Swansea is “more a nice country village than a city,” Maud wrote a fan on March 3, 1936.1 Located at the western fringe of Toronto, Swansea had many of the features that Maud had loved about Norval: beautiful natural scenery with a small river running through it, and a relaxed village atmosphere. But Swansea also had a good public library, a movie theatre, and a drugstore for ice-cream sodas. Streetcars ran into Toronto proper, with its literary culture and shopping. Just one mile square, Swansea was a tiny, near-perfect community.2
In 1935, Riverside Drive was the primary road running down through Swansea to the Lakeshore Boulevard from north of Toronto. When Swansea was opened for development in the mid-1920s, developer Home Smith set aside locations along the cliff on Riverside Drive for the finest houses. These were built to simulate old-world elegance for the growing number of entrepreneurs and professionals with new money. Other areas of Swansea were far more modest, with a cross-section of income levels. Maud’s new home was in the expensive enclave, surrounded by mature trees and overlooking the Humber River. The front of her house, built in an impressive English Tudor style, faced east in the direction of Toronto (and ultimately her beloved Prince Edward Island); the back faced the west and the setting sun.
Over cliffs, beyond the Humber River, was countryside. Looking through her bedroom window, Maud could go to sleep watching the waving tops of pine trees, just as in Norval. She loved the sound of the wind rustling through these trees. The meandering Humber was less picturesque than the Credit River, but to compensate, Lake Ontario stretched in the distance until water met sky, like a far-away sea. Ferns, bracken, and wildflowers in the ravine reminded her of the flora of Prince Edward Island, as seen from her bedroom window (or the small second-floor balcony). And just beyond her front door was access to the many advantages of urban life.
The Macdonalds were the first to live in their new “ghostless” home, as Maud called it. She was pleased that she would not displace any previous mistress, and she envisioned introducing her own traditions. A four-level home, built on a square plan with a flagstone entrance, 210A Riverside Drive boasted a spacious basement recreation room, a ground floor with ten windows, and a second floor with three bedrooms. Maud had always loved fireplaces, and had not had one since living with her grandparents. The master bedroom, with pale apricot walls, joined to a bathroom done in turquoise and white tile; this bedroom also included its own bath (a new luxury at that time). Another bedroom, painted blue, would belong to Stuart. Off the main hallway, a second bathroom was decorated in small black and white tile. A third bedroom would be for their live-in maid. Upstairs, on the fourth level, was a private garret bedroom. Chester would claim that. Incredibly, however, Maud still had no “room of her own”—she continued to write in the bedroom that she shared with Ewan, setting off her writing area with her movable screen.
Maud decorated her house with the artwork she had brought from Norval—her own framed and coloured snapshots of favourite locations and her children, plus a few professional paintings depicting Island scenes. She particularly liked her watercolours of the Cavendish shore by Helen Haszard, and an oil of Cavendish Pond by a Mrs. Crownfield. She also hung the original cover art from Anne’s House of Dreams, and an etching by the 1911 Governor General of Canada, Earl Grey, of himself.
Although artwork made a wall “friendly,” nothing made the house “a home” more than her beloved cats. Her captain of cats, “Good Luck” (shortened to “Lucky”), moved to Toronto with them. To Maud’s grandparents and most Islanders, her house would have seemed no less than the home of British aristocracy. To any local observer, Maud had achieved the pinnacle of success when she moved to scenic Riverside Drive, dubbed by the poorer villagers “the rich street” of Swansea. She had climbed “the Alpine Path” of her youthful dreams. Her disciplined life and hard work had paid off.
Ewan found Swansea a sympathetic place, too. Riverside Drive was exclusive, but not filled with sophisticated “old money” people, with whom he would have felt out of place. Still the country parson, he made regular rounds to the neighbours, knocked on the doors, and was invited in for visits and tea. Dropping in on neighbours was part of the rural tradition Ewan knew from his upbringing (as well as being the pastor’s duty), and he continued this in Toronto. The Riverside Drive women were stay-at-home wives, many with maids or other help, and they had leisure time. Dr. Richard Lane, who became the family doctor for Ewan and Maud, lived at 219 Riverside Drive, across from the Macdonalds’ home. His daughter, Nora Lane, a university student at the time, remembered Ewan well. He was “a nice old man,” she said, “very gentle, friendly, sweet—like a great big teddy bear.… a very, very lovable person.” But, “he was clearly very lonely and, left on his own, he wandered around [the neighbourhood] for companionship.” The Lane household tried to make him feel “valued and important.” He told them that his wife worked seven hours a day on her writing and he wanted to get out of the house so he wouldn’t bother her. “He was friendly and happy at our house, surrounded by people who wanted to make him comfortable,” recounted Nora.3
The Herbert Cowan family lived next to the Macdonalds on the south, at 208 Riverside Drive. Mr. Cowan was the manager for the new Loblaw grocery stores, which had just introduced the modern concept of “self-serve.” Mrs. Cowan took Maud shopping and showed her how this worked. The Cowans had a very pretty unmarried daughter, Margaret, who was four years older than Stuart, and who had just graduated in dentistry. A younger daughter, Elaine, was still in school, as was the only son, Gardiner (“Billy”).4
Mrs. Cowan frequently gave formal teas and other parties, both in her home and in clubs, and she ensured that her fancy affairs were written up in the “women’s pages” of all the major Toronto papers. She welcomed the Macdonalds with pleasure—Maud was “famous” and would add class and distinction to the street. Over the next few years, Mrs. Cowan often asked Maud to recite at her teas, and Maud always obliged. They went for frequent walks together in the first two years. But Maud quickly decided that Mrs. Cowan lacked the discretion and reticence needed in a friend. She was shocked when Mrs. Cowan said she hoped her daughters would “marry money”: such an outright admission seemed shockingly “déclassé” to Maud. (Although Maud was equally conscious of social class, she would never have admitted it.)5
The realtor A. E. LePage had one of the most expensive homes on the street (in the assessment of 1937, his property was valued at $7,300, compared to the Macdonalds’ $4,625). George Mowat, the head of Glidden Paints, and his wife were at 212 Riverside Drive in a house valued at $6,650.
A retired contractor named Mr. Fry lived at 217 Riverside Drive. He had built several upscale homes on the street, including the Lanes’, the LePages’, and two others. The Macdonalds soon developed casual friendships with neighbours, especially the Frys. The genial Mr. Fry introduced Ewan to the sport of lawn bowling, which Ewan took up with a passion, joining not just one but several lawn-bowling clubs in the area. Maud and Ewan set up regular evenings of card-playing with the retired couples on Riverside Drive. They fit right in as newcomers in the rich part of Riverside Drive and were well liked. Most of the people in the poorer areas, with smaller houses, on other streets had been in Swansea for a long time and all knew each other.
The Macdonalds—particularly Maud—had frequent visitors. Friends from the Women’s Missionary Society in Norval and Glen Williams dropped in on visits to Toronto. Many parishioners from Leaskdale also remembered the Macdonalds with great fondness and often stopped by. Ewan and Maud still made trips to Glen Williams to visit with Ernest and Ida Barraclough, who in turn often came to Toronto. In addition, Ephraim Weber and his wife came through in July 1935 for another visit.
Marion Webb Laird, now married and living in Norval, was like a daughter to Maud, and they visited back and forth. Marion’s sister, Anita Webb, came up for the birth of Marion’s first baby in early October 1935. Marion was very pretty, delicate, and gentle; Anita was sturdy, feisty, and independent, with a hearty laugh. Luella came to visit with little baby Luella from time to time, and Maud termed the baby a “sweet thing” in her journals. Isabel Anderson still tried to intrude on Maud’s life, but the distance between them made it easier for Maud to dismiss her by mail.
