“Buttercups” (poem) Maud Cavendish The Mayflower (Floral Park, NY), July 1899
L.M. Montgomery The Farm Journal (Philadelphia), May 1910
“Last Night in Dreams” (poem) Ella Montgomery American Agriculturist (Springfield, MA), 10 November 1906
L.M. Montgomery Holland’s Magazine (Dallas), August 1915
I think people make their names nice or ugly just by what they are themselves. Live so that you beautify your name, even if it wasn’t beautiful to begin with, making it stand in people’s thoughts for something so lovely and pleasant that they never think of it by itself.41
In this world you’ve just got to hope for the best and prepare for the worst, and take whatever God sends.42
After all, I believe the nicest and sweetest days are not those on which anything very splendid or wonderful or exciting happens, but just those that bring simple little pleasures, following one another softly, like pearls slipping off a string.43
The mistakes of today are lessons for tomorrow. Isn’t it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?44
The reach of such short pieces should not be underestimated, since I have counted forty instances of the “mistakes” extract so far between 1914 and 1916, and no doubt the continued digitization of newspapers will yield many more instances in the years to come. These items are not without some mystery, however: the first known instance of the first extract here, which appeared under the title “Live So That You Beautify Your Name,” is in the Baylor County Banner of Seymour, Texas, in May 1906 – more than three years before the publication of Anne of Avonlea.
In a sense, the “J.C. Neville” example could mark an attempt by Montgomery to claim control of her work at a time when the name “L.M. Montgomery” had started to circulate within the marketplace in ways she could no longer control. After all, two question-and-answer segments appearing in several American newspapers in the 1930s demonstrate one of the ways in which her ultimate choice of authorial identity was not uniformly accepted in the media of her day. “Is L.M. Montgomery a real name or a pen name?” asked an unsigned writer in mid-1934. The answer hardly clarifies the distinction between the two terms: “Lucy Maud Montgomery is the full pen name of Mrs. Evan [sic] Macdonald.”45 Six months later, a similar question appeared: “Is the author L.M. Montgomery a man?” The response makes a revealing statement about what can be considered an author’s “real” name: “No, her real name is Lucy Maud Montgomery Macdonald.”46
While in these instances the circulation of Montgomery’s “real” name and of extracts from her books occurred outside her control (and quite possibly outside her knowledge), in “The Alpine Path,” which closes this volume, she had the opportunity not only to name herself according to her preference – as the author of the piece and as the young person she creates within it through narrative – but also to present her life story in a way that was consistent with the ways she had represented herself in the press prior to this: after all, in the earliest known publication about herself in the months following the appearance of Anne of Green Gables, she was so successful in suppressing all details about herself, including her gender, that the piece appears under the headline “Author Tells How He Wrote His Story.”47
As a narrative whose significance is made more explicit by its contrast to Montgomery’s journal text, “The Alpine Path” has been studied by several critics in terms of both what it reveals and what it conceals. In a volume on Montgomery for Twayne’s World Authors series, Genevieve Wiggins notes that the text “presents [an] optimistic viewpoint” about Montgomery’s childhood and eventual literary success “without reference to personal frustrations.”48 William V. Thompson, discussing this memoir in L.M. Montgomery’s Rainbow Valleys: The Ontario Years, 1911–1942 (2015), notes that the text “demonstrates Montgomery’s borrowing from her own journals in order to construct a public version of herself as precocious child and budding author,” highlighting one such entry, dated 7 January 1910, apparently written immediately after Montgomery discovered a lump in her breast that she interpreted as cancerous.49 Meanwhile, according to Helen M. Buss in her book Mapping Our Selves: Canadian Women’s Autobiography in English (1993), Montgomery had difficulty in her lifetime “articulating her self in her public autobiographical writing. To read her public autobiography … is to read of a person entirely different from the diaries. This autobiography is the positivist expression of a straightforward climb to success, an ‘alpine path’ to an uncomplicated literary stardom, one that must have confirmed the readers of the famous Anne books in the opinion that there is nothing so difficult in life that a girl of spunk and daring cannot overcome, given a fast-moving plot line and the lesser intelligence and imagination of all the powers that be.” Montgomery’s journals, Buss writes, “tell a different story,” one that “also reveals a darker side.”50
