L M Montgomery Part I

I still like some “children’s books” and I still read the ANNE series.  Although it has its faults, particularly in that it is overly sentimental, I enjoy re reading the stories. But I also find the author very interesting.  I’ve also read most of er adult novels and her other “girls” series, the Emily books but they never have the same charm for me as Anne.

Lucy Maud (usually called Maud) Montgomery was born in Prince Edward Island in Canada in 1874. Her mother died when she was a baby and she was looked after by her grandparents, while her father went away out west to recover from his grief.  Her grandparents, who lived in Cavendish, were strict and “ultra-Victorian”  so she had an unhappy childhood.  She was very lonely.  She was a dreamer and made up stories, which helped her.  During her childhood her father remarried and she spent some time with him and her new stepmother.  However, she didn’t get along with the stepmother and said that her father’s second marriage was not a happy one.  She received a good education, including going to University, which enabled her to become a teacher.

She didn’t care much for teaching but it gave her time to write- and she began her career. She wrote short stories, and was able to secure a good income by so doing.  In time she also took on proof reading work for a newspaper.  In 1898, she moved back to Cavendish to look after her elderly and widowed grandmother.  She lived with the old lady until 1911, when her grandmother died.  It was a difficult time for her.  She was able to write and in 1908, she wrote her first book, Anne of Green Gables, which became a runaway success.  But she was lonely, still as her grandmother was not a companion for her.  She had various admirers but she didn’t find anyone who was a suitable husband, and she was tied by her duty to her grandmother. This situation comes up quit often in her books, where a daughter is expected to look after an elderly mother, or where a domineering Mother (or occasionally father) makes it difficult for an adult daughter and sometimes a son to marry…

In one of the Anne books, a lady called Janet finds that her admirer has not proposed to her, because his mother made him promise not to bring another woman into the house until she had died.

1897, she accepted a proposal from Edwin Simpson, out of a desire for companionship and protection, since marriage was considered a necessary rite of passage for women.  Even though she was earning her own living, she felt she needed the status of being a married woman.  She has some of her child characters remark in her books that “if you were married, your husband bossed you around, but you were single, people looked down on you as an old maid.”

However, she wasn’t in love with Simpson –and she then met a young farmer, whom she did find physically attractive and was involved briefly with him.  She knew that he wasn’t likely to be a suitable husband as he shared none of her intellectual interests.  She broke off her engagement to Edwin Simpson and settled at home with her grandmother. She seems to have given up hope of finding a man whom she loved, who was marriageable.  During her years with her grandmother, she met and was courted by Ewen McDonald, who was a Presbyterian minister.

In 1911, she married him. Ewen was not a particularly clever man, but he was a minister and that had a certain status.  Maud was eager to have children and she wanted to be married, so while she didn’t love him, they married and moved to Ontario where he had taken a job.

Her Anne story, is about a middle aged couple (brother and sister) in Prince Edward Island, who want to adopt a boy to help them on their farm.  By mistake a girl is sent, the red headed Anne Shirley.  She is an imaginative child, who has never had a real home, and Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert come to love her. A lot of the humour in the story comes from Anne’s imagination clashing with the hard headed narrow minded (but often eccentric) folk of the farming community.  And some of Anne’s life is drawn from Maud’s.  The childhood loneliness, the resentment of “Victorian strictness” and the emotionalism.