A Name for Herself

by L. M. Montgomery

  Yours,

  Cavendish.

  The Alpine Path

  The Story of My Career

  In 1916, at the height of her career as a novelist, L.M. Montgomery penned a 25,000-word memoir in which she narrated a version of her childhood, her evolution and ultimate success as a writer, and her honeymoon. The invitation to do so came from the Toronto magazine Everywoman’s World (1914–1923), which had a monthly circulation of over 130,000 copies, according to the front cover of its May 1917 issue. Published in six instalments starting in June and ending in November 1917, “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career” is the most detailed autobiographical account that Montgomery published during her lifetime. It was remarkably frank compared with earlier essays and interviews, in which she had appeared highly reluctant to reveal even basic biographical details; yet it was also tactful and calculated compared with versions of her childhood and career that she constructed in her journals, which she eventually intended for posthumous publication.

  Everywoman’s World, which declared itself “Canada’s Great Home Magazine,” had already run a profile of Montgomery entitled “The Novelist of the Isle” in Mary Josephine Trotter’s “Prominent Women” column in 1914. It had also published several of her stories and poems1 and had included, in its April 1915 issue, both a contribution by Montgomery to a round table entitled “What Twelve Canadian Women Hope to See as the Outcome of the War” and her essay “The Way to Make a Book.”2 The magazine featured first-person and third-person accounts of prominent Canadian women on a regular basis, including five-chapter celebrity memoirs by film actors Margaret Anglin (1876–1958) and Julia Arthur (1869–1950) that appeared throughout mid-1916 and into 1917.3 Appearing alongside the August 1917 instalment was an article by Arthur B. Farmer entitled “Will My Daughter Be an Author?,” which featured a photograph of Montgomery under the headline “Fiction,” along with commentary on her appearance (see figure 1).4 According to an unsigned editorial appearing alongside the September 1917 instalment, the editors had obtained Montgomery’s “intensely human and yet restrained” memoir “only after much persuasion on our part,” adding that her title “suggests the hard, upward climb which almost everyone must come through life, and especially in journalistic life, before they arrive anywhere.”5

  When Montgomery wrote in her journal that she had consented to write the piece, she noted that she had chosen the title from “a bit of fugitive verse entitled ‘Lines to the Fringed Gentian’ by some forgotten author.” Carol Gaboury identified the source of this poem in the late 1980s: “The Fringed Gentian” appeared in a sixteen-chapter serial, “Tam: The Story of a Woman,” by Ella Rodman Church and Augusta de Bubna, in Godey’s Lady’s Book (Philadelphia) in six instalments published in the first half of 1884, when Montgomery was nine years old. What does not seem to have been discussed before is that Montgomery consistently misquoted part of this poem in her journals and in “The Alpine Path,” even though the Godey’s clipping is in one of her scrapbooks. The poem in its entirety appears as follows:

  Lift up thy dewy, fringed eyes,

  O little Alpine flower!

  The tear that trembling on them lies

  Has sympathetic power

  To move my own; for I, too, dream

  With thee of distant heights,

  Whose lofty peaks are all agleam

  With rosy, dazzling lights.

  Where aspirations, hopes, desires,

  Combining, fondly dwell –

  Where burn the never-dying fires

  Of genius’ wondrous spell.

  Such towering summits would I reach,

  Who climb and grope in vain:

  O little flower! the secret teach –

  The weary way make plain.

  Who dreams of wider spheres revealed

  Up higher, near the sky,

  Within the valley’s narrow field

  Cannot contented lie;

  Who longs for mountain breezes rare,

  Is restless down below –

  Like me, for stronger, purer air

  Thou pinest, too, I know.

  Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep,

  How may I upward climb

  The Alpine path so hard, so steep,

  That leads to heights sublime?

  How may I reach the far-off goal

  Of true and honored fame,

  To write upon its shining scroll

  A woman’s humble name?6

  What Church and de Bubna’s poem frames as two questions – “How may I upward climb … ?” and “How may I reach the far-off goal … ?” – Montgomery reframes as a demand: “Whisper … how I may upward climb … how I may reach that far-off goal.”7 Whether the misquotation was deliberate or inadvertent, it shows the degree of her determination to succeed.

