The Vows Kept for Life
… My arm is getting do wobbly now I must stop. Sorry I had to tell you Anne isn’t real. But if she is real to you that is all that matters. She looks very real in the picture “Anne of Windy Willows” and very like what I pictured her.
With all good wishes I am
Yours sincerely
L. M. Montgomery Macdonald
—Letter to Gertrude Ramsey, July 26, 19401
Maud’s bond with her fans was emotional and lasted a lifetime and beyond, yet it also had a surprisingly pragmatic side. In the letter cited above, Maud was purposefully enlisting the help of twelve-year-old fan Gertrude Ramsey. Would Gertrude write a letter to Hollywood’s R.K.O. Motion Pictures to tell them that she would like to see Anne’s House of Dreams and Anne of Ingleside on the screen, Maud asked. In her letter to Gertrude, Maud included the California address, explaining the lobbying plan to produce movies of these two Anne novels: “My agent is trying to get them to produce them and I think letters from my readers might help. Only don’t tell them I asked you to do this. (One girl did.)”2 This correspondence reveals just how deft Maud was in putting her fans to work. Illuminating too is the fact that the author of Anne of Green Gables cultivated a bond of secrecy and complicity with her young Anne fan.A key point of Maud’s legend was that after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, her struggle was over; the seismic change from obscure
writer to celebrity and mistress with a maid in her own home was part of her mythology. But the fragmented selves and the labor of reconciling them, as well as the many secrets of her life were also catching up with her in her professional and private lives. In her home life, more than ever, she was in need of daydreams and fantasy. In her relationships and friendships, she was laboring to keep broken things together. Loyal and self-protective Maud was still putting together the scraps and fragments of her own life with effects that would be occasionally tragic.
Maud finished her new and still unchristened Anne book in the late fall of 1908, but on December 26, L.C. Page & Company announced that since Anne of Green Gables “is bound to continue one of the best sellers of the Winter and Spring,” “ANNE AT AVONLEA” would not appear before the fall of 1909.3 And that’s when it did appear, with a new redheaded Gibson Girl portrait by George Gibbs on the cover. Grown-up Anne, as Maud had told Ephraim Weber on September 10, the year before, “couldn’t be made as quaint and unexpected as the child Anne.”4 Yet there is plenty in the novel to appeal to the reader, including new romantic haunts, such as Hester Gray’s garden and the Crystal Lake, a cast of familiar and new characters such as Marilla’s adopted twins Davy and Dora Keith, and the adventures of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society. Conscious of her wide American readership, the precocious student poet Paul Irving is a born “Yankee” who comes to live on Prince Edward Island.
Ironically, while Maud was giving her readers the dream of fairy-tale liberation and transformation, nothing had changed to loosen the chains of her own imprisonment. She was angry because she had to decline an invitation to speak in Toronto, for she could not leave her grandmother. She was angry because Grandmother Macneill’s own children left all the care for their aging parent to Maud: Aunt Emily, for example, had visited only once in three years. Her feeling toward her own family was “intense, unforgiving, bitter resentment.”5 How much she confided in Ewan, who was in Bloomfield, is not clear, but he must have had an inkling. In February 1909,
he sent her Bliss Carman’s The Making of Personality, the book that had been promoted alongside hers on the Page publishing list. It was a kind of self-help book based on Theosophy, emphasizing harmony of the mental, spiritual, and physical. (Maud would later fictionalize its healing power in the spiritual nature writings of John Foster in her 1926 novel The Blue Castle.)6 Her February 20, 1909, journal entry indicates that she was also feeling guilty about past friendships with girls, confessing to her journal that in her childhood she had formed girl intimacies that did her “no good,” in fact did “positive harm.” She was determined to form intimacies only with those who were kindred spirits like Frede.7
