The Model for Anne’s Face
… an extraordinary observer might have seen that the chin was very pointed and pronounced; that the big eyes were full of spirit and vivacity; that the mouth was sweet-lipped and expressive; that the forehead was broad and full; in short, our discerning extraordinary observer might have concluded that no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.
—Anne Shirley’s first appearance in Anne of Green Gables1
For decades, the taste and style of Queen Victoria had dominated an era known for its top hats, bangs, and bustles. Its ludicrously voluminous dresses, trains, and crinolines constrained generations of women. Growing up during this period, Maud had imbibed its images and values, its codified behavior, its rigid class structure, and its expectations of women’s desire for marriage, children, and domesticity—all of which penetrated and structured the world of Cavendish and the fictional world of Avonlea. The Queen’s death in January 1901 was an important threshold for societal changes that had begun during the 1890s, with women entering professions and universities, and even riding bicycles in public. In cosmopolitan New York the old Victorian icons had been crumbling for some time, and by the time the Queen died, the idealized domestic woman known as the “Victorian Angel in the House” was gone. Gone was the woman perfectly pure: her good image had become stale. The New Woman was in. She had entered the media in photos of the mischievous, fun-loving gamine, and, through the magazines, her image and the altered
expectations concerning her role filtered down into the quiet world of Cavendish, as the rains filtered through the soft clay soils in spring.
At the newly opened Campbell Art Studio on Fifth Avenue in Lower Manhattan,2 fashionable women, actresses, and models flocked to have their pictures taken by one of the era’s great portrait photographers—Rudolf Eickemeyer Jr.3 His iconic photographs appealed to readers of The Delineator, Colliers, Scribner’s, and Century Magazine, the very magazines Maud was trying to reach with her fiction. His knack for natural lines and perfect light effects gave the illusion of spontaneity and romance. He understood that “portraits, like Tableaux Vivants, were images designed to please.”4 He also had a way of bringing the New Woman into the commercial press by reassuring readers that she had not strayed too far from the old conventions. His modern girl heralded the change of time, but also accommodated the nostalgic and sensuous beauty in which Lucy Maud Montgomery found an inspirational spark.
The photo that would inspire Anne was taken in the late summer of 1901, just around the time when twenty-six-year-old Maud was preparing to leave Cavendish to become a “newspaper woman” in Halifax, Nova Scotia. That summer, sixteen-year-old Evelyn Nesbit flitted to the half-timbered house at 564-568 Fifth Avenue. She had an appointment with Rudolf Eickemeyer.
Evelyn Florence Nesbit was born on December 25, 1884, in Tarentum, twenty-four miles from Pittsburgh. Her father, Winfield Scott Nesbit, a successful lawyer, had died when she was eight and Evelyn helped supplement the family income through cleaning jobs, sales clerking, and modeling for painters. In Philadelphia, she had posed as an angel, “barefoot, in long white robes, my hair hanging in uncoiled profusion down my back,” as she recalled in her memoir.5 She talked her mother and brother into trying their luck in New York. After months of hardship and toiling, Evelyn’s fortune changed virtually overnight, from struggling model to celebrity, when she began posing for fashion photographers in early 1901. In the whirlwind of New York, her sudden celebrity was dizzying, as was
her new friendship with the famous New York architect Stanford White. It was he who had sent Evelyn to Eickemeyer’s studio that late summer of 1901, for he collected pictures of pretty teenage girls.
Eickemeyer, looking debonair, greeted Evelyn like someone used to catering to clients in the studio. He was efficient and courteous behind the hangdog expression of his shaggy moustache.6 Her long lustrous copper curls cascaded over her shoulder and coiled up in a question mark at the end. “My eyes were hazel and very brilliant,” she recalled years later in her memoir; “my nose was straight and almost Irish in its slight upward tilt, my mouth a very red—a bit full, the lips pouting”7 At the Smithsonian, in Eickemeyer’s personal papers, there is a postcard featuring one of Evelyn’s more famous pictures. Scribbled on the back, in what looks like Eickemeyer’s hand, is a curious note: “ … she was not really as beautiful. She was very photogenic.”8 Evelyn, in turn, wrote in her memoir: “Eickemeyer, a genuine artist, had spared neither himself nor me in his attempts to get the right effect in his photographs of me.”9 Often he would work for an hour on just one plate, while Evelyn patiently followed his orders. They were both professionals in their craft.
