that she would have to draw on her capital. She thought ruefully of all the thousands of dollars that she had wasted on Stella Campbell, giving her money to lend to a suitor (Irving Howatt) and later money to buy a farm in California. The pressures on her increased, and with Ewan’s mental health being so unpredictable, she was beginning to worry about whether she could maintain her income sufficiently to support them. She felt vulnerable in almost every aspect of her life now, and that would in turn affect her ability to write.
In the summer of 1922, there was no chance for the Macdonalds to drive down to Maud’s beloved Prince Edward Island. (Ewan was busy talking to people, organizing witnesses for the Pickering lawsuit.) Instead, in July they made a shorter trip to the beautiful lake district of northern Ontario, an area Maud remembered from her return train trip from Prince Albert some thirty-one years earlier. On July 24, 1922, they packed their car and motored the eighty-five miles to Bala, Ontario. Maud took her imaginary “dream lives” with her.
In the jazz age, Bala was one of the most popular vacation spots in Ontario. A charming resort town on the lake some 125 miles north of Toronto, it was a favourite destination for Torontonians wanting to escape the summer heat in pre-air-conditioned times. Well-to-do people usually drove up in their own cars, but others came by train. Waiting to see who might spill out of the train (or steamboat from other ports) was the main excitement of the day for the younger folk in Bala.
Bala lay at the edge of Lake Muskoka, where the Musquosh River flowed into Bala Bay. Large American bands came in the summer, playing for all the vacationing city people who congregated there to mix, eat, drink, dance, and have a good time. At night, a part of the town was lighted by lanterns, and the large dance pavilion down by the lake gave Bala the atmosphere of a carnival. In the day, it was a beautiful place with lawns sloping down to the lake water, making it easy to swim or canoe. When the music died down and night fell, the roaring waters cascaded over the jagged rocks with a thunderous roar that sounded much like the surf in Prince Edward Island. Wealthy people built beautiful summer homes on the larger islands, which were reached by stately mahogany launches, some of them so large that their decks were used as dance floors. Bala was a magical place in those years between the end of World War I and the onset of the Great Depression, and both Ewan and Maud needed some magic in their lives.
Ordinary tourists stayed in guest homes near the shore of the lake. The Macdonalds stayed at Roselawn Lodge, located on Bala Bay, right below the waterfalls. Maud fell in love with the area. The twinkling lanterns reminded her of the carnival setting of the canals at the base of the famous conical Tomnahurich Mountain in Scotland.
When fogs arose, Bala had the same otherworld quality of Prince Edward Island and Scotland. Maud particularly liked the evenings, when she could sit on the porch, looking through the mists to the lights at other cottages, with campfires blazing, and escape into imaginings of warm fellowship in these private places. When Ewan took the boys out one afternoon, she described one of her “waking-dream lives”:
I picked out an island that just suited me. I built thereon a summer cottage and furnished it de luxe. I set up a boat-house and a motor launch. I peopled it with summer guests—Frede, Aunt Annie, Stella, Bertie—Mr. MacMillan (to whom I engaged Bertie!). We spent a whole idyllic summer there together. Youth—mystery— delight, were all ours once more. I lived it all out in every detail; we swam and sailed and fished and read and built campfires under the pines—I saw to it that I had an island with pines—and dined gloriously at sunset al fresco, and then sat out on moonlit porches (well-screened from Muskoka mosquitoes!)—and always we talked—the soul-satisfying talk of kindred spirits, asking all the old, unanswered questions, caring not though there were no answers so long as we were all ignorant together. (July 31, 1922)
Maud continues describing their “dream life” adventure. Ewan does not make the first list of names above, but she tucks him into the second paragraph, maybe as an afterthought, adding that in her dream he is “not a minister.” The people she chose for her dream were all people who made excellent company. Of course, the best conversationalist and storyteller she knew in 1922 was Edwin Smith who loved lakes, oceans, and water. His ability at sailing was legendary and his yacht from his Prince Edward Island days would have been a classy companion for the motorized mahogany launches in Bala. Significantly, he is not named in this waking dream. He has been all but erased from the narrative in her journals.
While Maud was in Bala, she checked the English proofs of Emily of New Moon and did restful fancy-work. The family took their meals across the street with a Mrs. Pyke, “a lady cumbered with much serving.”72 In a picture of herself in a canoe, which Maud has entitled “Dreaming,” she looks extremely happy.
On this Muskoka vacation, the Macdonalds made a day-trip to see John Mustard and his wife. For $100, John Mustard had purchased a wilderness spot on Lake Muskoka a few miles north of Bala. John and his teenage son Gordon had recently finished building their own modest wooden cottage, amid mature maples and oaks on a long, sloping bank that ran down to the lake.73 John Mustard’s rural retreat was a paradise, just what Maud might have dreamed of owning herself. With the $10,000 she had wasted on her feckless cousin Stella Campbell, she could have bought the largest and most romantic island in Muskoka.
But what would that have availed her without a soulmate to enjoy it with? Nature—water, trees, flowers—all made Maud feel wholesome, but Ewan did not even notice them. The lake would only have been a place for Ewan to drown himself when a melancholy spell descended on him. Ewan’s figure had thickened with age, inactivity, and too much food. By contrast, the trim and distinguished-looking Reverend John Mustard shed his formal clerical garb and turned into a woodsman when he came to Muskoka. John had nailed up a nice little cottage for his family, but Ewan was so clumsy that he could not have clapped two boards together. In this little cottage in the backwoods, one could go to sleep to the call of the whippoorwill and wake to the call of the loons. It was a dream spot. Maud must have felt unspeakable envy when she first saw it nestled amid the trees.
Needless to say, John Mustard did not make it into Maud’s waking-dreams. He was too genuinely and irritatingly good to be interesting. But she could not have helped comparing the man she had spurned to the man she had chosen. John Mustard was healthy and optimistic; Ewan was sluggish and gloomy. John Mustard had far less income than they had, but he had far more joy in what he had.
