EPILOGUE

Dramatis Personae

Readers may wonder about what happened to some of the dramatis personae in Maud’s life:

The Page brothers’ conservative taste in literature made readers turn elsewhere. Their company’s revenues decreased. Following the drawn-out court battle against L.M. Montgomery, George died in 1927. Louis sent a telegram to Maud strongly insinuating that she was responsible. Meanwhile Louis’s propensity for philandering and drinking caught up with him. His third wife, Mildred, whom Maud had met during her visit to Boston, divorced him. And yet he outlived L. M. Montgomery by a decade and a half, dying in 1956. A year later Farrar, Straus, and Giroux purchased the L. C. Page Company but discontinued its imprint in 1980.

Evelyn Nesbit became notorious when on the night of June 25, 1906, her husband Harry K. Thaw shot and killed her former lover Stanford White. Dubbed the Murder of the Century, the story was front-page news around the world—sparking a tabloid frenzy of unprecedented proportions. The trial began in New York on January 23, 1907, but it was Evelyn’s testimony in February that brought the frenzy to its climax. It was front-page news even in Cavendish, with regular updates that stretched to early March when the local newspapers reported about the intimate details of Evelyn’s seamy life with Stanford White: “Seated in the big witness chair and looking like a sweet little school girl, Evelyn Nesbitt [sic] Thaw today denounced Stanford White as her betrayer,”

The Charlottetown Daily Patriot reported on February 11. “Her thrilling story of how pitfalls are arranged by great and rich men to trap young and pretty girls caused the flesh of every man and woman in court to creep.”¹ On February 23, an illustration of Evelyn Nesbit in the witness box graced the cover of the Charlottetown Guardian.² Garbed in a demure dress with high collar, the twenty-two-year-old looked very different from the sensuous portrait that Maud had clipped from The Metropolitan fewer than four years earlier. Whether or not Maud made the connection between the picture in her room that had provided the face for Anne and the woman in the center of the scandal, we have no conclusive evidence one way or the other.

Evelyn survived neurasthenia, morphine addiction, a suicide attempt, and a second marriage ending in divorce in 1933. Against all odds, the model did achieve a semblance of a “normal” life. During the mid-twenties she opened a tearoom on West Fifty-Second Street near Broadway. A photograph shows her in her mid-thirties, wearing a housewife’s gingham dress, ready to serve her customers in her homey little tearoom. In the concluding lines of her 1934 memoir Prodigal Days: The Untold Story, the single mother sounded a note of maternal happiness: “And having successfully raised Russell, I no longer feel that I have lived in vain.”³ The notorious woman had found more happiness in her quiet family life than Maud had. Sculpting and teaching ceramics, Evelyn also served as the adviser for the 1955 movie, The Girl in the Red Velvet Swing (with Joan Collins playing Evelyn). Outliving her notoriety, Evelyn died at the age of eighty-two in Santa Monica, California.

Ellen Macneill, the Nova Scotia orphan who provided the spark for Anne of Green Gables, married Garfield Stewart and lived first in Dundas, in the eastern part of Prince Edward Island, and then in Brackley Point. She raised a large family of twelve children, whom she introduced to the Anne books. According to her daughter Ruth, Ellen “always wondered” if Anne of Green Gables was based on her, but it was not until four years before her death in 1974 that she was gratified to receive the long-awaited confirmation. Francis Bolger’s The Years Before Anne cited Maud’s unpublished journal and identified Pierce Macneill’s little orphan girl as an important inspiration for the novel.⁴ The journals also indicate that Rachel Lynde had been named after Ellen’s mother Rachael. In fact, in the table of contents of the original edition of Anne book, Rachel Lynde’s name is spelled Rachael, like Ellen’s mother, a mistake that was repeated in several printings. Ellen died in 1978.

