The final Emily book, Emily’s Quest, had been published in 1927. It was time to start another novel. Maud decided to expand the rejected Marigold stories into a novel, with Marigold Lesley as her new heroine. In June 1927, she began Magic for Marigold, and she finished it by October 1928.
Marigold Lesley showed Maud making a conscious effort to modernize her heroines rather than to write out of her own experience, as she had with Anne and Emily. Marigold is born into a world where women can be successful medical doctors. In fact, Marigold’s life is saved by a very capable woman doctor after the “men-doctors” have given her up. The well-known Dr. Helen MacMurchy of Toronto likely provided a model. Politically active as a crusader for women’s and public health matters, she had a long and distinguished career as an author and doctor. She had also written an influential series of “little blue books” about child-raising and nutrition, published by the government.30
But besides a theory of child-rearing, Magic for Marigold presented an old-fashioned sense of mothering love. All her life, Maud had treasured the memory of Pensie’s mother, Mrs. Charles Macneill, coming into their bedroom, bending over the children, and saying (when she thought the little cousins were asleep): “Dear little children.” Maud echoes that line in Magic for Marigold.
The setting for Magic for Marigold is Prince Edward Island, but in fact the setting is drawn from both the Island and Ontario. The name “Lesley” paid honour to the many “Leslie” families in the Union congregation. Maud had dreamed up her new heroine as she sat at her Norval bedroom window and looked up at the “hill o’ pines” on Russells’ Hill: Marigold’s home was “Cloud o’ Spruce.” And later in the book, when the “lady-doctor” marries, she marries an adventurer and prospector returned from prospecting in the Klondike, as one of Maud’s friends had. For professional women to marry and continue in their profession was still unusual. But Maud wanted to show that she was moving with the times.
Maud’s lawsuits with her former publisher, L. C. Page, were drawing to a close. Back in February 1926, her lawyer had seen a small opening after the fourth case was dismissed (a case in which Page had tried unsuccessfully to sue her for libel in the New York courts). Mr. Rollins suggested that Maud sue Page for the costs of this New York libel suit. This became the fifth legal action between her and Page. She won this round and collected $2,200 from the publisher. From this settlement in July 1928, she had to pay her lawyers $1,200 for their services. But she had the satisfaction of finally extracting some blood out of Page, knowing how bitterly he would have hated to pay her.
In the same month (October 1928) that Maud completed Magic for Marigold, Rollins wrote that a favourable decision had finally been made in her Further Chronicles of Avonlea lawsuit, the one that had sought an injunction against Page’s publishing Further Chronicles. It had originally been filed in early 1920. The decision rendered in 1925 was: that the Page Company had violated its 1919 contract with Montgomery when it published the 1912 versions of the stories; that Page could publish no more of these books; and that the profits thus far were to be turned over to Maud, subject to Page recovering his costs for publishing the books. The last provision, of course, gave Page a significant loophole. And he had appealed the 1925 decision every step of the way, dragging the case on until 1928.
In 1925, when Page had first appealed the injunction and the accounting of the profits, the business of establishing profits had been remanded to the County Court for accounting. Then the haggling had begun. Page claimed every imaginable expense against the profits. He also argued that his firm should deduct $3,000 for having bought the stories from Maud in the first place, plus the excess profits’ tax they had paid in 1920 on them. And he claimed that 25 percent of the remaining profits had been paid to the United States government as tax. But things were coming to a close, as Page’s options diminished.
An auditor assigned to the case in February 1927 said that Page owed her nearly $16,000 profits for Further Chronicles of Avonlea after his costs were deducted. She was astonished—she knew that Further Chronicles was one of her weaker books. This gave her some idea of what the income from her books meant to the Page Company—and led her to suspect that Page had not figured her royalties honestly on the better books in the Anne series. She was too weary to feel joy over winning the suit, and she merely wondered if she would ever see the money he owed her. She correctly predicted that he would spin out his delaying tactics through appeals.
But Page’s game of intimidation and obstruction was playing itself out. She had already heard, on May 3, 1927, that George Page had retired from the firm, and a month later, on June 2, she heard that he was dead. Lewis’s unhappy brother was only fifty-five when he died “suddenly of a heart attack” on May 28, in his summer home in Sherburn, Massachusetts. Maud heard an unconfirmed report (from Margaret Marshall Saunders) that he had shot himself. She quipped in her journal that Providence had made a mistake in taking George instead of Lewis.31
Two days later, on June 4, Maud received a bizarre telegram from Lewis Page saying: “Since, as advised, you like a good fight, you will be interested in knowing that George Page was buried today.” Soon, she received a letter from Page with the same message, enclosing another copy of the telegram. All in all, she observed that she got three copies of the message, a baffling attempt to assign to her some responsibility for the death of George Page. In mid-June 1928, Mr. Rollins and Mr. McClelland both reported the gossip they had heard from a former Page salesman that Lewis Page had fought with his brother until George left the firm.