As not only a public autobiography but also a celebrity memoir, one that supplements Montgomery’s shorter essays and interviews collected in Volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader, “The Alpine Path” acts, as Katja Lee puts it, as “one of the more significant and substantial interventions Montgomery made into the production and dissemination of her public image and brand in Canada.” Yet for Lee, the text reveals a paradox between Montgomery’s usual attempt to keep the focus of her life narrative on her career and the fact that the narrative in question appears in a domestic periodical for women: “There are no narratives of her childhood that reveal any inclination for the domestic arts; all interests, skills, and ambition are focused on anticipating her future work as a writer. Of Montgomery’s adult life in domestic spaces, we are told very little, and of her considerable labour in this sphere, we hear nothing.”51 Rubio notes in a 1992 piece that Montgomery’s opening strategy to frame the writing of the memoir as a reaction to an unshakeable habit always to say yes to the “whims” of editors suggests a set of gendered politics at play: “A male author of equal fame would have felt no need to begin his sketch in such a self-effacing way – he would have considered his writing a profession and his success proof of its excellence.”52 Lorraine York, calling Montgomery “a woman of such quick intelligence and pragmatism that … she was well able to diagnose her own condition as a public commodity,” notes another strategy by focusing on the end of the narrative, in which “the literary celebrity, prey to the glamorization of her literary life narrative, compensates by deglamorizing it,” returning in her final paragraphs to the “idea of a slow, painful struggle” rather than a career.53
Returning to “The Alpine Path” now, after the publication of eleven volumes of her journals to date, offers us an opportunity to reconsider the strategies Montgomery employed in creating a version of her life available for public consumption, one that coincided with, as Thompson notes, “her growing awareness of herself as a public figure – as both author and minister’s wife.”54 In particular, Montgomery’s decision to end the narrative with a selected travelogue of her honeymoon merits closer examination. For Lee, the addition of these “restrained, even dull, travel entries that perform a kind of vague domesticity while evading personal detail” are some of the most curious components of the memoir, not only because Montgomery’s husband “remains unnamed and unnarrated,” but also because she remains “silent on the subject of how one might take a European honeymoon or run a household on a pastor’s salary.”55
One possibility is that Montgomery sought to erase her husband from the narrative in response to what Rubio refers to as his “deep underlying hostility to her success as a writer,” which York suggests created further “role conflicts occasioned by Montgomery’s celebrity.”56 Yet there might be another reason, too, depending on what new pieces of evidence are uncovered. In an alternate version of an interview Montgomery gave while on her honeymoon, Montgomery and the interviewer (identified in this version as Christian Richardson) veer off in a direction that they had avoided in the version included in Volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader:
Mrs. Montgomery-Macdonald’s new home is to be Leaskdale, Ontario. Her husband is a Presbyterian minister; indeed, she confesses, “was our minister in Cavendish for four years.” But of Mr. Macdonald she quite refuses to talk – for publication. “He is my own private, personal property,” she insists, “with which the public has nothing whatever to do. He is not to be bothered just because he has had the misfortune to marry a semi-celebrity.” She is certain she is going to be lonesome for her old home. Prince Edward Island is in her estimation the loveliest spot in all Canada. “But then,” she says, “I will have some one to talk to who knows all about it.”57
Montgomery’s memoir ends with an inspirational note from the editors of Everywoman’s World, celebrating her arrival as L.M. Montgomery and signalling the fact that, although the memoir has ended, her career will continue: “The ‘Alpine Path’ has been climbed! At the summit we rest, to reflect with you that there has been great joy, great inspiration in the accomplishment, and to look forward to the continuation of the journey, with L.M. Montgomery, upon the sunlit top, at some future time when another glorious milestone has been pressed upon the roadway of her life.”58 Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy, consisting of numerous such “glorious milestone[s],” continues to appeal to readers all over the world more than three-quarters of a century after her death, and thanks to the advances of the digital age, the recovery of neglected materials shows no sign of abating.
BENJAMIN LEFEBVRE
NOTES
1 Brontë, “Biographical Notice,” ix.
2 Montgomery, 28 September 1893, in CJLMM, 1: 170.
3 Montgomery’s response appeared alongside those of Arthur Stringer (1874–1950), Agnes C. Laut (1871–1936), Emily Murphy (1868–1933), Robert J.C. Stead (1880–1959), and Stephen Leacock (1869–1944), all of whom rivalled Montgomery in popularity during this period.