Toronto-based friends were more accessible now. Nora Lefurgey Campbell lived at 21 Wilberton Road—too far to walk, but Chester was always willing to drive his mother, and Nora herself sometimes took Maud out for drives in the Campbells’ car. Maud’s earlier friendship with Mary Gould Beal—a very good friend from the Leaskdale period who now lived in Toronto—had been cooling for some time. The talented and gracious Mary, daughter of prosperous and prominent Harvey Gould of Uxbridge, had a sophisticated polish similar to Maud’s. She had married a well-to-do Uxbridge and Toronto businessman, Norman Beal. Beal had once been mayor of Uxbridge, but his inherited leather business had begun to fail after the end of World War I. Mary borrowed substantial sums of money from Maud to maintain their standard of living, which Maud resented, given that she herself was also feeling the pinch. She was frustrated when Mary spent her second loan on a newer car without offering to pay interest on the first. Still, Maud found it hard to say no to a long-standing friend whom she saw as in her own “class.” Aside from Nora and casual friendships with neighbours, Maud’s main circle of friends now would become those in the literary world. She had wanted all her life to be part of an intellectual community of people who loved books, and now she was on the verge of attaining her wish.
The churches were the social centre of the Swansea community, as they had been in Norval. There were four major churches in Swansea—the Anglican, the Presbyterian, the Baptist, and the United—plus a Salvation Army that was particularly active in the Depression. The Macdonalds joined the Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church, some distance away, because they liked the minister, Dr. McKerroll. The Young People’s Societies in the churches provided one way for young people to meet and socialize, and the Victoria-Royce Presbyterian Church had an especially active program for young adults.
While in many ways Swansea in the 1930s was a strongly ecumenical environment, in other ways it was not. Generally, the ministers of Swansea’s four churches knew the names of everyone in their congregations, and of many in other churches, too, and would stop and speak to them on the street. However, it was a strictly Protestant community of people primarily of English and Scottish descent. There was no Roman Catholic church in Swansea, nor would anyone have sold property to Catholics without attracting criticism. Protestant children were told never to talk to Catholics. They were also cautioned not to wander into the poorer districts south of the Swansea Public School, where there were small houses and tarpaper shacks and people might be picking over the dumps to find food. There were no known Jewish families in Swansea, either.
The local schools were the common meeting ground for younger children, and all nationalities and religions mingled there. Elementary students went to Swansea Public School and secondary students to Runnymede Collegiate. The children of the rich might be sent to a private school (as Chester and Stuart had gone to St. Andrew’s in Aurora), but generally the public schools were the great social leveller. The public library was in the local school, and everyone used it, including Maud.
Only the wealthy people on Riverside Drive owned cars. Other people walked to their destinations, stopping to chat with neighbours along the way, especially where the more common houses had front verandahs. Women usually shopped daily for food. In the days before refrigerators, iceboxes were used; a forty-pound block of ice would need replacing every two or three days. But for her own new kitchen, Maud bought a real electric refrigerator.
Shopping uptown in Toronto meant an hour’s ride on the streetcar or two to three hours of walking, but in those days people were used to walking, and their larger purchases would be delivered to them at home by horse and wagon, or increasingly by motorized vehicles. Horses and deliverymen were a common sight—delivering ice for the icebox, coal for the coal chute, fresh milk, fresh baked goods, groceries, and store purchases. (The Eaton’s department store always used distinctive grey or grey-dappled horses.)
The Swansea area was flanked on the south and north by two very different types of public entertainment. To the north, at the corner of Runnymede and Bloor, was the Runnymede Theatre. A grand establishment, the theatre boasted a ceiling painted to look like the sky, with light projecting stars onto it and shadows of airplanes flying across it (until World War II made that too frightening). In the other direction, down by the waterfront, there was a famous beach entertainment area called the Sunnyside Amusement Park. Built in the early 1920s, before the great crash of 1929, it had a massive outdoor public swimming pool and a dance hall called the Palais Royale. In the mid-1930s, at the height of its popularity, famous bands like Duke Ellington’s and the Dorsey Brothers played for up to three thousand people at a time. The beaches were public and clean and safe: during serious summer heat waves, before air-conditioning, families would take rugs or blankets down to sleep on the beach through the first part of the night, until the temperature became cooler towards the morning. Maud herself did this during one heat wave in 1935.
Swansea itself was safe. Children wandered without supervision (though they were told not to go near the Humber River or Grenadier Pond, after the three-year-old son of the area’s most prominent lawyer drowned in the pond). People knew each other, watched out for others’ children, and enjoyed the sense of community.
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Maud was delighted that her sons would be living at home again. She wanted her family to rise from the humiliating ashes of Norval and make a new start in Swansea, establishing a different—and better—life in this sophisticated setting. Having the boys at home would save the cost of room and board, and it would bring the Macdonalds together as a family once more. Luella would stay with her widowed father in Norval, keeping house for him, and Chester would take the car and visit her and the baby on weekends. At the time of their move in April 1935, Chester, who would be twenty-three in July, was into his second year of “preliminary articling” in Mr. Bogart’s law office; he would be ready to start his three years of the formal study of law in fall 1935, while still working part time at the articling firm. Stuart, who would be nineteen in October, was in his second year of Medicine (out of five years, plus a year to intern) at the University of Toronto.
Maud’s dream of a happy home, one filled with laughter, finally seemed attainable. Chester and Stuart would bring home amusing tales from their daily encounters, and the Macdonald household would be filled with stimulating conversation. She prayed that Chester would settle down and study now that he had a family. She also fervently hoped that Stuart would lose interest in Joy Laird, his Norval girlfriend. Now that Ewan was free from the pressure of performing as a minister, Maud expected that his mental health would improve.
Barely three weeks after the move, Maud embarked on her new social life, attending a Canadian Women’s Press Club dinner at the Royal York Hotel. Over seventy-five women were there. Maud looked forward to putting her organizational skills and her celebrity to use in a new context. She was public-spirited, and as an ardent Canadian nationalist, she wanted to foster the growing field of Canadian literature.
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It was not long after the move that Maud received a registered letter from the Prime Minister of Canada, the Honourable R. B. Bennett:
May 20, 1935
Dear Mrs. Macdonald,
No man born, as I was, in the Maritime Provinces can fail to know of the contribution you have made to Canadian literature. There are few Canadians who have not read at least one of your books.
His Majesty the King is very anxious that in this Silver Jubilee year of His Reign there should be recognition of the work of men and women who have made real contributions to the cultural life of the Empire in Literature, Art, Music, and Science. It will therefore give me very great pleasure if you will permit me to recommend to the Sovereign that on His approaching Jubilee birthday you be appointed an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (O.B.E.) …
The notice of this award helped offset a significant failure on the home front. A week after receiving the O.B.E. letter in May, Maud learned that Stuart had failed his second year of Medicine. Stuart had always been an excellent student, and he had passed all his first-year exams, despite his devotion to gymnastics. Perhaps things had come too easily, however, for this young man with such extraordinary intellectual gifts.
According to a classmate, Dr. Richard Braiden, Stuart failed the second year because he’d spent his time playing cards—and betting on them (regarded as a sinful form of gambling at that time). This card-playing was done in a hidden area of a men’s bathroom where the boys were out of sight of their professors. Stuart was so good at cards—his memory was a great asset here—that other students came to watch him play, a heady encouragement. He began skipping classes and labs. Stuart was accustomed to learning all his texts the night before exams, but the second-year course of study was mostly human anatomy, learned in labs. The final examination consisted of the students being hustled along a table with piles of bones, which they had to identify at lightning speed. Because Stuart hadn’t done the lab work, he was unable to identify the bones quickly enough. Classes were small and professors knew the students. The Anatomy professor, the author of a famous text, had noticed that Stuart was merely coasting along, and failed him. Stuart learned a hard and humiliating lesson.
Stuart would have to repeat his year: his tuition money for the previous year had been wasted. Maud was shaken. She had come to expect failing grades from Chester, but never from Stuart. She greatly resented the waste of a thousand dollars for a year’s university expenses. Being disappointed in her “one good son” was bad enough, but the public embarrassment was far worse.
Maud was a high-profile celebrity, and everyone who knew her, from the city of Toronto to the province of Prince Edward Island, would hear about Stuart’s failure, either from the newspaper “pass lists” or from gossip. In a society where well-to-do women did not work, formal afternoon teas became an agony: boasting about children’s success was a staple of conversation and status at these. Unlike Chester, Stuart was genuinely mortified and ashamed of himself. He had never dreamed that this could happen to him, and he made sure it never happened again.
