The same year she met Nora, 1902, Maud was introduced by a mutual friend to two long-distance pen pals she would count as close friends all the rest of her life. Both men were bachelors when Maud “met” them by mail; each became an essential connection, someone to whom she could safely pour out her feelings on life, love, and literature.
One was Ephraim Weber, a Mennonite teacher and homesteader in Western Canada. Weber aspired to be a writer. He was “an ideal correspondent,” Maud found, to her surprise, and his letters were “capital” on a wide range of intellectual subjects. Her second pen pal was the gentle George MacMillan, a Scottish journalist. MacMillan’s letters were not as brilliant as Ephraim Weber’s, but Maud suspected “as a man, he is superior to the former.” Each new long-distance friend was lonely, articulate, and book-loving, which made them ideal correspondents.
When Maud was not ensconced in nonsense with Nora — or taking photographic “snaps,” writing, or going for swims in the Saint Lawrence — she easily lapsed into loneliness and gloom. Domestic and financial anxiety haunted Maud and Grandmother Macneill in these years. They lived right next door to Uncle John, yet were severed from him as effectively as if they had been banished to another country. Uncle John owned the barns on their old homestead but refused to let Maud and his mother keep a horse and carriage. The two women were forced to depend on others for even the most basic transportation.
Sometimes, in an especially dark mood, Maud would read over the jokes in those shared daybooks with Nora and wonder how she could be one of its authors. “I’m tired of existence,” Maud confided to her journal.
She never completely recovered from her “year of mad passion” with Herman Leard. Regret haunted her. “Life has been a sorry business for me these past five years.” But no one guessed the depth of her sadness. Maud was good at putting a bright face to the world. She knew she was considered a “very jolly girl,” but she often gave way to despair. Maud was in her late twenties now, and in her darkest moods she felt little hope for the future: “Life will just go on getting a little harder for me every year. . . . Soon youth will be gone and I shall have to face a drab, solitary, struggling middle age. It is not a pleasant prospect.”
By summer of 1903, Nora Lefurgey had finished her teaching stint and fled Cavendish. Maud cast about for new friendships. That September, the thirty-four-year-old Ewan Macdonald, the “chust lovely” new up-and-coming minister, took on the ministry at the Cavendish church. He stopped by the Macneill post office for chats with Maud, and those lighthearted conversations soothed them both.
Maud earned $500 from her writing that year. She experienced the delicious novelty of magazine editors requesting new work. Maud’s name cropped up in an article about the rising authors of Canada. Though she little suspected it, Maud was laying the foundation for her most famous house of dreams.
The brutal winters between 1902 and 1905 brought the worst snowstorms in Prince Edward Island history. All mail stopped. No visitors came by for days. Snowdrifts piled as high as the top of the old house on either side. The ground-floor rooms were as dark as dusk. The wind howled around the old homestead, keeping Maud a prisoner indoors. As soon as she could get outside and walk again, in the flaming red and gold of a winter sunset, Maud could “forgive” the storm — only to be trapped by the next blizzard.
The long-awaited, much-delayed spring released “a sheaf of happy days.” Maud was almost incapable of being unhappy in June. All winter she planned out her garden; as soon as weather permitted, she worked with her hands in the dirt. A walk through Lover’s Lane could make her breathlessly happy. She felt the reassuring presence of the sky and sea: “I gazed always on the splendid pageant of the sea — splendid with ever-changing beauty of dawn and noon and midnight, of storm and calm, wind and rain, starlight, moonlight, sunset.”
The escape into certain stories reliably uplifted her. One such volume was Washington Irving’s exotic Alhambra, which Maud had devoured as a girl. At the end of one dreary day she wrote, “Washington Irving, take my thanks. Dead and in your grave, your charm is still potent enough to weave a tissue of sunshine over the darkness of the day. I thank you for your ‘Alhambra.’”
All too often, books were the only company Maud could entertain. Grandmother Macneill was fiercely jealous of Maud’s friendships. As she aged, the old lady became increasingly fretful and withdrawn. Lucy Macneill never made anyone feel welcome in their home, and she restricted access to it as much as possible. Though Maud was earning enough to make repairs to the old homestead, Grandmother Macneill would allow nothing to be changed. She would not even permit Maud to bake a cake when company came. The two women spent more and more time alone.
