In November 1907, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote to a friend that biography is a “screaming farce.” She added that the best biographies give only two-dimensional portraits, but every person has a half dozen “different sides.”1 In 2008, one hundred years after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, we know much more about the many sides of “Maud,” as she liked to be called. And in fact many now feel that Maud’s greatest literary creation was her own tortured self-portrait, now published in her private journals more than fifty years after her death. But the truth may be even more complicated than that.
Maud’s life feels at times like a smoke-and-mirrors game. By 1920, when her name was famous all over the English-speaking world, Maud began preparing material for those who would later interpret her life. She compiled scrapbooks, account books, review-clipping books, and a multitude of other memorabilia. Although she was (in her son’s words) a “packrat” by nature, this material was also intended as a cache of information for those who would later become her biographers. She carefully recopied her journals, starting in 1919, making an edited, permanent copy. She saw her journals as her greatest gift to future biographers: they presented her life as she wanted it remembered.
When Elizabeth Waterston and I began editing the L. M. Montgomery journals in the 1980s, we took them at face value. Later we came to question elements in these fascinating life-documents. They did not hold the truth, we felt, so much as a truth. These journals, frank in so many ways, and so rich as social history, began to seem to us a cache of concealments, displacements, contradictions, and omissions. Initially, they seemed such a boon, but eventually they became another layer to excavate through. This biography will track some of my own processes, as well as my conclusions. In the nearly three decades that she has been the object of my part-time research I have never grown bored with Maud. She is truly a biographer’s dream subject: you never feel that you have found the master key that fully unlocks all the rooms in her house.
In 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery burst onto the literary scene with her first novel, Anne of Green Gables. At age thirty-three, she had already published scores of short stories and poems, but this best-selling novel achieved instant acclaim, with seven impressions printed in its first year alone. It churned up so much attention that her home province, Prince Edward Island, soon had a flood of visitors, all wanting to see the landscapes she painted so vividly. Her publisher demanded sequels, and she obliged, eventually making her beloved Island a site for tourists from all over the world. Her books appeared to be “simple little tales” (to echo her own modest phrasing in a journal entry dated October 15, 1908), but that was misleading: the last quarter century of scholarly research has shown that her writing has been, in fact, a very powerful agent of social change.
Anne of Green Gables was not written as a novel for children. It was aimed at a general audience of adults and children, men and women, sophisticates and simple readers, as were many of her other books. It appealed to famous statesmen as much as to ordinary people. In 1908, the celebrated author Mark Twain wrote Maud to praise “Anne” as “the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.” In 1910, Earl Grey, one of Canada’s most beloved Governors General and an esteemed writer himself, travelled to Prince Edward Island just to meet her. In 1923, she was the first Canadian woman to be elected as a member of the British Royal Society of Arts.
By 1925, translations into other languages were expanding her readership in Sweden, Holland, Poland, Denmark, Norway, Finland, Australia, and France. Two prime ministers of Great Britain expressed admiration for her books: Stanley Baldwin made a point of meeting her during his 1927 tour of Canada; his successor, Ramsay MacDonald, is reported to have said that he read all of her books that he could find—not just once, but several times.
At home in Ontario, where she moved in 1911 following her marriage to Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald, Maud was in constant demand as a storyteller and speaker. She was also active in organizations associated with the Canadian cultural scene, particularly the Canadian Authors Association. In 1928, a rapturous audience of two thousand gave her a standing ovation at the annual Canadian Book Week in Toronto, Ontario. In 1935, she was elected to the Literary and Artistic Institute of France for her contributions to literature. In the same year, she was made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE) in Canada. In 1937, the Montreal Family Herald and Star reported from a survey that she and Charles Dickens were the “most read” authors in Canada. Also in 1937, the Prince Edward Island National Park was established to preserve the landscapes her books had made so famous. Her status as an international celebrity seemed secure.
By the time of her death in 1942, she had published over twenty books, and more than five hundred short stories and five hundred poems, all while raising a family, living a busy life as the wife of a country minister, and completing ten volumes of secret journals. Her books were read all over the English-speaking world, and were translated into many more languages. No other Canadian writer had reached such a pinnacle of success on so many fronts: she was truly an international celebrity.