Along with a new book, the golden September of 1909 brought romantic excitement. Enter cousin Oliver Macneill, the wealthy, good-looking, mustached divorce who had made his fortune in North Dakota. The infatuation that followed reinforces the sense that Maud’s feelings for Ewan were comradely rather than passionate during the three years of their engagement. Walking with Oliver among the maples of Lover’s Lane, she responded to his caressing tones and physical nearness. Their secret courtship flared up like an intense bright light. On September 21, she recorded in her journal that he kindled in her “a devastating flame of the senses.”8 True to her pattern of compartmentalizing sex, she was warmly responsive when there were safe boundaries that prevented sex from being acted out. On the rebound and in search for a new wife, Oliver proposed marriage. Perhaps sensing her innate desire for freedom, he even proposed all sorts of “absurd” arrangements. Yet the Presbyterian side won the battle and she chastised herself for the “evil demon.” She said she knew that she could not marry Oliver. He was too contradictory, she said—a little like herself. He was too unpredictable—too impulsive. She crushed her sexual passion. His departure was followed by months of longing and loneliness. She makes no mention of the web of evasion, lies, and subterfuge she must have used to hide the infatuation from Ewan. Meanwhile, her pen pal Ephraim Weber married schoolteacher Annie Campbell Melrose at Christmas 1909, and wrote to Maud about it in January.9
The success of her novel brought financial independence. The royalty income is recorded, in her hand, on the title page of the contract: “Feb. 22. 1909. $1000 / Mar 22. 1909 $729 / Feb 19. 1910. Regular sales etc. $3634.48.”10 The contract for Anne of Avonlea, similarly notes the February
1910 royalties: $3698.49. Page had begun selling the serial rights almost immediately, and as a result, Anne of Green Gables was published in Canada, from 1909 to 1910, in Montreal, as a serial in The Family Herald and Weekly Star.11 Already Anne had begun to conquer the world. The Swedish translation in 1909 was followed by the Dutch in 1910 and the Polish in 1912, and it was only the beginning.12
In 1905 Beatrix Potter, aged thirty-nine and unmarried, used her royalties from her lucrative Peter Rabbit tales to purchase Hill Top Farm in the Lake District, which later became a literary site.13 In her fiction, Maud occasionally dreamed of idealized houses occupied by single women. Yet despite the financial power, like a child she was prohibited from traveling, keeping a maid, or entertaining friends. Readers and visitors who wanted to see how the author of Anne lived were carefully kept away from the house, for showing them the destitute homestead was too embarrassing. For now, there was one thing she was able to do with the royalties from Anne. She persuaded Frede Campbell, who had returned to teaching after her brief 1907 stint at the Ontario Agricultural College, to give up teaching and get a university degree. At first reluctant, Frede eventually yielded to Maud’s plan and studied Household Science at Macdonald College of McGill University in Montreal. The financial gift intensified their friendship, and the Campbells later came to rely on Maud for loans. Clan bonds were strong, and Maud was a generous woman with her new wealth, but one also senses that clinging Maud was buying loyalties, cementing them into the future.
Meanwhile, Maud was also inventing herself as a public persona. It was a quiet revolution. Her deeply rooted insecurity about not being loved for her own self had left a cavernous emptiness waiting to be filled by the mirage of accolade and fame. Although fundamentally shy, she had all the ingredients for a celebrity14 An accomplished elocutionist, she could address groups of people. She loved fashion and photo opportunities. She was a bit of an actress who knew how to mask her feelings. Her already entrenched pattern of evasiveness and obfuscation was also a useful tool. When by
1910, the author of Anne leapt from the obscurity of Cavendish onto the world stage, two events were crucial in the birth of the celebrity author.
First she met Earl Grey, the Governor General of Canada during Prime Minister Wilfrid Laurier and Prime Minister Robert Borden’s era. A man with ideas for social reform, who also gave his name to the Grey Cup of the Canadian Football League, he was an avid promoter of Canadian culture. Grey was also “an ardent admirer,” and when he visited Prince Edward Island in September 1910, he asked to visit with L. M. Montgomery.15 Although not exactly attractive—balding and with “squirrel teeth,” as she described him—he was a good conversationalist who made the shy author feel at home. He invited Maud for a private walk down a winding path at the Andrew Macphail homestead in Orwell. Grey stopped at a little white-painted secluded building and sat down on the step with Maud, oblivious that it was the Macphail outhouse. While they were holding court, a number of ladies from the viceregal party, looking for the WC., slunk hurriedly away after seeing them sitting there.
Being with people was exhausting to Maud, but being singled out by the statesman “warm[ed] the cockles” of the Macneills, in particular Aunt Mary Lawson, who seemed more excited even than Maud herself.16 She was gaining the attention of the clan, finally restoring the old glory of the Macneill name.
