The Mystery of Lucy Maud Montgomery

On the tortured soul behind the prolific pen

On a warm summer Wednesday, about 50 Lucy Maud Montgomery devotees, some in historical costume, travelled to Leaskdale, Ont., where the Anne of Green Gables writer watched her husband deliver Sunday sermons more than 100 years ago. Instead of a certain saviour, Canada’s bestselling author is depicted in an engraved triptych on the wall of the old Presbyterian church near the Leaskdale Manse National Historic Site, about 90 kilometres northwest of Toronto. At the podium, if you borrowed some of Anne Shirley’s ample imagination, was Montgomery herself.

It was really Nova Scotian Rosalee Peppard Lockyer, dressed in a gorgeous lace gown in shades of blue and an elaborate wide-brimmed hat. The women’s musical oral historian has been portraying “Maud,” as the writer liked to be called, since 2017, when she was hired by the Lucy Maud Montgomery Society of Ontario to write a song cycle about the famous Canadian. That afternoon, she performed L.M. Montgomery: a Song Portrait, along with dramatic readings from Montgomery’s diaries. If attendees were expecting those words to sound at all like her famous character Anne Shirley, they were in for a disappointment.

“Maud called her journals her grumbles,” said Peppard Lockyer, the author of a 2022 storybook called My Maud by Katie Maurice, in an interview after the tea and talk. Anne fans know Katie Maurice is the lonely orphan’s imaginary friend, but are likely unaware Montgomery had a make-believe companion of the same name when she was a child. It’s poignant since, as Peppard Lockyer noted, Montgomery lacked a single confidante in Leaskdale to talk about the pressures of being a minister’s perfect wife, the family breadwinner, mother of two small children and a wildly successful writer.

In November, for the much-anticipated 150th anniversary of the iconic writer’s birth on Nov. 30, 1874 in Clifton, P.E.I., expect a lot more fanfare. The island’s Montgomery 150 celebrations have already welcomed hundreds of thousands of visitors to an extravaganza of literary tours, lectures, musicals, children’s summer camps, scavenger hunts and high teas. Canadian bookstores are stocked with all nine books in the Anne series – not to mention 12 other novels, two poetry collections and more than 500 short stories – which, combined, have sold more than 50 million copies worldwide. In June, the Royal Canadian Mint released a commemorative loonie featuring an artist’s sketch of a pig-tailed Anne and introspective Montgomery, in profile.

On the surface, Anne and the author have much in common. Both were born on P.E.I. in the late 19th century. Both were sent to live with older adults – Anne to middle-aged siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert; Montgomery to her maternal grandparents – who were stern, religious and conservative, compared to the creative and imaginative children. Like Anne, Montgomery excelled at her studies and became a school teacher.

And yet, there are key discrepancies between the writer and her literary alter ego. Some are silly and superficial, like the carrot-red hair that Anne called her “lifelong sorrow” (Montgomery’s waist-length brunette waves were her favourite physical feature) or Anne’s insistence on her “e” (Montgomery was equally adamant it was never to be added to Maud). Other differences are as big as they come. Montgomery refused love from her “Gilbert Blythe” – a school chum called Nate – and married, for stature and security, the curmudgeonly Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald, who moved them from P.E.I to manses in the small Ontario towns of Leaskdale and Norval, and, eventually, their final home in Toronto. Where Anne happily gives up her writing to embrace marriage and family, Montgomery steadfastly fought against a sexist society to have it all.

In a diary entry about her new marriage, after crying herself to sleep the night before the wedding, Montgomery wrote: “I sat at that gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man I had married – and I was as unhappy as I’ve ever been in my life.”

In comparison, when Anne Shirley married in 1917’s Anne’s House of Dreams, she “wakened on the morning of her wedding day to find the sunshine winking in at the window of the little porch gable and a September breeze frolicking with her curtains. ‘I’m so glad the sun will shine on me,’ she thought happily.’” The stark contrast was likely lost on her husband; by all accounts, he never read a single one of her books and resented her success.

Reconciling the woman who wrote these “grumbles” with the one who wrote the cheery Anne of Green Gables isn’t easy, but Peppard Lockyer said trying – and empathizing – is the only way we might begin to unravel the mystery of Montgomery. “To me, Anne is her spirit, light and bright, while Maud is the real woman, dark and complicated.”

Although Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, was an instant bestseller that made her both rich and famous in 1908, Montgomery was nonetheless prone to bouts of depression, fuelled by legal fights with her publisher; her husband’s mental illnesses; a wayward son who secretly married his pregnant girlfriend; and worry over investments lost in the 1929 stock market crash. Much of Montgomery’s frustration came from her treatment by the Canadian literary establishment, mostly men, who often dismissed her work as women’s lit and kids’ books. But, with Montgomery’s life in mind, the Anne books gain depth and meaning. “You may think Anne’s talking about, say, cherry blossoms on a tree,” said actor Megan Follows, who played Anne Shirley in the 1985 TV miniseries, “but really she’s talking about making the choice of seeing beauty in the world instead of going toward darkness.”

At 14, Montgomery read over her embarrassing childhood diaries and, to her eternal regret, burned them. She never made that mistake again and leaned into writing her entries. “She shaped the journals very, very carefully,” said Toronto Metropolitan University English professor Irene Gammel, author of the 2009 non-fiction book Looking for Anne of Green Gables. “She often went back, adding and subtracting, always careful and conscious of her posthumous legacy and reputation, right up until the days before she died.” Even though we’ll never know what she omitted, what remains is just what she wanted us to know, including every unbecoming mood and rant and insult.

After years of self-medicating with brandy and sedatives, Montgomery died in her Toronto home in April 1942 from an overdose of barbiturates. Most scholars consider it a suicide, given the note found at her bedside: “May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it.” Montgomery’s youngest son, Dr. Stuart Macdonald, pocketed the note and hid it along with his mother’s private journals. In 1981, Macdonald sold his mother’s journals and scrapbooks to the University of Guelph, and academics like Gammel and Mary Henley Rubio, co-editor of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, began investigating the writer’s troubled life.

“I’ll never forget reading the diaries for the first time,” says Gammel. “There was so much public discussion at the time about what they meant and whether they’d change how we all feel about Anne.” For Gammel, Montgomery’s personal challenges only make Anne’s existence even more impressive.

We’ve all long loved the fantasy of Anne Shirley and, although Montgomery most certainly didn’t embody it, true Anne fans should embrace the writer as the foil for her beloved mythic heroine: challenging and complicated, contradictory and confusing, but a kindred spirit, nonetheless.