John Mustard was a compassionate man who undoubtedly saw the depressive aura around Ewan. From his brothers, Hugh and James Mustard, mainstays in Ewan’s parish, John would have known that Ewan was well liked but that his health had been troublesome. No doubt he sensed Maud’s inner worries. When Mrs. Mustard took Ewan and the boys out for a little fishing expedition, John Mustard played the good host and stayed behind to keep Maud company. This was not appreciated—Maud would never have discussed her husband with him, or their past encounter in Prince Albert. And she despised pity. Their conversation was stilted. His friendly kindness annoyed her. In her journal, she presents the Reverend John Mustard as the same “tedious man” who had been her teacher in 1890–91, and she says nothing to indicate his sterling qualities. The Reverend John Mustard’s career path had been steady, solid, and upward from the beginning. Maud was well aware of all this, but she does not write anything about it in her journal. Nor does she tell us what she very well knows—that he has become one of the most successful and respected Presbyterian ministers in all of Toronto.74
Maud had asked earlier in her life why people could not always love that which was most worthy. Certainly John Mustard was as worthy as men come, and he was unfailingly kind to the Macdonalds, and genuinely solicitous over Ewan’s health until the end of Maud’s and Ewan’s lives. In a thoughtful frame of mind during this Bala vacation, Maud must have compared Mustard to the other minister of her ken, Edwin Smith. Smith had the personal charisma and dazzling oral skills that left people admiring him, whereas John Mustard exuded sincerity, solidity, and generosity of spirit towards others. But Maud could not bring herself to give John Mustard his due in her journals.75
Maud’s visit to Bala, and to the Mustard cottage, got only a small write-up in her journals, but her trip gave her new ideas. She tucked away this magical landscape—and the waking dreams she had had there—in her memory bank for a future novel.
The following spring, in 1923, Ewan had bad news from the Island. His sister Christie’s son, Leavitt, had embezzled a large amount of money, and the only way for his family to avoid public shame in the province was to make silent restitution. Ewan’s distracted and heartbroken sister begged for a $5,000 loan on her mortgage. Since Maud had just received profits from Further Chronicles of Avonlea, Ewan wanted her to lend them to Christie. Maud balked. She doubted she would ever get the money back, and she had already lent a great deal of money to other family members that would not be repaid. She wanted Christie to go to Ewan’s two brothers for the money. One brother, Dr. Angus Macdonald, in Indiana, was very well-to-do, and he had no children, so he could well afford to help. Ewan decided to take a quick trip to the Island to see what else he could do for his sister; Maud approved, knowing that Ewan always performed well in negotiating situations where he had a focus.
Ewan came back from the Island with hopeless news: Leavitt had run up a $13,000 debt and embezzled $1,500 from the post office, a federal offence. He had now absconded to the United States, leaving his dying father and distraught mother to cope. Ewan worked it all out, asking for some of Maud’s royalty income. “To get his parents in a mess like that!!” Maud exclaimed in her journal, but then added, “But I must not be too harsh. I don’t know how my own boys will turn out yet” (May 21, 1923). She had plenty of reason to worry about Chester.
A month later she noted another sounding of this theme: a family’s disappointment in a son. John Mustard’s only son had “broken his parents’ hearts,” she wrote, “by suddenly presenting them with a French Canadian Catholic wife whom he picked up in the mining regions up north.” Maud felt, like most of her Presbyterian contemporaries, that marrying a Catholic, especially a French-Canadian one, was a big plunge down the social ladder. Scotland’s history was full of clashes between the Presbyterians and the Catholics, and the enmity ran centuries deep. It had carried across the Atlantic, and Maud had been brought up to believe that Catholics were even worse than “heathens,” who were merely ignorant. This was embedded as deeply within her as the fear of what people would say or think. (Yet, intellectually, Maud rose above her deep prejudice in her Emily novels, portraying a Catholic priest with respect.)
By late summer 1923, Maud herself wanted to travel to Prince Edward Island for some renewal. She was having trouble writing. This time, she left Ewan at home, taking only her two sons, now eleven and seven. But the visit was bittersweet. In spite of the still-strong charms of the sea wind, the hearty meals, the twilights in “Lovers’ Lane,” and the warmth of renewing friendships, Maud realized sadly that the Prince Edward Island she loved was as much a time as a place. The landscape might be the same, but many of the people she loved, like Frede, were gone. In addition, the character of the Island was changing as a result of tourism, for which she was largely responsible. (Once the law against cars had been repealed, American tourists had flooded in again.)
The only thing that had not changed on the Island was the superior quality of its cats. At Park Corner she picked out a wonderful little striped kitten with an “M” on its side to ship back to Ontario. She named him “Good Luck” and called him “Lucky.” Of all the cats that she would have in her life, Lucky was to be her favourite.
As soon as she returned from the Island, in late August, Maud resumed the task of writing Emily Climbs. She felt little interest in it. Her readers would demand that Emily grow up, marry, and live happily ever after. Maud had been in a state of heady excitement when she wrote both Anne of Green Gables and Emily of New Moon, but it was only her personal discipline that got her through the sequels, where her feisty heroines had to be tamed.
The family tension in Maud’s life, combined with the steady writing and revising of her books, compounded by a too-busy round of social obligations, was beginning to take its toll. She had gained forty pounds in the previous two years. She was suffering from muscle spasms in her shoulders and neck, and these were expanding into headaches. She was now forcing herself to write three hours per day instead of two, which aggravated this condition. She revised “Emily 2” during the next two months, and had it ready for a typist by March 8, 1924. She dedicated Emily Climbs to “Pastor Felix,” the pseudonym of a long-time correspondent, the Reverend Arthur John Lockhart (c. 1850–1926), a poet who was the uncle of Nate Lockhart, her first “beau” from schooldays.
The formula for popular fiction required young women to marry. Young men could light out for new territory and adventure (like Huckleberry Finn), but women were usually destined for matrimony. Maud complained in her journals that she could never write of young girls as they really were, very interested in boys and with growing sexual urges: “Love must scarcely be hinted at—yet young girls in their early teens often have some very vivid love affairs. A girl of Emily’s type certainly would …” (January 20, 1924). As Maud watched Emily’s sexuality developing (while remembering her own development, and keeping one eye on the real-life turmoil in Chester’s pubescent life and the other on her aging, troubled husband), she must have wondered where to take her story. Emily had to be taken through her teenage years into marriage without any hint of improper thoughts along the way.
Maud was in her forty-ninth year, still full of vitality, locked into a marriage to a man who, when he was depressed, she found repugnant. Maud’s maids recounted that although Ewan wore relatively formal attire most of the time, he always looked slightly slovenly; his rumpled look was accentuated by his swarthy skin. Some people compared Maud’s impeccable cleanliness and wondered how she could tolerate such an unkempt husband.
In the first Emily book, Dean Priest is an older man, widely travelled, who becomes a friend to Emily. In the second Emily book, he becomes the hunchbacked “Jarback” Priest, who develops a romantic interest in her. An adult reading Emily Climbs feels discomfort with the change: Dean may be a “Priest,” but to adult readers he begins to feel unwholesome, more like a sexual predator than an older friend.
