A Name for Herself

by L. M. Montgomery

  “We sail for home next Thursday on the Adriatic.303 I am glad, for I am replete with sight-seeing. I want now to get back to Canada and gather my scattered household gods around me for a new consecration.”304

  As my husband was pastor of an Ontario congregation,305 I had now to leave Prince Edward Island and move to Ontario. Since my marriage I have published four books, Chronicles of Avonlea, The Golden Road, Anne of the Island, and The Watchman, the latter being a volume of collected verse.

  FIGURES 26–27 Chester (top); Stuart (bottom). Undated photographs, ca. 1916. (Courtesy of the L.M. Montgomery Collection, Archival and Special Collections, University of Guelph Library.)

  The “Alpine Path” has been climbed, after many years of toil and endeavor. It was not an easy ascent, but even in the struggle at its hardest there was a delight and a zest known only to those who aspire to the heights.

  “He ne’er is crowned

  With immortality, who fears to follow

  Where airy voices lead.”306

  True, most true! We must follow our “airy voices,” follow them through bitter suffering and discouragement and darkness, through doubt and disbelief, through valleys of humiliation and over delectable hills where sweet things would lure us from our quest, ever and always must we follow, if we would reach the “far-off divine event” and look out thence to the aerial spires of our City of Fulfilment.307

  (1917)

  Afterword

  We did not like to declare ourselves women, because – without at that time suspecting that our mode of writing and thinking was not what is called “feminine” – we had a vague impression that authoresses are liable to be looked on with prejudice …

  – CHARLOTTE BRONTË, WRITING AS “CURRER BELL” IN 18501

  Oh, I wonder if I shall ever be able to do anything worth while in the way of writing. It is my dearest ambition.

  – L.M. MONTGOMERY, JOURNAL ENTRY DATED 28 SEPTEMBER 18932

  IN AN ARTICLE PUBLISHED IN BOOKSELLER AND STATIONER (Toronto) in 1916, L.M. Montgomery participated on a panel of six well-known Canadian authors – three male, three female – to answer the question “What Are the Greatest Books in the English Language?”3 Her selection of six texts that she claimed she would attempt “to save from complete extinction” if compelled to do so – Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850) and The Pickwick Papers (1837), George Eliot’s The Mill on the Floss (1860), William Makepeace Thackeray’s Vanity Fair (1847–1848), Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre (1847), and Sir Walter Scott’s Rob Roy (1817) – is fairly consistent with the favourite prose authors she had named in a journal entry dated two years before this publication, a list that included “Scott, Dickens, Thackeray, Collins, Trollope and fifty others.”4 The unidentified compiler of the article drew attention to the fact that none of the six Canadian authors included in the piece had listed a Canadian book in his or her response; what escaped notice was that Montgomery was the only one of the six to select a text written by a woman – and, in fact, she listed two of them.

  Montgomery’s choices are noteworthy not only because no women are included on the list of favourite authors in her 1914 journal entry (except for those implied in the phrase “and fifty others”) but also because the two female authors mentioned on the list meant for public consumption – George Eliot and Charlotte Brontë – are examples of a specific form of female authorship in nineteenth-century Britain.5 In The Madwoman in the Attic: The Woman Writer and the Nineteenth-Century Literary Imagination (1979), Sandra M. Gilbert and Susan Gubar link British author George Eliot, pseudonym of Mary Ann Evans (1819–1880), to French author George Sand, pseudonym of Amandine Lucile-urore Dupin (1804–1876), claiming that these authors “most famously used a kind of male-impersonation to gain male acceptance of their intellectual seriousness” and were among a group of women authors who “protested not that they were ‘as good as’ men but that, as writers, they were men.” The works of Eliot and Sand continue to be published under the male pseudonyms they chose for their careers; by contrast, the publishers of posthumous editions of the work of Charlotte (1816–1855), Emily (1818–1848), and Anne (1820–1849) Brontë have ignored the androgynous pseudonyms and identities these authors had cultivated during their lifetimes, opting instead for their legal names and unambiguous gender identities as women. This reversal effectively undoes what Gilbert and Gubar see as the Brontë sisters’ strategy to “conceal[] their troublesome femaleness behind the masks of Currer, Ellis, and Acton Bell, names which Charlotte Brontë disingenuously insisted they had chosen for their androgynous neutrality but which most of their earliest readers assumed were male.” Moreover, what they call “the cloak of maleness” allowed these women authors an opportunity to “move vigorously away from the ‘lesser subjects’ and ‘lesser lives’ which had constrained [their] foremothers.”6 The authorship of Charlotte Brontë’s breakout first novel was cloaked even further in the designation of Currer Bell not as author but as editor of a book published initially as Jane Eyre: An Autobiography.