Even more important in her transformation was a November 1910 visit to L.C. Page in Boston. Grandmother had given permission for her to go on the “business” trip. Accompanied by jolly Stella Campbell, the almost-thirty-six-year-old writer loved the journey, arriving in Boston on a beautiful Sunday morning. For the first time in her life she rode in a car, which had been sent by Mr. L. C. Page. Maud stayed in Page’s mansion at 67 Powell Street in Brookline, a wealthy and picturesque town that was also home to modernist poet Amy Lowell.
Boston and the surrounding towns had perhaps more literary shrines per square foot than any other American city. The spirits of Louisa May Alcott, Margaret Fuller, and Harriet Beecher Stowe lived on in their literary homes, which had become tourist sites. Nearby Concord was home to Ralph Waldo Emerson and Nathaniel Hawthorne. South of Concord was Walden Pond with the world’s most famous wood cabin home built by nature philosopher Henry David Thoreau. Brooke Farm was the site of
another utopian living experiment. Boston was also a city of living writers, among them Jefferson Lee Harbour, the editor of Youth’s Companion and author of “Lucy Ann” who lived in nearby Dorchester.17
When Maud finally met her publisher Louis Page in person, she thought he was “one of the most fascinating men I have ever met.”18 She was captivated by his charisma, wealth, and breeding, although she also claimed to have had suspicions about his character. In his personal library she saw the original Gibbs pastel of Anne. The Pages were aggressively smart, as she noted, but she was a quick study. Throwing her economical instincts overboard, she purchased expensive clothing. Looking into a full-length mirror door in her room, she enjoyed the sight of herself head to toe in full fashionable regalia. Presumably adding to her ebullience was a love note from Frede, signed with her initials FEC on a postcard: “I dwell in Macdonald Halls but the sweetest thing is that you love me still the same.”19 Curiously, this postcard, which adapted the lyrics Maud had used in Anne of Green Gables, is found in Maud’s journal of 1935. It had been sent from Macdonald Hall in Montreal where Frede was studying courtesy of the Anne royalties.
A celebrity in Boston, Maud was fêted as “The Canadian Jane Austen.” The Republic likened her visit to “Charlotte Bront[ë] coming up to London.”20 In her journal she proudly quoted the journalist who had written that she was “petite, with the fine, delicate features of an imaginative woman.”21 Maud gave interviews. When the Boston Herald asked what she thought on the subject of suffrage—an important question considering the activism of, for instance, the College Equal Suffrage League—she answered in her typical exasperating casuistry. She said she did not think very much about it at all, but thought that yes, women should be allowed to vote. She did not think it would effect as great a change as both the champions and adversaries seemed to think, and therefore she confessed that “it does not seem to me worth while to worry about it.”22 This opportunistic answer, that tried to appease both positions at once, was disingenuous considering that she came from a family of politicians, and had listened to the fierce debates regarding suffrage in the Cavendish Literary Society. The pose of the philosophically dreamy gentlewoman was self-serving and yet also characteristic of her hallmark equivocation, trying to accommodate two contradictory positions at
once. The newspapers described her as a quiet little woman, childlike, with aquiline features and with little interest in suffrage.
The Boston authors’ club hosted a reception in her honor at the Kensington Hotel. Maud’s gown “shimmered and dazzled,” as she later quoted the newspapers saying in her November 29 journal entry. Here she met, for the first time, many of the authors she had read, including Nathan Haskell Dole, Charles Pollen Adams, Helen Winslow—and J. L. Harbour.23 When she was introduced to Jefferson Lee Harbour, and when she shook his hand, would she not have remembered that his 1903 tale “Lucy Ann” was one of the formula orphan stories that helped inspire her novel’s heroine? Would he have dropped a hint or ignored the matter like a gentleman? Poker-faced Maud was mum on this issue in her journal. Given her genius for self-deception, it is entirely possible that she had forgotten about “Lucy Ann.” However, exactly two months later, on the evening of Friday, January 27, she wrote, for the first time, a lengthy entry in her journal detailing all the personal and local references for Anne of Green Gables. It seems that the author who had reacted so defensively to the Cavendish folk who suggested that she had copied from “real life” now seemed to agree with them. She carefully identified the Cavendish models for Green Gables, Lover’s Lane, the Haunted Wood, Lynde’s Hollow, the Lake of Shining Waters, and so on in a lengthy entry that would later allow Parks Canada to establish many of the these landmarks as part of the Green Gables tourist site.24 She also identified Ellen Macneill as her inspiration and talked about “another odd co-incidence,” such as the adult Ellen looking the same as the Anne cover girl.25 Conscious of her literary legacy, Maud was now keen on referencing the homegrown roots of Anne of Green Gables because they allowed her to prove the originality of her book.