Stuart’s failure took the edge off her pleasure over the O.B.E., but conversely the O.B.E. made Stuart’s failure easier to bear. Maud’s O.B.E. was granted on June 3, 1935, by King George V, but the formal investiture in Ottawa was not held until early September. Neither Stuart, Chester, nor Ewan attended this ceremony. Determined to earn his own tuition money for his repeat year, Stuart had obtained a job in a Campbell Soup factory and worked there until classes started. Chester seemed busy with his law work in Mr. Bogart’s office. The trip was too far for Ewan, so Maud arranged for Mrs. Cowan’s daughter Margaret to drive her to Ottawa for the ceremony at Rideau Hall. In her journal, Maud wrote of the trip, in which she and Margaret “gabbed away” as if they were both girls (September 8, 1935). Maud saw Margaret as the kind of “nice” young woman she hoped Stuart would start dating.
For the ceremony, which was conducted by the Governor General, Lord Bessborough, Maud was handsomely decked out in a purplish-navy chiffon and cut-velvet dress with a blue felt hat.6 She received the formal O.B.E. medal, which could be worn only on state occasions, in the presence of a representative of the King. She had a smaller replica of it made to wear with full evening dress. On June 12, 1935, an article in The Family Herald entitled “Specially for Women: King’s Honours for L. M. Montgomery …” described her achievements in great detail. Ewan’s reaction to her honour is never described in her journals—only that he was often “dull” and laid around groaning from pain in his head during this period.
Maud’s professional life was very busy following the move to Toronto. She was on the executive of the Canadian Authors Association, but the meetings were often tense. William Arthur Deacon was also on the executive, and he put her on edge.
Canadian literature was still a fledgling field in the 1930s. The Canadian Authors Association (CAA) made it a mission to bring attention to Canadian books. Deacon, like Maud, was eager for Canada to develop its own literature. By the mid-1930s, he had become a very powerful force in the Canadian book-reviewing world. As a newspaper critic, he began to consolidate his power in the CAA. He was determined to sweep out all vestiges of Victorian sentiment and style, hoping that Canadian literature would reflect the new trends. As Maud would learn eventually, there was no place for the famous “L. M. Montgomery” in Deacon’s vision, either as a writer or even as someone working in the CAA.
On July 21, 1935, when Maud wrote Stuart Kennedy, the national executive secretary of the Canadian Authors Association, thanking him for his letter of congratulation on her O.B.E, she made the subtle point that she, too, was working for Canadian literature:
Dear Mr. Kennedy,
.… Thank you so much for your congratulations on the O.B.E. I feel the honour is less for me than for Canadian literature, of which I am an unworthy representative.… It’s time something was recognized as worthy of honours besides huge fortunes and political juggling.
Yours sincerely,
L. M. Montgomery [Macdonald]
When Maud moved to Toronto, she expected to refocus the energy she had spent in church organization towards the promotion of Canadian literature. But she was becoming increasingly aware of the complicated politics in the CAA, and in the Canadian literary scene in general. Deacon was everywhere, involved in everything, and his personal disdain for her was palpable.
The week after she received the O.B.E. award, Maud attended a CAA executive meeting at the home of A. H. Robson. At this meeting, plans were laid to start a new magazine of Canadian poetry to be edited by Professor E. J. Pratt, the noted Canadian poet, of the University of Toronto. Deacon, as always, was present. Maud writes tersely in her journals of Deacon without naming him, “One of the men on it [the CAA executive] is no friend of mine and has gone out of his way many a time to sneer at my books in the nastiest fashion” (September 16, 1935).
Deacon’s first public attack on Maud had been in Poteen back in 1926 when he had said that “Canadian fiction was to go no lower” than in “sugary” stories like Anne of Green Gables. Maud was fully accustomed to negative reviews, but Deacon’s ongoing hostility to her and her writing seemed more personal than professional. He sneered at her books, dismissing them, as if any outright discussion of them was beneath his intellect.
Maud used her own celebrity to promote other new writers, and she knew also that the immense sales of her books allowed McClelland and Stewart to take chances on publishing newer Canadian writers. (In fact, McClelland and Stewart eventually became a major twentieth-century publisher of Canadian fiction and poetry.) She feared that Deacon’s scorn would make people question their own judgment if they enjoyed reading her books. And if his attacks on her damaged her reputation and her sales, this would hurt not only her own income but also her publisher’s.
In her journals, she remarked without naming anyone that some of the CAA members took themselves very seriously, “especially those who did not amount to a row of beans in any department of authorship” (October 13, 1935). Still, the CAA did important work in organizing and lobbying for better copyright protection. It organized many promotional book-centred activities. According to Eric Gaskell, later the national executive director of the CAA, Maud brought many ideas to these CAA meetings. She knew that many of the people in the CAA had only small talent, but that didn’t mean the group could not accomplish a great deal working together for a common cause. All her life, she had been an organizer who got others to work together, and she was very skilled at coming up with fundraising ideas.
On September 21, 1935, the Telegram reported a press conference at which Mr. Robson, CAA president, formally announced that they had set up a trust fund to support the publication of the poetry magazine by the CAA, one of their early efforts.7 He also called attention to the CAA’s forthcoming Canadian Book Week in November, another big project to get people “reading Canadian.” The same issue of the Telegram provided a review of Maud’s new book, Mistress Pat. It described the book as being full of “charming romances” which end in “the orthodox chime of wedding bells so beloved of youthful readers”—just the kind of characterization that was sure to invoke Modernist scorn. “Cosmopolitan” was the new catchword for avant-garde literature in an era when the world had shrunk because of the advances in transportation and communication following World War I. Maud’s books had originally been pegged as “regionalism” (once a complimentary term) because they took as their primary subjects unsophisticated people in rural and small towns. In the 1920s, their re-categorization as “children’s books”—or as “girls’ books”—had frustrated her. She wrote to one of her fans that the Honourable Stanley Baldwin, Prime Minister of Great Britain, had come to Canada, and had come to see her, and had asked to shake her hand, saying he wanted to tell her “what delight” her books had given him!8 Just “tell that” to anyone who taunts you, she advised, for liking “girls’ books.” Two years later, she wrote him that her newest book, A Tangled Web, was for adults.9
Now in the 1930s, her books, even those specifically for adults like A Tangled Web, were being further re-categorized as “provincial”—a highly pejorative catchword that invoked the opposite of all things “cosmopolitan.” Critics now looked for “cosmopolitan” literature that had “universal” themes.10It didn’t matter that all the jealousies, antagonisms, power-grabs, and political manoeuvrings in small rural communities were a microcosm of those same symptoms in the larger world.
As soon as Maud was re-categorized as “a children’s writer” and “provincial,” most male critics who belittled Maud’s books did not actually read them; they just accepted the labels pinned on them. Accepting the prejudices and opinions of others was apparently almost the case with Professor Arthur L. Phelps (born 1887), an exceptionally influential critic and personality from the 1920s through to the 1950s. He was part of a group of cultured men who spent their summers in cottages at Bobcaygeon, Ontario, where their families socialized and the men themselves talked over their ideas about the state of Canadian literature, world literature, and politics. This group included other academics, journalists (like Deacon), and writers invited to join them (like Frederick Philip Grove).
Phelps was in the rather ubiquitous category of male critics who judged before they read when dealing with “L. M. Montgomery.” Phelps prepared a book called Canadian Writers, and he devoted a chapter to Montgomery. He starts by panning her work, lumping her with popular writers like Robert Service, Mazo de la Roche, and Ralph Connor, who as “romantic and sentimental writers,” he deems unimportant “by the standards of discriminating literary criticism.” He judges Montgomery’s work “naïve,” and innocent to the point of showing “ignorance of life.” He asserts that her readers are only “the nostalgic and sentimental or … the uncultured and unsophisticated.” Even “modern young girls,” he says, can no longer “tolerate” the “soft well-meaning goodness of Miss Montgomery’s portrayal.” He ends that same paragraph with the rather ironic information that the librarian who lent him the four Montgomery books told him not to keep them too long as they were “out all the time.” After he actually reads her books, his essay changes tack. He acknowledges that Montgomery “should not be dismissed too casually just because she has been popular.” He continues, “Widespread popularity … usually suggests the presence of positive and fundamental qualities,” and decides that Maud is somehow better than the other superficial writers of the era because her stories “have qualities of range and subtlety and fine comprehension which make them relatively worthy even today.” He does not revise the first part of his essay—he just closes with the advice to get her book and read it. This assessment, however, was not published until 1951, after Maud’s death.11
Various factors worked against Maud in the 1920s and 1930s. Her narrative style, which reflected her grounding in the oral tradition of Scotland, was one of these. The oral tradition had become unfashionable in the late nineteenth century, along with “fairy tales” and “old wives’ tales.” The next generation of writers, who saw a fragmented world, wanted new ways of telling stories. And worse, Maud often lapsed into sensuously evocative and lush “purple prose,” particularly when writing about nature. The Romantic and Victorian poets had been an important early influence on her, with their belief that Nature should be a primary subject for art. Maud used this style to create atmosphere in her books, and such passages seemed cloying and old-fashioned. The new post-war Modernist critics called for a tough, hard-edged, pared-down style, as well as gritty subject matter, including tortured people, war, criminality, and sex. Maud’s writing—humorous, domestic, and localized in a rural region—fell short on all counts.