4 “What Are the Greatest Books,” 152; Montgomery, 15 April 1914, in LMMCJ, 1: 154. See also Lefebvre, Headnote to “What Are the Greatest Books,” 151. Montgomery would mention Wilkie Collins (1824–1889), English novelist best known for The Woman in White (1859), in her contribution to Fiction Writers on Fiction Writing (1923), included in Volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader. Anthony Trollope (1815–1882), English novelist best known for The Way We Live Now (1875).
5 It is worth noting that the recent CBC/Netflix series Anne with an “E” continues the links between Montgomery, Brontë, and Eliot. The titles of all seven first-season episodes allude to Brontë’s Jane Eyre, whereas the titles of all ten second-season episodes allude to Eliot’s Middlemarch.
6 Gilbert and Gubar, The Madwoman in the Attic, 65.
7 Gerson, “L.M. Montgomery,” 68.
8 Montgomery, 22 September 1925, in LMMCJ, 3: 408.
9 Two notable exceptions were Peg Bowen in The Story Girl and The Golden Road and Miss Brownell in Emily of New Moon. But whereas Montgomery provided the genesis of the former character in “The Alpine Path,” she kept the inspiration for the latter character private. See Montgomery, 19 October 1927, in LMMCJ, 4: 186.
10 For a comprehensive overview of the development of Montgomery’s critical reception since the publication of Anne of Green Gables, see the pieces and supplementary materials included in all three volumes of The L.M. Montgomery Reader. For an exhaustive bibliography of scholarship devoted to Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy, see the website for L.M. Montgomery Online at https://lmmonline.org.
11 Island Guardian and Christian Chronicle (Charlottetown), “P. of W. Convocation,” 2. In Montgomery’s journals, references to Eliot or the Brontës or to female authorial role models more generally are infrequent. She recorded reading a biography of Eliot two months before her twenty-first birthday (Montgomery, 30 September 1895, in CJLMM, 1: 289) and Eliot’s novels Adam Bede in spring 1903 (Montgomery, 12 April 1903, in CJLMM, 2: 68) and Romola in late 1910 (Montgomery, 26 December 1910, in CJLMM, 2: 335); in a journal entry dated January 1911, she recorded her wish, upon rereading Elizabeth Gaskell’s The Life of Charlotte Brontë (1857), to make one day a “pilgrimage” to the Brontë house in West Yorkshire (Montgomery, 22 January 1911, in CJLMM, 2: 339), which she and her husband did on their honeymoon six months later, but she omitted that part of her trip from her account of it in “The Alpine Path.” In a journal entry dated 1925, however, Montgomery stated that she would not have liked Brontë as a woman: “I could never find a kindred spirit in a woman without a sense of humor” (Montgomery, 22 September 1925, in LMMCJ, 3: 408). For more on Eliot’s evolution as an author, see Bodenheimer, “A Woman of Many Names”; Dillane, Before George Eliot.
12 Montgomery, 21 March 1916, in LMMCJ, 1: 221.
13 Montgomery, “Novel Writing Notes,” 197. These distances are slightly different in “The Alpine Path.”
14 As Montgomery claimed about the magazine The Editor: The Journal of Information for Literary Workers in an essay published in 1923, Cavendish “was one of the loveliest spots in the world – but it was absolutely out of the world in a literary sense, and The Editor was indispensable to me” (Montgomery, “Novel Writing Notes,” 197).
15 Montgomery, 3 December 1903, in CJLMM, 2: 89.
16 Easley, “Making a Debut,” 15, 17, 18.
17 Sharp, Handbook of Pseudonyms, 713, 642, vi.
18 Clarke, Pseudonyms, xii.
19 Atkinson, Dictionary of Literary Pseudonyms, 8.
20 Haynes, Pseudonyms of Authors, iii–iv.
21 A transcription of a letter that the fifteen-year-old Montgomery received from her classmate Nate Lockhart refers to her as “L.M. Montgomery” (Montgomery, 18 February 1890, in CJLMM, 1: 20). Her letters to Ephraim Weber and G.B. MacMillan are all signed “L.M. Montgomery” until her marriage in 1911 and either “L.M. Montgomery Macdonald” or “L.M. Macdonald” thereafter.
