Life after death: the real Lucy Maud Montgomery

Celebrating the woman behind Anne of Green Gables on the literary icon’s 150th birthday

One hundred and fifty years ago, on the last day of November 1874, a pair of young newlyweds welcomed their only child into the world in a two-storey wooden house on Prince Edward Island. Even if the girl’s early months were happy, they were over by the time she formed her first memory: her mother laying in a coffin, dead of tuberculosis just 21 months later. Her father, never approved of by his in-laws, left the baby to be raised by her strict, religious grandparents. But the girl grew to be clever, articulate, imaginative and resilient. She excelled in school, eventually becoming a smashing success.

If this story trajectory sounds familiar, it should: it’s the real-life biography of Canadian literary icon Lucy Maud Montgomery and the foundation of her beloved bestseller Anne of Green Gables and its seven sequels, which have sold more than 50 million copies in 36 languages around the globe. Like countless fiction writers before her, Montgomery took inspiration from her real life, polishing and perfecting — or rewriting entirely — reality to fit her imagination.

“All the stories that Maud told were essentially variations on her own personal narrative,” Mary Henley Rubio writes in her Montgomery biography The Gift of Wings. Turning to her journals for content, Anne of Green Gables let Montgomery rewrite her life as she wished it had unfolded.

Forty years after Montgomery’s death, her inner life was finally revealed through her personal diaries, notebooks, scrapbooks, private correspondence and original manuscripts, all donated to the University of Guelph by her youngest son, Stuart. Through them, Rubio and the close-knit community of Anne scholars would dive well beyond her books and deep into the mind of their author. For nearly a century, by design, if you knew Anne, you knew Montgomery. But all that was about to change.

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On September 21, 1889, 14-year-old Montgomery began anew: “I am going to begin a new kind of diary. I have kept one of a kind for years — ever since I was a tot of nine. But I burned it to-day … I’m going to start out all over new and write only when I have something worth writing about.”

Although it was well worth writing about, in her diaries Montgomery never fully reveals the childhood abandonment that wounded her and the lifelong tribulation of having been born female at the time. Perhaps if she had been a son, her father might not have disappeared. At first, he remained on the island and visited sporadically, but by the time Montgomery was six, he had moved to Saskatchewan to seek a fortune he never found. He did remarry and start a new family, though, while Montgomery stayed in Cavendish with her 50-something maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill. (Since Grandma’s name was also Lucy, it’s here that Montgomery became Maud.)

Unlike Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, the fictional Anne’s stern but loving guardians, neither of Montgomery’s grandparents expressed the affection or endearment the child so craved. Alexander was critical and crotchety, and Montgomery believed for years that he didn’t like her. With legal personhood for women still decades away, both grandparents believed children should be seen and not heard and that women belonged in the home. When Montgomery’s grandfather entered the room, both wife and granddaughter were expected to remain silent.

“Montgomery fantasized a different ideal of masculinity,” says Irene Gammel, Anne of Green Gables scholar and author of Looking for Anne. “Anne, Marilla, Rachel Lynde — they’re all strong women surrounded by these sweetheart, supportive men.” Matthew is reimagined as a quiet gentleman eager to listen to the endlessly talkative orphan, while Montgomery may have found inspiration for Gilbert Blythe, Anne’s academic rival-turned-sweetheart, in her real-life schoolmate Nate Lockhart — the cleverest boy in her Cavendish, P.E.I., grade school.

Alongside their friendly rivalry, they passed notes, walked together along “Lovers’ Lane” and gave each other nicknames. The year she turned 15, Lockhart wrote Montgomery a letter bravely declaring his love. Montgomery avoided him from then on, and when she got word he’d said her “fair intellect” meant she “might attain some success in the world of letters,” she never forgave him for the slight.

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“Well, this has really been the proudest day of my life! I feel at least three inches taller than I did yesterday,” Montgomery wrote on Sunday, Dec. 7, 1890 — the day her first official publication, a poem, appeared in the Charlottetown Patriot. She had just turned 16. “I seized it with a beating heart and trembling fingers and opened it. I grew dizzy — the letters danced before my eyes and I felt a curious sensation of choking — for there in one of the columns was my poem!”