The Emily trilogy had begun in 1921 as a Künstlerroman, a story about the education and development of an artist figure—in this case, a female artist. It loses its direction as Maud negotiates the dark waters of sexuality, unable to depict either the abnormal or normal kind. Dean’s nickname of “Jarback” signals that something is wrong with this man. “Jarback” then slips into the skin of a predator—he is quite willing to destroy Emily’s self-esteem and her writing in order to persuade her to marry him. Ewan had counselled Maud to give up her writing after she had a nervous attack early in their relationship. As we saw earlier, Maud once complains in her journals that the otherwise kindly Ewan has a “medieval” attitude towards women, seeing them as a man’s possession (March 25, 1922). The adult reader hardly knows what to make of this fictional character, Dean Priest, who suddenly shifts from being a father-figure to a lurking menace, interested only in Emily’s body, not her creativity or soul. The fictional world of sexuality has become as unstable as Montgomery’s real one. Maud seems to be writing out of her own emotional turmoil, and although the young reader stays interested in finding out what will happen to Emily, the novel seems to have lost its focus. Maud often said that she intended to keep the “shadows” of her own life out of her fiction, but they appear here in strangely twisted form.
By March 1924, when Maud was finishing Emily Climbs, she had the “tight” feeling in her head again. Her Canadian income was down. Rilla had sold, but only 12,000 copies; and Emily of New Moon only 8,500 in Canada. And there was ongoing aggravation over Ewan’s lawsuit. Ewan could be hauled into court anytime that Pickering thought he might have enough money to pay the judgment. The letters from Lawyer Grieg kept insulting Ewan for his “inability to pay.” The mere reminder of the lawsuit stirred up one more failure for Ewan—his inability to get justice in a court of law—and seemed once more to prove that God had rejected him.
At one point Greig sent an affidavit, implying that Ewan was hiding his real income so he would have more money “wherewith to enjoy himself and to spend in unnecessary ways.” Both Maud and Ewan thought this statement a howler. The idea of a staid Presbyterian minister, particularly a depressive one, enjoying himself in “necessary” ways was funny enough, but “in unnecessary ways” was beyond imagining, even to Ewan. It is one of the few times in her journals where Maud tells of having a good laugh with Ewan (although maids and relatives said they did have a good time together in the early years).
The whole Pickering affair continued as a strain on the Macdonalds, even if they could laugh over aspects of the case—including the fact that the court required Pickering to pay thirty dollars, then a substantial amount of money, for Ewan’s expenses every time Ewan was summoned for a court examination of his financial state. The procedure wore Ewan down, and he relapsed into melancholy after almost a year of being fairly stable. Maud wanted to pay the debt from her income and be done with Pickering, but Ewan stubbornly refused.
On a Sunday in the first week of March 1924, Maud went into the library to find him, with a bandana tied round his head, suffering another attack: “unshorn, collarless, hair on end, eyes wild and hunted, with a hideous imbecile expression.” He preached a puerile sermon, reducing her to tears of humiliation. Ewan was soon too ill to preach at all. In mid-April, their newspaper, the Northern Ontario Times, carried the Leaskdale note that “Mr. Macdonald is improving after an attack of neuritis. Mr. Edmunds of Uxbridge occupied the pulpit on Sunday.” Maud was using neuritis to explain her husband’s problems at this time; it is a vague term suggesting inflammation of the nerves. Soon Maud was again in pain from a tight feeling around her head, undoubtedly caused by stress, a symptom that would afflict her during tense periods for the rest of her life.
When Ewan did manage to sleep, he found himself frightened by his dreams. Once he woke in a terror, having dreamed of murdering a good friend. This was apparently the second time Ewan had had the dream of killing a friend, and Maud began to be frightened of him, for herself and for the boys. He had begun to hear voices in his attacks telling him “he was going to be lost—God hated him—he was doomed to hell” (March 25, 1924).
Whenever Maud saw Ewan start to “paw” at his head, she knew the malady was starting up again. She could not imagine where things would end. She had been giving Ewan a steady course of chloral or Veronal when he had symptoms or when he could not sleep—drugs that were recommended by Dr. Shier, as well as the Bostonian Dr. Nathan Garrick. (Ewan may have medicated himself on top of what Maud gave him.) In these attacks, Maud reported that Ewan had abnormal physical symptoms: his breath smelled of urea and his skin turned a poor colour.76 This time, his attack intensified as the days wore on, and he paced the floors, shaking, his eyes haunted. One day his illness reached a peak, and he fled the house and strode up the road in mud and slush, in full view of the neighbours, and then returned, muttering that he was dying. Maud took his pulse, which was fine. She brought him to the library so the boys would not see him. After bursting into tears and crying for some time, he improved.
When he was at his worst, she kept him out of sight of the community. When he was only slightly affected, and they had to go visiting, he was able to keep up a minimal conversation, and she would carry it. Once, by “devilish felicity” a lady they were visiting in Zephyr regaled them with tales of the “suicides of the unsound in mind.” A Zephyr neighbour had just tried suicide by Paris Green, but had not taken enough to kill her, only enough to furnish “gruesome details” for gossip (April 20, 1924). Maud watched Ewan’s increasing agitation until he got up and left the room, at which point she managed to change the subject.
—
Maud finished Emily Climbs on March 8, 1924. Since the Emily books were to be a trilogy, it would have been natural for her to start the third and final Emily novel next. Instead, she started a novel called The Blue Castle on April 10, and then the third Emily book, Emily’s Quest, on May 26, 1924. This was unprecedented—having two novels going at the same time. The Blue Castle seems to have been a “one-off” novel, demanding to be written, pushing aside the third and final Emily book. The Blue Castle is set in Muskoka.
In late April 1924, Maud took a break from her writing for her “semiannual orgy of household shopping” in Toronto. She brought home a little puppy for her boys, an Airedale they named Dixie, hoping it would be a happy distraction in a troubled household.
She made some speeches, and local newspapers carried accounts. The North Bay Nugget reported: “Mrs. McDonald [sic] paid a glowing tribute to the high character of Canadian writing.” In all her speeches she now routinely made a plea for Canadian support for Canadian writers, books, and magazines. She was carrying the Canadian Authors Association message everywhere she spoke. The Hamilton Spectator found her:
an altogether delightful person—rather above medium height [not accurate], and with thick hair, slightly graying, which she wore waved and coiled becomingly about her well-shaped head. Her face was unlined and she smiled easily, and to the reporter who had once fancied that the lovable Anne of Green Gables was none other than the author, she seemed indeed the embodiment of that wholesome, refreshing type of Prince Edward Island womanhood.… When asked her opinion of the modern “teenage girl”—the ultra modern young person who smoked and went everywhere unchaperoned, and who contrasted rather sadly with Anne of Green Gables, Mrs. McDonald defended the modern young girl.… Speaking of the too popular sex novel of the present day which the young girls read, Mrs. McDonald admitted that it was not until the other day that she had read Flaming Youth, the most flagrant of the fast sexy novels. She had been disgusted by it, for it neither pointed a moral, nor had it any excuse for its existence, like some of the really great sex novels, such as Tolstoy wrote.