Maud probably had not fully realized when she moved to Toronto how very small the Toronto literary circle was and how much infighting there would be. She watched as Deacon solidified his position and grew more influential. After his stint as literary editor for Saturday Night, he worked for The Mail and Empire from 1928 until 1936, and in 1936 began a two-decade position as literary editor for The Globe and Mail. According to his biographers, Clara Thomas and John Lennox, he “loved leadership and the feeling of power to influence events; he also loved to be seen to be leading.”12 He saw no place for Maud in the Canadian garden of literature he was cultivating, and he let her know how he felt. She was coldly furious: she knew that her books were sold, read, and enjoyed around the world. It was only her local reputation that seemed under attack—and by men she worked with in the CAA.
To make matters worse, in 1935 Maud’s royalty income of $2,770 was the lowest she had seen in years. She was having a hard time covering her new mortgage, the boys’ tuition and upkeep, and all their living expenses. Ewan’s church pension of $237.60 a year (paying a quarterly $59.40) would not kick in until 1936, and when it did, it would not even cover their food bills.
Canada’s National Book Week, held from November 9 to 16, was the biggest fall literary event in Toronto in 1935. To kick it off, the Toronto branch of the Canadian Authors Association arranged and advertised a special fundraising banquet to honour those who had received the O.B.E. that year. Maud’s celebrity status with the public made her a huge drawing card for any event. One of its organizers was another prominent male academic critic who scorned her writing: Professor Pelham Edgar, Head of the English and French Departments at the University of Toronto, a man who kept himself in the public eye as much as Deacon.
Maud rarely recorded anything negative said about her or her books in her journals, probably because she intended them for eventual publication; however, she exploded after this particular CAA banquet. She felt that Deacon and Edgar had deliberately snubbed her in front of everyone who attended. It was a large public event that bore witness to the developing rift—a rift that would trivialize her literary reputation and demolish the status she had worked so hard to acquire over her lifetime.
The banquet was advertised as “quite the most outstanding event of the season in the literary circles in this city.” The occasion would honour the “three knights and two O.B.E.s” created that year: Sir Ernest MacMillan, Sir Wyly Grier, Sir Charles G. D. Roberts, L. M. Montgomery, O.B.E., and Dr. E. A. Hardy, O.B.E. Everyone who mattered in the literary scene would attend. Nellie McClung came from the west, and, with Marshall Saunders, C.B.E., sat at the head table.
The event began with A. H. Robson, Toronto branch president, reading several messages, including one from the much esteemed Lord Tweedsmuir, Governor General of Canada and honorary president of the CAA. Then Dr. Pelham Edgar, national president of the CAA at that time, proposed a toast to each of the five members.
In her journals, Maud recounts how Pelham Edgar began with long and fulsome toasts describing the individual accomplishments of each of the first three honoured guests: Sir Ernest MacMillan, Sir Wyly Grier, and Sir Charles G. D. Roberts. She continues, rather crossly, that Professor Edgar, “who has a high opinion of Prof. Pelham Edgar’s critical acumen,” did not consider that her books had “any literary merit whatever.” After finishing off his flowery toasts to the first three men, Professor Edgar merely nodded to Maud and Hardy, dismissing them together in one bald sentence by saying, “The other two who are included in this toast are Dr. Hardy and Mrs. Macdonald.”
Maud snaps that Pelham Edgar would have praised Dr. Edwin Austin Hardy, a widely respected educationalist, as much as the others, but he would then have had to praise her. But Edgar “would have died any death you could mention rather than admit I represented Canadian literature. So,” she steams in her journal, “the good Edgar selected the horn of the dilemma and impaled himself thereon,” by slighting both her and Hardy together in this huge public forum.
A lengthy and unsigned piece in the Globe of November 11, 1935, describes the situation exactly as Maud did, showing that she reported it accurately. Although it could seem she is over-sensitive (because a knighthood is a higher honour than an O.B.E.), all five being toasted were asked to respond to their toasts. Deacon’s piece in The Mail and Empire describing the event omits the information that Dr. Hardy and she made replies to their toasts. Maud felt humiliated by this public snub. A special reception at the home of Dr. Herbert A. Bruce, the Lieutenant-Governor of Ontario, on November 26, 1935, fêted her shortly after.13
Slowly, over the next two years, Maud would find herself increasingly irritated in the CAA executive by the behind-the-scenes machinations of Deacon. After Deacon was hired as literary editor of the Globe and Mail he had enormous influence over who was given favourable review attention and who obtained positions of influence in the CAA. Many in the literary and academic world, wanting favourable press and not wanting to incur his ill will, tended to follow wherever he led.14
Deacon continued to subtly disparage Maud’s books. It was in May 1934 that he wrote a long column in The Mail and Empire tracing the development of Canadian literature. He implied that Canadian literature was initially very poor in quality.
However much Maud was hurt by Deacon’s condescension, she also knew that he exerted admirable effort for public causes, like improving Canadian copyright legislation, and he was an indefatigable organizer of literary events that benefited writers, booksellers, and readers. For Maud, the most irritating aspect of feeling sidelined by Deacon’s narrow vision of Canadian literature was that she thought him a mean-minded man who was motivated largely by personal ambition. He was trained as a lawyer, not in arts and letters, and lacked the judiciousness of wide, discriminate reading.
Once her critical descent started, Maud’s loss of status would continue steadily until her death. Not until near the end of the twentieth century, long after she was dead, would literary critics dismantle and discredit the norms that the entire generation of academic critics had worked so hard to establish in the 1930s, norms that pushed popular fiction—and almost all women’s writing—completely out of the canon and off the map of literary culture.
After the move to Toronto, Maud suffered periodically from acute homesickness for the manse and the beautiful Credit River setting of Norval. In retrospect, her Norval life seemed idyllic.
Ethel Dennis, the maid who moved from Norval to Toronto with the Macdonalds, remembered how unhappy Maud sometimes looked after the move. Maud’s mental distress caused specific symptoms: she complained variously of a “queer feeling” in her head, of her eyes “pulling,” of “old-time headaches” which resulted in vomiting before she had relief. Ironically, Ewan now gave his wife the same futile advice that she had initially given him in his depressive states, telling her to “cast it off” or “don’t think of it.”
Maud worked at organizing her house after their move, but she suffered periodically from what she called “neurasthenia,” a catch-all term for a host of conditions believed to come from “exhaustion of the nervous system.” She described the peculiar “waves” that would rush over her, flooding her mind with memories of times past, but selectively choosing and colouring these memories to turn them into painful humiliations. At first, she was afraid to go to church for fear that one of her “waves” of nervous anxiety would wash over her, forcing her to get up and flee in the middle of a service. Ewan often went alone, and she stayed home.
She did not write in her journals about what these flooding memories consisted of—that most likely would have been too revealing—but we can speculate that she was dredging up the ways she had felt unimportant, unworthy, and unloved as a child and young woman. As an over-sensitive child, Maud had internalized real and imagined slurs that attacked her developing sense of self. When she became a best-selling author at age thirty-three, she believed that she could move beyond this pain. Now, late in life, with her work and celebrity under attack at the precise time she had hoped to begin engaging productively in the Canadian cultural scene, she fell into the old, hurtful thought patterns. She was sensitive, and any snubs she felt or imagined acted like salt being rubbed in old wounds. New worries over her finances and her sons only added to her emotional instability.