  The publication of “The Alpine Path” in 1917 coincided with a year of major changes in Montgomery’s professional life. After publishing seven books with L.C. Page and Company, she had decided to part ways with her first publisher, partly because of his increasingly unethical business tactics, and partly because of his refusal to publish a book of her poems, which she thought he might agree to as a personal favour given the continually outstanding sales of her novels. The Watchman and Other Poems would be published by McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart in November 1916; the following year, Anne’s House of Dreams would be published by the same firm in Canada and by the Frederick A. Stokes Company in the United States. This publishing arrangement would continue for the rest of her career. The July 1917 issue of Everywoman’s World also contained Montgomery’s short story “The Schoolmaster’s Bride,” which would be reworked for Anne’s House of Dreams.

  When Fitzhenry and Whiteside republished “The Alpine Path” in 1974, an unsigned preface called this memoir “the most complete source of information about the childhood and early struggles of this accomplished and well-loved Canadian writer.”8 Indeed, the fact that little was widely known about Montgomery in 1974, the year of the centenary of her birth, made this volume a welcome addition to the conversation, even though it was poorly received.9 Yet its effects on the beginnings of Montgomery scholarship were immediate: half of the new articles appearing in the “L.M. Montgomery Issue” of Canadian Children’s Literature in autumn 1975 drew on “The Alpine Path” to provide biographical and cultural context.10 But as I discuss in the afterword to this book, it was only after several volumes of Montgomery’s private journals were published that scholars began to look at “The Alpine Path” as evidence of her creation of a public persona that stood in marked contrast from the supposedly “real” Montgomery of the journals. The book version also omitted twenty photographs and first-person captions that Montgomery had included in the Everywoman’s World version, many of which were organized in framed clusters that ignored chronology. In this volume, for ease of reference, photographs appear alongside first references to their subject matter in the text.

  Revisiting “The Alpine Path” a century after its appearance in Everywoman’s World and more than forty years after its first book publication by Fitzhenry and Whiteside is important because of how much more we know now about Montgomery’s life and about her strategies for self-representation than readers did in either 1917 or 1974. While she noted in her journal that she had snubbed her editor’s request for an additional thousand words about her “love affairs,”11 she remained silent about her decisions concerning what to include and what to exclude in this public account of her life. She did not explain, for instance, why she provided two snapshots captioned “Stuart” and “Chester” as part of a work that does not identify these children as hers or even declare that she had children at all, or why she decided not to name either her husband or the Ontario community to which she had moved after her marriage. Only in a brief note accompanying the penultimate instalment do the magazine editors attempt to correct this absence, referring to Montgomery first as “Lucy Maude [sic] Montgomery” and then as “Mrs. Ewan Macdonald, as she i
s now.”12 She likewise did not reveal what would be difficult to detect prior to the search capabilities of the digital age: she included in her memoir lengthy extracts from her journals, complete with date, but a closer comparison of this text and her private life writing reveals that she mined her journal for far more material than she let on, changing only details that would contradict the story of her life that she aimed to construct for public consumption.

  WHEN THE EDITOR OF EVERYWOMAN’S WORLD ASKED me to write “The Story of My Career,”13 I smiled with a little touch of incredulous amusement. My career? Had I a career? Was not – should not – a “career” be something splendid, wonderful, spectacular at the very least, something varied and exciting? Could my long, uphill struggle, through many quiet, uneventful years, be termed a “career”? It had never occurred to me to call it so;14 and, on first thought, it did not seem to me that there was much to be said about that same long, monotonous struggle. But it appeared to be a whim of the aforesaid editor that I should say what little there was to be said; and in those same long years I acquired the habit of accommodating myself to the whims of editors to such an inveterate degree that I have not yet been able to shake it off.15 So I shall cheerfully tell my tame story. If it does nothing else, it may serve to encourage some other toiler who is struggling along in the weary pathway I once followed to success.

