With her genius for choosing effective titles, L.M. Montgomery called the novel that caught the essence of her life in Leaskdale Rainbow Valley. The two words in the title have biblical connotations. They recall the rainbow of hope that God sent to the world after the flood, as well as the valley of the shadow of death that psalmist David had to walk through. Later poets have reused these natural symbols of high moments of joy and low moments of sorrow: William Wordsworth cries, “My heart leaps up when I behold / The rainbow in the sky!” while folksingers moan, “Down in the valley, the valley so low / Hang your head over, hear the wind blow.”
In 1917–18, as Montgomery worked in the Leaskdale manse composing her new novel, her mind and heart and imagination swung between valleys of depression and rainbow-coloured affirmations. She exposed this alternation directly in her journal: on 20 April 1918 she wrote, “This has been a hellish week of ups-and-downs.”1 At the same time, she explored it obliquely through plot and characterization in Rainbow Valley. In her journal, she focused explicitly on her husband, her children, the ongoing world war, the position of women, and the seasonal shifts in the local landscape. Through fictional symbols, the novel discloses her secret hopes and fears about all these aspects of her current life.
Rainbow Valley focuses at the outset on a Presbyterian minister. In her earlier works, Montgomery had portrayed clergymen, some of them rather ridiculous, as in The Story Girl, some of them menacing. But never had she placed a minister in a central position in one of her novels. Now, writing in Leaskdale, she could paint a subtle, ambiguous, full-length portrait of a minister – because she was married to one. She could imagine the Reverend John Meredith as a dominant figure in a church-centred village because she was living in such a setting now as the minister’s wife.
In her early years in Leaskdale, Montgomery, as Mrs Ewan Macdonald, played the traditional role of the minister’s wife. She was relatively happy in that role. Her continued success as a respected and popular author eased some of the financial difficulties of her marriage. Before his nervous breakdown in 1919, Ewan was lovable enough to let her sympathize with the isolation and loneliness of a small-town minister. She inserted family photographs from 1917 into her journals that show a smiling Ewan interacting with his sons and captioned the pictures “Three good pals” and “On the lawn one summer day.”2
1.1 Three good pals
1.2 On the lawn one summer day
In Rainbow Valley, John Meredith is treated with great sympathy as a very lonely man. Like Ewan, he is well educated; a university degree plus two years at a theological college have given him familiarity with Greek and Hebrew as well as Latin, depth of church history, and Bible interpretation – all guaranteed to separate such a learned man from the hard-working, hard-handed farmers and housewives in his spiritual care. Both the real and the fictional minister are watched warily and incessantly by their congregations. Unlike Ewan, the Reverend Mr Meredith has lost his beloved wife, but in both cases, the minister is suffering from mild depression, walking in the deep valley known in that time as “melancholia.”
For Ewan, real life provided no relief from his vale of sorrows, but in fiction, Montgomery can raise a rainbow for his sad counterpart. In the imaginary parish into which John Meredith has moved, a gentle, pretty woman will appear. They will gradually find pleasure in quiet conversations. He will fall into the habit of going to meet her at sunset by the spring in Rainbow Valley. Eventually she will marry him and become a mother for his children.
Like the eventually happy fictional minister, the children in Rainbow Valley both reveal and conceal Montgomery’s increasing concerns over her own two sons. Mr Meredith’s children have been sorely neglected. Rapt in thought about a “new book which was setting the theological world by the ears,” he has not noticed that his children are badly dressed and badly fed.3 The whimsy and warmth of child life presented in earlier novels such as Anne of Green Gables and The Story Girl give way here to a more ambivalent picture. Montgomery’s life in Leaskdale had enlarged her own vision of childhood. She now had new experiences to draw on, as minister’s wife in charge of adolescent groups, as a helpmate who had learned surprising facts about every family in Ewan’s charge, and as mother of growing boys. She writes in her journal, for example, about Chester, “a big, sturdy fellow,” but adds that “he has been a rather difficult child to manage – he is so determined and so full of ebullient energy.”4
Chester and his younger brother, Stuart, also faced special problems as children of the manse, like Jerry, Faith, Una, and Carl Meredith in Rainbow Valley. Montgomery knew that such children, like her young sons, would always be watched and also set apart from the village children already at work in the fields. For the fictional children, however, she could provide a refuge in the friendliness of the sons and daughters of Anne and Gilbert Blythe.