Some days later, Maud wrote again in her journals how much she was enjoying writing The Blue Castle. It touched on taboo themes: she gave an unmarried mother a brief but sympathetic treatment in it, depicting her as an innocent, gullible, and psychologically needy young woman who got pregnant out of innocence. The main heroine fantasizes wildly about the perfect lover.
Maud’s life seemed in some sort of choppy turmoil. In May 1924, she inexplicably set The Blue Castle aside and prepared to start “Emily 3.” She finished her annual month-long ritual of spring-cleaning, followed by cleaning layers of manure and straw buildup out of the horse stable with pitchforks in preparation for a new batch of chickens. Maud could not count on Ewan to do work like this, so she did it herself, with help from Lily—who was a hard worker, good at pitching manure, whatever her other faults might have been.
Finances were a problem because of the ongoing Page lawsuit, but Maud’s financial state eased when The Delineator asked her to write four Emily stories, with payment of $1,600. On the first of June, Ewan left for a long vacation in PEI, a relief after three months of gloom.
Sadly, as soon as Ewan returned from PEI, Maud learned that her Aunt Annie had passed away; she went to the Island for the funeral. Maud experienced her beloved Aunt Annie’s death as she would have that of her own mother—she remained deeply attached to the Park Corner farm as a beacon of happiness from her childhood. Her Aunt Annie Campbell’s nonjudgmental love had been a source of great comfort to her when she was young, and now one more person she loved on the Island was gone. She came back with nerves frayed, and decided they all needed a holiday.
Now, Maud planned a different vacation for her family: a car trip to see the unusual underground formations in Kentucky known as Mammoth Cave. Being behind the wheel always cleared Ewan’s mind. Maud’s cousin Bertie McIntyre came from British Columbia to accompany them. Bertie had the Montgomery sense of gaiety and was good company. The boys, now twelve and nine, were the right age for such a car trip.
There was something symbolic in Maud’s desire to see this cave. She herself lived partly on the surface of life and partly in another world, out of sight, where she walked in the alternate byways of literature, creativity, and imaginative adventures. So, in a sense, she was drawn to the subterranean. She had grown up with Scottish and Irish mythologies, which held that there was an alternate world of fairy folk beneath the earth’s solid surface. To her imagination, this pagan Celtic legacy of subterranean folk was no more fantastical than the Christian belief in a God and singing angels above the earth’s solid surface. She wanted to see, in real time, in real life, a place where there was an alternate world that was out of this world but that nevertheless had physical existence. Powerful emotions that no one could know of were churning in her.
So the Macdonalds packed their bags, loaded their car, and started off on the morning of July 28, 1924, to Kentucky. Ewan drove their new car “Dodgie” without accident for a total of 1,817 miles, over an eleven-day period—a remarkable feat of concentration, considering that most of the roads they travelled over were dirt and gravel, full of ruts and potholes that could knock off the tires or axles of those fragile, early cars. It was an endurance test for all. When a storm came up near Sarnia, the Macdonalds quickly drove their car off the road into a nearby barn until it was over, and they were lucky to encounter no more rain on the trip. Their only other mishap was finding a single bedbug in an Indiana hotel. Maud was amazed to find red roads in Kentucky, just like the ones in Prince Edward Island.
Mammoth Cave cast an indescribable spell on Maud. Even Ewan was captivated—“and Ewan seldom seems to take much pleasure in the things that please others,” she wrote. Each day they donned “cave costumes” and walked down into the mouth of the chilling cave (fifty-four degrees Fahrenheit), then followed guides with gasoline lanterns through two to three miles of subterranean paths, past underground lakes and rivers, along precipices, down steep steps, and through long, lofty “rooms” with strangely formed grotesque figures looking like birds or animals or people, in a world without sight or sound. Maud mused over the totally white eyeless fish that she had heard about in sermons all her life—an example of what ministers said happened when living creatures didn’t use their powers and descended into a “degenerate state.” When the tourists rose to the earth’s surface again, it seemed unreal for the moment, the ground she stood on an illusion.
The trip both pleased and “spooked” her. She never wanted to return: this mysterious underworld world, beneath the lush rolling green fields of Kentucky, was too close a reminder of the double life she led herself.
The profound identification she experienced in the hidden worlds of Mammoth Cave proved to be curiously restorative. She again felt pleasure in the world around her, and her love of sharing that pleasure with others bubbled up again, with its healing powers. After she returned home, she spoke to many groups about the wonders of this experience, including the Hypatia Club and the Guilds of Leaskdale.
A new concern had been percolating in the Macdonalds’ lives for a number of years: the subject of “Church Union.” It had been mooted before the Great War, and approved by the General Assembly in 1916, but was not taken up again until after the war. In 1924, a Church Union bill went before the Canadian Parliament for debate. It proposed that the Presbyterian Church, the Methodist Church, and the Congregational Churches (and a few already amalgamated Protestant denominations) join into one church, to be called the “United Church of Canada.” The doctrinal differences between various Protestant churches were compatible. Canada’s population was diverse and scattered, and the increasing use of cars, giving people more mobility, made it unnecessary for there to be so many tiny rural Protestant churches with very small congregations.
Many farmers were sympathetic to the economic aspect of Church Union. They struggled to support their churches in the depressed times after the war. From a financial point of view, Church Union made sense. There would be a larger congregation supporting a single minister, and only one church building to maintain. There would be social benefits, too—people could see many more of their neighbours in the community every time they worshipped or attended a church function. Churches were still the dominant social organization in every community.
From other points of view, however, Church Union spelled trouble. Old loyalties to specific denominations and sects would die hard. Although the war had lessened the hold of the Church on people, congregations were still very loyal to the specific churches of their fathers. Both Ewan and Maud knew that if Union went through, amalgamating several denominations into the “United Church,” the weaker ministers would be pushed out. The unspoken truth was that Ewan was likely to be one of these, given his erratic health. Maud knew that if he lost his profession, she could still support them well enough on her income, but she feared that the psychological impact on him would be devastating.
Church Union was particularly favoured by parishioners in Zephyr. That tiny village not only had Ewan’s Presbyterian church, but the Methodist one as well. (The Methodist church was the one Marshall Pickering attended— although he himself was in hospital now with the diagnosis of diabetes.) The national government planned to ask each congregation in Canada to vote on whether the parishioners wanted to amalgamate churches, either to endorse Church Union or stay out as Continuing Presbyterians. This vote at the community level became an incredibly divisive agent, splitting families, and pitting neighbours against each other.
In summer, after the Church Union bill passed in Parliament, setting the stage for local votes on whether to go “union” or not, Ewan mobilized himself again to persuade his two churches to remain Presbyterian rather than become a “United Church.” He and his Scottish forebears had all been Presbyterian, and he wanted to stay Presbyterian, rather than go “Union.” For her part, Maud decided that she didn’t much care which way things went, writing in her journals:
The Spirit of God no longer works through the church for humanity. It did once but it has worn out its instrument and dropped it. Today it is working through Science. That is the real reason for all the “problems” we hear so much of in regard to the “church.” The “leaders” are trying to galvanize into a semblance of life something from which life has departed. (December 14, 1924)
She said nothing like this in public, however.