The story went that the fighting had worried Mrs. George Page (Mabel Hurd Page) until she had a mental breakdown. When George Page died, Lewis attended his brother’s funeral, but was reputed to have sat by himself. Maud puzzled over Lewis Page’s psychology—why would he send her, his most bitter legal antagonist, such inappropriate and inexplicable telegrams about family matters? Lewis Page was right in sensing that such messages would bedevil her.
But Maud’s day of triumph was coming. In the last week of October 1928, a fat letter came from her lawyer. By this time, the mere arrival of these letters spooked Maud. Sometimes she would wait several days to get up courage to slit open the envelope. However, this one brought the good news she had been hoping to hear for a decade. The lawsuits were all over. Rollins told her that he had “attached” Page’s property until he paid the judgment, and that the lawsuit had cost Page over a year’s profits. Rollins also reported that Page had acquired heavy gambling debts and that he had been forced to lay off people in his firm and require the remaining ones to work longer hours to compensate.
Maud wrote in her journal on October 22, 1928:
It is over! Over!! Over!!!
And——I——am—-free!
Of course, Page had a few parting shots. In late November 1928, he sent her another telegram: “Mrs George Page has lost her mind after her husband’s shocking death. She never recovered. She died yesterday.” This puzzled Maud all over again. She thought it a sign of Page’s mental imbalance. A more obvious explanation was merely that he had probably been drinking heavily when he sent her these telegrams.
Lewis Page had a phenomenal ability to get under people’s skin. In the process, he damaged his own business. New authors who heard of his reputation feared signing with him, and although his old best-selling titles continued to generate income, he shifted his focus to reviving out-of-print classics. Without the Wanamaker’s sales, his firm went downhill, although he hung onto it until the end of his life, and managed to die a well-to-do but not wealthy man. Even after his death in 1956, Page’s will reflected his vindictiveness. He skewered various members of his family, but left substantial sums to all the women who had worked for him and garnered his favour. According to Roger Straus and Robert Wohlforth, the women’s names were gleefully published in Boston, which caused local wags to joke that some women only found out who his other mistresses were when his will was probated.32
Page asked in his will to have only one thing inscribed on his grave: “Qui libros bonos edendos curavit” (Latin for “He took great care to publish good books”). Maud would have agreed with him on this point: he did make beautiful books. For her part, she would always regret that the man who had launched her career turned out to be such a scoundrel.
The battle against Page had brought Maud enormous strain for the eleven years between 1917 and 1928, keeping her constantly facing the possibility of complete financial ruin. L. C. Page was one of the foremost robber-barons in the publishing world, but he met a tough opponent in Maud. When her righteous indignation was fully aroused, she had found more courage than even she knew she had. And stamina, too: she managed to publish six novels during the duration of the five lawsuits and countersuits.
The $15,000 settlement cheque came on November 7, 1928 (it was originally for over $18,000, but Rollins had extracted his well-earned final fee of $3,000). Maud observed that she had paid out about $14,000 in lawyers’ fees over the years for the five lawsuits, so she really had netted only about $4,000 for all her trouble and worry after the various settlements were paid, “plus the satisfaction of thoroughly beating a man who tried to trick me. That second item, not the first, makes me feel that after all it was all worthwhile” (November 7, 1928).
Maud wrote in her journals that it was very handy to have that one big lump sum come in a lean year. She looked forward to investing it wisely so that it would pay for her children’s university education and “make things easier.”
In September 1928, a long-lost friend turned up: Nora Lefurgey, now Mrs. Edmund Campbell, re-emerged in Maud’s life after an absence of twenty-four years. Back in 1903, the gifted and vibrant Nora—then the Cavendish schoolteacher—had boarded with Maud and her grandmother. Nora shared Maud’s love of memorizing poetry and literary passages, as well as her love of nature. There was one very big difference, however: Nora did not have mood swings like Maud—she was unfailingly upbeat.
Nora had moved to Toronto so her two sons could attend high school there. Maud had known Nora’s husband, Edmund Campbell, back in Belmont, PEI, when she was twenty-two. He had gone on to take a B.A. and an M.A. in Engineering, and had become a distinguished Canadian mining-engineer. He and Nora had enjoyed their nomadic life, travelling to the Canadian north and the American south and west, and had recently returned from a trip to western Canada. (Their stories of the Klondike inspired elements of Marigold.) Ed had now set up a consulting company in Toronto so that they could settle down and educate their remaining children.
