Lucy Maud Montgomery

by Mary Henley Rubio

  Reflecting on her adolescent years much later, Maud complained that if she slipped out for a walk in the woods her grandmother would suspect she had been out to meet a young man and would make remarks that made her “hate living” (January 2, 1905). This is bitter language. When she complains that her grandparents frowned on her interest in attending all the Baptist evening prayer meetings and community hall lectures, she makes them sound rigid and unreasonable. Maud’s journals pretend to be candid in self-analysis, but she skips lightly over the taboo subject of sexual behaviour. However, on three separate occasions when she admits she was deeply attracted to certain men, she vigorously denies in each case that she gave in to her sexual impulses. The very force of her denial—probably written into her journals after 1919 when she began recopying them—suggests that she wanted to counter gossip that she feared might linger years later when she was world-famous and expected her life to be scrutinized. She alludes in her journals to future biographies.

  Gossip was not just entertainment. It was a powerful form of social control when Maud was young. Gossip went from one end of the 145-mile-long Island to the other in record time, often travelling faster than people did, especially after the Island adopted the telephone that Alexander Graham Bell had patented in 1876. Men outwardly disdained gossip as a woman’s vice, but women understood—as Maud did—that gossip could bring the mightiest down, men included. “What will people say?” was always the dreaded question. Maud’s grandmother used it with her, and she would later use it repeatedly with her sons.

  Female sexuality was a source of enormous anxiety in that era; indeed, all human sexuality was seen largely as a shameful, secret activity. Raising a girl like Maud would have been a nerve-wracking process in an era when a female’s reputation for chastity set her social value, her marriage potential, and hence her future happiness. Relatives who resented that she was cleverer than their offspring would have been ready to chastise her behaviour with young men, especially since any indiscretion on her part would reflect poorly on the entire clan.

  Fortunately, Maud’s beloved teacher, Hattie Gordon, was the model of an ambitious young woman who had gained some education and was practising a profession. Like many young men, Maud wanted to take teacher’s training in order to put aside enough money to finance a real university education at a school off the Island. But there was a catch: school teaching was much more poorly paid for women than for men, even when they did the identical work. Once again, she could see that her gender was a disadvantage. And anyone could point out that the women who proceeded through the Prince of Wales College to become teachers quit teaching the minute they found a husband. (In fact, teaching in a different community was often a means of obtaining a husband.)

  A woman who was not lucky enough to marry stayed with her parents, or she might move in with a married sibling, where she had a very low social status and hence had to work doubly hard at domestic chores to justify her use of space. Or she could move to town and clerk in a store. A few women, like Charlottetown’s talented Angie Doiron, had their own commercial shops, but this was rare. An unmarried woman could move around as a dressmaker, or could work as a maid in someone else’s home, but these options were beneath Maud’s social class. The Scots regarded going out “in service” as fit only for the Irish or the French Acadians. As she grew older, Maud was terrified that she would become a lonely and pitied old maid.

  Yet, when Maud looked at women like her aunts and her grandmother, she could see that married women’s lives were hard: the saying that “a man must work from sun to sun, but women’s work is never done” was clearly true. Women’s lives were given over to incessant child-bearing and work—and if they married a difficult husband, to suffering in silence unless they could “manage their man.” If they could not produce children they were pitied, while today we might be more inclined to pity the fertile woman of that era. There was no effective birth control. With six to eighteen children to care for in primitive conditions, motherhood was no small task. Women frequently died in childbirth or developed medical problems from overwork or from merely giving birth to so many children.

  Maud was beginning to understand her rather tenuous position within the structures of her clan and village. There was no easy escape from her position as a clever but plain young woman without an inheritance or the means to a good education. Her Uncle Leander, a minister, could have done much for her at this period. He could have invited his talented but restless niece to New Brunswick and introduced her to culture there if he thought she was getting out of hand in Cavendish. But his family visiting went in one direction only. Maud could again see that if she had been a boy, there would have been more interest in her career.