With Church Union boiling up, Ewan could focus his considerable persuasive and negotiating skills. But by the end of the year, the tension over the Union question made everyone feel frayed. There was much politicking, much gossiping about others’ motives, nasty power-wielding within congregations, and in some cases, some real skulduggery in voting procedures, as ministers devised ways to deny the vote to those whose preference they did not like.
By Christmas, Maud felt exhausted. She was coping with the general anxiety over Union, endless youth dialogue practices for the Christmas concert, letters from people asking her for financial help, mail from her Boston lawyer, the start of a bad cold, and Lily’s claiming to have a dozen illnesses—a “new one every half hour.” Maud felt, she said, “like a cat one jump ahead of a dog” (December 28, 1924). A new physical symptom bothered her: roving and immobilizing muscle spasms.
When the votes were all counted in January 1925, both of Ewan’s congregations had voted to remain Presbyterian. Leaskdale was solid, voting 63 to 11, but the results in fractious Zephyr had a smaller margin, 23 to 18. Some of the Zephyr people left the church anyway. This placed even greater financial strain on those who remained. Maud was cross with those who left, but the Macdonalds laughed to hear a report of the Methodists complaining that the Presbyterians had sent all their “cranks” over to them.
All across Canada, the aftermath of the Church Union vote was acrimonious. Many Presbyterian ministers quit speaking to former friends who had taken the other side. The Macdonalds had been very close to John and Margaret Stirling in Prince Edward Island, visiting each other whenever possible. Church Union did not completely destroy this long-time friendship, but it did cause serious strain, because John supported Union. Church topics were off limits when they met. It also caused rifts between many of the Presbyterian ministers in the Ontario circle that Ewan knew. Maud mentions nothing in her journals about Edwin Smith’s thoughts on Union, but church records show that he later became the minister at a United Church some distance away in Ontario.
Ewan’s position as minister in Leaskdale and Zephyr was now— thankfully—reasonably secure. This cheered him enough that he kept trying for a new “call” to a different congregation. They were still in a moving mode. The bickering and cash-strapped parish of Zephyr, the Pickering affair, the incessant small community gossip over Maud’s personal life and business affairs, and the Church Union fighting had left them both convinced that it was time for a change. It seemed that as soon as Ewan smoothed over one problem in Zephyr, another issue arose. When Maud went to women’s meetings—and there were many of these—she claimed to feel an undercurrent of tension.
Ewan had received a number of invitations to “preach for the call” in the post-war period—after all, it was widely known that he was married to the famous authoress, L. M. Montgomery, and that she was an excellent “helpmeet” in his church work. Ewan could rise to the challenge of giving fine sermons when he preached elsewhere, but there must have been something subtle in his demeanour or appearance that turned people off. Or, given the speed at which gossip spread, perhaps rumours of his intermittent illnesses preceded him. Again and again, over several years, he lost the call to someone else: at Pinkerton and Priceville, at Columbus and Brooklyn, at Markham, Orangeville, Hillsburg, Whitby. All were rural or small-town parishes—a Toronto charge was beyond him—and even the rural places seemed not to want him after they saw him. One reputedly did not want him because he came with a car: ministers with cars were apt to go gadding off to Toronto. Each rejection laid him lower. Ewan’s continuing failure to get a new call sent him to bed with his old, debilitating depression once again.
In February 1925, a new maid, Elsie Bushby, came to replace Lily Meyers. Maud had wanted to dismiss Lily for a long time, but she had been afraid of what an angry Lily might say. Even when Lily finally left on her own, Maud still worried that she would “tell all kinds of falsehoods about me and my household all over the country” (February 27, 1925). There were few stories, of course, that Lily had not already told, but Maud makes the comment to emphasize in her journals—for future readers and biographers—that Lily was nothing but an unreliable troublemaking gossip.
Elsie Bushby, her replacement, was a bright and perky young woman who brought enormous cheer into Maud’s life. By her own account, Elsie came from a very poor farm family and had grown up in a household where there rarely was enough food to go around. Elsie was nevertheless rich in vitality, with an irrepressibly positive attitude towards life. She was a hard worker, a quick learner, and a spunky young woman very glad to get the position.
As soon as the bouncy, bright Elsie was established in the household after the end of the first week in January, Maud’s spirits soared and her pen started flying again. She went back to writing The Blue Castle with renewed vigour. She could write and enjoy it again, even if Ewan was struggling mentally and taking bromides. In less than a month, she had finished the first draft of the novel, calling it a release from her cares and worries.
This novel is her most revised novel, perhaps an indication of the stress she was under when she wrote the first part of it. It is also a novel that changes greatly in tone from beginning to end, so much that it almost seems to have been written by two people (an indication, perhaps of Elsie’s effect on the household). In early March, after a whirlwind but immensely detailed revision, Maud pronounced the novel finished.
Maud first began to unpack her emotions from the 1922 trip to Bala into fiction in April 1924, immediately following Ewan’s worst mental attack since 1919. Bala remained in her mind as the terrain for private dreams. She could imagine trysts with a lover on one of the distant, misty islands. Their private cottage among the trees would be visible only when its lights twinkled over the water at night. They would be there alone and together, wildly in love, enjoying each other. She began to fashion an imaginary lover—he would be a mysterious man, believably ordinary in some ways, but with the mystique of a fascinating demon-lover in others. She would use elements of the Bluebeard fairy-tale myth to give him a sinister aura. These creative stirrings completely obsessed her, and this was the book that shoved the final Emily novel into the background.
Anne’s House of Dreams had removed a zombie-like husband from a passionate young woman’s life. Reversing this situation, The Blue Castle produced a romantic lover for its unhappy, lonely heroine. The Blue Castle was drawn from deep in Maud’s reservoir of imaginative wishes. Ewan’s apparent “madness” and murderous dreams certainly heated up her febrile imagination. She could not help wondering what her life would have been like had she married a man who was a confident, intellectually stimulating, responsive partner, a composite of the best qualities of men like Ewan, John Stirling, John Mustard, and Edwin Smith.
The heroine of The Blue Castle, the plain and depressed Valancy Stirling, is a spinster of twenty-nine who is as desperate for marriage as Maud herself was at the same age. There, on an imaginary island in Lake Muskoka, Maud put her most passionate writing into the story of Valancy Stirling, who “wakened early, in the lifeless, hopeless hour just preceding dawn. She had not slept very well. One does not sleep well, sometimes, when one is twenty-nine on the morrow, and unmarried, in a community and a connection where the unmarried are simply those who have failed to get a man.”