Nora had already buried two of her four children: one had died at birth, and their only daughter had died of polio at age twelve. A third son, David, had survived polio, but was badly crippled and wore heavy iron leg braces. Their youngest son, Edward, known as “Ebbie,” had been untouched by bad luck, and both sons were now enrolled in Upper Canada College, an exclusive Toronto secondary school for boys. Even though Nora had experienced the tragic loss of two of her children and the crippling of a third, she was as vital a life-force as ever.
Nora and family came out to Norval to visit Maud for Thanksgiving dinner. Out of touch for nearly a quarter-century, they “clicked” as before, and fell into an afternoon of reminiscing. Maud had a real companion again, like Frede, someone with whom to exchange good stories, even though they lacked the bond of kinship. Nora was trustworthy, of equal intelligence and learning with Maud, and she was happy in her own life, yet impressed by Maud’s achievement and willing to acknowledge it. Nora’s supportive friendship would help bring stability to Maud’s life through the next decade.
In Prince Edward Island, Nora’s family had outclassed Maud’s—a detail left out of Maud’s journals, although of course Maud would have been keenly aware of it. Nora’s father, William Thomas Lefurgey, had been a parliamentary secretary; although he was a man of letters rather than a farmer, he also owned farmland in PEI. Nora was from French Huguenot stock—not Scottish—but her family was distinguished, and she had made a happy and successful marriage.
Nora’s son Ebbie remembered vividly when he first met Maud during the summer of 1928, and his recollections give us quite another view of the world-famous author:
She was seated in the sofa, Mother diagonally in front of her in a big armchair. I, ten years old, on the floor, small, skinny, fascinated at last to meet this woman of whom I had heard so much. To me she was a massive woman, formidable, with a strong voice which expressed her feeling of self-importance and superiority. My mother was ecstatic at seeing her old friend again but slightly hostile at Maud’s air of superiority. I cannot remember what they talked about—all I remember is a feeling of relief when Maud at last left. I had my mother back.33
Young Ebbie saw another part of Maud’s personality here, the woman who knew her books had made her a “household name” all over the English-speaking world. Justifiably proud of her attainments and honours, she wanted her hard-won achievement recognized, even by friends. She was, as the precocious Ebbie noted, very good at conveying her sense of dignity to others. Her carriage and nuanced use of language spoke her attitudes. A powerful presence was a real element in her person, a “persona,” as real as her buried sense of inferiority—or, perhaps, just another expression of it.
Nora apparently could see both Mauds—especially the Maud who was insecure, who carried damaging psychological baggage from childhood, and who needed approval and respect. Nora gave that willingly.
In November 1928, Maud was a busy participant in the Canadian Book Week. The opening lineup of speakers in the fifth annual event were the big names of the day: Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, novelist Arthur Stringer, essayist and editor (of Saturday Night) B. K. Sandwell, and “L. M. Montgomery.” In the public’s eye, Maud was the biggest celebrity. Over two thousand people flocked to hear her in the program at the University of Toronto’s Convocation Hall, with another thousand reputedly turned away. In a newspaper account of the gathering, “L. M. Montgomery (Mrs. McDonald), author of Anne of Green Gables, declared she could not speak, the only thing she could do was to tell her stories. To her, she asserted, amid laughter, the four most wonderful words in the language were ‘once upon a time.’ She then told a story of a Prince Edward Island shipwreck, and recited two poems …”34 Montgomery’s speech drew a standing ovation, with a call for an encore.
After the speech she was mobbed by young people wanting autographs, except for one who merely wanted a “handclasp” and “to touch” her. “Poor kiddy!” she wrote, “humanity can’t get along without some god or goddess to worship. It is well that my young worshippers don’t know what a very clay-footed creature their divinity is. Their lives would be poorer if they lost their illusion” (November 7, 1928). Maud’s spirits improved greatly after Book Week—her success there offset the bruises to her professional ego elsewhere.
During this week, Maud spoke again, this time on a platform with Dr. Charles G. D. Roberts and (Margaret) Marshall Saunders, through the auspices of the Maritime Provinces Association of Toronto and McMaster University. The newspaper account says that Roberts “deplored his ‘propinquity with modernism.’ ” Saunders kept the audience of over five hundred people in a state of laughter with her amusing reminiscences of the Maritimes. Mrs. Macdonald also related stories of famous characters living down by the sea.35 After she arrived home from the conference, she had more letters from her lawyer and Lewis Page. Her lawyer had mailed her the typed trial evidence. Then, incredibly, she had a letter from Page asking if he could “now” publish Further Chronicles of Avonlea, the book that she had waged the entire lawsuit to suppress. She was again bedevilled by his weird request.