  During these tumultuous years, it was Miss Gordon who helped Maud develop a belief in herself. Very soon after her arrival, Miss Gordon organized her students to give a “Literary Concert” in the Community Hall. Here Maud gave her first public recitation, “A Child Martyr.” Her excellent memory made learning set pieces easy, and she knew from her grandfather how to make her voice perform. She was a big success, and this was just the first in a lifetime of public performances. Her stature in the community went up several notches. Meanwhile, Miss Gordon began to foster Maud’s talent in other ways. She asked her students to work on essays for entry in the Montreal Witness school competition. In February 1890, Maud’s essay on the wreck of the Marco Polo placed third in the county. As the year unfolded and Miss Gordon constantly praised her elocutionary and writing abilities, Maud began to dream of becoming an author. She believed that she could only achieve this goal through higher education. She wanted to become famous, and to prove to her clan that she was talented and worthy—even if she was only a girl.

  The “Old Home,” where Maud was raised by her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill, in Cavendish, PEI.

  Maud around age 12.

  Maud’s “Lovers’ Lane” in Cavendish.

  Two images of Maud’s bedroom in the “Old Home.”

  Maud’s paternal grandfather, Senator Donald Montgomery (1808–1893).

  Maud’s grandfather’s contemporary, the thirteenth Earl of Eglinton, of Scotland.

  Hugh John Montgomery, Maud’s father, and his second wife, Mary Ann.

  Maud’s mother, Clara Macneill Montgomery.

  Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill, Maud’s maternal grandparents.

  Maud’s birthplace at Clifton (New London), PEI, with Dr. Stuart Macdonald, her son, taken a few weeks before his death in 1982.

  Left: Professor Murray Macneill (Maud’s cousin), Uncle Leander Macneill, and Grandmother Macneill and grandchild.

  The home of David and Margaret Macneill, and the model for “Green Gables,” in 1935.

  The John Campbell home in Park Corner, PEI, home to the “merry Campbell cousins.”

  Maud’s beloved teacher, Miss Hattie Gordon.

  Maud’s uncle John F. Macneill and his wife.

  John A. Mustard, while he was Maud’s teacher and suitor in Prince Albert, PEI.

  CHAPTER 3

  The ugly stepmother: Prince Albert and disillusion

  During the winter of Maud’s fifteenth year, the possibility of an escape from the scrutiny of her strict grandparents presented itself. It was mooted that she travel to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, to live with her father. She felt certain that she would be happier there. It never occurred to her that her father might want her to come for any reason other than deep paternal affection.

  As a senator in Ottawa, Maud’s Grandfather Montgomery had access to political perks like free passes for railway travel, and he was hankering to make a trip all across the country on the newly opened transcontinental rail service. (Before the Last Spike was driven on November 7, 1885, railway lines had already branched in many directions on the prairies.) He planned to visit his son Hugh John in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, on his way to the west coast. He could easily drop Maud off at her father’s house. She would be a lively travell
ing companion, and the magnanimous gesture would cost him nothing.

  The Macneills were willing to release Maud to her father’s family, though not without mixed feelings. Despite their difficulties with their spirited granddaughter, they did care for her deeply. Moreover, they had raised her to an age at which she could now be useful. Daughters and granddaughters who stayed close to home were expected to look after their elderly parents and grandparents. Of Alexander and Lucy’s children, John F. Macneill was at odds with his father, and their two living daughters were some distance away. Lucy Macneill could hardly be blamed for hoping Maud might be a source of practical help and future comfort. If she were now whisked off to the distant interior of the great continent, might she marry there, and stay? Never kindly disposed to Hugh John—especially given that he had contributed almost nothing to the costs of raising Maud—the Macneills likely felt he was now arrogating to himself the benefits of their labours. But Maud’s increasingly tempestuous nature had caused enough turmoil, and her grandmother was undoubtedly weary from buffering the clashes between Maud and her grandfather.

  Much had happened in Hugh John Montgomery’s life since his departure from the Island. Grieving after Clara’s death, he had gone first to his sister in Boston, a natural destination for many Maritimers. Then, after returning to the Island to maintain contact with his young daughter, he had left to seek opportunities in the west, like thousands of other Islanders. He worked in Winnipeg, Manitoba, and then moved to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, a boom town, where his father’s political connections helped him find a lucrative $700-a-year position as a Forest Ranger and Homestead Inspector. When he began moonlighting as an auctioneer to supplement this rich salary, his supervisor disapproved and punished him by transferring him to another town, Battleford. This was inconvenient: Hugh John had acquired a house in Prince Albert, pretentiously naming it “Eglintoun Villa” in honour of his putative connection with the Earls of Eglinton.