  But while Montgomery declined to include Brontë and Eliot in her private account of favourite authors, the influence of Brontë in particular is unmistakable, to the point that, in a chapter on Montgomery and “the conflictedness of a woman writer,” Carole Gerson declares that “at one level, Montgomery is always rewriting Jane Eyre.”7 I would extend that line of thinking by speculating that Montgomery perhaps named her major protagonists Anne and Emily after two of the Brontë sisters and refrained from creating a heroine named Charlotte in order to make such a connection less definitive (although characters named Charlotte or Charlotta appear in Anne of Avonlea, Further Chronicles of Avonlea, and two stories in Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans). The fact that her novel Emily of New Moon has so many echoes of Jane Eyre adds weight to this speculation, as does the title of Shirley (1849), Charlotte Brontë’s second novel, and the fact that Emily Brontë’s middle name, Jane, would be gifted to the protagonist of Jane of Lantern Hill, whereas Patricia “Pat” Gardiner, protagonist of Pat of Silver Bush and Mistress Pat, calls to mind the father of the Brontë sisters, Patrick (1777–1861), and their brother, Patrick Branwell (1817–1848), as do two sensitive boy characters in The Blythes Are Quoted. Given the extent to which Montgomery peppered her fiction and her non-fiction with literary allusions – a practice that extends to the texts in this volume, as my notes attest – such a theory is far more plausible than the one that would see Montgomery naming these characters after her late mother’s three sisters, Annie Macneill Campbell, Jane Macneill McKenzie, and Emily Macneill Montgomery. In a journal entry dated 1925, writing against the claim that Charlotte Brontë had “creative genius,” Montgomery retorted that “her genius was one of amazing ability to describe and interpret the people and surroundings she knew. All the people in her books who impress us with such a wonderful sense of reality were drawn from life.”8 By the 1920s, readers were making the same assumptions about Montgomery’s work, even though she always denied that her characters were based on real people.9

  Montgomery’s inclusion of Eliot and Brontë on her public 1916 list and her exclusion of them and of any other woman author from her private 1914 list provide a starting point for my discussion of Montgomery’s “arrival” as an author, not only of twenty-four books published between 1908 and 1939 but also of eleven hundred periodical pieces published across an even broader span of time, from 1890 to 1942. Although critics have frequently discussed Montgomery’s books as part of a North American context within the pre–First World War and interwar periods (when they consider historical context at all),10 it seems plausible that she looked to Eliot and the Brontës as models of female authorship when she was starting her writing career in the last decade of the nineteenth century. Indeed, as I mentioned in the headnote to Montgomery’s essay on Shakespeare’s Portia earlier in this volume, an unsigned editorial in the Island Guardian and Christian Chronicle of Charlottetown declared that her essay “might have come from George Elio
tt [sic] in her ’teens.”11 Moreover, in a journal entry dated 1915 in which she told of hearing of a young fan whose daily reading included a chapter from Anne of Green Gables and a chapter from the Bible, she admitted that “in my salad days I may have dreamed of rivalling Brontë and Eliot. I certainly never in my wildest flights dreamed of competing with the Bible!!!”12 Montgomery did more than attempt to “rival” these nineteenth-century British novelists, however; although she lived in the isolated community of Cavendish, “eleven miles from a railroad and twenty-five from a town,”13 she had ample access to the literary cultures of North American metropolises thanks to her unfettered access, as the town postmistress, to literary magazines from all over the continent.14

  Moreover, Montgomery’s experiences as an author – “My ambitions were laughed at or sneered at. The sneerers are very quiet now. The dollars have silenced them” – were typical for women of her era, not only in Canada but internationally.15 As Alexis Easley notes in her contribution to The Cambridge Companion to Victorian Women’s Writing (2015), “Women who chose the literary life often faced social censure, received substandard pay, and fell subject to a critical double standard.” While periodicals were crucial to the development of the careers of many women writers, providing venues that “were often more accessible than the conventional book trade,” many women opted to publish their work anonymously or through the use of one or multiple pseudonyms, including Elizabeth Barrett Browning (1806–1861) and Christina Rossetti (1830–1894) early in their careers and Jane Austen (1775–1817) until her death. Publishing their work in this way, according to Easley, “enabled many women to begin writing careers without having to assume ‘feminine’ identities” and “to situate their work outside a narrowly defined feminine literary tradition.”16