But a reversal of her literary reputation had been slowly occurring. For the first decade after Anne of Green Gables was published, critics praised Maud’s books. However, as Modernism set in, with its grim focus on the breakdown of social norms, critics dimmed their view of her cheerful books, with their witty treatment of human behaviour and their celebration of the imagination and nature. Instead, the professional critics started faulting her novels for their splashes of purple prose and their “sentimentalism,” ignoring the darker soundings that haunted her stories before the reader got to the “happy endings.”
In the mid-1920s, the growing cadre of men who panned her books included influential newsmen, university professors, and writers in Canada, and they all knew each other. In 1926, one of Canada’s powerful newspaper critics led the attack, labelling her books the nadir of Canadian fiction. A much respected professor of literature termed her books “naïve” with an “innocence” that suggested “ignorance of life.” A grudging evaluation was made by another male novelist, who wrote: “… not that those books may not have their readers who profit from them: I have found that out. But how a woman who judges so accurately can stand writing that stuff …” In the face of such attacks, even the critics who had previously lauded her writing started being careful to temper their praise.
Nevertheless, all these men were impressed (and annoyed) by her sales success. While some allowed that her large readership might speak to some undefined cultural need, others felt that her popularity merely proved her “lowbrow” quality. These detractors spoke with such a powerful voice in Canada between the mid-1920s and her death in 1942 that her work fell into disfavour. Librarians heeded what the influential critics said, and some libraries even shunned her books. In 1967, the don of Canadian librarians, Sheila Egoff, wrote a groundbreaking study of Canadian children’s literature that gave definition to the field. She repeated the view of the earlier critics, and attacked Maud for “sentimental dishonesty.” By the 1970s the general wisdom was that Montgomery was a sentimental writer who appealed to the uncultured and masses of undiscriminating women and children, and still in the 1980s, expressing an admiration for Maud’s books was rather risky. She was relegated strictly to the category of “children’s writer,” and was judged by her weakest books, not by her best.
My thinking for this biography began in summer 1974. At that time, I was a young academic attending an international children’s literature conference in Toronto, which brought together librarians, academics, and writers from North America and the United Kingdom. I was surprised to hear several Canadians there refer to Maud’s writing in terms that depicted it as a national embarrassment. That, I learned, was the legacy of the critics of the previous fifty years: their view was entrenched.
This puzzled me. I had come from the United States and a background in American literature. I taught Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn at the University of Guelph. In my view, Anne of Green Gables held up very well in comparison. The main difference was that Huck, a boy, could challenge conventions, but Anne, a girl, had to conform to them. Otherwise, there were many interesting similarities between the two books. Each author had a wonderfully comic way with satire, and each book—though telling a simple, episodic story—had a great deal of depth.
I soon discovered that one of my senior colleagues, Elizabeth Waterston, believed that Maud was undervalued, too. In 1967—Canada’s centennial year and the year Sheila Egoff’s book was published—Elizabeth had written the first substantial scholarly article taking Maud’s books seriously. Soon after, she had been quietly advised by a distinguished university colleague not to waste any more time writing about Maud if she wished to advance up the academic ladder. He meant the advice in a kindly way, fearing that her critical talents would be squandered on an unworthy subject—at least in the eyes of the English Department’s Promotion and Tenure Committee.
By 1974, Elizabeth had moved on, and had become Chair of the Department of English at the University of Guelph. In 1975, a group of us in the department decided to start the journal CCL: Canadian Children’s Literature. (We had already started a course in “Children’s Literature,” a new academic field then.) Maud became the focus of our third issue, with Elizabeth’s 1967 piece reprinted as the lead article. We were scrabbling for material in a new field, and I set about writing a comparison of Huckleberry Finn and Anne. Writing this article intensified my interest in Maud. I didn’t like the sequels as much as I liked Anne of Green Gables, but there was something magnetic about her writing.