But Maud loved the old homestead and was fiercely protective of it. She took comfort in all her “little hobbies” — gardening and photography, scrapbooks and handicrafts. She managed to involve herself in the life of Cavendish in a dozen ways, large and small: became the church organist and choir director, taught Sunday school, engaged in the Literary Society and Lending Library. In those years of isolation from the larger world, Maud came to know her neighbors in a deeper, more intimate way, as her fiction shows time and again.
Life, she later argued, was just as vivid in small towns as in big cities. Maud knew her best subject matter lay not in faraway places but right at home. In these long, lonely Cavendish years, she was digging deep among the roots of her own home soil — all she needed was the dropping of a seed.
In 1904, Maud came across an old note scribbled in her journal: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.”
Over the next eighteen months, Maud began to shape around this brief entry her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables. Anne Shirley, the red-haired orphan who shows up at the railway station of Avonlea, captivated Maud’s imagination. She fell in love with her own heroine — and no wonder. Maud performed the great alchemy of art. She transformed her own history of abandonment into a story of rescue. Maud put herself into the fictional Anne: her own vivid imagination; a passionate love of nature; her habit of naming inanimate objects; the imaginary cupboard friend; her hungry affection for books; her own vanity, pride, stubbornness; and a deep, abiding attachment to those she loves.
The novel’s setting, Avonlea, is Maud’s hymn to small-town life in Cavendish. Avonlea is a pastiche of every place Maud knew best, from Lover’s Lane, that flowery path that she loved “idolatrously,” to the Haunted Wood. The Lake of Shining Waters was based on the bright pond Maud glimpsed from her guest bedroom at Park Corner. The White Way of Delight, Violet Vale, and the Dryad’s Bubble were pure inventions.
The germ of Anne’s story, jotted in Maud’s old journal, echoes the history of Maud’s adopted cousin, Ellen Macneill. Ellen had arrived by train with her brother, instead of the expected two boys from the orphan asylum. Another man adopted the brother at once. Maud’s elderly cousins, Pierce and Rachael Macneill, decided to adopt the three-year-old girl. Seventeen-year-old Maud wrote about it in her journal — then let the idea rest quietly for years. She denied any parallel between her own invented Anne and Ellen Macneill, whom she unkindly dubbed “one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable.”
Anne’s house, Green Gables, was loosely based on a house belonging to two other cousins, David and Margaret Macneill. Their house was notoriously untidy, nothing like Marilla’s well-swept home. The real-life David Macneill was shy and retiring, and this older couple, too, had adopted — David and Margaret had taken on the raising of an illegitimate great-niece. Maud noted that the book illustrations of Matthew Cuthbert looked uncannily like David Macneill, though she hadn’t consciously thought of him while creating Matthew.
One may find hints of Maud’s father’s shy and affectionate nature idealized in Matthew, just as Grandmother Lucy Macneill’s flinty personality is elevated into the lovable Marilla. But Maud argued rightly that no writer simply plucks her characters from life. Fiction is th
e art of transformation. For many writers, including L. M. Montgomery, it allows for happy reconciliations they cannot achieve in real life.
Marilla Cuthbert possesses the keen sense of humor and understanding that Grandmother Lucy Macneill lacked. Unlike Maud’s real-life father, Matthew Cuthbert is a model of devoted fatherhood, immensely brave when it comes to protecting his girl. And the fictional Anne loves the right young man in the end, overcoming her own stubbornness and false pride. Anne Shirley earns the happy marriage that Maud found so hard to achieve. Anne of Green Gables sparkles with happiness all around, though it’s touched by heartbreaking sadness. And that is true especially of its mercurial heroine, Anne, who makes us laugh one instant and cry the next.
Margaret Atwood, a well-known Canadian author, has argued that the main love story in Anne of Green Gables plays out not between Anne and Gilbert Blythe, but between Anne and the love-starved elderly Marilla. Certainly Marilla’s tart personality gives savor to Anne’s sweetness. Without Marilla, Anne might strike the reader as almost too good, despite her misadventures.