22 English-speaking women authors besides L.M. Montgomery who published under initials have included E.D.E.N. Southworth (1819–1899), American author of sixty novels, including The Hidden Hand (1888); Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888), American author of Little Women (1868–1869) and several other novels, including some published under the names L.M. Alcott and A.M. Barnard; L.T. Meade (1844–1914), Irish author of girls’ novels, including A World of Girls (1886); E. Nesbit (1858–1924), English author of several novels, including The Railway Children (1906); E.H. Young (1880–1949), bestselling English novelist; H.D. (1886–1961), American author; P.L. Travers (1899–1996), Australianborn British author of Mary Poppins (1934) and its sequels; P.K. Page (1916–2000), Canadian author of fiction, poetry, and children’s writing; A.L. Barker (1918–2002), English author best known for John Brown’s Body (1970); P.D. James (1920–2014), British crime novelist; V.C. Andrews (1923–1986), American author of several novels, most famously Flowers in the Attic (1979); E.L. Konigsburg (1930–2013), American author and illustrator of books for young people; A.S. Byatt (1936–), Booker Prize–winning British novelist; S.E. Hinton (1948–), American author of young adult fiction, most notably The Outsiders (1967); J.D. Robb, pseudonym of Nora Roberts (1950–), American crime novelist; K.A. Applegate (1956–), American author of the Animorphs series; A.M. Homes (1961–), American author whose books include The Safety of Objects (1990); E.L. James, pseudonym of Erika Mitchell (1963–), British author of Fifty Shades of Grey (2011) and its sequels; A.L. Kennedy (1965–), Scottish novelist and stand-up comic; J.K. Rowling (1965–), British author of Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone (1997) and its sequels, who has since published as Robert Galbraith; E. Lockhart, pseudonym of Emily Jenkins (1967–), American children’s writer; K.A. Tucker (1978–), Canadian author of suspense fiction; and A.J. Walkley (1985–), American author of young adult fiction. Consider, too, women authors who omitted parts of their names to make them seem more gender neutral, including (Margaret) Marshall Saunders (1861–1947), Gene (Geneva) Stratton-Porter (1863–1924), and (Nelle) Harper Lee (1926–2016), children’s writers.
23 Women who used male pseudonyms include (in addition to au
thors already mentioned) Olive Schreiner (1855–1920), South African author whose book The Story of an African Farm (1883) was published under the name Ralph Iron; Sara Jeannette Duncan (1861–1922), Canadian author whose newspaper column “Other People and I” appeared in the Toronto Globe under the byline “Garth Grafton” in 1885; Madge MacBeth (1878–1965), Canadian author who wrote The Land of Afternoon (1924) as Gilbert Knox, a secret that was not discovered until after her death; Karen Blixen (1885–1962), Danish author who published the memoir Out of Africa and the story “Babette’s Feast” under the signature Isak Dinesen; Alice Bradley Sheldon (1915–1987), American author who wrote science fiction novels as James Tiptree Jr.; and Margaret Laurence (1926–1987), who submitted her earliest short stories as Steve Lancaster.
24 Montgomery to MacMillan, 8 January 1908, in MDMM, 37.
25 As Connie Ann Kirk notes in a biography of Rowling published in 2003, “Years later feminists would cry foul and lament that once again a woman had succumbed to the commercial pressures of publishers to sublimate her true identity and disguise her gender, as was the case with George Eliot and many other women in literary history” (Kirk, J.K. Rowling, 76).
26 A.J. Walkley, “Androgynous Pen Names,” Huffington Post, 10 June 2012, http://www.huffingtonpost.com/aj-walkley/and-rogynouspen-names_b_1413563.html.
27 Coultrap-McQuin, “Pseudonyms,” 716, 717.
28 Gerson, Canadian Women in Print, 31.
29 See Montgomery, 2 July 1911, in CJLMM, 2: 418; Montgomery to MacMillan, 6 February 1928, in MDMM, 131. Montgomery stated that family members and friends called her “Maud” (and, in her journals, she referred to herself as Maud). In “The Alpine Path,” an adult refers to her as a child as “little Miss Maud.”
30 Rubio, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 63.
31 The bibliographical details in these tables draw on the list prepared by Rea Wilmshurst and included in Lucy Maud Montgomery: A Preliminary Bibliography (1986), co-authored with Ruth Weber Russell and D.W. Russell, and supplemented by my own extensive research on Montgomery’s periodical publications, which has benefited considerably from the findings of Donna J. Campbell, Carolyn Strom Collins, Joanne Lebold, and the late Christy Woster. Many more of her periodical pieces remain unidentified or their bibliographical details unconfirmed.
A Name for Herself Page 37