When Ewan had developed mental problems, she remembered her earlier fears that she would never be able to attract a desirable mate, a fear that seemed perversely fulfilled after his illnesses surfaced. As her son Stuart later quipped, “My mother wanted an escape [from spinsterhood in PEI], but she did not know that the ship she chose had a faulty boiler.” When her sons grew into sexual maturity, she remembered her grandmother’s disapproval of her own behaviour, accusing her of “stealing out” to “see some fellow” (December 20, 1904). Having grown up in a culture that taught that sexual urgings must be repressed, she came to her adult life with a great residue of shame over what had been normal feelings for a flirtatious, high-spirited girl. When Chester and Stuart were attracted to the opposite sex, this stirred up feelings from her childhood. Maud was a person given to reliving everything in the past over and over—in her journals, in her writing, and in her imagination.
Maud knew by this time that her mind was its own place, and as John Milton had put it, it could “make a Heaven of Hell, a Hell of Heaven.” Her extraordinary memory, her heightened sensitivity to the emotions that washed over her, her clairvoyant vision into the heart of human muddle—these gifts could paralyze her in the process of living, but they could also inspire and release her into creative work, giving her the “gift of wings.” She could see what was happening to herself emotionally, but she was less able to cope with her mood fluctuations as she aged. When her “nerves” were in bad shape, her intellectual understanding of her state and its causes did nothing to reorient her to what should have been, and could have been—a feeling of having made a remarkable success of her life, despite many trials along the way, trials that would have destroyed a person with less personal discipline. Because she lacked an unshakeable sense of self-worth, her fluctuating self-image made her especially sensitive to external slurs and this made her increasingly vulnerable to depression. It could be a self-perpetuating downward spiral.
When “waves” of depression came during those first months in Toronto, Maud would often leave the house for fresh air and a walk in the garden or along the street to infuse her senses with a wholesome present again. She was unable to compose when severely depressed; she could rewrite, revise, adapt, but creative work was not possible. What would happen to her family’s income, she worried, if she could not settle her mind enough to write? For years, her happiest moments had always been when she was writing: what if she lost this pleasure? She lived when she wrote. Because she always built her writing around her own feelings, it allowed her to gain distance and see things with greater perspective—and to exorcise (or make light of) painful memories.
In Toronto, Maud’s symptoms were not all psychological, however. She was writing for much longer stretches than she ever had before, but she was getting far less varied physical exercise without her parish duties and other activities, which had kept her moving. In Toronto, she subjected herself to the strain of long periods at a desk in her urgent need to support her family and a new house.
Oddly, Maud had never purchased a desk that was the proper height for writing. In both Norval and Toronto, she wrote in the bedroom she shared with Ewan, either on a high square table (with an uncomfortable raised decorative braid around the edge) or in a chair with a portfolio on her knees, with her feet propped up on a stool and her back hunched down. She sometimes revised manuscripts by cutting up sections and laying them out on her bed, then bending over as she reassembled them. When Maud typed her book manuscripts, the ergonomics were equally bad. She either put the typewriter on the braided table desk—which was entirely too high for it—or she placed it on a low footstool in front of her and sat, tipped forward with her back rounded, on her rocking chair. Long stints of work in such a position gave her severe muscle strain in her back, shoulders, and neck—something that her aging and overweight body tolerated less well. Muscle spasms caused a vice-like tightness in her head and the pain around her eyes that she complained of in this period. Her headaches sometimes responded to aspirin, but only if she lay down and relaxed directly after taking medication. Chester’s wife, Luella, described how in the latter Toronto years something that looked like a “cord” in Maud’s neck began to pull out under the skin. Maud would hunch up her shoulders or tip her head to one side, as if this reduced her pain.15 Maud’s increasing fear of this physical pain, without knowing its cause or how to find permanent relief, greatly increased her anxiety. Her old standby to reduce pain and depression—relaxing walks and concentration on the beauty of nature—was more difficult in Swansea because the walking areas were along the street, not on private paths, and the ravine was too steep to really walk in. In varying proportions, Maud was suffering from the tangled effects of real physical pain and from a generalized anxiety over many aspects of her life.
Maud knew that she was too anxious. Her son Stuart later characterized her as someone who worried about every bridge she had to cross long before she reached it. The line her grandmother had drilled into her—“What will people say?” made her into a person whose self-evaluation was filtered too much through others’ eyes, rather than determined by her own internal moral compass. Then, when she reread her journals, she read a skewed account of her own life, one that gave support to her growing conviction that there was a curse on her and everyone she cared about. That idea lodged itself in her brain as one of the increasingly pernicious fixed ideas that would surface during depressive episodes.16
The disconnect between the public record of Maud’s busy, productive life and her own distressed inner feelings, as found in her journals in the 1935 to 1936 period, is staggering. Although there is much joy recorded in Maud’s early journals (particularly before her boys were teens), the later journals became the primary repository for her thoughtful or morbid moods. In public, she concealed her depressed feelings, even from friends and relatives. Her self-containment was also a function of what might be called pride: she was determined to maintain others’ view of her as a successful celebrity. When her journals were first published, revealing so many of her depressions and doubts, older relatives and close friends who had known her were astonished and confused. Most relatives said that this was not the woman they knew. They remembered only a joyous person whose infrequent visits were characterized by joke-telling, high spirits, and good times.
The public record of Maud’s activities in 1935 shows that she was a dynamo of activity right after the move to Toronto, giving speeches and readings, attending formal teas and literary functions, tending to her business affairs, writing and adapting stories to send to her New York agent, and continuing to produce longer fiction. As expected by her publisher, she kept up a rigorous speaking schedule, not only in Toronto but also in locations around Ontario. She spoke about her own books, but she also urged people to buy books by other Canadian writers. She begged her audiences to preserve their local culture, as she had in her books, rather than to think a writer had to employ exotic topics and settings. With subtlety and humour, her speeches defended her books against disparagement by the new critical norms of Modernism, which held that regional novels like hers showed only “idyllic life,” not real-life hardships.
Maud was caught in the difficult position of being damned if she did and damned if she didn’t—she had an audience that expected a certain type of fiction from her, and if she put in any explicit “modern” material describing such things as girls’ sexual fantasies, she would be pilloried and her books banned. Yet when she wrote the light, humorous fiction expected by her publisher and audience, the critics like A. L. Phelps condemned her as “ignorant of life.” When she introduced a pitiful, dying, unmarried mother into one book (The Blue Castle), some libraries banned it and she lost sales. Yet when writers like Morley Callaghan wrote about the underbelly of civilization, and got banned for salacious subject matter, Deacon talked this up in the papers, and it translated into publicity (and presumably increased sales). Maud’s speeches began to show her preoccupation and frustration with the prevailing critical attitudes.17
Mistress Pat was released in August 1935 (and Anne of Windy Poplars was underway), and Maud kept up a rigorous schedule of speeches throughout the autumn. The Globe announced on September 24 that she would speak at the annual banquet of the Progressive Business Girls’ Club. Two days later, she attended a tea given by Lady Willison (Marjory MacMurchy). In October 1935, she spoke to a capacity audience at the Royal York Hotel for the opening meeting of the English-Speaking Union. At least three newspapers—The Mail and Empire, the Globe, and the Telegram—described this talk in some detail. She began with a light account of how Anne of Green Gables was written (“I did not create Anne—she just popped into my mind with her red hair and the ‘e’ at the end of her name …”), and described how it was written on a typewriter which wouldn’t print “m” at all and had a crooked “y.” Then she described how it was sent to several publishers and was returned each time. She made the point that while writing came easily to her, getting published required persistence—good writing was not always immediately recognized. Her speech also included sketches of Island life, “proving that it is not necessary for the author to seek big cities for material or for ‘something to happen.’ ”18(This was a gentle attack on the critics’ implicit claims that modern literature should depict a broad canvas of cultural dislocation and loss, treating “universal” themes in “cosmopolitan” localities.) She stuck to her belief that her “local” subject matter was universally relevant.
Maud told her audiences about listening as a child to all the old stories and local folklore. She advised people to write down sketches of their early years, and the stories they had heard from their parents and grandparents, even if they were without literary ability themselves. She insisted that these stories should be preserved to “give colour to our native Canadian history and literature.” She tried hard to defend the “regional” and “provincial”—those qualities that modern critics now saw as old-fashioned in a fragmented and increasingly “cosmopolitan” world.