This ultimately led to a long journey into literary archaeology. In the late 1970s I met Maud’s son, Dr. E. Stuart Macdonald (who, as our friendship developed, I came to call “Stuart”), after sending him a complimentary copy of our special issue. By this time, I had formed an image of the personality I believed to be behind Maud’s books: she had a wonderful sense of humour and she looked at humankind with a bemused, tolerant smile. I thought she must have been the ideal mother, and said so early in my first meeting with her son. That ill-advised remark clearly hit a nerve, and I will never forget Dr. Macdonald’s slow, appraising look, first at me and then into me and finally through me. A succinct (and more measured) version of his response to me is found in a letter he once wrote to a Swedish woman:
… although in her writings, [my mother] … gave the impression of broad tolerance of human weaknesses, she did not condone any such elasticity in herself or her family.… She was extremely sensitive, although an excellent dissembler, and though she experienced great peaks, she also fell to great depths emotionally, which does not make for tranquillity. This rigidity and sensitivity, prevented any easy camaraderie in the family, but she was capable of inspiring deep affection in us all.2
By the end of the interview, I was rather intimidated by Maud’s son, a busy and respected medical doctor who knew how to speak his mind forcefully when journalists and academics intruded on his time. But my curiosity about his mother’s personality was piqued to the extreme. Where did those funny, happy novels come from?
Dr. Macdonald died suddenly of an aneurysm in 1982, and Elizabeth Waterston and I began the long process of editing Maud’s journals together. Maud had willed them to Dr. Macdonald with the instruction that he should publish them eventually. I expected them to answer my evolving fascination with Maud’s hold on people—including me. A friend working on a Ph.D. told me her theory: “I reread Montgomery to wash the academic sludge out of my mind.” Other’s comments confirmed that reading Maud’s books seemed to make people feel happy, refreshed, and part of a special community. I mused over the possibility of measuring happiness through people’s neural responses while reading different writers, and I fancied the fun in matching Maud against a Faulkner or a Joyce.
As Elizabeth and I went through the journals together, editing them, we puzzled over the astonishing disjunction between the bright, happy novels and the dark, often painful life. How could one personality produce such different documents simultaneously—writing cheerful novels in the morning and tortured journals in the evening, so to speak? Maud was quite aware of her own bifurcated life. As a minister’s wife with a very judgmental nature, she developed a carefully controlled public persona and revealed little of her inner thoughts. Her journals were clearly a safety valve for a highly volatile woman. What was this complex woman really like?
Once, when a journalist came to interview her, she wrote that she was keeping her inner life private and hidden: “Well, I’ll give him the bare facts he wants. He will not know any more about the real me or my real life for it all.… The only key to that is found in this old journal.”3 But as Elizabeth and I worked closely with the journals, those “tell-all” documents, we discovered they did not reveal everything.
Dr. Macdonald had asked me to write a biography of his mother based on her journals shortly before he died. I argued that the proper order was to publish the journals first, and then write a biography, after more research. Elizabeth and I wrote a short biography called Writing a Life: L. M. Montgomery in 1995, and it is now available on the Internet (www.lmmrc.ca). Dr. Macdonald told me that if I did write his mother’s biography, he wanted it to be as truthful as possible for several reasons: first, because she herself hated prettied-up biographies that made no attempt to get behind the real truths in lives; second, because her achievements would be more remarkable if people knew the conditions under which she wrote; and finally, because there would be things people could learn from her life that might prevent them from making the same mistakes. His mother had left him written instructions that he was to publish all of her journals intact, eventually, but there is much in this biography that is not in her journals and that he himself did not know.
This longer biography represents my attempt to answer more questions. By the time of Dr. Macdonald’s death, I had seen the depth of his loyalty to his mother, alongside some unresolved feelings, including anger. What was the quality that made those who knew his mother so loyal to her memory, including all of the family’s housemaids? (I had started locating them in the late 1970s, and talked to them and other acquaintances before people’s memories were tainted by the publication of the journals.) How could one explain the contradictions in Maud’s character? Where in this complicated woman did her books actually originate? What gave her books their staying power as best-sellers? (Their sales were not inflated by being required novels on courses.) And, most puzzling of all, what was the basis of their appeal to readers of diverse cultural backgrounds, in different generations, with varied experiences and temperaments and educational backgrounds, all over the world?
In 1984, I travelled to Denmark and Poland with Elizabeth Waterston and Ruth Macdonald, Dr. Stuart Macdonald’s widow. We saw a command performance of a Polish musical based on The Blue Castle in Krakow, and a drama based on Anne of Green Gables in Warsaw. When the audiences found out that we were from Canada, and represented their beloved “L. M. Montgomery,” we were mobbed in both theatres by autograph-seekers. The passion in Poland was astonishing. In 1992, my younger daughter and I retraced Maud’s 1911 honeymoon path in Scotland and England. Staying in bed-and-breakfasts, we met only one hostess on the entire trip who did not know of Maud’s books. As my contacts with other countries outside North America developed (Germany, Israel, China, Japan, Russia, Norway, Sweden, Spain, India) through the Internet, I was staggered by her worldwide appeal.