Unlike Anne, who refuses her full scholarship to college in order to stay home at Green Gables and teach in the local one-room school, Montgomery aspired to more and fought hard for it. To afford tuition to attend an accelerated-year teachers’ college in 1893, the year she turned 19, she taught music lessons and saved every penny. The difference was made up by, of all people, her grandmother. This generosity wasn’t because she was proud of her granddaughter, like Anne’s Marilla, but because she was pragmatic; when her husband passed, the homestead would go to the eldest male heir. If Montgomery didn’t find work, she’d be homeless.

Fast-tracking through a two-year program in one year, Montgomery got her teacher’s licence and worked a few teaching jobs across the island to make ends meet. On the side, she pursued her real passion of writing and saw successes trickling in: her first paid (in the form of magazine subscriptions) poem, “The Violet’s Spell,” to Ladies Home Journal, her first legitimate cheque ($5 for a contest won at the Evening Mail) and a puff column at the Halifax Echo that she published under the pen name “Cynthia.”
By age 30, with what Rubio calls “manic energy,” Montgomery’s creative output was at its peak, with at least 168 short stories and 192 poems published thus far. She was earning $500 annually for her writing — as much as a well-paid male professional. While living back at her then-widowed grandmother’s house, Anne flowed effortlessly from Montgomery in just 18 months.

Meanwhile, suitors pursued her almost constantly, including the new local reverend — handsome and single, and therefore the most eligible man in town — whom Montgomery would later marry.
Outwardly, Montgomery’s life was the best it had ever been, and she no doubt channelled that into Anne’s positive and uplifting tale. Inwardly, Montgomery suffered from her first bouts of depression, and her journals grew increasingly cruel and sour. On her Aunt Emily, for example, who’d later inspire Emily of New Moon, Montgomery writes, “I have never cared for her. She jars on me in every fibre; she has no intellectual qualities; she is unsympathetic, fault-finding, nagging and ‘touchy’.” On the marriage of her old flame, Nate Lockhart, some biting sarcasm: “Poor Nate, I hope he is happy and that he has a nice little wife.”

For more than a year, the Anne of Green Gables manuscript circulated among publishers and was rejected five times. Though surely disappointed, Montgomery didn’t vent in her diaries and in fact didn’t mention writing Anne at all until it finally sold, in August 1907, to L.C. Page & Company of Boston. Only when the deal was done did Montgomery dare commit her efforts to paper. “Nothing I have ever written has given me so much pleasure to write,” she wrote. “I wrote it for love, not money — but very often such books are the most successful.”

Montgomery had no idea how right she would become. Anne of Green Gables hit shelves in June 1908 and became an instant bestseller. Rave reviews poured in from the New York Times Review of Books (“one of the most extraordinary girls that ever came out of an ink pot”) and the Toronto Globe (“worth a thousand of the problem stories with which the bookshelves are crowded these days”). Within four months, Anne was already into its fifth reprinting, and almost overnight, L.M. Montgomery became Canada’s most well-known author.

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The night before her 1911 wedding to Reverend Ewan Macdonald, Montgomery cried herself to sleep. In her journals, she recalled, “When it was all over and I found myself sitting there by my husband’s side … I felt a sudden horrible onrush of rebellion and despair. I wanted to be free!”

Why did Montgomery, the richest and most famous author in the country, with all the resources to be free if she chose to be, marry just the same? “Because she was a creature of her time, and in many ways, she was conventional and conservative,” says Gammel. Namely, she wanted children, and having them out of wedlock was completely unfathomable. Montgomery didn’t even publicly embrace women’s suffrage, though that’s not to say that ideas of female equality and empowerment aren’t written between the lines of Montgomery’s books. “The subversiveness that we all enjoy so much is typically in the subtext,” says Gammel.

After the wedding, the Macdonalds left Montgomery’s beloved island behind and moved to the tiny village of Leaskdale, Ont., near Uxbridge. The minister’s manse, although not technically hers, was the first home that ever felt like Montgomery’s own. She revelled in its design and decoration, ordering furniture and finishings from the Eaton’s department store in Toronto. In her journals, she diligently monitored her progress, pasting photographs of rooms as they were completed.

In the bedroom upstairs, beneath a gabled ceiling and atop her homemade patchwork quilt, Montgomery gave birth to three sons: Chester Cameron in July 1912, Hugh Alexander, a stillborn, in August 1914 and Ewan Stuart in October 1915. Parents and children shared one bedroom, which visitors can still see at the well-preserved manse-turned-museum, while their live-in maid slept in a room down the hall.
Montgomery was a hands-on mother who loved caring for her sons more than most anything else. “Motherhood is heaven,” she gushed in her journal. “It pays for all.”