The year 1928 ended much better for Maud than it had begun. The Macdonalds decorated their Christmas tree and enjoyed a turkey sent them by friends. Maud spent Christmas afternoon reading Morley Callaghan’s first novel, Strange Fugitive, a Christmas gift from Nora. The book made her huffy. “Some ‘sex’ novels are interesting and stimulating, whatever may be thought of their wisdom or unwisdom,” she wrote in her journal. But Callaghan dismayed her.
Callaghan’s idea of “Literature” seems to be to photograph a latrine or pigstye meticulously and have nothing else in the picture. Now, latrines and pigstyes are not only malodorous but very uninteresting. We have a latrine in our backyard. I see it when I look that way—and I also see before it a garden.…—over it a blue sky—behind it a velvety pine.… These things are as “real” as the latrine and can all be seen at the same time. Callaghan sees nothing but the latrine and insists blatantly that you see nothing else also. If you insist on seeing sky and river and pine you are a ‘sentimentalist’ and the truth is not in you. (December 30, 1928)
She added another paragraph dismissing Callaghan, who was then twenty-five years old:
Callaghan is no newly risen star. He is not even a meteor. Merely a Roman Candle shooting up sparkiously and then sputtering out into darkness. He has neither wit, imagination nor insight. And he is deadly dull … (December 30, 1928)
Frustrated by what was happening to her own reputation through the latter 1920s, she began to grumble privately about being demoted to “only a children’s author.” She had written The Blue Castle in 1926, intending it to be a story for adults. Instead, it was often treated as a children’s book and, as a result, its mature content got it banned for children in a number of places. While she was censored for mentioning an unwed mother (who dies, no less), young writers like Callaghan were earning praise for sympathetic treatment of down-and-outers and prostitutes. It did seem unfair. The only consolation was that, despite the fact that it shocked her Sunday School readers, The Blue Castle sold well, and her publishers wanted more of the same.
Maud had long been contemplating a novel about the tangled clan structure of the Scottish population in Prince Edward Island, and she saw a way to build this story around one of her own most prized family heirlooms, the old Woolner jug. The result, A Tangled Web, is probably her most intricate and complicated novel, and clearly intended for adults, not children. She took her title from Sir Walter Scott’s Marmion, Canto xvii: “O, what a tangled web we weave / When first we practice to deceive!”
Maud had grown up hearing Grandfather Macneill tell how this jug had been brought by his wife’s family, the Woolners, from England to Canada. Maud had given it a place of pride both in her Leaskdale home and in the Norval manse. In a subtle way, making the jug the centre of a new novel for adults would help solidify her credentials as belonging to one of Canada’s “old families,” a family with “traditions” and stability behind it. In Prince Edward Island, everyone knew her family’s standing and pedigree. In Ontario, where it now mattered to her, they did not.
Maud knew much about the “tangled web” of family intermarriage in the small communities of Cavendish, and later Zephyr, Leaskdale, and Norval. During the Pickering trial and the Church Union fracas, the intricate patterns of kinship and marriage had caused a constant shifting of allegiances and realignment of loyalties. Now, with some perspective—and having Nora Lefurgey Campbell nearby, always ready for an exchange of funny stories—she could see the comic potential in this clan material. In May 1929, she began a new and very ambitious novel. She had already been planning the plot structure for nearly a year. It would take two more years to complete it.
In one interval between the recurrent bouts of flu and ulcerating teeth that plagued her throughout the winter of 1928–29, Maud travelled to Toronto and spent a January night with Nora. Together they read over the “comic” diaries they had kept together back in Cavendish, laughing over their social life with the limited lot of available young men. This helped Maud immerse herself in the memory of the ups and downs of young love relationships, all of which fed into A Tangled Web.
In the Old Tyme Concert that she organized for January 1929, Maud stole the show in her performance as Mary, Queen of Scots. She had rented a theatrical costume from Toronto. The long, full dress was crimson velvet decorated with braid, ermine, lace, and pearls, topped with a ruff of lace. She wore her hair high, with a crown on it, and recited a poem about Mary, Queen of Scots. She got such an ovation that she gave an encore, “The curfew must not ring tonight.”36
Maud kept up her speaking engagements, too, while she worked on her novels, directed plays, and organized women’s church affairs. In May 1929 she addressed an audience of nearly five hundred young women at a banquet given during Girls’ Conference Week in the Ontario Agricultural College Dining Hall in Guelph. It was the “final session of one of the most successful Girls’ Conferences in the history of the Junior Women’s Institute Movement.”37She enjoyed her position as a role model for young women—she had combined professional success with marriage and motherhood—and her talks were both funny and inspirational.
