Heilbron - Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery

Remembering

Lucy Maud Montgomery

ALEXANDRA HEILBRON

Copyright Alexandra Heilbron, 2001

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording, or otherwise (except for brief passages for purposes of review) without the prior permission of Dundurn Press. Permission to photocopy should be requested from the Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency.

Publisher: Anthony Hawke

Editor: Judith Turnbull

Design: Jennifer Scott

Printer: University of Toronto Press

Canadian Cataloguing in Publication Data

Heilbron, Alexandra

Remembering Lucy Maud Montgomery

ISBN 1-55002-362-4

1. Montgomery, L. M. (Lucy Maud), 1874-1942. 2. Novelists, Canadian (English) 20th century Biography I. Title.

1 2 3 4 5 05 04 03 02 01

We acknowledge the support of the Canada Council for the Arts and the Ontario Arts Council for our publishing program. We also acknowledge the financial support of the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program and The Association for the Export of Canadian Books, and the Government of Ontario through the Ontario Book Publishers Tax Credit program.

Care has been taken to trace the ownership of copyright material used in this book. The author and the publisher welcome any information enabling them to rectify any references or credit in subsequent editions.

J. Kirk Howard, President

Printed and bound in Canada.

Printed on recycled paper.

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This book is dedicated to my mother,
Jan Serlier Heilbron

Contents

This book wouldnt have been possible without the help of many people. Most importantly, the interviewees, who generously shared their time and memories, as well as George Campbell, Mary Beth Cavert, Brock and Sharon Clark, Harold Clark, Wilda Clark, Elaine Crawford, Gail and Bill Currie, Kathy Gastle, Judy Koshan, Stephan Lim, Anna MacDonald, Jennie and John Macneill, Norm McLeod, Robert Montgomery, Brenda Moore (ne Harwood), Kathryn Morton, John Wallace, and especially my mother, Jan Serlier Heilbron.

Thanks to all of you!

Most of L.M. Montgomerys books were so sunny and bright that her readers assumed that the authors life was exactly like that of the Anne of Anne of Green Gables, but when her journals were published, a darker side of L.M. Montgomery emerged. Naturally, this raised questions. Which L.M. Montgomery was the real Maud (as she preferred to be called) Montgomery? What was she really like?

Maud made an interesting assertion in an early volume of her journals. She claimed that when she was very young, she decided that no matter how difficult things were, no matter how she felt about certain people or aspects of her life, she would be cheerful and outgoing. She didnt want to darken other peoples lives with her troubles. Consequently, she concluded, no one truly knew her. They only knew the optimistic, outgoing, and helpful L.M. Montgomery she saved her problems for her journals.

Many entries were so dark and full of anguish that it is difficult to believe Maud could possibly have kept this part of her life to herself. While drowning in the sorrows revealed in her journal, could she really have presented herself as an upbeat, happy person to all who knew her?

I set about talking to people who had known her personally, to search out the answers. It gradually became apparent that just as Montgomerys books dont paint a true portrait of the author, neither do her journals. Perhaps this is because, as she openly admitted, she used her diaries largely to record her complaints. Not having a close friend in whom to confide her troubles, she wrote them down in order to get them off her chest. Naturally, some pleasant events were recorded, but considerable portions of the journals are filled with complaints, worries, and even nasty remarks. Writing in her journals was a catharsis for the often-troubled Maud.

Maud was an extremely busy person by choice, and as a ministers wife, a mother, and a world-famous author, she was under a lot of pressure. Some of this she brought on herself. Even though, for example, she had a maid to help with the cooking and housework, in her early married life Maud often insisted on planning menus and doing many of the chores herself. In addition, she ran several church groups, had members of the congregation over for visits or went to visit them, and set aside several hours each day for her writing. Maud also wrote in her journals and carried on a correspondence with pen-pals, fans, friends, and relatives. And she had two sons to look after Chester, born in 1912, and Stuart, born in 1915.

When Mauds long-time pen-pal Ephraim Weber offered to write her biography after her death, she replied that she did not want him or anyone else to write her biography, because no one could ever give an accurate portrayal of another person. At least with respect to herself, Maud was absolutely right: no one truly knew her when she was alive. It has become clear that only certain aspects of her personality are portrayed in her books and journals. Only when we take in all the information her novels, her journals, and the memories of the people who knew her do we have as true a picture as possible of the real L.M. Montgomery. This book offers one more aspect, one more piece of the puzzle that was Maud. The following shows how she appeared to the people who knew her the fans, friends, maids, Sunday school students, and family members.

Courtesy Robert Montgomery Lucy Maud Montgomery Heritage Museum

L.M. Montgomery lived in Prince Edward Island from her birth in 1874 until 1911, when she married the Reverend Ewan Macdonald and moved to Ontario. Although only three of her twenty novels were written while she lived there, nineteen of her books took place in whole or in part on Prince Edward Island.

After her move to Ontario, Maud visited the Island as often as she could, first with her husband and their two boys, Chester and Stuart, and later, when her sons were grown and her husband was ill, by herself. Her last visit was in 1939. She had a number of close friends and relatives on the Island with whom she would stay. When Maud was a child, she loved to visit her four cousins, Clara, Stella, George, and Frederica Campbell, in Park Corner. Clara, Stella, and Frederica had grown up and moved away, but George was still living at the Campbells farm in Park Corner with his wife, Ella, and their children. His mother, Mauds Aunt Annie, was also on hand.