On her last day in Boston she attended a reception at the home of Prince Edward Island-born writer Basil King. By now Maud had upgraded her wardrobe and style. She had her hair done up in town and decorated with tiny pink satin roses, and for the first time she wore a low-necked chiffon evening dress that made her feel almost naked. Never mind that the new velvet slippers she wore were hurting her feet excruciatingly. The next day she had her picture taken for the Press bureau. The pose was decidedly feminine, foregrounding her bosom, while her eyes looked dreamy with hooded lids, her gaze slightly turned away from the camera as if involved
in some imaginative thought. The Anne celebrity author was complete—not exactly beautiful, but feminine, stylish, smart, and imaginative.
Ending her trip on a high note, she had also become caught in Page’s web. Against her better judgment, having received information regarding Page’s dubious business ethics, she signed a new contract binding herself for five more years to Page. Why? Reluctant to break the spell of his personal charm, she also felt obliged to sign, having stayed in Page’s lavish home as a guest. Moreover, she had never learned the art of friendly sparring with an adversary, an art Ed Simpson might have taught her. A lifelong habit of evading unpleasant truths caught up with her, as she chose to ignore warning signs, committing herself to another long contract with a publisher she knew to be exploitative. On the day of her departure, with the new contract signed and sealed, Louis Page took Maud to the train, where a delegation of the Canadian and Intercontinental clubs said goodbye with yellow chrysanthemums. She bathed in the feeling of recognition and achievement.
When she arrived at the train station on Prince Edward Island, George Campbell picked her up on the cold and rattling buggy. Sleet blew into her face the whole way home.
Four months later, in March 1911, Grandmother Macneill died of pneumonia at the age of almost eighty-seven. Maud cared for her in her final days, with Grandmother sleeping in the warm kitchen and Maud keeping vigil. For the first time since their quarrel in the fall 1905, Uncle John came to visit. Until this moment, he had not spoken with his mother. The Macneill pride had stood in the way of reconciliation. Aunt Annie Campbell of Park Corner and Aunt Emily Montgomery of Malpeque arrived. Once again the parlor was the host for a casket. The loyal woman, who had been the only mother she had known, lay surrounded by flowers. The scene uncannily mirrored Clara in her coffin thirty-five years earlier. After the funeral, Aunt Annie and Aunt Emily helped disperse their mother’s possessions. Maud had only a few days to vacate the premises. For the first
time since the old homestead was built it stood empty—no light shining from the kitchen window. The home fire had finally gone out. It would remain a ghost house until Uncle John tore it down in April 1920. Taking the belongings that could be fitted into a little room, she found a temporary home in Park Corner, which had always been a second home to her. Grieving the loss of Grandmother Macneill and her beloved home, she was now a lonely vagrant.
By this time Ewan Macdonald had lived away from Cavendish for five years. A year earlier he had assumed a presbytery in Leaskdale and Zephyr in Ontario and their relationship had assumed the form of a correspondence, like the ones she cultivated with Ephraim and several others. Maud rushed to fill the vacuum in her life, never experiencing the opportunities of freedom, travel, and purchasing a home. A date was set; she and Ewan would marry on July 5. Frede rushed back from Montreal to help her with the preparations. The excitement of being a bride gripped her. Frede and Stella took pictures of Maud’s wedding trousseau purchased in Montreal and Toronto, pictures she would later put in her journal in lieu of a wedding photo. Her wedding dress of white silk crêpe de soie with pearl beading can be seen today at her birthplace in New London. The local newspapers announced the event—interestingly with the same misspelling of Ewan’s name that Maud favored. Evidently she took pride in publicizing her wedding to a respectable member of the community.