It particularly surprised me when people said that they reread their favourite Montgomery novel(s) every year. (After all, there are many other good books in the world, and our lives are finite!) As I dug deeper, and met other scholars, I began to see that Maud’s books actually changed people’s lives. Where did these books get that power?
Editing the journals helped reveal where her novels came from, at least in part. All the stories that Maud told were essentially variations on her own personal narrative—those of young girls and women trying to find a home and a life where there is love, approval, and respect. From the orphaned Anne (who wants to be adopted into a home where she will be loved and valued), through Emily of New Moon (an orphan who likewise wants love and acceptance but who also wants a writing career), to Valancy Stirling of The Blue Castle (who wants to escape a cruel mother and find love in marriage), Maud’s heroines begin life without the comforting kindness of a protective mother. This might explain the interest of girls and women in her books, but it hardly explains their appeal to famous statesmen in England.
The more we worked with the journals, the more obvious became the shaping and pruning. We found almost no outright factual falsehoods in her journals, but there were evasions and omissions. It was as if Maud had become an actor in the drama of her own life, a movie that she was writing, directing, acting, editing, and reviewing. As we edited the last three volumes (published in 1992, 1998, and 2004) we recognized the extent to which Maud was constantly rereading, revisioning, and reshaping her own life document—no real surprise since she recopied all her journals, beginning in 1919.
More puzzles emerged. How far could one trust the journals, which were designed as a creative work on their own? What was the emerging narrative trajectory that shaped her life story as she wrote it over a period of fifty-five years? Did the narrative trajectory affect the way she interpreted her life—and, even more interesting, did that trajectory itself affect the choices that she made in her life? And what about the gaps? What segments of her “film” were cut and discarded?
After the publication of Maud’s journals began in 1985, revealing, to almost everyone’s surprise, that she was often a tormented woman in her private life, arbiters of literary taste started giving her a second look. Other developments fuelled this re-evaluation: the birth of feminism, new attention to popular culture and the oral tradition, new theories about language, subjectivity, and literary value. It was a turbulent period in the academy, producing an explosion of new scholarship that challenged the old, and Maud was one of its many beneficiaries—and not just in North America. Articles and doctoral theses about her from abroad began spilling into the critical void. Judging by the more recent Internet blogs and websites devoted to her, she has certainly regained her place in the literary firmament. She is now widely acknowledged to have been an extremely important cultural influence.
This biography, then, is not a mere retelling of Maud’s own compelling account of her life. It is based on my own research and analysis conducted over several decades during a busy career in academia and raising a family. I have examined old newspapers, magazines, and archival records, trying to absorb the ambiance of her time. I have tried to verify the stories in her journals, given that she had always intended them for eventual publication. It is self-evident that anyone as concerned with her legacy as Maud was would present herself as she wanted to be remembered, only giving away intimate (or damaging) revelations when it suited her. Having her eye on the future reader certainly worked against full disclosure, and she herself admits there are certain things she cannot commit to her journals. Some of those blanks are filled in here.
My research took me into many areas ancillary to literature—the Scottish-Anglo heritage from which Maud emerged, the educational practice in Prince Edward Island, the publishing industry in the nineteenth and early-twentieth centuries, the history of religion and science, the development of the professions, major historical events such as World War I, the spread of communication networks, the legal profession (which touched her life in so many ways), the practice of medicine, psychiatry, and pharmacology in the first half of the past century, and the history of the book trade, including the influence of her books in other countries. I try to set her life in those contexts.
When I first began this project in the early 1980s, personal computers had not come into use, search engines were unheard of, and the potentials of the digital world were only a gleam in the eye of twenty-five-year-old Bill Gates and others. The development of e-mail has greatly increased my contact with scholars and readers in countries around the world. The L. M. Montgomery Collection at the University of Guelph has become its most consulted archival resource, attracting scholars from many foreign countries. Every contact has enriched my understanding of Maud’s reach and impact, which truly circles the globe.