  Several reference books on pseudonyms reveal some of the motivations behind the adoption of a name for a career, although, perhaps because the compilers of these volumes are men, the specific factors at play in women’s careers are rarely considered in detail. In Handbook of Pseudonyms and Personal Nicknames (1972), which cross-references “L.M. Montgomery” to the author’s “real” name, “Macdonald, Lucy Maude [sic] Montgomery,” Harold S. Sharp suggests that some authors and actors choose to adopt a pseudonym because “a given name may be unwieldy” or because “an author may wish to conceal his [or her] identity.”17 In Pseudonyms (1977), Joseph F. Clarke adds to this list by taking into account a wider set of possible circumstances: “a need to conceal one’s identity because of persecution or discrimination,” or else “to differentiate between the kinds of books they write, to preserve their anonymity or to keep separate their vocation and avocation.” And, in the case of women writing under men’s names, a pseudonym may have been a strategy resorted to “before the freedom and tolerance of the twentieth century.”18 In Dictionary of Literary Pseudonyms (1982), Frank Atkinson posits that name changes can also occur when there is a perceived need for the authorial name to match the genre to which the text belongs, listing romances and westerns as examples, “on the grounds that any product sells better under a familiar label.”19 Far earlier than these volumes, in Pseudonyms of Authors (1882), John Edward Haynes provided even more compelling reasons to adopt a fictitious name:

  a genuine modesty with those who decline to place their true name before the public until their work has passed through the terrible crucible of the merciless critic, so that if it should not succeed and be generally condemned, the real author would be known to only a few friends; fears of personal injury if their name is disclosed, where direct attacks are made upon motive or character; many times the real name would serve to limit the sale of a work, notably, where the private character of the writer has been tainted, or when totally unknown to the public, the idea is often entertained, that a work published anonymously, or over a pseudonym, will have a larger sale on account of the universal desire to ascertain the author’s real name, and that the investigation will bring out a large amount of gratuitous advertising.

  Furthermore, Haynes added, “Literary titles are frequently changed when ill success attends previous efforts, or when an entire change is made in the character of the works.”20 In other words, authors resort to pseudonyms to protect their privacy and to make their work conform to convention – including, at an extreme, the prejudice that women cannot write or should not write at all.

  Montgomery settled ultimately on “L.M. Montgomery,” a name she also used in her private life,21 for the vast majority of her publications. This gender-neutral authorial identity would allow her to maximize her audience – and, by extension, her sales – for it meant she could persuasively write stories aimed at boys as well as poems with male speakers in a way that “Lucy Maud Montgomery” could not. That decision places her within a long tradition of English-speaking women writers who sought to avoid gender inequality within male-dominated publishing industries by changing or eliminating parts of their names in order to appear more gender neutral (and hence be perceived as male). One common approach was for writers to use their initials, a strategy that persists in this age of social media;22 another was to follow the Brontë sisters and choose androgynous or conspicuously male authorial names and identities.23 Nearly a century after Montgomery fought with her first publisher over what version of her name would appear on the cover of Anne of Green Gables (he wanted “Lucy Maud Montgomery,” which she says she “loathe[d]”),24 Joanne Rowling agreed to her publisher’s request that they issue Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone under the name “J.K. Rowling” due to the assumption that boy readers would be turned off the book if they knew it had been written by a woman.25 More recently, YA author A.J. Walkley explained in a 2012 Huffington Post article why she had opted for double-initials even in the Web 2.0 era despite the fact that a quick Google search would immediately solve the mystery of her gender: “Women writers have used initials and male pen names for centuries to cover up their gender while publishing their writing, knowing that for some readers (namely male), simply seeing a female’s name on the cover of a book would dissuade them from even cracking the spine … I still believe I may have more male readers with the use of ‘A.J.’ instead of ‘Alison’ under my titles and bylines – and this is troublesome.”26 But in an entry on pseudonyms in The Oxford Companion to Women’s Writing in the United States (1995), Susan Coultrap-McQuin reminds us that anonymity and pseudonymity allowed eighteenth- and nineteenth-century women writers the option of maintaining respectability and that “they have also been used as assertive strategies in women’s literary careers,” namely “to name oneself outside of patriarchal, racist, and heterosexist limits.”27 In other words, a practice that began as a strategy for women authors to negotiate sexist attitudes within the public sphere is now “troublesome,” to use Walkley’s term, in the twenty-first century.