Yet her experience of village life also impelled her to add darker shadows to childhood life in the valley. A malicious force enters in the form of Mary Vance. Manipulative and warped by early experiences, given to lying and trouble-making, Mary plays a role somewhat like that of Josie Pye in Anne of Green Gables. Mary Vance, however, is much more complex than any Pye. Her sly gossip shadows the innocence of the Meredith children, and her spite adversely affects the lives of the young Blythes.
But there is an even darker shadow in this story of childhood, a consequence of Montgomery’s intense response to the darkness of her times. These boys and girls share a destiny of doom. Anyone reading Rainbow Valley when it first appeared in 1919 would know that the boys – Jem and Walter, Jerry and Carl – are of a generation soon to be decimated. The dedication of the book continues to remind readers of that shadow. The young men named on that first page, all victims of the First World War, had been boys in the Sunday school or adolescents in the Young People’s Association when Montgomery first assumed her role as minister’s wife in Leaskdale. Now, as she wrote Rainbow Valley, they were gone, killed in the war. A journal entry written 22 January 1917 catches the immediate sombre response to the death of one of these young men: “This morning word was ’phoned over that Goldwin Lapp had been killed at the front . . . He has been in the trenches for a year and four months and went through the Somme offensive without a scratch. Poor boy! We drove over to Lapps’ this afternoon. It was bitterly cold and the roads were dreadful. And it was a heart-breaking errand. But is not life a heart-break these days? It seems to me that the very soul of the universe must ache with anguish.”5 Because of that sense of the times, Montgomery gives to Anne’s poetic young son Walter a fey sense of impending death. She assigns to him the kind of horrifying prophetic dream of war that she herself experienced and recorded in her journal: “Last night I dreamed again. I stood on a plain in France. It was sunset and the red light streamed over the plain. I held in my arms a man whom I knew, in some inexplicable way, to be dying. He leaned against me, his back and head against my breast. I could not see his face. Then he died, slipped from my grasp, and fell to the ground.”6
Montgomery breaks up the shadow of doom in the valley, however, by offering two individual stories of the potential force of childhood. In chapter 12, Faith – faith, not piety – bursts into the church and harangues the parishioners for their hypocrisy. She throws her heresy at the shocked churchgoers, passionate in defence of honesty and love and charity and selflessness in the face of a congregation that seems lacking in all these virtues. Gentle, romantic, needy Una shows those same virtues of selflessness and charity and bravery. In chapter 34, she trudges up a steep dark hill to face a woman she has feared. For young readers, feisty Faith and courageous Una bring reassurance: a child can charge against the menacing walls of adulthood.
Montgomery’s early years of motherhood offered similar flashes of happiness. Her boys sharing their evanescent joys could lift her darkened spirits. Happy family times, such as a delightful afternoon when “not only did the minister’s son go paddling but the minister’s wife went too” – and as the accompanying photograph and other photographs from this period attest7 – revived rainbow memories of her own early years.
In this novel, however, as in all her recent work, Montgomery had already slipped away from the child-centred stories that had made her so famous. Anne of the Island (1915) features college-age young women; Anne’s House of Dreams (1917) is dominated by Anne’s early motherhood and the trauma of a miserable marriage for her friend Leslie Moore. Rainbow Valley still rings at times with the familiar Montgomery gaiety. The children’s happiness draws on the pleasures of life in Leaskdale, which the novelist genuinely enjoyed. It also revives the cheerfulness of some of Montgomery’s memories of her own early years in Cavendish, preserved in the journals she could still consult. The more recent pages of the journal, however, focused on more adult emotions. The war-torn world, even in a village like Leaskdale, posed new questions about the status and role of women in society. Montgomery notes the day that Ontario women are accorded the vote.8 This becomes the third theme of Rainbow Valley. In spite of the known appeal of a Montgomery book for child readers, the very cover of the first edition of Rainbow Valley signals this shift. It pictures a sunset moment when a slender woman goes alone down into a darkening valley.
1.3 Corn roast with Chester, Stuart, and Montgomery (1922)
1.4 Leaskdale swimming hole with Chester and Stuart (1925)
1.5 Halloween mask (1922)
1.6 Chester and Stuart at water pump
1.7 Cover for first edition of Rainbow Valley
Rainbow Valley presents several adult women, differentiated from each other in nature and experience: dreamy Anne and sensible Susan Baker; competent Miss Cornelia, accepting responsibility for raising Mary Vance, and feckless Aunt Martha, leaving the Meredith children to their own dubious devices; gentle Rosemary West, dreaming of love, and her clever, domineering sister, Ellen, mocking male power. Rosemary and Ellen, bound together in their house on the hill by an old fateful vow, present a fairy-tale duo. These pairings of unlike women reflect the duality of Montgomery’s own life. Her position in Leaskdale intensified the pull between her ambitious, creative intellect and the traditional expectation that a woman should be “the angel in the house.”