The story of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life begins—in its most elemental form—with the birth of a little girl, Lucy Maud, on Prince Edward Island in 1874. It moves through time until she becomes a best-selling author at age thirty-six, then marries, and lives the rest of her life in Ontario, as a committed author and public-spirited citizen. But her life is much more than her “lived” life.
Her “story” extends into the impact of her books. In a twentieth-century society still dominated by patriarchy, she was one of the many forces convincing young women that they could have careers in many different professional fields (such as medicine and law), opening new vistas for them.
In the same way, her influence extended to young women who aspired to become authors. They saw that it was possible for a woman writer to work with the community she knew, rather than tackling the sweep of great world events. After all, what goes on in the human heart rules both the domestic and the larger political world. These young writers saw that stories about plain people in small communities could catch a wide audience. It might also be said that Maud was an early pioneer in the technique of “branding” a named but imaginary fictional community. From Maud’s “Avonlea” in Prince Edward Island, Margaret Laurence could move to “Manawaka” on the Canadian prairies, Alice Munro to “Jubilee” in south-western Ontario, and Margaret Atwood could depict new fictional neighbourhoods within Toronto. The creation of named fictional communities continued with Canadian male authors, with Stephen Leacock’s “Mariposa” in Sunshine Sketches of a Little Town (1912), and with Robertson Davies in his “Deptford” novels in the 1970s. Around the world, many other women writers would claim Maud as their favourite childhood writer—and sometimes as their model, as in the case of Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of the “Pippi Longstocking” tales. Maud’s characters may have been ordinary people, but she moved into people’s inner emotions and dealt in miniature with events occurring on a much larger scale in the world outside. Her magic chariot was “the story.”
The tale of her impact continues. Her creativity has spread from the book realm to other media. Anne of Green Gables was first made into a silent film in 1919 and then into a “talkie” in 1934. Anne of Windy Poplars became a film in 1940, and there have been many other interpretations of the Anne story since: in musicals, plays, television, movies, videos, comics, and animated films. An immensely successful musical based on Anne of Green Gables was developed in 1965 and is performed each year in the Charlottetown Festival. Theatrical versions are regularly staged by schools across North America, and Anne’s life has been extended into “prequels” in book and film. Her Emily of New Moon series—the books that budding writers love—have recently been made into an animated television series by a Japanese studio, following the earlier Anne of Green Gables. The economic impact of her books is beyond measure.
Maud’s own personal story took on a completely new life with the publication of her secret journals long after her death. Covering the period between 1889 and 1942, The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery were published in five volumes between 1985 and 2004, establishing her as one of the most readable female diarists of the twentieth century. These journals reveal a woman much engaged in the intellectual world she found herself in, even when she was living in rural outposts before television and radio. Her reading was prodigious and omnivorous—not only fiction, but also history, biography, science, psychology, medicine, anything that might explain the evolving world to her. She had been catapulted from a bucolic, rural childhood into a turbulence heading towards two world wars. She wrote in November 1901 that the story of “human genius” was seen in “its colossal mechanical contrivances. Two or three thousand years ago men wrote immortal poems. Today they create marvellous inventions and bend the erstwhile undreamed of forces of nature to their will.”
Maud’s own life story carries us through the social and economic history of the twentieth-century world. We witness the new arsenal of medications developed to alleviate human disease and misery, the development of railroads, automobiles, airplanes, the telegraph, the telephone, the radio, silent and then talkie movies, electric refrigerators, washing machines, and many other marvels of science and technology, especially those pertaining to modern warfare. In February 1932, she calls this new warfare “a hideous revel of mechanical massacre.”
In 1942, Maud exited from her own stage play (and life). About that sad event, we can only reflect that “the manner of a death is hardly the measure of a life.” As the distinguished Canadian novelist Robertson Davies said at the time of her passing: “Nations grow in the eyes of the world less by the work of their statesmen than their artists. Thousands of people all over the globe are hazy about the exact nature of Canada’s government and our relation to the British Empire, but they have clear recollections of Anne of Green Gables.”4 The impact of Maud’s writing will continue in the twenty-first century—her heroines will continue to charm us, but as we come to know her better as a woman, her own story also will haunt our imaginations.