Maud’s speaking was always full of humour, but it was also designed to set certain views forth. After the Progressive Business Girls’ Club banquet in October, four Toronto newspapers covered her talk: the Globe, The Mail and Empire, the Telegram, and The Toronto Star.19 (Deacon’s account was the shortest.) In this era when young women worked only until they could “catch a man,” Maud took the contrary position that young businesswomen should not “marry as long as they could help it,” but added that “when the right man came along they couldn’t help it.”20 She linked this to “writing,” saying that you should not try to write unless you couldn’t help doing so, for it was a hard way to earn a living. On the current trend in fiction, she told them that “beauty and happiness were ‘just as real’ as the sordid side of life which was so often stressed in the ‘modern insistence on realism.’ ”21
On October 28, she spoke at the Humbercrest United Church. The following day she attended another formal tea given by her neighbour, Mrs. Cowan. A week later, Maud spoke in Owen Sound to the local Business and Professional Women’s Club. Although this club had only fifty members, another hundred women appeared to hear her, driving in from locations as far away as Guelph, nearly one hundred miles away. It was a capacity audience. Again, she encouraged her audience to write down their youthful memories because the old ways were passing away. Her speech was shaped to recast “nostalgia” as valuable social history.
The Owen Sound Daily Times gave a full account of her talk, which followed a fairly standard format of personal and general, varied only in particulars. She began with an “intimate picture of the little island of ‘ruby, emerald and sapphire.’ It is a land, she said, where there are still old maids and grandmothers, where a family is still proud to claim a minister in its number, a land where the Ten Commandments are still considered reasonably up-to-date.” Then she told of clan life on the Island and the result: her father had “157 first cousins, all living on the island at one time within a radius of a few miles.” Next came the tale of the three Montgomery brothers emigrating to Canada, and the life of the pioneer women like her great aunt “who had 17 children without medical attention and in one day five of those children died and were buried.” She sketched her own career, particularly her earliest writing—“biographies of her cats”—and her early reading, declaring the Bible the most important of books she had access to, and a valuable literary guide to any would-be writer. She told about the shortage of paper and her youthful debt to government bills and to “Dr. Pearce’s little yellow note-books,” which advertised his various remedies. She said that the best reward for being a writer was the pleasure of the actual writing. She amused her listeners with accounts of her fan mail, which, she made very clear, came from all over the world. She concluded by reading three of her poems about ordinary life.22
According to newspaper accounts, Maud mesmerized her audiences, and the newspaper reporters strained for the language to describe her. She “skillfully [blended] homely touches and the heroic.” For this speech, she wore her floor-length gown (the purple cut-velvet gown) and she was “a lovely figure, poised, serene, yet engagingly animated, as she stood in the place of honour and her fresh, sweet voice unfolded tales of the romance and unique beauty of her beloved native island …”23 Maud never used notes when she spoke, and she always kept people laughing.
On November 12, Maud addressed the Mission Circles and Auxiliaries and the Canadian Girls in Training of the United Church at Goderich. Once again, she told of her childhood, and of her determination to become a professional writer. Then she leaped into the critical fray: “To read some books today, one would think there were no good people in the world. I never cater to the prevailing taste for these books. I believe there is a place for sex books, but only a genius should write them.” She may have had Morley Callaghan in mind, for she did not think him a genius, no matter how much Deacon and the “old-boy network” praised him. But of course she did not mention names.24Soon after, Maud spoke in Sudbury at the Women’s Canadian Club annual banquet, addressing some 120 people, the largest audience ever gathered by the club, according to the local paper. She warned people that a writer’s life was not an easy one. Then she added her oft-cited line that “perseverance, patience, and postage stamps” are necessary for a writer—rejection slips were many and often. She said that Anne of Green Gables had been rejected five times, and accepted the sixth.
At this event, her readings from her “mailbag” were chosen to make a very specific set of points in areas where she felt her reputation was under attack.
First, she cited a letter from a young man, a divinity student, who wrote her that she proved one “could write novels and still be a Christian.” Maud laughed over self-righteous people in private, but she knew many in her audience would see it as a compliment, an illustration that her books were morally sound stories, not trashy, sentimental “novels.” Unsophisticated listeners would have heard the praise for the morality of her books, but more thoughtful listeners might have felt some of Maud’s own bemusement at the young man’s priggishness. Another letter she read was from a monk in Tibet thanking her for Anne of Green Gables—again, demonstrating the moral seriousness in her novels, and also that her readers were not just women and children, but important and thoughtful men.
Next, she told of a “Mohammedan girl in India” who was so inspired by her books that she persuaded her father to allow her to be educated, and she had just matriculated for study at Cambridge University. Another letter was from a Mother Superior in Australia, who wrote, “I do not need to read your books before putting them into the girls’ library.” And the last letter was from a teacher who asked the names of the wives of Henry the Eighth on a test and found this answer: “Catherine of Aragon, Jane Seymour, and Anne of Green Gables.” That always brought a laugh.
Maud knew her small town audiences well. In Sudbury, she won applause for saying: “I have no sympathy for the so-called realists who seem to think that the only things real are sex, obscurity, and filth. I have tried to write books that will bring a little happiness, a little cheer into other lives.”25 She would not have taken this swipe in Toronto, where it would have been reported in the local papers, further sealing her fate among the male critics as a reactionary and a sentimentalist. And she would never have told this rural audience that she railed in her journals about the prudish Mrs. Grundys who would not allow her to write of young girls and their love affairs as they “really were.”26
—
On November 26, 1935, the day after finishing the first draft of Anne of Windy Poplars, Maud attended a huge reception at Government House (Chorley Park) in honour of the new Governor General of Canada, Lord Tweedsmuir. Tweedsmuir was otherwise known as John Buchan, an immensely prolific and versatile writer, well known for his popular fiction. Over one thousand of Toronto’s important society people attended this function, and on November 27, 1935, the Globe published most of their names. Maud’s name was not included—a surprise, because she would normally have been near the top of any list of important Canadians. She would have read the newspaper account, and she summed the affair up crustily in her journals, saying that she found “a very moderate pleasure” in Buchan’s fiction, adding that he was a small “weazened-faced man” and “nothing to look at.” It was a far cry from her Earl Grey reception, or even the Stanley Baldwin one. Sadly for her, her years of being lionized in public were starting to pass.27
Two days later she was off to Windsor, Ontario, where she gave two addresses. Then she travelled to Leamington. There she had the startling experience of having her mind go blank ten minutes into her talk, but she recovered quickly. This was a frightening event for the woman who spoke so easily. On December 12, she gave a fifteen-minute talk on her books over a radio program in Toronto called “For You, Madame.” This talk (apparently no longer extant in the sound archives of Ontario) was part of a remarkable year of advancement for women. At the end of 1935, the Globe announced that more programs were produced for women “than ever before in the history of radio,” noting that “at one time these offerings always opened with a cup of flour and ended with a spool of thread,” but “now they include national and international affairs, music, literature, science and education.”28 Maud was proud of the fact that her novels had an empowering effect on female readers, even though she herself was not a public crusader. She encouraged change quietly through the subtle force of the pen.29
For Christmas in 1935, Maud put up a small tree. She remained determined and hopeful about her new life. The Macdonald family had a dinner together, a set of nicely wrapped presents, and a warm fire in their fireplace. Ewan was a little melancholy, but not out of touch with reality. Maud spoke of her “tired and anxious heart,” but wrote in her journal that things could have been “much worse.” After Christmas, she had a small fall and sprained her wrist (while hanging up her O.B.E.), but it was more demoralizing than damaging. At least there had been no real disasters following their move; life was markedly better than it had been the previous Christmas at Norval, when a miasma of misery had settled over the entire house of Macdonald. In many ways she felt optimistic, but she could not ignore ominous rumblings in the distance.
At the end of November 1935, The Toronto Daily Star had carried the headline: “JEWS FORCED TO RUN IN CIRCLES TILL DEATH IN REICH.” The article stated that “almost three years after the Hitler regime came to power, the Jews of Germany are being hounded to death in a cold pogrom as horrible and cold-blooded as anything history has ever seen.” Drawing on information in the London Times, the article told of the Jews’ loss of citizenship and property, the tortures in concentration camps, and the savage ferocity of the anti-Semitic fanatics.30 Many people discounted such accounts as unbelievable. Maud’s last diary entry in 1935 ended: “I cannot and will not believe that the world will ever repeat the madness of 1914. But it is a ‘mad world, my masters,’ and no one can ever predict what madmen will do.” A student of history and a victim of circumstance, Maud knew far too much about “madness”—both personal and collective—to look to the future without justified fear.