Valancy’s mother, Mrs. Stirling (an Anglican, by the way, not a Presbyterian), is the kind of overbearing and pinched mother who would “sulk for days” when crossed. Living with them is “Cousin Stickles,” a whining widow with a “mole right on the end of her dumpy nose, bristling hairs on her chin,” and “protruding eyes.” Cousin Stickles never tires of bragging to Valancy that she was married at seventeen. And Valancy’s mother—a woman who can make her anger felt in every room of a house, and who feels daily embarrassment over the fact that her daughter has failed to marry—never tires of telling Valancy, who wants nothing more in life than to get married and have “fat little” babies, that it is “not maidenly to think about men.” Mrs. Stirling does not know that Valancy, “so cowed and subdued and overridden and snubbed in real life, was wont to let herself go rather splendidly in her day-dreams.”
Valancy’s escape is to her “blue castle” in Spain. In it she keeps many lovers, though “only one at a time.” She had one at age twelve, another at fifteen, and another at twenty-five. By age twenty-nine, Valancy often feels a pain around her heart. She would like to see a doctor about it, but is afraid to—afraid her mother will find out she has gone without permission, afraid of what the doctor might tell her.
Valancy’s only escape from the dreariness of her life is to read books by John Foster, a popular writer who mixes nature description with philosophy. Her life is changed the day she comes across the line in his Magic of Wings that says: “Fear is the original sin. Almost all the evil in the world has its origin in the fact that someone is afraid of something” (Chapter 5).
Mrs. Stirling has instilled in Valancy the terrible fear of “what people will say” about her. Valancy’s mother, as well as her aunts and uncles and cousins, all say cruel things to her. If Valancy ever speaks back to anyone, her mother chides her that it is “unladylike to have feelings.” Her mother polices her every moment; she is not allowed solitude and privacy even in her own bedroom, lest she do unmentionable things there.
After reading Foster’s statement about “fear,” and articulating to herself that “Despair is a free man—hope is a slave” (Chapter 8), Valancy begins to free herself. She goes to see a doctor. Through a mistake, the doctor tells her that she has only one year to live. She is seized with a new attitude to life, and decides to move out of the family home. To the shock of her clan, and as an act of compassion, Valancy moves in with a young woman who is dying of consumption, the daughter of the disreputable town handyman, “Roaring Abel.” “Cissy” Gay has had a baby out of wedlock, and the baby has died. To make the Gays even worse social pariahs, Roaring Abel Gay, though Presbyterian, is a profane inebriate who always manages to reduce to shambles the theological arguments of every minister who tries to reform him. Valancy has always liked Abel, “a jolly, picturesque, unashamed reprobate” who “stood out against the drab respectability of Deerwood and its customs like a flame-red flag of revolt and protest” (Chapter 9).
While living at the Gays’, Valancy meets their friend Barney Snaith, who roars around town in his Grey Slosson car (named “Lady Jane Grey,” like the Macdonalds’ own car). Cissy dies (the predictable fate in Victorian literature for any woman who has sinned sexually). With a shocking lack of propriety, Valancy herself proposes to Barney Snaith, the dashing mystery man whom the town believes to be a criminal on the run, explaining to him that she does not have long to live. They marry hurriedly and move to his small cottage on a secluded Muskoka island. They have a year of more bliss than she has known in her entire life. Maud concludes with a surprise ending that is, of course, happy for everyone. Barney Snaith is, of course, the famous John Foster, a millionaire from the sales of his popular books. Her family, who have been so ashamed of Valancy’s behaviour that they disowned her, rush to reclaim her.
This book is wonderfully implausible, but readers willingly suspend their disbelief. The hard-hitting but hilarious verbal exchanges between well-sketched characters expose all of Maud’s disdain for social sham and hypocrisy, and must have left many of the readers of her time gasping for air—some in shock, others in laughter. The book defies classification, even as a “romance,” because it is so full of wisdom about life, laughter at human foibles, and powerful emotions. A 1926 review in Great Britain’s famous journal Punch notes that the plot of the book is like “sentimental fiction,” but hastens to add that although the “plot is as threadbare as could well be imagined … [,] the odd thing is that in the telling it acquires a surprising semblance of freshness.”77
At the end, we find that John Foster has become a writer because he experienced emotional deprivation in childhood due to his mother’s early death. Both he (and Maud) offset the feelings of isolation and loneliness by finding an alternate world where they write novels in order to create their own happiness. Foster is slightly embarrassed by his books, which are full of purple prose (like Maud’s own). Maud structures the book in a way that consciously exposes the psychological necessities behind her imaginary writer’s actions and his stratagems for coping in life. The imaginary heroine is given the same treatment. The book provides genuine insights about how personalities are moulded. It also captures and defuses the corrosive and explosive rebellion in its author’s soul.
Once again, Maud had caught the spirit of her era in creating characters who challenge religion and give human hypocrisy a rough ride. Maud gave away nothing personal, however, when talking about her novels and her own life. Later, in 1929, she said about the setting for The Blue Castle, the only novel she ever set in Ontario: “The Blue Castle is in Muskoka. Muskoka is the only place I’ve ever been in that could be my Island’s rival in my heart. So I wanted to write a story about it.”78 No one would have guessed that she gave her own subterranean emotions a life in her imaginary places—in this case, her “Blue Castle,” the island where she escaped her own prison, and lived through her heroine the fantasy of being married to a man she was wildly in love with. He might tell her that “There is no such thing as freedom on earth … Only different kinds of bondages,” but she would counter, as Maud herself might have, that the “prison unto which we doom ourselves no prison is” (Chapter 29). And, when Maud closed off this book, she resolutely returned, with dignity, to her own personal prison.
The Blue Castle sold very well in its day, from England to North America to Australia in English, and in other languages as well. It has stayed in print. Its plot took on political overtones when it was made into a musical comedy in Poland in 1982, and well over a decade later that show was still a box office success there. In 1992, it was made into a successful play in Canada, authored by Hank Stinson, and it was performed in both Muskoka and Prince Edward Island. In 1987, the Australian writer Colleen McCullough wrote a book, The Ladies of Missalonghi, which had so many similarities to The Blue Castle that she was accused of plagiarism. (In the resulting international furor, McCullough acknowledged that she had read Montgomery so many times in her childhood that she might have unconsciously internalized the plot and characters.) Maud herself probably had a literary model in mind for Barney Snaith: his prose sounds much like that of John Burroughs (1837–1921), a famous naturalist whose works she enjoyed. Barney’s writing also echoes Maud’s own purple prose.