At noon on July 5, Maud stood ready in her little room. On her neck she wore a necklace of amethysts and pearls, a gift from Ewan. In her arms lay a bouquet of roses and lilies-of-the-valley. Stella and the Howatts provided the chorus as thirty-six-year-old Maud descended the stairs on the arm of Uncle John Campbell, Frede’s father. Ewan Macdonald, just two weeks shy of his forty-first birthday, waited for her in the parlor, along with friends, neighbors, and the Reverend John Stirling of Cavendish. In Anne’s House of Dreams, Maud interestingly shifts the focus to Gilbert’s feelings at the very moment he first spies Anne in her bridal gown. “She was his at last, this evasive, long-sought Anne, won after years of patient waiting … . Was he worthy of her? Could he make her as happy as he hoped? If he failed her—if he could not measure up to her standard of manhood—then, as she held out her hand, their eyes met and all doubt was swept away in a glad certainty.”26 If Maud had the same expectations for Ewan, it was a
great deal of pressure, given her volatile mood swings and exceedingly high ideal of manhood. Several men had already failed the test.
Frede’s wedding dinner was sumptuous, showing off the latest Household Science skills. Yet when Maud sat down by her husband’s side, something in her revolted and doubt asserted itself. “I felt a sudden horrible inrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free!” Having lived in bondage for several years, she now felt again “a hopeless prisoner.”27 She felt like tearing off her wedding ring and freeing herself—but of course, the Presbyterian in her asserted control. How hard rebellious Maud had to work to make these feelings subside, we do not know. It is fascinating, though, that there is no wedding photograph. The photograph taken of them during their honeymoon anticipates many other photographs taken of the middle-aged couple. The body language is stiff and awkward. Each faces the camera with a smile, each proudly and distinctly connecting with the camera but not with each other. There is a safe distance between the two.
Maud’s royalties would augment Ewan’s minister’s salary for the next three decades, and allow the couple some luxuries including cars and trips. Ewan typically served as the chauffeur, the role of escort that Maud had always found useful with men. Her royalties also paid for the three-month wedding trip from early July to late September, which took them to the literary shrines of Scotland and England—Scott’s Abbotsford, J. M. Barrie’s Kirriemuir, Charlotte Brontë’s Haworth, Wordsworth’s Lake Windermere. She was pleasing herself with this journey and she was in her element. The journey became a major part of her legend as a writer, as readers of The Alpine Path know well.28 In her journal she even confessed to the romantic pleasure of “a little bit of ‘honeymooning’” sitting alone with Ewan above the water in the green seclusion of Buttermere Lake.29 But she never said a word about the physical side of their relationship, signaling disappointment in her characteristic way: first through silence and in later years through unfavorable comparisons with Herman Leard. In Scotland, they met George MacMillan, “a slight, fair, nice-looking man.”30 Maud was relieved to have found a good conversationalist. Walking ahead with George, Maud left Ewan to entertain George’s fiancée Miss Allan, who later complained that Maud monopolized George with discussions about literature. In Edinburgh, she suffered from cystitis. In London, for the first time, Maud saw “a flying machine soaring across the sunset sky like a huge
bird.”31 In Dunwich, on the crumbling Suffolk coast, she saw her Grandmother’s old Woolner House, a building of red brick surrounded by trees and with a garden in the front. It was like coming home. Suddenly she could visualize the childhood of Grandmother Macneill, when twelve-year-old Lucy was growing up and leaving this home behind to go to Canada. As she was hoping to become a mother herself, she was connecting with the woman who had been her reserved yet loyal mother.
Another snapshot followed a year later. Frede was in the Leaskdale Manse, helping Maud with the birth of her first son. Frede took to Chester as if he was her own. Happy Maud noted in her journal on September 22, 1912: “Frede and I work together in beautiful concord and at last I have the home I had dreamed of having.”32 A photo of the Macdonald dinner table pictures the marriage idyll in a staged photograph: Maud in the lead role in foreground but looking wan and tired; Frede, glowing and smiling, as if she were the proud mother sitting beside Ewan, and Ewan holding the baby yet slightly out of focus. Perhaps the perfect marriage included Frede, just as it included motherhood. “Motherhood is heaven,” claimed Maud who was remarkably uninhibited in detailing the bodily changes and processes of pregnancy and childbirth.33 As for married life, it was not the rosy dream she had dreamed as a teenager. As she wrote to her friend Fannie Wise, seven months after the wedding, she had “learned to find happiness in the small sweet things of ‘the trivial round and the common task.’”34
In the following years, the most contented ones of her marriage, we see a woman addicted to activity, running a home, caring for two sons, fulfilling her duties as the minister’s wife, while also maintaining an impressive creative productivity and public presence. Up to 1911, she had authored four books—Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Kilmeny of the Orchard, and The Story Girl. Between 1911 and 1939, she would write Chronicles of Avonlea, The Golden Road, Anne of the Island, Anne’s House of Dreams, Rainbow Valley, Further Chronicles of Avonlea, Rilla of Ingleside, Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, The Blue Castle, Emily’s Quest, Magic for
Marigold, A Tangled Web, Pat of Silver Bush, Mistress Pat, Anne of Windy Poplars, Jane of Lantern Hill, and Anne of Ingleside—in addition to thousands of pages of journal, memoir, personal correspondence, verse, and hundreds of short stories.