In many ways life in Leaskdale made it easier for Montgomery to satisfy the urge to write. There was no demanding grandmother, no dread of childless spinsterhood, and no mockery of the artist’s métier by a farming/fishing village and a bunch of sneering Simpsons. Maud Montgomery Macdonald had status now; the village knew she was a writer and admired her work. In larger communities, such as nearby Uxbridge, people respected her ability to continue writing while maintaining traditional domestic and pastoral roles.
It was increasingly difficult, however, for the minister’s wife to find time to write, what with Young People’s meetings and the Women’s Mission Society’s need to be led in prayer, and the little boys who did not like to see a door locked against them, and the self-absorbed husband who wandered in to explain again about his sense of sin and worthlessness. Furthermore, the war had added to the weight of traditional female roles the new demands to rally the Red Cross workers, to cope with food shortages, to comfort the bereaved.
Montgomery concocts a happy ending for at least two of her women characters. Ellen West’s chauvinistic suitor renews his courtship and is accepted on feminist terms; Rosemary West, recognizing the needs of Mr Meredith’s daughters, drifts down to Rainbow Valley to accept his offer of love and marriage.
As to her own marriage, no romantic glaze can hide Montgomery’s recognition of its base not in romantic passion but in societal security. “I was never in love with Ewan,” she writes in her journal, “never have been in love with him. But I was – have been – and am, very fond of him . . . Life has not been – can never be – what I once hoped it would be in my girlhood dreams.”9 The honest, pained recognition of the difference between “life” and “dreams” marks her enlarged vision of the duality of woman’s experience. The happy ending confirms the generally upward tone of Montgomery’s sense of women’s lives in the mid-war years. When so many men left the village to join up or to work in city factories, Leaskdale became a world of women rising to new challenges. In her own life in those years, Montgomery was filling contradictory female roles: writer and wife, mother of little boys and speaker to Toronto authors’ groups, Uxbridge literary star and swabber of the barn. She was on the whole happy with the current status of women (she was not a supporter of women’s suffrage) and with her own status.
Notably, although Rainbow Valley involves so many female characters, not one of them is central enough to establish her name in the novel’s title. Earlier book titles named a person and set her in a physical environment: Anne – in Green Gables, of Avonlea, of the Island, in her House of Dreams; Kilmeny of the Orchard; Emily, Pat, Marigold, and Jane, each in her special place in a book’s title. The intriguing new title with its double references to physical elements of sky and earth promises a new emphasis on place rather than person.
The poet whose heart leapt up at the rainbow intoned more generally, “Nature never yet betrayed the heart that loved her.” By 1917–18, Montgomery’s heart had opened fully to the landscape around the little Ontario village of Leaskdale. In Cavendish, the picturesque landscape had run toward the vastness of the sea. In Leaskdale, there was no such orientation. This rural village nestled in a rolling, undramatic land of small hills and shallow valleys. Montgomery, who had always been a walker, could slip out her front door and cross to the narrow dirt road running up past the Leask homestead toward the old sawmill. To her right, at the top of the hill, the mill brook ran, like the brook in her fictional world sparkling “with amber waters,” running quietly between wild cherry trees, violets and daisies in summer, or ferns and goldenrod and asters in fall, and trilliums in spring.10 In July 1917 she planned a picnic for Chester “in the woods up the old mill-race” – a favourite retreat, as revealed by her description and photograph of Chester’s first picnic on 24 May 1914 – and shortly thereafter she recorded an evening when, with Bertie McIntyre, she took “a most memorable and glorious walk at sunset . . . up the north hill.”11 She was enabled to create a secret place where children could play games and tell stories and enjoy picnics of fish caught in the amber stream. Here Rosemary, edging toward middle age, could accept an unworldly minister as a possible husband. This valley would be a haven from a grown-up world, with rainbow colours of laughter, fantasy, outrageous impudence, and happy comradeship, but tinted with presentiments of doom. A writer could escape from “life” into “dream” here. Returning from this place of quiet natural beauty, she could put into memorable words her new vision of the pathos of religious ministry, the complexity of joys and troubles in children’s experience, the unavoidable consequences of war, and the wide range of women’s lives.
1.8 Chester’s first picnic (1914)