Chester, now seventeen, and Stuart, fourteen, came home for the summer in June 1929. Chester had already had driving lessons, but she wanted him to learn how a car actually worked, so she persuaded the local garage to employ him for a month. Both Chester and Ewan objected to his doing any “manual labour,” but her will prevailed. Ewan had been raised on a farm, but he felt he had risen above doing manual labour, and he also apparently felt that his sons were too good for it. Chester, by nature indolent, assumed easily the mantle of entitlement. But Maud did not want Chester sitting idle lest he get into trouble: he continued to “chase” girls.
That same summer, Nora Lefurgey Campbell went with her two boys to a cottage on Lake Temagami. In July, her older son, David, the one crippled by polio, accidentally turned over his canoe, and the heavy iron braces he wore pulled him down; he was drowned. They dragged the lake for four days before recovering his body. Three of the four children that Nora had given birth to were now dead. To distance herself from the heartbreak, Nora took a trip out west to see friends, and Maud did not see her again until December 1929.38
In September 1929, Maud took a long-awaited trip to the Island. She had been working on A Tangled Web since May and needed a break. A highlight of her trip to the Island this time was a reunion with Mary Campbell, Nell Dingwall, and Ida MacEachern, her old friends from the Prince of Wales College. The four women took a picture that matched one taken thirty-five years earlier. Maud could not resist remarking in her journals that Mary Campbell Beaton, who had been a “fine-looking girl” in 1894, had gone “to seed.” Maud, who was still stylishly plump, was secretly pleased that she looked successful and well kept, no matter how ragged she felt at times.
Maud also spent time with Ewan’s sister Christie, her favourite of Ewan’s siblings. Of Christie’s family of eight children, only one son was now left at home. Like the Campbells of Park Corner, Christie’s family had been a financial drain on Maud. Christie had not repaid the $2,000 “lent” to the family by Maud to cover her son’s embezzlement five years earlier (in addition to the $600 given to her by Ewan out of his $1,500 yearly salary).
Maud also made a visit to Angie Doiron’s stylish dress and hat shop. Angie’s buying trips to the States ensured that her Prince Edward Island customers were as well dressed as the best Boston ladies. Maud bought a dignified dress of brown lace, with a long tail—quite different from the above-the-knee dresses the young flappers were wearing. Maud had always admired Angie—who was beautiful, charming, and educated—and disparaged the English prejudice against the French. She noted that men of English ancestry would look down on Angie’s French parentage, limiting her marriage choices. Maud was as inconsistent as others of her generation: she could feel prejudice against an entire ethnic group but admire a talented individual within it.
On this trip, Maud noted the change in the Island roads. Cars were everywhere, the roads were being widened, and the trees that lined the roads were being cut down. But inside the houses she visited, she reminisced, life was the same: in rooms lighted by kerosene lamps and warmed by wood stoves, they sat and did women’s fancy-work, talked over family and friends, played with the ever-present kittens, and read. A good night’s sleep had become a precious thing to Maud by this time, and here she slept peacefully again.
On this same trip, Maud went to visit Helen Leard MacFarlane, the sister of Herman Leard. Herman had been dead for many years, but he was very much alive in Maud’s memory. When Helen’s son drove them past the cemetery where Herman lay, Maud later recounted in her journal that she was gripped by the gruesome sensation that Herman was “reaching out to me from his grave—catching hold of me—drawing me to him” (October 13, 1929).
Maud’s vivid memory of intense emotions was both a blessing and a curse. When she was home in Norval, her worries over the future roiled in her mind in the middle of the night. In Prince Edward Island, her memories of the past tormented her in the daytime.
Soon after Maud returned home from the Island in October 1929, women became “persons” in Canadian law, giving them the right to hold public office. The milestone “Persons Case” had been brought forward by five women, including Judge Emily Murphy and Nellie McClung, and was finally settled with the Canadian Privy Council’s declaration that women would have the same legal status as men did. The status of women had been changing rapidly ever since they had taken on traditionally male roles during the war. Women were entering the professions. Big newspapers had instituted “women’s sections” and gave extensive coverage to women’s activities.
Women had been becoming more assertive of their rights in marriage, and in general. Maud had been asked to speak on this change to the Junior Women’s Institute. She gave a talk that said that the “modern girl was in no respect worse, and in many respects better, than the girl of former generations” in wanting her rights and respect. She approved this advance.
But she would soon be thrust into a future that would test every strategy she had for survival. By November 25, 1933, she would write in her journals: “Not even a cat would care to haunt so changed a world.”