When Valancy Stirling thwarts convention and marries Barney Snaith, his shack of a cottage recalls the cottage of John Mustard. No doubt John Mustard read this novel after it came out. He would have recognized the physical landscape of the novel, and the cottage, but he must have puzzled over its dashing, freewheeling, and raffishly charming Barney Snaith, who bore no resemblance to him, except in his love of escape into the deep woods. Nor would there have been any clear visible connection between Mrs. Ewan Macdonald—who had always been staid, distant, and formal with him, even as a girl in Prince Albert—and the sexually vibrant Valancy Stirling. As a minister who dealt steadily with the parables, metaphors, and symbols in biblical messages, he must have puzzled over the magical transformations of fiction and the secret thoughts that lay deep in Maud’s heart.
If “Captain” Edwin Smith read the novel—and he undoubtedly did—he would have seen many of his own characteristics as adventurer and raconteur in the hero, Barney Snaith, who sweeps repressed Valancy off her feet. Both he and Snaith had travelled extensively, both loved driving on the open road, and he, like Barney, could be a charmer with blarney. Smith wrote well, too, about travel, beauty, and nature, and had published in various Canadian magazines. Would he have been flattered—or alarmed? Likely, he would have seen many of Maud’s traits in Valancy Stirling, for they had revealed some of themselves to each other in their late evening talks.
Another man who would have read the novel was the egotistical Edwin Simpson, Maud’s former fiancé. He kept up with Maud’s novels and always bragged to others that he knew the sources of Maud’s characters. Did he fancy that he had only to look in the mirror to see some of the mysterious and deeply alluring Barney Snaith in himself?
But the man who must have been most puzzled of all by the novel was the man to whom it was discreetly dedicated, a man whom Maud had never met in the flesh: Ephraim Weber, M.A., the quiet, earnest, stiff, intellectual Alberta teacher who had been her pen-pal for nearly twenty-five years. The dedication reads: “To Ephraim Weber who understands the architecture of blue castles.” Weber, a strict Mennonite by upbringing, must have been both flattered and deeply puzzled by this dedication. He may even have wondered, or fantasized about, the depths she could see in him that were not readily apparent to others, even perhaps to himself. Yes, he had dreams, but Weber’s dreams in life had remained in the architectural drawing stage. This dedication tweaked Ephraim Weber’s curiosity enough that he and his wife made a trip from the west and stopped to meet Maud just two years later. Maud found him a likeable but earnest bore. No record remains of what Mrs. Weber thought of Maud’s insight into her husband’s “blue castles.”
This novel was certainly not written for children. It was even banned from some church libraries. First, it has an unwed mother in it, but, worse, when Roaring Abel skewers religious hypocrisy, he is so funny that readers cannot help laughing. Apparently, no one saw that this novel was close to being Maud’s own spiritual autobiography, a spillover mid-life crisis. It is ironic that at the same time Maud was choosing older heroines and mature themes for her novels, she was being demoted to the children’s shelves of bookstores and libraries by changing literary styles and other forces. This novel was the first to be banned in some libraries.
Writing The Blue Castle was emotionally draining for Maud. To calm and restore herself, she now took out the old diary of Charles Macneill that she had borrowed from Alec and May Macneill on her recent trip to the Island, and began copying it straight into her journal. It reminded her of how things were between 1892 and 1898: “it took me back again in a world where happiness reigned and problems were non-existent—for me at least … Pensie was alive to run with me under the moon and together we slipped back into … the Eden of childhood” (March 1, 1925).
The act of copying helped her to begin reliving these years in preparation for picking up and finishing “Emily 3.” Copying the old—and dull—diary also took her mind off herself. She felt on the brink of a nervous collapse—she felt morbid, as if imprisoned. She knew she was in an abnormal state. She had spells where her hands began trembling uncontrollably (a common symptom of depression, as well; possibly a sign of too many of the medications the Macdonalds were prescribed). She had not felt such despair since her 1909–10 depression. There was no privacy from the children, Elsie, or Ewan. She started waking up at 3:00 a.m. (the classic time for depressives to wake) “in the grip of silly, senseless, gnat-like worries” (March 27, 1925). On March 29, she wrote: “I can’t see any chance of happiness or even of peace again.… I can’t help crying.” The next day she came down with the flu, and convinced herself that this was the cause of her fits of crying, but found no real consolation in that theory. Yet, by April 20, she had pulled herself together and she gave her unforgettably wonderful lecture on Mammoth Cave and its subterranean world to the Hypatia Club ladies in Uxbridge.
As spring came, Ewan’s depression lifted. He was able to get his car out after the winter and go out visiting his parishioners. The Macdonalds now heard that Marshall Pickering had been confined to bed with a serious paralytic stroke. The accident and its aftermath had been equally destructive to each family. Pickering had been a vigorous man when the accident occurred in 1921, but the aftermath of public disapproval had been a strain, and his failure to get his money in spite of winning the lawsuit had caused further aggravation. It must have felt like salt being rubbed in the wound when he could see that Ewan was not going to pay the judgment because he “had no money,” while Maud herself continued to lend money to local people in need (something she does not record in her journals, but which old-timers in the community all remembered in the 1970s and 1980s). Whenever a parishioner had bad luck financially, “Mrs. Macdonald” would help out. Mrs. Isobel Mustard St. John recalled in the 1990s, for instance, how Maud had lent her uncle money to get through medical school. He paid Maud back every penny he borrowed, and was proud to do so because “most people never repaid Mrs. Macdonald.”
Elsie, the new maid, continued to be a delight in the Macdonald household with her sunny disposition. She was eager to learn and eager to please, even though she suffered from recurring and painful chronic appendicitis. Elsie had a facility for making work into fun; she took great delight in simple things, like getting out the wash earlier than anyone else in the village. Late in her life, Elsie spoke affectionately about Maud as an employer. She said that Maud taught her how to plan meals, to cook many different dishes, to serve guests properly—in general, how to manage a good kitchen and run a tidy, well-organized house. Elsie said her own family had often subsisted through the winter on a skimpy diet of mostly potatoes. The many techniques for vegetable, fruit, and meat preservation and cooking that Maud taught her were a revelation in that era before electric refrigerators and freezers. She believed that she learned more from Maud than she would have from taking a full college course in Home Economics, a developing field of studies then for women. She said, in fact, that the knowledge she acquired at Mrs. Macdonald’s home had allowed her to become “a lady” and “marry above her class.”
Maud’s spirits began to rise steadily, too, when the days lengthened and warmed. A fundraising play she directed in the church was a big financial success, and her group was asked to present it in surrounding communities. But the winter had taken its toll: she wrote tersely in her journal, “Went to Guild tonight and conducted a programme on ‘Canadian Humour.’ Did not feel humorous.”