  Many years ago, when I was still a child, I clipped from a current magazine a bit of verse, entitled “To the Fringed Gentian,”16 and pasted it on the corner of the little portfolio on which I wrote my letters and school essays. Every time I opened the portfolio I read one of those verses over; it was the key-note of my every aim and ambition:

  “Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep

  How I may upward climb

  The Alpine path, so hard, so steep,

  That leads to heights sublime;

  How I may reach that far-off goal

  Of true and honoured fame,

  And write upon its shining scroll

  A woman’s humble name.”

  It is indeed a “hard and steep” path; and if any word I can write will assist or encourage another pilgrim along that path, that word I gladly and willingly write.

  FIGURE 9 The house at Clifton where I was born. I think that Prince Edward Island is a good place in which to be born, and a good place in which to spend one’s childhood. Undated photograph. (Courtesy of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.)

  I was born in the little village of Clifton, Prince Edward Island.17 “Old Prince Edward Island” is a good place in which to be born – a good place in which to spend a childhood. I can think of none better. We Prince Edward Islanders are a loyal race. In our secret soul we believe that there is no place like the little Province that gave us birth. We may suspect that it isn’t quite perfect, any more than any other spot on this planet, but you will not catch us admitting it. And how furiously we hate any one who does say it! The only way to inveigle a Prince Edward Islander into saying anything in dispraise of his beloved Province is to praise it extravagantly to him. Then, in order to deprecate the wrath of the gods and veil decently his own bursting pride, he will, perhaps, be induced to state that it has one or two drawbacks – mere spots on the sun. But his hearer must not commit the unpardonable sin of agreeing with him!

  Prince Edward Island, however, is really a beautiful Province – the most beautiful place in America, I believe. Elsewhere are more lavish landscapes and grander scenery; but for chaste, restful loveliness it is unsurpassed. “Compassed by the inviolate sea,”18 it floats on the waves of the blue gulf, a green seclusion and “haunt of ancient peace.”19

  Much of the beauty of the Island is due to the vivid colour contrasts – the rich red of the winding roads, the brilliant emerald of the uplands and meadows, the glowing sapphire of the encircling sea. It is the sea which makes Prince Edward Island in more senses than the geographical. You cannot get away from the sea down there. Save for a few places in the interior, it is ever visible somewhere, if only in a tiny blue gap between distant hills, or a turquoise gleam through the dark boughs of spruce fringing an estuary. Great is our love for it; its tang gets into our blood; its siren call rings ever in our ears; and no matter where we wander in lands afar, the murmur of its waves ever summons us back in our dreams to the homeland. For few things am I more thankful than for the fact that I was born and bred beside that blue St. Lawrence Gulf.

  And yet we cannot define the charm of Prince Edward Island in terms of land or sea. It is too elusive – too subtle. Sometimes I have thought it was the touch of austerity in an Island landscape that gives it its peculiar charm. And whence comes that austerity? Is it in the dark dappling of spruce and fir? Is it in the glimpses of sea and river? Is it in the bracing tang of the salt air? Or does it go deeper still, down to the very soul of the land? For lands have personalities just as well as human beings; and to know that personality you must live in the land and companion it, and draw sustenance of body and spirit from it; so only can you really know a land and be known of it.20

  My father was Hugh John Montgomery; my mother was Clara Woolner Macneill.21 So I come of Scotch ancestry, with a dash of English from several “grands” and “greats.”22 There were many traditions and tales on both sides of the family, to which, as a child, I listened with delight while my elders talked them over around winter firesides. The romance of them was in my blood; I thrilled to the lure of adventure which had led my forefathers westward from the Old Land – a land which I always heard referred to as “Home,” by men and women whose parents were Canadian born and bred.