  This house now had to be put up for rent. The entrepreneurial Hugh John rented to the Agent for Dominion Lands, a Mr. McTaggart. McTaggart’s stepdaughter, Mary Ann McRae, twenty-three years old, was the niece of the railway millionaire William Mackenzie (1849–1923; knighted in 1911). Hugh John took notice. Perhaps the chemistry of his loneliness and her connections to wealth helped him see beauty in Mary Ann’s slightly sour face.

  Hugh John Montgomery and Mary Ann McRae were married in 1887, back at her home in Cannington, Ontario; they were fêted in Ottawa at a viceregal reception in the Senate Chamber; and they lived in Battleford for three years before moving back into “Eglintoun Villa” in Prince Albert. Hugh Montgomery resumed his auctioneering, sold life insurance, ran a conveyancing business, dabbled in real estate, and became a purchasing agent for the growing railway network of his wife’s wealthy uncle, William Mackenzie. Described in the Prince Albert Times as a popular and buoyant character, he somehow never managed to become a man of substance.

  By 1890, he and Mary Ann had a two-year-old daughter and were expecting a second child. Bringing Maud out to help his peevish wife with the work must have seemed a good idea to Hugh John (and it is doubtful that he was fully apprised of what a handful his daughter could be). Maud would gain experience in homemaking while she looked after her half-siblings, and Mary Ann would have more time for the socializing she enjoyed. He may also have hoped that an adoring daughter in the house would offset Mary Ann’s bad temper. With his little “Maudie” about, he could share tales about people on the Island.

  On August 11, 1890, when Maud and her grandfather left for Saskatchewan, Senator Montgomery arranged to be taken briefly into the private railway car of Canada’s prime minister, John A. Macdonald, who was just then touring the island by rail. Impressed, Maud wrote in her diary that the prime minister was a “great crony” of her Grandfather Montgomery. Maud described Sir John A. Macdonald as pleasant, “a spry-looking old man—not handsome but pleasant-faced,” and his wife as “stately and imposing, with very beautiful silver hair, but not at all good looking and dressed … very dowdily” (August 11, 1890).

  Travelling some three thousand miles in nine days, Maud rolled past the picturesque New Brunswick riverbanks, the steep, wooded hills of Maine with clusters of ragged children in the clearings, the northern wilds of Ontario (a landscape of tree stumps along the Canadian Pacific Railway tracks), the “cold Superior’s rockbound shore,” the monotonous prairies of Manitoba and the “desolate” city of Winnipeg, which looked “as if someone had thrown a handful of streets and houses down and forgotten to sort them out afterwards,” and the Saskatchewan bleakness around Regina. The last part of the trip was in a caboose and then in a buckboard pulled by a team of horses. They arrived on August 20, and her grandfather was then ready to hail ceremoniously the first train that came through, extending the line to Prince Albert.

  Prince Albert had been founded in 1866 as a Presbyterian mission but was now incorporated as a “pretty” but “straggly” town along the riverbank. It had one bank, a town hall, tailor, gunsmith, dentist, taxidermist, barber shop, millinery shop, and sash and door factory; two hotels, bakeries, drugstores, blacksmiths, photographers, jewellers, breweries, gristmills, printing offices, and doctors; three sawmills, purveyors, and butchers; four painters and law firms; five carpenter shops; and seven bricklayers and stone masons.33 There was also a division of the North West Mounted Police, several churches, a public school, and a convent school for girls. The 1890 census reports Prince Albert as having 1,090 inhabitants; this included a visible population of natives and many “half-breeds.” The Riel Rebellion of 1885, in which Maud’s father claimed to have been a volunteer, had culminated in Batôche, twenty-seven miles away. Maud came to a booming, raw frontier town with a totally different character from the staid, settled, and cultured Cavendish.