  Given the ongoing tradition of women authors masking their names or their genders in order to avoid what Charlotte Brontë referred to in one of the epigraphs to this afterword as “prejudice,” and given that the convention of publishing work “anonymously or under pseudonyms or initials” extended to Canada’s early newspapers, as Gerson notes in her book Canadian Women in Print 1750–1918 (2010),28 it might seem reasonable to expect Montgomery to emulate this pattern, especially given that she published in newspapers and magazines for nearly two decades prior to the publication of Anne of Green Gables. Yet she did the exact opposite of this. Many of her earliest publications appeared under her full legal name, “Lucy Maud Montgomery,” including her poem “On Cape Le Force,” which is significant for several reasons: first, “Lucy Maud Montgomery” was a name combination that by her own account she had never liked and that no one had ever called her;29 second, for this initial publication, which appeared in the Charlottetown Daily Patriot while the adolescent Montgomery was living with her father in Saskatchewan, she drew heavily on the oral repertoire of her difficult maternal grandfather, to the point that biographer Mary Henley Rubio refers to this publication
as an act of poaching, something that everyone in her Cavendish community would have gleaned upon reading the poem because her grandfather’s stories were so well known;30 and third, far from being relegated to a corner or to the women’s page, the entire poem appeared prominently on the front page of the newspaper for that day.

  TABLE 1 Work published as “Lucy Maud Montgomery,” 1890–1899

  TITLE/TYPE PERIODICAL/LOCATION/DATE

  “On Cape Le Force” (poem) Daily Patriot (Charlottetown), 26 November 1890

  “The Wreck of the ‘Marco Polo’” (essay)* Montreal Daily Witness, 5 March 1891

  “June!” (poem) Daily Patriot (Charlottetown), 12 June 1891

  “A Western Eden” (essay)* Prince Albert Times and Saskatchewan Review, 17 June 1891

  “Farewell” (poem) Saskatchewan (Prince Albert), 2 September 1891

  “The Wreck of the ‘Marcopolo,’ 1883” (poem) Daily Patriot (Charlottetown), 29 August 1892

  “The Last Prayer” (poem) The College Record (Charlottetown), 1894 (exact date unknown)

  “Portia” (essay)* Daily Patriot (Charlottetown), 11 June 1894

  “The Violet’s Spell” (poem) The Ladies’ World (New York), July 1894

  “Blueberry Hill” (poem) The Ladies’ World (New York), August 1899

  * Appearing in this volume.

  Montgomery continued to use her legal name on several of her subsequent publications through 1899 (see table 1),31 including her poem “The Violet’s Spell,” published in The Ladies’ World (New York) – a venue so prominent that in several retrospective accounts of her early career she referred to this poem as the first she ever published32 – and whose acceptance prompted her earliest declaration of her ambition to be a writer, shown as the second epigraph to this afterword. By 1894, however, she had already started publishing work using her initials, including several items appearing in this volume (see table 2): an early essay describing her cross-Canada journey home to Prince Edward Island from Saskatchewan and three pieces published in the student periodical of Prince of Wales College, The College Record. While this transition from “Lucy Maud Montgomery” to “L.M. Montgomery” would suggest that she had settled on her preferred authorial identity once the novelty of being published had ebbed, such an assumption tells only part of the story. Beginning in 1895, as she started to establish herself as a contributor to popular magazines and newspapers in Canada and the United States, she published under a wide variety of signatures (see table 3).33 In 1896, for instance, she published work as “Maud Cavendish,” “Belinda Bluegrass,” “Enid,” and “M.L. Cavendish,” as well as “L.M. Montgomery” and a variety of initialisms, some of them used likely to conceal her identity in the case of essays about her teaching experience. Given that she had been publishing poems only since 1890 and short stories only since 1895, her reliance that year on so many signatures dovetails with what Gerson refers to as “a common practice of authors or editors who felt it strategic to dilute their presence.”34 Arguably, however, such a strategy would go against the understandable attempt of an emerging author to build a literary reputation under a consistent byline: in The Ladies’ Journal, for instance, Montgomery published as “Maud Eglinton” in February 1895, twice as “Maud Cavendish” only a few months later, and eight more times as “L.M. Montgomery” in 1896 and 1897, whereas in Golden Days for Boys and Girls, she published three short stories and a poem as “L.M. Montgomery,” “Maud Cavendish,” and “M.L. Cavendish” within a span of five months.