Maud never had the daughter she desired, and the life of her fictional daughter Anne was determined by her publishing marriage with L.C. Page. While their correspondence no longer exists, snippets of it survive in court documents in the Library and Archives of Canada and they show how aggressively L. C. Page was assuming paternity of Anne. The documents reveal how strongly and persistently L. C. Page urged Maud to write a third Anne book, what would become Anne of the Island, and how strongly she resisted. In fact, when she worked on putting together the 1912 collection of early stories Chronicles of Avonlea, his urgent pressuring to “bring in our dear Anne as much as possible” shows her publisher to have been an active partner in the production of Anne for selling purposes:
Please do your very best to have Anne appear in as many of the stories as possible, even if she only speaks ‘My lord, the carriage waits.’ But, of course, the idea will be to have her a real character in all of the stories, and she should certainly be at least mentioned in all of them. It will make a tremendous difference in the success of the book.35 In 1915, Anne of the Island delved into Anne Shirley’s college years, again a topic suggested by Louis Page as early as 1910, but resisted by Maud. She wrote “Anne III,” as the Great War was raging in Europe, finishing it just before she turned forty. She dedicated the novel
TO
ALL THE GIRLS ALL OVER THE WORLD
WHO HAVE ‘WANTED MORE’ ABOUT
ANNE.36 As a student at Redmond College in Kingsport, Anne shares a house with Priscilla (Prissy) Grant, Philippa (Phil) Gordon, and Stella Maynard. The ideal of the independent bachelor girls living together in one household
with a housekeeper had been laid out in “The Bachelor Girl” in Godey’s Lady’s Book in November 1893.37 In the novel, Diana marries Fred Wright in a June wedding, while Anne Shirley graduates with a B.A. with honors in English Literature—the dream Maud had for herself and realized in part by giving Frede a university education (Frede completed a vocational program at college, but did not study toward a B.A. at university). The novel ends with Anne’s engagement to Gilbert Blythe. No sooner were they engaged than Page pressured Maud to write about Anne’s married life. By the time Maud wrote Anne’s House of Dreams, with its focus on marriage and motherhood, she was contemplating her divorce from L. C. Page.
She finished the inspired Anne’s House of Dreams in a record writing time of six months, despite the clouds of the war and Page’s threats of legal action, should she choose to leave L. C. Page and take Anne to a new publisher. Maud was asserting her rights with the help of her new agent, John McClelland. She had joined the Author’s League of America and was planning to achieve better royalty conditions for Anne’s House of Dreams. Carole Gerson, who has studied L.C. Page’s business practices and the complex legal wrangles involving his authors, concludes that L.M. Montgomery’s complaints about the Page Company’s exploitative business practices were more than justified and consistent with the problems encountered by other authors.38 In 1913, for instance, Louis Page had begun cultivating a competing juvenile series, Eleanor H. Porter’s Pollyanna, whose central character was, like Anne Shirley, an irrepressibly optimistic orphan and a force of exuberant happiness. Not only was the novel and its sequel Pollyanna Grows Up (1915) a direct competitor to Anne, but Page turned the character into a franchise. At least eleven more sequels were written not by Eleanor Porter, but by other authors. “Glad Clubs” sprang up, followed by numerous adaptations including a silent Hollywood movie in 1920 starring Mary Pickford and, eventually, a Disney movie in 1960 starring Hayley Mills. The L.C. Page Papers at the New York Public Library reveal that in 1960 Disney turned down a proposed film version of Anne with the rationale that it was too similar to the Pollyanna story. Page treated Anne as a cheap popular book, a franchise like Pollyanna. Meanwhile, Maud was concerned with her literary legacy.