Anne of Green Gables is a book about creating lasting family. It is a celebration of place, a story about belonging. No one but Maud Montgomery, with all her checkered history and heart-hungry longing, could have created it.
Maud found her inspiration when she was most ready to use it. By 1905, the shy new minister, Ewan Macdonald, had moved full-time from nearby Stanley to Cavendish — closer to the Cavendish Church, and to Maud. He had recently escaped a near engagement to another woman and so proceeded very slowly with Maud. Their friendship was founded on common interests. Maud acted as church organist and director of the church choir. She and the young minister — just four years her senior — always found plenty to talk about. Nora wrote teasingly about Maud’s sudden interest in church events and ice cream socials, “You know she has taken up church work since the young ministers have struck the place.”
Aside from the few joking entries in Maud and Nora Lefurgey’s notebook, we don’t have Maud’s true first impression of Ewan Macdonald. Ewan admitted that he had his “eye on her from the beginning.” He was wise to proceed cautiously. Maud was skittish in the face of courtship, but she hungered for friendship. Ewan was sweet-tempered, with dimples, an attractive smile, and that irresistible Gaelic lilt in his voice. He was considered the catch of Cavendish — every unmarried girl or woman for miles around had set her sights on him.
Ewan was Prince Edward Island – born and –bred. But he came from a large farming family on the other side of the island. His family was less prosperous than Herman Leard’s, and Ewan’s upbringing had been far less elegant than Maud’s.
Like Maud, Ewan had attended both Prince of Wales College and Dalhousie University. Two of his brothers became farmers, but Ewan was the treasured intellect of the family, and his desire to become a minister was seen in his family as a significant step forward. In 1903 he began regularly guest preaching in Cavendish, and by 1905 he was inducted as full-time minister. Other aspects of Ewan’s biography remain less clear. He seems to have had a youthful history of clinical depression, a fact he managed to keep well hidden from Maud.
Between 1903 and 1905, Ewan boarded in nearby Stanley. Maud frequently visited Stanley, for another love of her life now lived there — her youngest Park Corner cousin, Frede Campbell.
Cousin Frede was ten years younger than Maud. That age difference had kept them apart in childhood and youth. For years they maintained a casual, friendly family relationship, as one might expect of one cousin a decade older than another. Then during one memorable visit at Park Corner, Maud and Frede stayed up talking and discovered themselves like-minded on a wide range of subjects — true and absolute kindred spirits. It was a hot summer’s night, and the two cousins talked till the cool of dawn. From that night forward, they lovingly stood by each other. Maud adored Frede. She called her “my more than sister.” Between Ewan and Frede, Maude had found two essential people, and they buoyed her up while Anne of Green Gables was taking shape.
For someone who kept such careful journal notes on her private thoughts and life events, Maud revealed very little about her writing process. She may have begun notes on her masterwork as early as 1904 and probably finished it in the winter of 1906. She likely took between nine and eighteen months to finish the novel.
In 1905, she told her Mennonite pen pal Ephraim Weber that she wrote three hours a day — one hour of magazine work in the morning, one hour of typing in the afternoon, and one hour for novel composition in the evening. The rest of her time was eaten up by housework. She wrote fast, she told Weber, “having ‘thought out’ plot and dialogue while I go about my household work.” Yet the young writer published forty-four short stories in 1905 — a lifetime’s worth of work for many authors — and she wrote most of Anne of Green Gables that same year.
When Maud rediscovered her note about the elderly couple, she quickly sketched out a seven-chapter story — the ideal length for a Sunday-school magazine submission. She gave her main character a name, Anne Shirley. She clipped a picture of a redheaded girl from a magazine and modeled her character on that image. Then she set to work.
Ewan Macdonald interrupted the opening chapter that June afternoon when he stopped by for his mail. Maud and Ewan chatted till the light of day had faded from the kitchen. Maud must have felt sure both of her subject and of her visitor’s interest.