The next phase of the Church Union vote loomed in the parish, and several families were still wavering between remaining Presbyterians or going over to the newly created United Church. Some people would sign a promise to support the “salary list” and then defect. The loss of a single family hurt the weakening Zephyr Presbyterian Church. The reasons that parishioners left a church did not generally arise from religious convictions; instead, they were financial, political, social, and personal. For instance, the Methodists had a nicer church and better Sunday School facilities. On the June day after people had to declare themselves definitively for one church or the other, Maud wrote: “The papers are full of flamboyant accounts of the ‘birth’ of the Great United Church.… It is rather the wedding of two old churches, both of whom are too old to have offspring” (June 11, 1925).
There was a lot of ministerial traffic through the Macdonald manse in the aftermath of Union, and Maud thoroughly enjoyed squaring off against some offending ministers. She could not insult her husband’s parishioners, but when a pompous minister crossed her threshold and then patronized her, he was fair game. Maud had many traits that made her an excellent minister’s wife, but her need to trim people down to size occasionally was not one of them.
Chester was now ready to start high school, but there was no high school in tiny Leaskdale. He might have boarded in Uxbridge, but Maud had very high aspirations for her sons, and this meant giving each boy the best education that she could afford. After surveying the possibilities, she chose St. Andrew’s, a boarding school in Aurora, north of Toronto. Chester studied for the entrance exam and made the grade. He was a gifted student, and although he still had serious problems relating to his peers, he had learned superficial social skills.
His departure on September 10, 1925, was a sad day for Maud. Like many mothers, she felt anxiety when her first little fledgling left the nest. But she had more legitimate worries than most mothers: she remembered how Ewan’s malady had manifested itself every time he went off to a new school—to high school, to Prince of Wales College, to Dalhousie, and then his final and terrible breakdown in Glasgow. Chester’s behaviour, she wrote in her diary, was “on the knees of the Gods.” After depositing Chester at his new school, they stopped to visit Elsie’s grandmother on the way home. Maud was astonished when one of Elsie’s “rough” uncles told her he had read all her books. Ewan, Maud’s own husband, did not read them. When Chester came home for Thanksgiving she and the boys celebrated by going to see the new movie The Birth of a Nation. Ewan did not enjoy the new “moving pictures” that were becoming increasingly popular. Maud loved them.
In the fall of 1925, the Delineator asked Maud for four more stories (about a new heroine, “Marigold”). For these four stories she would again be paid $1,600. (This was $100 more than Ewan was paid for his full year of work in two churches.)79 It was on October 30 that she got the news from her lawyers that Page’s lawsuit against her in New York had been denied. This meant that L. C. Page had exhausted his options and he could no longer hold up her royalties from the Stokes company. This was a huge relief.
In November 1925 she was still trying to draft her third Emily book, but her heart was not in it. Emily was growing up. Her marriage was the foregone conclusion, demanded by the genre and the era. Maud’s fans were so involved in the story that many wrote her anxious letters, pressing the case for or against the various potential suitors. One fan wrote imploring her not to let Emily marry Dean Priest. Maud had no intention of this, of course. But another candidate for marriage—Teddy Kent—struck most mature readers as an unsatisfactory choice, too. Perry, the hired boy, despite his brilliance and potential, was socially unacceptable “for a Murray” (like Emily was). How to resolve this novel was a problem, so she put it aside in frustration.
Finally, Evan had some hopeful news. The Reverend W. D. McKay, then moderator of the Toronto Presbytery, came to preach at their church for its anniversary service. He told Ewan about an opening in Norval, Ontario, a small town halfway between Guelph and Toronto. Maud caught certain remarkable details: that the large brick manse was outfitted with electricity, that it had an indoor bathroom, and that it was on a radial railway line that went to Toronto. Ewan was invited by the moderator to preach for the call in Norval just before Christmas in 1925. A few days later he received the news that he had been chosen. After years of trying for another parish, he was elated.
Not surprisingly, Maud felt some ambivalence about leaving Leaskdale, and she began to feel sentimental about the manse where her children had been born, and where she had written all her books since The Golden Road. But she knew it was time to move on. Most of all, she hoped that the change would lift Ewan’s melancholy permanently. If that happened, she would be able to resume a social life with the literary groups in Toronto, and from Norval she could get to Toronto more easily. She was starved for the intellectual companionship and fellowship that she had enjoyed in Toronto before Ewan’s breakdown in 1919. Now it looked as if Ewan might be getting a new lease on life—and with that, she and her family would, too.
Ewan accepted the call to Norval shortly after Christmas. They planned to move in February 1926. Both parishes were distressed over the Macdonalds’ departure, particularly over the loss of Maud, who had brought so much to the community: intellectual input into the women’s meetings and clubs, and outstanding work with the young people in both churches.
Maud sorted and started packing their belongings the first week of January, continuing steadily for the intervening weeks. Some furniture was sold, as the Norval manse was much larger and required bigger pieces of furniture. As Maud packed, she sorrowed over each room she dismantled, particularly the parlour, so full of memories of her little babies and of Frede. Various men helped Ewan crate up the furniture they were taking, and it is a measure of his improved mental health that he was able to help pack.
Many parishioners came to tell them how sad they were to see them leaving. Sessions often ended in tears. In the third week of January, Maud wrote a paper for the Guild on Marjorie Pickthall and noted that it was the last one she would read there. In 1911, when she had first arrived in Leaskdale and was still unpacking, she read them a paper on England; now she was reading them another paper, this one on a Canadian poet.
On February 9, 1926, the Leaskdale Women’s Missionary Society honoured Maud at a meeting attended by all seventy-five members. Their address thanked her for the “honour you have conferred upon our place, it has become known as the home of L. M. Montgomery Macdonald, the world-known Authoress …” The feeling was so genuine that Maud found she had to fight tears during the meeting. On February 11, the Zephyr church gave a farewell reception, presenting her with a golden pen and Ewan with a leather-bound copy of The Book of Praise. She had not expected to feel sorry to leave Zephyr, but she did. At another farewell occasion at Leaskdale Church on February 12, they were given more presents and one hundred dollars in gold. February 14 was Ewan’s last Sunday of preaching in these congregations. He did well. In the end, Maud found parting a bittersweet experience. She had put down much deeper roots than she realized. Ewan, however, felt no attachment to Leaskdale, and had no regret at leaving. That was Ewan, flat in the kind of emotions that nearly swept Maud off her feet.
February 14 was also their last night in the manse. Ewan was out late trying to wrap up loose ends, and he returned after Maud had fallen into bed in exhaustion. He woke her with the news that he had been handed a note from a friend in Zephyr saying that Pickering was telling people he planned to seize the railway car with their possessions if they were shipped in Ewan’s name. The movers were coming at eight o’clock the next morning. Maud sprang out of bed, and she and Ewan worked frantically until four in the morning changing all the name tags from “Rev. Macdonald” to “Mrs. Macdonald.”
They hoped now to leave the Pickering affair and Zephyr problems behind. Maud knew that if Ewan should only stay well, all would be fine. Life looked hopeful again.