Introducing Lucy Maud Montgomery

L. M. Montgomery
(1874-1942)

I know you both know who Lucy Maud Montgomery is, in that you have read books she wrote.  She's most famous for books like Anne of Green Gables, and she did publish twenty novels... but she also published more than 500 short stories AND more than 500 poems.  Her poetry is less-well-known, so I'm excited to explore a bit of it with you.

Maud had a very difficult life.  She was born on Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874, but her mother died when Maud was only 21 months old.  Maud's father asked his in-laws to raise his baby for him, as he felt he was too overcome with grief to properly care for her.  At first, he continued to live nearby and be part of her life but, when she was seven, he moved almost 3,000 miles away, to what were then called the North-West Territories (now Saskatchewan).

So, Maud grew up being cared for by grandparents who were reportedly austere and undemonstrative.  She had a lonely childhood with few friends, but created extensive imaginary worlds for herself, crowded with imaginary friends (including one named Katie Maurice she would later include in her first Anne book).  Her father remarried when she was in her early teens, but still did not ask his daughter to live with him for several years.  When she was sixteen, she did go live with her father and stepmother for one year, but returned to PEI because she did not get along with her stepmother at all.  However, while she was living with her father, she did have her first publishing success!  Her poem "On Cape LeForce" was published in a Charlottetown newspaper.  

Maud went to college and earned her teaching license in one year instead of the usual two.  She set out to support herself by teaching school, though she did not enjoy it.  And she rejected several proposals of marriage, eventually accepting one from a man she initially liked but later realized was shallow and selfish.  She had a brief romantic fling with another man who, sadly, died of influenza before she could break off her engagement to her fiancé and accept her lover's proposal.  She gave up all hope of marrying for romantic love and moved back in with her grandmother, as her grandfather has recently died.  She lived with her grandmother and cared for her until she died, while also doing a lot of writing and publishing, including publishing the first two Anne books.

When Maud was thirty-seven years old, she married Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister.  They moved to Ontario, where she wrote her next eleven books.  Ewen was not fond of literature or fiction, and the two did not have a particularly loving marriage.  They did have three sons together; one son was stillborn.  She suffered from what we would probably now diagnose as post-partum depression after the birth of their third son.  She already struggled at times with what we would probably call clinical depression.  Her husband Ewen also suffered from what we now call major depressive disorder, as well as bad health.

In 1918, Maud almost died from the Spanish flu epidemic.  She had often expressed doubts about God and Christianity in her private journals and letters, but surviving that flu seemed to result in revived faith that God did care personally about people, rather than being a remote being who watched impersonally over the world. 

Ewen suffered a nervous breakdown a year later and was never well again.  He believed in the false Calvinist idea of predestination, that only some people are elected to be saved eternally, and he came to believe he and his whole family were not part of those elect and were all doomed to hell.  This worsened Maud's own mental struggles.  Writing remained a refuge for her, as it was a way for her to maintain her mental and emotional equilibrium.  

In 1925, her husband Ewen resigned from his congregation, and he and Maud moved away.  In 1934, Ewen committed himself to a sanitorium to treat his extreme mental struggles.  Maud bought a house near Toronto with money she'd earned from her books and continued to write and publish.  In 1935, King George V made her an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, a high honor bestowed in recognition of her literary contributions to society.

Maud was very upset by World War Two breaking out.  World War One had been emotionally and mentally devastating to her, and to think that the horrors of widespread war were happening again was more than she could bear.  In 1942, she was found dead in her bed.  While her official cause of death was coronary thrombosis (a blood clot moving into the heart and stopping it from beating), her family and close friends were pretty sure she had ended her own life by overdosing on some of her medicine.  She was only sixty-seven.

You can see a lot of pieces of her own life that she used to create characters in her books, which I find pretty fascinating.