Maud was now using a young and able literary agent in New York City named Ann Elmo. Having sold her book rights to Page in 1919, Maud received no royalties for the new 1934 talking movie of Anne of Green Gables. However, the enterprising Miss Elmo suggested resuscitating Anne as a heroine for another novel, to piggyback on the popularity of the movie. Maud found a segment of Anne’s earlier life that was not yet covered, and this became Anne of Windy Poplars. Propelled by the need for money, Maud wrote it in record time, between May and December 1935. In this novel, she makes creative use of her dealings with Isabel Anderson.
In Anne of Windy Poplars, while Gilbert is at medical school, Anne moves to Summerside, PEI, to become the high school principal. Here she faces many challenges. First is the organized hostility from those who had promoted another candidate for her position. Second, she must win the cooperation of a sour vice-principal, who dislikes her before meeting her. Anne has an innate sense of how to win people over and persuade them to co-operate; much of the book’s interest is in watching this happen. The rest is episodic, filled with eccentric characters in the community.
Most characters in this book have a chapter devoted to them and then disappear, but one character keeps recurring throughout the novel—the vice-principal, a young woman named Katherine Brooke. She is a strange creature, rude and remote, a puzzle to Anne. Katherine is twenty-eight, but looks as if she were thirty-five. Although she is a very capable teacher, she is sour, sarcastic, and unpopular. She boards in a “gloomy house” and dresses dowdily. Her pupils live in fear of her sarcasm. She has no friends, wants none, and is described as “repellent,” a term Maud used for Isabel in her journals.
Anne confesses that she would quit trying to win her over but for her sense that, under all Katherine’s rude aloofness, she is starved for friendship. Anne feels sorry for her, even when Katherine insults her openly, telling her: “I can’t pretend things. I haven’t your notable gift for doing the queen act … saying exactly the right thing to every one.”31 She attacks Anne for having more happiness and friends than she can fully appreciate, whereas if she, Katherine, were to die, she says no one would mourn her.
Over time Katherine is softened by Anne’s friendship. Katherine admits she’s never had a friend, that she has never belonged anywhere, and that she hates teaching. She also dislikes men. She wants nothing more than to be like other people, but she is unable to. Anne helps Katherine become a happier person.
Many of the other characters in this novel also share traits with Maud and her extended family. Young Elizabeth Grayson lives with her undemonstrative great-grandmother; her mother is dead and her father has gone away for business. Elizabeth longs for happiness in her imagined “Tomorrow-land.” Prompted by Anne, Elizabeth’s father comes to claim his daughter at the end of the novel, promising they will never be separated again—the very words Maud had longed to hear from her own father. Another irascible and controlling old man, Cyrus Taylor, torments his family with his sulky silent spells, taking more than a little inspiration from Maud’s Grandfather Macneill. Then there is Hazel who keeps a journal into which she pours purple prose and silly, effusive musings, as the young Maud had done. Lugubrious Cousin Ernestine, who sees only dark forebodings and negativity like the Maud of the later journals, shares identical medical problems with Maud (like lying awake nights with a pain that shoots down to her lower limbs). Another character, the nasty old Mrs. Gibson, disabled in body but manipulative in personality, refuses to let her daughters have a life of their own. (The theme of seeking to exert excessive control over adult offspring will appear more strongly in Maud’s next book, Jane of Lantern Hill.)
The most intriguing character, next to Katherine Brooke, is Miss Minerva Tomgallon; Minerva lives in a decaying Gothic house and romanticizes her dead relatives, making much of the fact that a “curse” is on her family. Despite the fact that Maud had herself become increasingly convinced through the 1930s that there was a “curse” on her own house, she makes old Miss Tomgallon into a comic character. Anne wryly observes that she is a melodramatic old woman who seems to positively enjoy the idea of this curse. However, when a bemused and skeptical Anne asks her landlords if there really is a curse on the Tomgallon family, she is told that, yes, it is true. Is this Maud’s indirect comment on the convictions expressed in her journals? In fiction, Maud examined human faults and eccentricities, including her own, turning all into humour. But in her journals—and in her life—she treated the same issues with deadly seriousness.
During the period Maud was writing Anne of Windy Poplars, Isabel Anderson continued to harass her. In July 1935, for example, Isabel insisted that Maud could help her if she “cared.” When Isabel told Maud that she wanted to travel to Prince Edward Island with her, Maud wrote a pert “Fancy that!” in her journals. Still, in November 1935, Maud allowed Isabel to come to Riverside Drive for a weekend. Isabel surprised Maud by writing her a pleasant letter of thanks after the visit, rather than a complaint. It seemed to Maud that Isabel was finally overcoming her strange infatuation and blossoming into a normal person. In fact, unbeknownst to Maud at the time, Isabel had merely found new victims for her unwelcome attentions. These included at least two unmarried men closer to her age and one older married man. These men found her weird and off-putting, and they scrambled to evade her, nimbly and successfully.
Maud’s exasperation at Isabel Anderson has such furious bite in her journals that it is astonishing to see Isabel become the inspiration for a sympathetic character in Anne of Windy Poplars. Anne is able to convince Katherine to leave the teaching profession in search of a more enjoyable life. In Maud’s journals, Isabel Anderson is presented as a highly disturbed person, a virtual pestilence who ignores all rebuffs. A reader begins to wonder if Isabel is given so much space in the journals because she is a creepy but fascinating character who offsets the surrounding entries, which say, in effect, “Ewan was dull today.” But Katherine’s transformation during the course of the novel shows what Maud may have hoped for Isabel, and why she put up with her. Maud was able to see a tortured person underneath the hostile exterior, and she genuinely wanted to help this person find a more satisfying life. Isabel, however, did not quit teaching.
Maud dedicated Anne of Windy Poplars to “Friends of Anne everywhere”: an assertion that while her books may not have stood up to modern critics, her fans everywhere still loved them.
The year 1936 began well. Maud continued to be in much demand as a speaker. In the first week of January, she spoke twice: to the Women’s Auxiliary of the West YMCA, and to the Canadian Women’s Press Club. Both The Mail and Empire and the Telegram covered these events, announcing them beforehand and describing them afterwards (who poured tea, who sang, who did the “thanks,” who came as distinguished guests, and so on). On January 16, she spoke in the Deer Park United Church, and on the 30th, she went to Norval to meet with the Women’s Missionary Society. In February, she spoke in Peterborough, and attended a PEN luncheon. In March, she spoke to a large audience at Chalmers Presbyterian Church in Toronto about her background and also about standards in literature,32 and later that month she spoke to the Lip Reading Circle of deaf people. She recycled some of her speech material, varying the focus and incidents, but her spontaneous and witty delivery kept it fresh.
At a March meeting of the CAA the national secretary, Howard Angus Kennedy, complimented her out of the blue on her “indomitable will.” The comment cheered but puzzled Maud: it was not generally known that she had troubles at home. She was cheered by his comment, even if she was curious about what prompted it. Mr. Kennedy did know, of course, about Deacon’s attacks on her. Quite likely, he was signalling that he did not share Deacon’s pejorative view of her achievement.
On March 26, Maud spoke to the Young People’s Society of the Farmer Memorial Baptist Church in Swansea, a church she sometimes attended. (Her Baptist connections harked back to her girlhood days, when the Presbyterian young people of Cavendish would go to the Baptist church for social events.)
At the annual dinner of the CAA in May, Maud thanked the speaker, Dr. O. J. Stevenson of the Ontario Agricultural College at Guelph, a pioneer in the teaching of Canadian literature at the post-secondary level. Dr. Stevenson spoke about the modernist credo that Canadian poetry should be “more rugged, larger in theme, broader in treatment and more virile in experience.” Discussion ensued over how poorly Canadian literature and writers were said to be regarded in England and Europe, with heavyweights such as Dr. Lorne Pierce, Dr. Pelham Edgar, Dr. O. J. Stevenson, and Mr. A. H. Robson pondering the problem. (The Canadian writer whose work was best known in England and Europe, of course, was L. M. Montgomery.)