Most of the composition of Anne of Green Gables happened not down in the busy Macneill kitchen/post office but in Maud’s flight of rooms upstairs. The central character of Anne Shirley swiftly took on a life of its own. Even the all-important e at the end of her name flashed into Maud’s mind at once. Anne “took possession of me to an unusual extent.” And then the daring thought came to Maud. “Write a book. You have the central idea. All you need do is spread it out over enough chapters.”
Anne of Green Gables was not Maud’s first attempt at a novel. She had written an earlier book called A Golden Carol, a preachy and predictable story about an idealized girl named Carol Golden. It was just the kind of fiction Maud disliked, and she ended up burning it.
Anne of Green Gables is about a perfectly imperfect girl — stubborn, homely, impulsive, proud — who is always getting into scrapes. Anne has a bad temper; she can hold a grudge. She is hypersensitive about her red hair, equally vain about her nice nose; she is by turns ecstatic and despondent, brilliant and silly, brave and tremulous. Anne Shirley felt vibrantly real to Maud. Maud knew the whole book relied upon her young heroine. As she would later write, “Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.”
Maud confided to her pen pal George MacMillan that, of all her works, this was most truly her own voice and style. The prose of Anne, she maintained, is “my real style,” and the fact that it was her own natural voice was, she believed, “the secret of her success.” Other stories may have been skillfully constructed, but they felt “created rather than summoned,” to quote another children’s writer, P. L. Travers. During spring and summer of 1905, Maud poured out the first six chapters of the novel — the section leading up to the moment when Marilla and Matthew decide to adopt Anne.
We don’t know the details of daily composition, but Maud’s journals give us a glimpse into her state of mind. That June, the world bloomed for her. Maud responded to human warmth as strongly as she did to sunshine. She had two close friends nearby, Frede and Ewan. She wrote quickly and easily in her white room overlooking fields and gardens.
Only two years earlier, Maud had confided to pen pal George MacMillan her secret fear: “I can never be a really great writer.” She genuinely believed her novel might appeal to only a handful of young female readers; she warned pen pal Ephraim Weber not to expect anything great or mighty when he read the book. But she also noted to MacMillan, “I think we should just write out what is in us — what our particular ‘demon’ gives us — and the rest is on the knees of the gods. If we write truly out of ou
r own heart and experience that truth will find out and reach its own.”
That June, while working on Anne of Green Gables, Maud sat at the window of her den, looking out on “a wide green field lush with nearly sprung clover, a lane where I know purple violets are growing thickly and an orchard arrayed as if for a bridal.” She added, “It is just good to be alive in a world where there are Junes.”
The creation of Anne marked the June of Maud’s life: the flowering of her gift as a writer, and the fulfillment of hope. She was supported by the nearness and warm affection of Frede and Ewan, though neither knew that she was at work on her first book. As some astute readers have observed, Anne of Green Gables takes us through five full years of Anne’s young life, but more than half of the novel’s events take place in the month of June. The novel was even published in June.
Maud was not the only one flourishing during this period. Ewan Macdonald, uplifted by his friendship with Maud, was fast becoming a popular minister. Together they began a few local beautification projects, including at the graveyard where Maud’s mother was buried. The young minister received invitations to give sermons in nearby Charlottetown and farther afield. Other clerics had started their ministries in Prince Edward Island and left for larger, more prestigious churches. Ewan thought his own career might benefit from some additional education. He made plans to study abroad.
On the evening of October 12, 1906, Ewan drove Maud into the country to visit friends. Along the way, he confided his plans to leave Cavendish in order to study at Trinity College, in Scotland.
Maud had begun to think of the shy minister more seriously. She celebrated his successes; she was proud of their friendship, and of his obvious fondness for her. It had occurred to her that Ewan might at some point propose marriage — but she remained noncommitted. She was not wildly in love with him the way she had been with Herman Leard. Ewan stirred no fires in her. But she had come to dread unbridled passion. When it came to men, Maud had few instincts to go by, little real-life experience — and as usual, no one to consult. It’s probable that Grandmother Macneill and Frede knew and liked Ewan. And it’s almost certain that Maud had confided some of her feelings to Frede. But she had never had a single close male relative she could entirely confide in and trust. That half of the human race remained a mystery.