In January 1918, after publishing Anne’s House of Dreams with McClelland and Stewart in Canada and Stokes in the US, Maud squared
off with her former publisher in a Boston court. She had sued Page for unpaid royalties.39 They each took the box and not surprisingly, Maud was a superb witness. She settled with Page for $18,000, signing over all the rights to Anne of Green Gables and earlier sequels to Page. But in early 1919, immediately after settling, Page sold the film rights to RKO for $40,000. It was a devastating blow, but a minor event compared to another life tragedy unfolding in Montreal.
From Boston, Maud rushed by train to Montreal where, in the early morning hours of January 25, 1919, Frede Campbell lay dying of the Spanish flu. When she passed, Maud was by her side. She was devastated. Maud’s beloved companion had been a fixture of the household, accepted by Ewan as she had been by Grandmother Macneill, spending her vacation there and writing regularly when she was not. Maud mourned her as more than a friend and a cousin. She mourned the loss of a life partner, wishing that Frede had left a child for her to raise.40 Intensely loyal Maud would grieve for the rest of her life, her love and loss fueling the idealization of Frede, whose memory filled the growing emotional void of Maud’s life. As if the event had unhinged their lives, just a few months later, Ewan suffered a mental breakdown.
In 1919, a dark cloud began to settle over Maud’s domestic happiness, as the delicate balance of romantic, family, and professional life began to crumble. Writing in her journal on September 1, 1919, Maud charged that Ewan had intentionally hidden his psychological condition before they were married. (Divorce should be allowed in cases of incurable insanity, she said on October 18, 1923.41) Yet in truth, her own consistent pattern of refusing to see what she did not like to see was probably equally responsible, a truth she failed to accept. Nor had she herself been entirely truthful regarding her own emotional stability or the complex motivations that prompted her to marry him. Even though she liked to cast herself in the role of martyr, she had never been too sympathetic with a friend’s suffering. And there was no Frede to provide emotional sustenance, although the boyishly
handsome and charming Reverend Edwin Smith and other friends occasionally took on the role of mediators. For the rest of his life, as we know well from Maud’s journal, Ewan would suffer from attacks of severe depression and phobia, accompanied by headaches and insomnia; during these attacks he believed he was destined for hell and damnation.
In February 1920, Maud fumed when she saw Hollywood’s silent movie version of Anne of Green Gables at the Regent Theatre in Toronto.42 Sugary-sweet seventeen-year-old Mary Miles Minter starred as Anne and said it was her favorite role. Library and Archives Canada holds two lithograph posters that show Minter wearing a shawl and holding a parasol (evocative of Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm), looking a little like Mary Pickford. Maud was furious about the changes. At Anne’s graduation, the Stars and Stripes were prominently displayed. In one scene Anne appears at the door of her school, “a shotgun in hand, standing off a crowd of infuriated villagers who were bent on mobbing her because she had whipped one of her pupils!”43 Coincidentally, as Maud learned years later, Mary Minter’s career ended in scandal and notoriety when director William Desmond Taylor was found murdered in his Hollywood home in 1922, a crime that still remains unsolved. In the course of the investigation it was discovered that Mary Miles Minter, who was drawn to older film directors as father figures, had loved the married director “not wisely but too well,” as Maud would write.44 Ironically, like Evelyn Nesbit, Mary Miles could no longer be cast as the innocent child waif. Her career was over and the movie itself has disappeared.
There was more to make Maud’s temper flare up. Without her permission, L. C. Page had published Further Chronicles of Avonlea using earlier, discarded stories. He had boldly put a red-haired girl on the cover, insinuating that the loosely connected stories were centrally about Anne. He was now tampering with her literary reputation. The writer who had her heroine crack a slate over a boy’s head would prove a formidable foe in open combat. In June 1920, the color of Anne’s tresses was central to the Boston court case Maud brought against her publisher L.C. Page. During a full day of testimony Maud and the lawyers wrestled over the meaning of “Titian red.” Maud insisted that she had had in mind “a sort of flame-red,” whereas the other side argued that Anne’s hair was “dark red.”45 These legal battles would go on until March 1925, when the Supreme Court of Massachusetts decided in her favor. Page knew that most women would
submit rather than go to the law, she wrote to George MacMillan in February 1929. “But I come of a different breed of cats.”46
On November 29, 1934, just one day before her sixtieth birthday, Maud saw the Hollywood Anne of Green Gables in sound in Toronto. She liked the movie and the actress Dawn O’Day. She was pleased that Prince Edward Island and Canada were represented. That same evening, as relayed in detail in chapter one of this volume, Maud disclosed in her journal that Anne’s face was based on Evelyn Nesbit’s, who coincidentally had published her memoir Prodigal Days: The Untold Story that year. As to how much Maud actually knew concerning the model’s identity, she took that secret—like the story of the hair dye—to her grave.