Ephraim Weber attended Queen’s University in Kingston, and pursued graduate studies toward a Ph.D. at the University of Chicago. His subject, German Literature, turned out to be a wild-goose chase because of the impending World War I and anti-German sentiment. In the summer of 1928, after three decades of corresponding, Maud and Ephraim first met face to face in Norval. The meeting was awkward. “We almost called for pen and ink,” recalls Ephraim: “The face-to-face way wasn’t the same thing.”⁵ They stayed pen pals for the rest of her life. Ephraim died in 1956. The high school teacher and pacifist quietly penned a satiric novel entitled “Aunt Rachel’s Nieces,” which has been discovered only recently.

Ed Simpson was a successful minister in Wisconsin and retired in the mid 1930s after being diagnosed with diabetes. In November 1937, he visited Toronto and rang up sixty-three-year-old Maud to introduce his young second wife Mary Fiske. They met for tea in his hotel. Although old and wrinkled and sick, he talked as incessantly as ever. Maud was offended that he monopolized the conversation, never mentioning her family or literary success. It was the last time they saw each other and, sadly, the dynamics between these two proud opponents were unchanged. Anne’s words to Gilbert, “we’ve been good enemies,” seemed prophetic.⁶ In real life, Maud was unable to overcome her resentment. Maud’s comment in her journal that night contained vicious poison: she liked Ed’s wife, she noted, but could not imagine “why she ever wanted to marry a broken-down invalid like Ed.”⁷

Oliver Macneill: The summer after their frantic courtship, Oliver returned, but Maud’s feelings had cooled. She tried to pass him on to some eligible Cavendish women, Campsie Clark and Lucy MacLure, but her efforts at matchmaking produced only ill will in many corners. Oliver married Mabel Lea of Summerside, one of Maud’s former Belmont pupils. He told Maud diplomatically that his bride reminded him a little of her.⁸ Twenty years later, in 1923, Maud met him again during a visit to Prince Edward Island and found him very changed, but did not provide any details. He was living with his wife in Summerside, and Maud found his wife to be the best-dressed woman there.⁹

Uncle John Franklin Macneill died in 1936, three years after his wife Annie. Their house, the old homestead site, and the surrounding fields were passed on to his son. Today his grandson John and his wife Jennie still live in Uncle John’s old house. After reading Maud’s journals, they lovingly restored the ruins of the homestead, planted flower beds, and nurtured the old apple trees. A bookstore displays the old post office scales. Jennie and John retell the stories of Lucy Maud Montgomery and her love for the old homestead, as she told them in her journal. In 2005, the homestead property was designated a Canadian National Historic Site. A replica of it is exhibited in Robertson Library at the University of Prince Edward Island. Also held at the university is a painting of the homestead by James Lumbers, entitled Twilight Sorceries.

Ewan Macdonald retired from the ministry in Norval in 1935. He died one year after Maud in 1943 and was buried beside her in the Cavendish cemetery, overlooking the sea. Today, however, the simple grave also overlooks a gas station and a motel. Curiously, on the gravestone Ewan’s name is spelled in two ways, the correct way “REV. EWEN MACDONALD,” and the way Maud misspelled his name: “LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY / MACDONALD / WIFE OF / EWAN MACDONALD.” The latter erroneous way has since been adopted by biographers, editors, and scholars for consistency’s sake, underscoring the power of Maud’s pen in transforming the “real.” Maud’s sons Chester became a lawyer and Stuart a medical doctor.

Frede Campbell made good use of the university education provided by Maud. She spent two years at Macdonald College studying Household Science before accepting a one-year position at Red Deer Ladies College in Alberta in the winter of 1913. In the fall she returned to Macdonald College as a demonstrator to the Homemakers Clubs of Quebec. Maud was happy to have her relatively near Leaskdale. After several unhappy love affairs, Frede became a war bride in May 1917, marrying Cameron MacFarlane in a ceremony that did not include Maud. Maud was at her bedside when she died in January 1919 and also organized the funeral and cremation. Frede’s sister Stella married in 1919 and settled in Los Angeles, California. At age 41, she gave birth to a son and named him Ewan after Ewan Macdonald.¹⁰