There must have been a vase with chrysanthemums in the studio that day—white or yellow—brilliant with their simple beauty. Evelyn pinned five big mums in her hair and struck a pose. Kachunk-click went the shutter. The picture, an amazing blend of vixen and virgin, appeared in July 1902 in the Theatre Journal.10 The model’s stare was unblinking and willful. This was the look of a young girl become a modern woman. But this was not the photo that would inspire the face of Anne—this pose was missing the soft veil of nostalgia.
The changing of the plates always took a few minutes as the assistant scurried to the darkroom with plates in hand. Evelyn must have rushed into the next pose, for her hair was disheveled where she had removed the mums. Only a single flower remained on each side of her face. Eickemeyer arranged the lights. The pose was uncomfortable but the light immediately gave the rapt face a brilliant radiance. The flash, held in position by the assistant, exploded and filled her eyes with blinding stars.
This time, Evelyn’s pose was sultry and mysterious, like an offering to a pagan god. When the photo took shape in Eickemeyer’s chemical bath, the play of light and shadow was dramatic. There was something angelic and
innocent in her expression. There was also something natural and honest about her. Nostalgic girlhood was captured in the fleeting snap of time before the shutter clicked and stole the image. The oversized flowers had come to life like sea-roses in water, and Evelyn looked like a wood nymph, a dryad who might roam in Lover’s Lane. It was a backward glance to the Victorian age, where this kind of representation of innocent flower girls had been wildly popular. Still, the model’s palpable eroticism also hailed the modern era. But could Eickemeyer and Evelyn have guessed that this very photograph would attract the attention of a solitary writer in Canada? Could anyone have imagined that the face of a beloved literary icon—the exuberant Anne—had just been conceived in a photographer’s studio on Fifth Avenue through the artistic collaboration of a willing model and accomplished photographer for the benefit of an aging American millionaire?
In her memoir, Evelyn recalled that at age fourteen she posed for George Gibbs, the Philadelphia writer and illustrator, who coincidentally would illustrate several of the covers of L. M. Montgomery’s novels. At age eighteen she posed for Charles Dana Gibson’s pen-and-ink sketch The Eternal Question, which became iconic, appearing on posters, cushions, and advertisements as a new version of the free-spirited yet innocent Gibson Girl. Maud would have been familiar with this idealized snapshot of the modern girl. She would have been horrified to know, however, that Stanford White, who had commissioned her beloved photograph of Anne’s face, aggressively took advantage of sixteen-year-old Evelyn probably just weeks following the photo shoot that inspired Anne’s face. After her life became the fodder for tabloids, the world would remember Evelyn only as the mistress of the married New York architect Stanford White, who was murdered by Evelyn’s husband Harry Thaw in 1906. That her face also decorated scores of churches and children’s books has been obscured by scandal. Like Maud, history has a way of compartmentalizing truth.
When did Maud first see Evelyn’s picture? There was nothing in Maud’s extensive scrapbooks to answer this question. There was nothing in the
more than two thousand published pages of The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery or in the many unpublished journal pages. The evidence had disappeared or been destroyed. There was nothing in Eickemeyer’s personal papers indicating where and when he had sold this photograph to a magazine. We do know, however, that Maud was a voracious reader who consumed cover to cover whatever she could get her hands on, even a cooking book, as she once joked. We also know that she carefully read all of the magazines in which she published stories. “Among others, the Delineator, Smart Set and Ainslee’s have opened their fold to this poor wandering sheepkin of thorny literary ways,” she had jubilated in November 1901.11 Knowing Maud’s penchant for magazines, I combed through these century-old magazines of fashion and culture looking most carefully at those in which Maud had published her work and in which Eickemeyer also routinely placed his photographs. After three summers of searching, there was little progress in finding the source for the face of Anne. Maud’s picture of Evelyn was mysteriously elusive.
Elusive, that is, until a visit to Donna J. Campbell, a private collector of L. M. Montgomery’s work. In her farmhouse were a number of magazines in which Maud had published her early stories and one Sunday afternoon, I discovered the missing link that led me to the source. The copy of an American food magazine, What to Eat, in which Maud had published a story in September 1903, revealed that it was here, in her own complimentary copy, that she would have stumbled over a tiny reproduction of Evelyn’s photo advertising the September issue of the Metropolitan Magazine, a glamorous literary periodical published in New York. Scanning the splashy full-page ad, Maud would have seen the teaser picture of the girl and the text:
Sixteen pages will as heretofore be devoted to portraits of beautiful women, and these full page pictures in the September Number will be printed in tint and will surpass all previous efforts made to enhance this distinctive feature of The Metropolitan Magazine.12 M-E-T-R-O-P-O-L-I-T-A-N. Would Maud, in September 1903, have capitalized the title in her mind, as she liked to do when she was excited?