Every morning between 9 a.m. and noon, Montgomery locked the door to her front parlour and wrote by hand on paper. Professionally, her time in Leaskdale proved fruitful; in 15 years, she wrote nine novels, two short story collections and a book of poetry. Personally, although by all accounts the people of Leaksdale adored her, she lacked a single confidant and found the role of the minister’s perfect wife to be lonely and ostracizing. “To all I try to be courteously tactful and considerate, and most of them I like superficially,” she wrote, “but the gates of my soul are barred against them. They do not have the key.”

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The Macdonald family relocated in 1926 to Norval, outside Guelph, and again in 1935, to a Toronto home they named “Journey’s End.” All the while, both Montgomery and her husband suffered with bouts of mental illness. After the First World War, Macdonald received an official diagnosis of “manic-depressive insanity” from a doctor in Boston. Since “any form of mental illness was considered a shameful secret,” writes Liz Rosenberg in House of Dreams: The Life of L.M. Montgomery, “Maud carefully hid the truth of her husband’s condition.” She wrote the sermons he read in church, and when he couldn’t, she’d lie and say he was out of town.

Taken with swigs of alcohol-filled cough syrup he carried in a flask, Macdonald was prescribed a rudimentary cocktail of sleeping pills and bromides (sedatives) that caused memory loss, headaches and lethargy. Montgomery was long prone to moods she dubbed “three o’clock in the mornings” for the anxiety-filled middle-of-the-night hours she’d spend pacing with clenched fists. She too self-medicated with sleeping pills, wine and tranquilizers alongside prescribed hypodermics and “Chinese pills” (likely an opioid). No doubt these years were, as Anne would say, the depths of despair.

Still, Montgomery managed to write and promote her work, though by this time, literary trends had changed, and not in her favour. “Romantic, affirmative women novelists … had been dominant throughout the first part of the twentieth century,” Rubio writes in her introduction to Montgomery’s selected journals, but “their dominance was now giving way (at least in the eyes of literary critics) to a new cadre of darker (male) realists.” Fitzgerald, Faulkner and Hemingway drove the new Modernism movement, which didn’t include Montgomery. Dismissed by critics like William Arthur Deacon, who described her work as a “series of girls’ sugary stories,” Montgomery felt increasingly excluded by the literary community.

“There was an active movement to take her down,” explains actor Megan Follows, best known for playing Anne Shirley in the CBC’s 1985 Anne of Green Gables miniseries. Follows is equally fascinated by the lesser-known life and plight of Montgomery herself. “She was actually targeted by the literary community who tried to minimize and erase her.”

Sadly, it almost worked. Until scholars like Rubio and Gammel resurrected her in the mid-’80s, Montgomery’s works sat collecting dust alongside contemporaries like Marian Keith and Mazo de la Roche — both bestselling Canadian women authors whose names most of us have never heard. Montgomery “was long ignored for the same reason Jane Austen was ignored: she wrote ‘women’s books’ about women,” says Gammel. “But even worse, she wrote about girls.”

Though exhausted and dejected, Montgomery nonetheless kept writing — an impressive feat given the depression, addiction and isolation that secretly defined her later life. In April 1942, Montgomery completed and mailed her final manuscript, the more modern and experimental The Blythes Are Quoted, and took a final dose of barbiturates that proved lethal. She lay down on her bed and never woke up.

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For more than 60 years, if there was a lesson to be had from Montgomery’s life and death, no one but her family could know it. Brought in to “take care” of things, Montgomery’s son Stuart removed all drug paraphernalia after his mother’s passing and pocketed what he always considered a suicide note: “May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand.” In 1942, if the iconic Canadian writer Lucy Maud Montgomery had ended her life by her own hand, it was a secret to be protected at all costs.

Today, thankfully, the world has changed to become a place where the Anne of Green Gables author needn’t have suffered in such shame and secrecy. As her stories continue to inspire new generations via television shows, audiobooks, theatre and musicals, the life lived behind them adds the very depth and complexity that her one-time critics insisted she lacked. What she couldn’t reveal in life, she revealed after her death.

Rather than burn or destroy her journals so they’d never come to light, Montgomery instead polished and perfected them. With the same careful effort she put into every book, she rewrote and reorganized her darkest truths. Despite everything, Montgomery still imagined a kinder, more empathetic world waited somewhere for her in the distant future. How lucky we are to live in the very world Montgomery envisioned, and to welcome her back with open arms.