By this time Maud, a grandmother, had reached the zenith of her remarkable but fluctuating career. L. M. Montgomery’s work continued to be popular, but during an era of buoyant Canadian nationalism, the gods of the literary establishment were suspicious of success achieved south of the border. Over the next decades, they also successfully purged the canon of anything they regarded as feminine or sentimental. Meanwhile, Maud fought back by raging against the “common rut of modern fiction with its reeking atmospheres of brothel and latrine.”47 While new generations of readers embraced Anne in Canada, the United States, Britain, Australia, Poland, and other countries, it would take until the mid-1980s for her fiction to find academic appreciation in the author’s own country.
In 1935 Maud settled in Toronto in her own home on 210 Riverside Drive at the Humber River. Sadly, it was not an inspired or happy home. Increasingly dependent on heavy medication, Maud and Ewan seemed to reinforce rather than alleviate each other’s depressions. “Takes fractious spells occasionally, but mostly he’s just vacant and good humoured and harmless,” Maud had written in Anne’s House of Dreams about Dick Moore, where Leslie Moore is living in a nightmarish marriage. “That’s the burden Leslie has had to carry for eleven years—and all alone.”48 Her spiritual home and refuge, even after almost three decades in Ontario, was still Prince Edward Island. During her frequent visits, she appeared to the Islanders as a famous, bejeweled woman, touring in a car. “She seemed as if she thought she was a little better than the rest of us,” said Keith Webb, recalling her visits to Cavendish.49 She always carried a little notebook, still jotting down impressions, phrases, jokes, and characters for future
use in her books. As if she was crawling back into the safety of her own fiction, she would often stay at “Green Gables,” the home of Myrtle Macneill Webb (Keith’s mother)—the very house on which she had modeled the home of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert years earlier. Maud would sleep in the upstairs room, what Ernest Webb (Myrtle’s husband) called “Anne’s room”—a bizarre blending of fact and fiction. In 1936, to mark one of her visits, she placed a postcard of “‘Green Gables’ Cavendish P.E. Island” in her journal. The house onto which she had projected her feelings of home would be maintained by the Canadian Government as a centerpiece of the new national park, with Ernest Webb as the first park warden.50 Published in 1936, Anne of Windy Poplars offered a glimpse of Green Gables that merged with the postcard view of Webb’s Green Gables, now part of the national park. The fairies had disappeared from the noisy world, she said, but they were still alive on Prince Edward Island. It was a world filled with “home-y ghosts—my ain folk.” It was still home. She walked through Lover’s Lane, which had never lost its magic. “I am always young back there,” she noted in her journal.51
In 1938, Maud, along with the rest of the world, felt a new wave of worry after Hitler annexed Austria. On September 12, a hot and muggy day in Toronto, she began to write Anne of Ingleside. (Maud had written Rilla of Ingleside in 1921, focusing on the Great War, when Anne was in her fifties, and in Anne of Ingleside she returned to a chronological time prior to Rilla, when Anne is in her thirties.) Anne of Ingleside was Maud’s final Anne novel published during her lifetime and she chose to focus on Anne as a young mother.52 Once more, one last time, she was roaming in the world of Lover’s Lane, the Haunted Wood, Idlewild, the Birch Path. She was living in all the spots she loved. It had been a year and a half since she had last written a line of fiction. “But I can still write,” she noted in her journal that night; “And I was suddenly back in my own world with all my dear Avonlea and Glen folks again.”53
One last time, she conjured up the world of Anne and Diana meeting in the old haunts as adult women and young mothers. “Anne … but we have kept our old ‘solemn vow and promise,’ haven’t we?” says Diana. “Always … and always will,” answers Anne, now the mother of five children. “Anne’s hand found its way into Diana’s.” Quietly and silently they walk home, “their old unforgotten love burning in their hearts.”54