The advertised magazine was urban, modern, and exotic. Hailing the world of the automobile, the stage, photography, fashion, and money, it represented the opposite of Maud’s Cavendish life, which consisted of the post office, baking, cleaning, cooking, dusting, and shoveling snow in the winter. The highlights of Cavendish social life were the Church and the Literary Society, house parties, dances and, as one of her girlfriends had quipped, funerals. Maud’s curiosity was piqued. A savvy businesswoman who earned her own living, an avid photographer with her own darkroom for photo development, a fashion lover who “put on bright hues and pretty garments, just as the flowers do,”13 she dreamed about a world that was different from her rural existence. She loved Cavendish dearly, but hungered for a richer social life, better financial conditions, an appropriate standing in the community, a passionate companionship, her own house, and success in the world. Maud’s delight in the American magazines resonated with these more worldly desires.
There in the ad was the Metropolitan address, 3 West 29th Street, New York, inviting her to request her own copy. If she couldn’t go to Manhattan, perhaps she could bring Manhattan to Cavendish. Presumably it was old “Santa-Clausy Mr. Crewe,” the mailman with his long gray beard, slouch, and limp who delivered the New York beauty on his rumbling buggy, traveling down the old lane and around the bend to the red kitchen door. The world came to the homestead each day with the mailbag. Coincidentally, just a month earlier, in August, Maud had placed the mailman’s photograph prominently in her journal, along with a detailed description of this “incongruous messenger.”14 Perhaps, though, Maud procured her copy from Geo. Carter & Company, the Queen Street bookseller in downtown Charlottetown, who ironically was also the dealer in seeds for flowers, fields, and garden and whose ad she had glued in her scrapbook years earlier.15 Inhaling the smell of the new magazines in his store, Maud often surrendered her Macneill thriftiness and snapped up a glossy periodical. Although there is no reference to The Metropolitan in her papers, the size and tinting of the clipping in her journal prove that it was in this magazine that she found the inspiration for Anne.16
According to her own account, but without acknowledging the source, she cut out the photograph from the magazine, framed it, and hung the picture on the wall of her den. To use prefabricated, so-called “passepartout”
cardboard sheets to frame magazine clippings was the fashion of the day. Portraits of beauty worked like advertisements that helped sell magazines such as Cosmopolitan and The Metropolitan. When Eickemeyer sold the photograph of the dark-eyed maiden to The Metropolitan Magazine in 1903, he paired it with another portrait of Evelyn. Robed in a white Greek gown, a laurel wreath tucked in her hair, she staged the popular pose of a Sapphic disciple. No doubt Maud would have seen the model’s name, “Miss Evelyn Nesbitt” [sic],17 but since no model was named for the chrysanthemum photograph, and since the two portraits of Evelyn look remarkably different, we cannot be certain that Maud realized that the model was the same. Nonetheless, she invited Evelyn into her inner sanctum, her den, where Evelyn’s romantic eyes could seep into her life and imagination.
Taking residence in Maud’s upstairs room, where Maud also housed her books and did most of her writing, the American girl with her nostalgic expression was a companion close by on the wall. As Maud sat at her desk in the waning light of dusk, overlooking the lane and the fields outside, Evelyn’s enraptured face shared the afterglow of evening sunset, the stark light of a new moon, and the murmur of the sea in summertime. But their relationship was not all sweetly romantic. As Maud read the seasons, so she would have read the girl’s visage, consuming the rich texture of her features. Just as Evelyn’s girlhood pose was created in front of cameras, so Anne was created in front of Maud’s imaginary lens. In fact, Maud was later consistent in emphasizing that all her characters “grew” over a long gestation period, contradicting her own memoir account of Anne as flashing into her imagination.