  But there was disappointment for Maud. Only three days after her arrival in Prince Albert, she became desperately homesick. Her homesickness was only partly for the beauty of Prince Edward Island. She had quickly taken the measure of her father’s new wife. “[A]lready my eyes have been opened by several little things,” she wrote in her diary. Mary Ann, pregnant and dyspeptic, insulted her husband. Maud wrote that her father “asked me to put up with some things for his sake … she picks and nags at him unceasingly and on some days he cannot make the simplest, most harmless remark but she snubs him.… For example—at dinner time today father and I were talking about Aunt Emily and Uncle John Montgomery. Father said he did not think Aunt Emily cared a great deal for Uncle John when she married him. ‘Oh, I suppose you think she wanted you,’ sneered Mrs. Montgomery, in her most insulting tone” (August 26, 1890).

  Mary Ann clearly resented the bond between her husband and the nearly grown child of his first wife, who was starved for her father’s love. By the time Grandfather Montgomery came back through from British Columbia on September 20, Maud wrote her cousin, Pensie Macneill, that she would have given anything to go home with him.

  The younger McTaggart children (Mary Ann’s half-siblings) apparently confided to Maud that they did not like Mary Ann either. Nor did Edie, the young girl from Battleford who had been hired to help in the house, and who was quickly dispatched back home after Maud’s arrival. When Mrs. Montgomery, resenting the girls’ friendship and chatter, quizzed Edie about why Maud “put her hair up” (a sign of a young woman’s adulthood, and premature for a fifteen-year-old), Maud fumed in her journal: “To ask such a thing of a girl in Edie’s position—household help. It has made me feel absolute contempt for her” (October 20, 1890). Maud had brought her own snobbery from her family, as well as her reading of British novels. Ironically, the easily displeased Mary Ann, who was only twenty-seven, now insisted that Hugh John quit calling his daughter “Maudie” because it was “too childish.”

  Hugh John, who had not seen his daughter since she was nine. He hadn’t anticipated that his daughter, expecting to be the apple of his eye and craving the affection he had to parcel out to his younger fami
ly, would be seen as competition by his wife. Maud was expecting to be treated as a princess, but Mary Ann saw her as an unpaid household drudge.

  Maud had looked forward to continuing her education in Prince Albert, but the school system in this raw town was far more crude than that of Cavendish. School classes were held in a former hotel. The classroom was directly beneath a public ballroom and doubled as a ladies’ dressing room on ball nights. On days following a dance, the children found hairpins, feathers, and flowers strewn on the floor. The police patrol headquarters were in the same building; drunken men and petty criminals were locked in cells adjacent to the classroom, according to Maud’s journals from this period.

  When Maud started school in September, there were eight boys in the class, four of them “Nitchees.” This Algonkian term meant “friend” but had become derogatory slang. To keep order in class, the teacher was expected to use a five-foot rawhide whip. Recess consisted of watching people on the street: “Indians for the most part—’braves’ with their dirty blankets … or chattering dark-eyed squaws with their glossy blue-black hair and probably a small-faced papoose strapped to the back,” wrote Maud. She described the native people again in letters to Pensie, saying that there were many Indians, but they were much handsomer than the ones in PEI.34 Another letter described how the women swaddled their infants in strips of flannel rolled tightly around the baby, then fastened the swaddled baby to their backs with a shawl.35

  Maud’s teacher was a rather handsome young man from Ontario, a graduate of the University of Toronto. Born in 1867 in Uxbridge, Ontario, John Mustard was the promising and gifted son of prominent farmers and churchmen of Scottish descent; coincidentally, he had gone to school with Mary Ann, Maud’s stepmother, in Uxbridge. His position in Prince Albert had been obtained with glowing recommendations from his former professors. However, Mr. Mustard, with what Maud called his “carefully cultivated moustache,” did not have the aggressive and commanding presence needed to handle the motley crew in his wild classroom. Raised by his devout Presbyterian parents to take life seriously, he was earnest about life and mild in personality. Maud commented, “Mr. Mustard is not a good teacher and the work seems to drift along without any ‘go’ or life in it” (Sept. 19, 1890). Letters to Pensie complain of dull lessons—drill, drill, and more drill. For a quick student like Maud, this was exceptionally boring.