  Hugh Montgomery came to Canada from Scotland. He sailed on a vessel bound for Quebec; but the fates and a woman’s will took a hand in the thing. His wife was desperately seasick all the way across the Atlantic – and a voyage over the Atlantic was no five days’ run then. Off the north shore of Prince Edward Island, then a wild, wooded land, with settlements few and far between, the Captain hove-to in order to replenish his supply of water. He sent a boat ashore, and he told poor Mrs. Montgomery that she might go in it for a little change. Mrs. Montgomery did go in it; and when she felt that blessed dry land under her feet once more, she told her husband that she meant to stay there. Never again would she set foot in any vessel. Expostulation, entreaty, argument, all availed nothing. There the poor lady was resolved to stay, and there, perforce, her husband had to stay with her. So the Montgomerys came to Prince Edward Island.23

  Their son Donald, my great-grandfather, was the hero of another romance of those early days. I have used this tale in my book, The Story Girl. The Nancy and Betty Sherman of the story told there were Nancy and Betsy Penman, daughters of a United Empire Loyalist who came from the States at the close of the war of Independence.24 George Penman had been a paymaster in the British Army; having forfeited all his property, he was very poor, but the beauty of the Penman girls, especially Nancy, was so great that they had no lack of suitors from far and near. The Donald Fraser of The Story Girl was Donald Montgomery, and Neil Campbell was David Murray, of Bedeque.25 The only embroidery I permitted myself in the telling of the tale was to give Donald a horse and cutter. In reality, what he had was a half-broken steer, hitched to a rude, old wood-sled, and it was with this romantic equipage that he hied him over to Richmond Bay to propose to Nancy!26

  My grandfather, Senator Montgomery, was the son of Donald and Nancy, and inherited his stately presence and handsome face from his mother.27 He married his first cousin, Annie Murray, of Bedeque, the daughter of David and Betsy. So that Nancy and Betsy were both my great-grandmothers. If Betsy were alive to-day, I have no doubt, she would be an ardent suffragette.28 The most advanced feminist could hardly spurn old conventions more effectually than she did when she proposed to David. I may add that I was always told that she and David were the happiest couple in the world.

  It was from my mother’s family – the Macneills – that I inherited my knack of writing an
d my literary tastes. John Macneill had come to Prince Edward Island in 1775; his family belonged to Argyleshire and had been adherents of the unfortunate Stuarts.29 Consequently, young Macneill found that a change of climate would probably be beneficial. Hector Macneill, a minor Scottish poet, was a cousin of his. He was the author of several beautiful and well-known lyrics, among them “Saw ye my wee thing, saw ye my ain thing,” “I lo’e ne’er a laddie but one,” and “Come under my plaidie” – the latter often and erroneously attributed to Burns.30

  John Macneill settled on a north-shore farm in Cavendish and had a family of twelve children, the oldest being William Macneill, my great-grandfather, commonly known as “Old Speaker Macneill.” He was a very clever man, well educated for those times, and exercised a wide influence in provincial politics.31 He married Eliza Townsend, whose father was Captain John Townsend of the British Navy. His father, James Townsend, had received a grant of Prince Edward Island land from George III.,32 which he called Park Corner, after the old family estate in England. Thither he came, bringing his wife. Bitterly homesick she was – rebelliously so. For weeks after her arrival she would not take off her bonnet, but walked the floor in it, imperiously demanding to be taken home. We children who heard the tale never wearied of speculating as to whether she took off her bonnet at night and put it on again in the morning, or whether she slept in it. But back home she could not go, so eventually she took off her bonnet and resigned herself to her fate. Very peacefully she sleeps in the little, old, family graveyard on the banks of the Lake of Shining Waters – in other words, Campbell’s Pond at Park Corner.33 An old, red sandstone slab marks the spot where she and her husband lie, and on it is carved this moss-grown epitaph – one of the diffuse epitaphs of a generation that had time to carve such epitaphs and time to read them.34

  “To the memory of James Townsend, of Park Corner, Prince Edward Island. Also of Elizabeth, his wife. They emigrated from England to this Island, A.D. 1775, with two sons and three daughters, viz., John, James, Eliza, Rachel, and Mary. Their son John died in Antigua in the life time of his parents.35 His afflicted mother followed him into Eternity with patient resignation on the seventeenth day of April, 1795, in the 69th year of her age. And her disconsolate husband departed this life on the 25th day of December, 1806, in the 87th year of his age.”36