Evelyn Nesbit’s pose heralded Anne’s rapt and intense personality. Maud, who possessed a strong visual memory, liked to organize her compositions like an architect or painter, using vibrant colors and distinctive shapes such as arches, circles, frames, and curves.18 But a picture is not a fully fleshed character, nor can it supply the narrative arc for a novel. Many other elements needed to blend with the picture in Maud’s imagination. If we follow Maud’s account, by now she had undergone a lengthy apprenticeship as a writer. Given how quickly Maud would write Anne of Green Gables in 1905, and how her Waverly pen would race over the pages less than two years later, it is safe to assume that a great deal of emotional and mental preparation had preceded the writing—making the twenty months following the arrival of Evelyn Nesbit’s portrait crucial in our search for
Anne. Maud would later say that her own life, her dreams and desires were contained in Anne of Green Gables. And something of the yearning, melancholy expression of Evelyn’s face also seemed to hail Maud’s nostalgic picture of her own youth that she sketched in her journal.
In the year Evelyn Nesbit’s photograph arrived in Cavendish, Maud missed her childhood friends who had left the town one by one. Her cousin and friend Clara Campbell in the neighboring town of Park Corner had become a stranger since she had gone to Boston as a domestic worker. Embarrassed by Clara’s choice of profession, Maud found they had little to talk about when Clara returned for a visit. Her Cavendish cousin and friend Lucy Macneill had married and gone to live in Lynn, Massachusetts. Such was the exodus that was part of Island life and that took many Islanders to the Canadian west or south of the border in search of jobs. The young female teachers who arrived to take the Cavendish school supplied a ready pool of friends but they inevitably left to get married or take better positions elsewhere.
Maud missed the intellectual and social stimulus that a writer needs to craft great fiction. As a Victorian citizen, she was also highly discriminating about the company she liked to keep, reflecting the class and cultural prejudices of her time. There was a solitary, self-involved, and occasionally misanthropic streak to her personality that made her feel comfortable only in the presence of a small group of congenial friends, whom she would later call kindred spirits. In her journal Maud often claimed that there where two Mauds—the jolly, public Maud, who could be seen laughing and dancing her feet off at her cousin Alec Macneill’s, and the private, morbidly self-scrutinizing Maud. The public Maud would never let it be known that she felt lonely in the company of uncongenial family.
Maud had ways of traveling into the past and reviving memory pictures of youth, some tinted with the same melancholy brush that had perfected Evelyn’s picture. When grayness and dampness heralded the lonely days of winter, Maud liked to take refuge in the attic, where she would rummage through her old trunk and reconnect with her own past.
On the night of November 20, a Friday, 1903, she found an old familiar text from her schooldays—the Third Royal Reader. Here, she discovered the pieces that had once moved her to tears when she was a child, among them, “The Child’s First Grief,” and “The Dog at His Master’s Grave”—the very same verse that Anne offers to recite in Sunday School in chapter eleven of Anne of Green Gables because she finds it sad and melancholy.19 But what solitary Maud found in the recesses of the old house were not only the little nuggets she would squirrel away and use in her fiction, but also ways to transport herself to a realm of adolescence, the age represented by Evelyn Nesbit’s picture. It was in these moments of reliving the past that Maud found the originality and authenticity of her voice as a writer of juvenile fiction. Because she read her journal before writing she received not only an important spark of inspiration, but also a method for blending fact and fiction, past and present, adulthood and childhood.
Adolescence is the age when the mind is racked with intense emotions.20 Although she was a disciplined, mature writer, Maud’s genius was in her ability to call up those passionate emotions and temperaments. The key to that skill was Maud’s adolescent journal, which began on September 21, 1889, just before her fifteenth birthday, the same day she destroyed her childhood journal. By actively remembering and reading through her journals, scrapbooks, and notebooks—often moved to laughter and tears, joy and sadness—Maud shaped her adolescent musings into art that would appeal to both young and old. But what she read also shaped Maud’s adult self—cementing the emotional obsessions and preoccupations of the past in the present. Addicted to her journal throughout her life, she would find the truth of her emotions on the pages of the diary she wrote years and decades ago.
As Maud found her remedy for loneliness and isolation in dreaming and writing, the months that followed the arrival of Evelyn’s picture were like an incubation period during which she whirled up deeply embedded emotions. The photo inspiring Anne’s face would bring together diverse feelings that Maud had felt over the years: youth slipping away, friends leaving, and family threatened. It was these unsettling realities that prompted Maud to create what she called “castles in Spain,” daydreams in which she had everything she was missing in real life. Nourished by her reading of romance, this dreamland of fiction would help Maud become an agent in transforming her own fate. She dreamed up Anne.