On the same day, the Telegram and the Star each announced the release of a book of poetry that typified the kind of sentimental and un-virile poetry that O. J. Stevenson had disparaged in his speech. The Star panned the book. Titled Up Came the Moon, by Jessie Findlay Brown, it bore a one-page “Foreword” by L. M. Montgomery. Maud’s foreword is courteous (and very tepid), but she must have squirmed over the timing of its appearance in the context of Stevenson’s lecture attacking this kind of sentimental poetry.33 On May 26, Maud attended the annual Canadian Women’s Press Club dinner. Maud liked the CWPC meetings much better than the CAA; the membership was limited to true professionals who were working or published writers, and women controlled the agenda, giving it a different atmosphere.
In Maud’s speeches, she often mentioned promising new authors, and she wrote endorsements for Mr. McClelland to use in advertising his new writers.34 One of her strongest early endorsements had been for Frederick Philip Grove a decade earlier; this evolves into a comic scene in her Emily trilogy, which parodies the critical discourses of the 1920–30 period. When his Over Prairie Trails had first been published back in 1922, Maud had praised it enthusiastically in her speeches. After that, she wrote Grove a letter encouraging him to write more about western Canada, telling him he had it in him to write “the great Canadian novel.” Grove and his wife laboriously unscrambled Maud’s handwriting, deciphering words and writing them above her scrawl. Grove took her advice to heart and spent the next summer writing what turned out to be Settlers in the Marsh. Maud continued to think highly of Grove’s writing ability. Maud appears to have met Grove sometime in the mid-1920s, perhaps at a CAA or other literary function. Her reaction to the man himself was decidedly less enthusiastic than her regard for his writing. She liked people with a sense of humour, and he took himself very seriously. She also disliked his growing penchant for “tragic endings.”
In 1927, Maud had published a spoof on the idea of tragic endings in Chapter 17 of Emily’s Quest: Emily drops into a Charlottetown newspaper office at the moment the editor cannot find the last section of a lugubrious potboiler that he is serializing to boost summer circulation. The paper has to go to press imminently, so she sits down and quickly composes a happy ending for it. Soon after, the book’s enraged author—a pompous, self-admiring fool named Mark Delage Greaves—arrives at her home in a huff and rails against her for having “murdered” his novel.35 But he takes one look at Emily and falls madly in love with her. Calling her a “lyrical creature,” he tells her that if she will marry him he will teach her to write proper tragic endings. The only “artistic” way to end a book is, he opines, with “sorrowful” endings. The scene is pure slapstick comedy, and it shows Maud’s impatience with Modernist critics who made “tragic endings” such an important part of critical discourse on what constituted a “great novel.”36
Maud continued to write Grove congratulatory letters on his new novels, until he went too far in her view with his tragic endings. In 1928, his novel Our Daily Bread concluded rather like Shakespeare’s King Lear. Maud wrote Grove, tactfully asking if such unmitigated disaster was not a bit extreme. Surely at least one of the ill-fated hero’s children would have come to a better end, she said. We do not know if he answered.
However, in 1929, Grove gathered some of his essays into a book called It Needs to Be Said. In it, he writes of his scorn for a best-selling female writer he has met because she writes “happy endings.” He attributes this woman’s best-seller status to the fact that her books pander to the uncritical masses. Maud never mentions reading this essay by Grove; however, she may have, since she had written Grove congratulatory letters about his other books. There is no known further correspondence between them following the publication of this book of his essays.37
Maud continued to be annoyed by the Modernist focus on cultural dislocation and misery. However, from the 1930s onward, she made a conscious effort—seen in the “Pat of Silver Bush” novels, and also in her three final novels—to bring some misery and troubled characters into her fiction. These unpleasant elements were always temporary and felt at a narrative distance. Her readers expected happy endings, and these continued.
Through 1936, Maud continued to adjust her sails to an unpredictable market, while still pleasing her regular readers, not to mention attempting to maintain the family’s lifestyle. She wrote several magazine contributions, including a piece on Mammoth Cave for a Maritime magazine, named The Busy East, and a nostalgic article about change based on her reflections on the diary of the old Cavendish farmer Charles Macneill (father of her special childhood friends Pensie and Alec Macneill). She finished typing up Anne of Windy Poplars, and she wrote Charles Gordonsmith, editor of the Family Herald and Weekly Star in Montreal, that he could start serializing the “Anne” stories linked to Anne of Windy Poplars on May 1, as the book itself would come out in August.
But she could not afford to let the dust settle. In April she started planning her next novel, Jane of Lantern Hill, and by mid-August was deep in composition. In a journal entry for September 2, she describes herself as writing as much as five hours per day in an attempt to finish it.
Jane was not the only fiction Maud was writing. Her New York agent, Ann Elmo, had persuaded her to re-enter the market for short stories, recirculating old ones in light of the great demand for cheerful, upbeat “Shirley Temple”-style material, and writing new, sharper-edged stories for an altered time and market. Their 1936 correspondence reveals much activity. Elmo reported that the editor of Cosmopolitan liked a story, “Here Comes the Bride,” but found the opening confusing. Elmo thanked Maud for another story and hoped to have news soon on yet another story named “The Pot and the Kettle.” Maud’s attempt to squeeze back into the short fiction market was impressive: on May 29, Elmo reported that she had sold a story called “The Use of Her Legs” to the Canadian Home Journal, which would pay $100 for first Canadian rights.
But the literary market demanded a “new” kind of writing which was not Maud’s métier. Elmo informed Maud that “The Use of Her Legs” had made the rounds of American journals without success; moreover, while the American editor of The Country Gentleman liked “The Pot and the Kettle,” he thought it not “robust enough.” Maud had experienced plenty of rejections at the beginning of her career, but few after she became famous. This rebuff was a blow, again underlining the change in literary styles, even in popular magazines. On July 28, Elmo returned “Penelope Struts Her Theories” and “Retribution” with bland hopes they “would find a home” soon.38
But there was some success. The editor of Good Housekeeping asked Elmo to find more stories like “I Know a Secret,” a tale of degraded characters and a thoroughly evil child built on the theme of the terrible damage that can be done to children’s lives by gossip. This was a topic that Maud had found congenial after her sons’ adolescence and her own experiences as mistress of the manse.
Miss Elmo wrote Maud that she hoped a movie company would pick up Anne of Windy Poplars, but the market was becoming increasingly unpredictable. On August 8, Elmo wrote that she had been unable to sell radio dramatization rights for Anne of Windy Poplars because Stokes, the American publisher, had offended the radio agent—not a likely excuse if the agent had really wanted the book, and Maud knew this. She had included several maladjusted characters in the book, but apparently that was not enough to suit the temper of the times.
Fortunately, her longer fiction continued to sell to devoted readers. On August 10, her American publisher, Stokes, sent Maud a royalty of $820.40 for the “sales up to today … less the US tax of 10%” for Anne of Windy Poplars. Maud had signed this contract with Stokes several months earlier, on February 11, so the book’s initial sales were reassuring.
Money still being a big concern, when she answered fan letters, she started asking her fans to write RKO in Hollywood saying that they wanted to see more of her books on the screen. Though she received no royalties of any kind from the earlier Anne books, she did have the copyright to Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), the first book published by McClelland and Stewart (and Stokes) after she parted company with Page. Once Anne of Windy Poplars was released in late summer 1936, she urged fans to write asking that it be made into a movie, too.
Maud had long chafed at how royalty money had bypassed her completely following the sale of film rights to Anne of Green Gables in 1919. Nor did she get any money from the 1934 remake, which she had seen several times in Toronto. She wrote to a correspondent that Anne (played by an actress named Dawn O’Day, who subsequently took the name “Anne Shirley” in her real life) was “good,” Diana a “washout,” Gilbert only “fair,” and Matthew “excellent.” She said Marilla (played by Helen Westley) was much more like her idea of Mrs. Lynde than the slim, stern Marilla of the book. But Maud positively hated the tacked-on “happy ending” of romance.39 Her own ending had focused not on Anne’s finding a man to marry, but on the more ambiguous image of the “bend in the road.” It pointed a way to interesting ventures in the future, not necessarily to marriage.