Lucy Maud Montgomery: More Than Just AoGG

[stillshimpy]

To each their own. I don't think a modern read of the Emily series can separate what we know psychologically today from the story; Dean in particular is always going to stand out as ringing major alarm bells. But I stand by my assertion that I don't think it's what the author intended at the time she wrote it.

 

That's going to be pretty accurate, Miss Dee.  As I've mentioned I've read all of her journals, I know more about the woman than I'd actually like to in a lot of instances.  

 

For one thing, as we bandy about the term pedophile...that's a particular thing.  That involves a sexual interest in pre-pubescent children.  It's horrifying and unfortunately, Lucy Maud Montgomery did know about actual pedophilia as her son Chester molested one of her maid's children -- Chester was a freaking nightmare -- now none of that is covered in her journals, that took Rubio's work to uncover and it sadly matches up with everything known about Chester.  He was definitely in the deviant category.  In fact, in Rubio's words, Chester's relationship with his mother made people (and here I quote Rubio) "deeply uncomfortable" .  Not from LMM's standpoint -- although she had her own issues and was very prudish, actually -- but from anyone observing the two together.  Chester was weirdly inappropriate with his mother -- nothing truly terrifying (before I scare the hair off of anyone) just inappropriate things -- lounging on her bed while talking to her, as a full grown man, several other things that made contemporaries of LMM just creeped out by the way Chester acted towards his mother.  It wasn't sexual, it was just manipulative and inappropriate.  There was also a passage in her journal about Chester killing a kitten that I've always wondered if it was truly an accident, he was really, really troubled. 

 

LMM married very late in life by the standards of the time, and frankly mainly did so in order to have children.  

 

She just wouldn't have had any concept that Dean's attraction to Emily was "wrong" on any level, and she certainly didn't prize any notion about child brides.  It was not actually that unusual for young women to marry  men substantially older than themselves.  Sure, to modern eyes, it's disturbing because it clearly indicates that men were not looking for an equal, or a partner ....but here's the thing: They weren't.  

 

They just were not and LMM had no problem with that as a concept.  Although she made her own money and split expenses with her husband on many things, it's because she was extremely successful and he was a minister.  However, and it does actually pain me to say type this, LMM had no interest in women getting the vote.  She actively did not want women in Canada to get the vote. She was not a feminist, or progressive in that area, but she was also not some complete traditionalist.  

 

She enjoyed writing young characters, children and actually resented the need to make Anne grow up and marry.   One of the notes in her journal -- and there were very few about what she was writing -- was her declaring that she supposed she must have Anne marry.  Frankly, even though it was clearly not a sexual thing, LMM liked the world of writing children much more than writing young adults.  She found the fanciful nature of them FAR more interesting than adults.  But you have to remember, that even though she was not a feminist -- she sort of was, she just would never have thought to frame it that way -- she did find the role of adult women in everything other than motherhood to be terribly repressive.  Having a sense of humor and laughing aloud were considered bad things in a grown woman.  

 

She had very few true friendships and was deeply lonely, because of the need to show no favoritism as the Preacher's wife.  Her friendships were part of her role and she was obsessed with appearances. 

 

Emily is closer to being an autobiographical character than Anne was and when Dean resents Emily's writing (which Anne gives up writing, until she takes up writing children's stories, before abandoning them entirely to motherhood...the expected role)....but one of the few things that ever came through in LMM's journals about Ewan -- for complicated reasons, LMM heavily edited and re-edited her journals and she had reason to resent her husband, he was kind, universally liked in fact, very different in Rubio's biography (having interviewed people who actually knew him, or corresponded with him)  than in the journals....in the journals LMM so heavily edited Ewan that he has no personality.  You never even get the sense of his personality.  She resented what she thought of as Ewan's madness -- he had a depressive streak and sadly the way they treated that back then made him very, very sick -- and both became addicted to opiate medications through no fault of their own (they were prescribed them in huge quantities) ...the sicker they became, and Ewan became very sick indeed, the more they were given. 

 

But a lot of the underlying resentment towards a character like Gilbert, or Dean has nothing to do with trying to portray them as creepy, or grooming anyone (they had very normal relationships for the time period....and again....at the time, men actively were not seeking an equal partner, there were entire societal movements against it) ...it's that LMM had complicated emotional relationships throughout her life.  

 

There's an awful lot of reason to believe she fabricated Herman Leard's interest in her and that she had an unrequited interest in him.  She deeply disliked and resented her first intended and whereas she initially liked her husband, Ewan, she married him because she wanted to have children....and he waited for her for years (waiting for her grandmother to die....which is an entire other "that's got have left some weird dents" subject).  When LMM's journals were published, they DEEPLY upset Herman Leard's ancestors, because -- seemingly without having any clue that she was doing so -- LMM portrayed Leard as coming to her room at night, and pressuring her to have sex, bringing her chocolates, trying to woo her and get her to have sex with him...and this is key....in her version of events, it was because Leard wanted her to marry him.  Herman Leard was engaged to someone else the entire time he knew LMM.  His sister's used to tease him and it was quite the family joke about her very obvious crush on him (she'd watch out of the windows, waiting for him, her interest was not at all concealed).   He died before he could ever marry the girl to whom he was engaged....and again....that's who Anne Shirley looks like.  Lettie. 

 

So LMM was a complicated person in many respects and her rendering of romantic relationships for her protagonists has to do with her own resentment at having to include them.  The only true exception is The Blue Castle, where the point of the tale is a romance, but otherwise, LMM did not like having to include romantic entanglements for her characters.  

 

That ended up coloring a lot of the romantic figures in her books, I think and Rubio thought so too.   I take Mary Rubio's words on things very seriously, because whereas I can turn around and see five fairly giant journals of LMM....Rubio saw them in their full form.  They were edited for publication, not to remove material, but to remove bulk.   They were even more extensive than the five volumes.  

 

One of the saddest things in Rubio's biography was the revelation of the only romantic advice Maud ever gave one of her daughter-in-laws:  never let your husband see you naked, nor should you see him naked.  

 

LMM had a very Victorian approach to marriage, romance and sex in general.  She really wasn't trying to suggest that Dean was a creepizoid.  She just was very odd about sexuality.   There are long passages in her journals about how she hated modern fashions and much preferred the (in her mind) more attractive fashions of the 1890s....and in a lot of ways, that's where her ideals always stayed. 

Edited November 24, 2015 by stillshimpy

[Miss Dee]

Thanks shimpy. I haven't read the journals, but I have read Emily a million times (roughly) and I just never got the sense that Emily was to be considered a molested child, even in subtext.

But all that said, if I ever met an adult who didn't get the concept of "grooming" children, I'd tell them to read the Emily books and pay particular attention to Dean. I know she didn't mean to, but he's a really good illustration.

Edited November 24, 2015 by Miss Dee

[Crs97]

I wonder if that's why I could never get into the Emily series. As much as I love Anne, I kept trying and trying to read Emily and always ended up putting it down. I never really could explain why I didn't like it. I may have to go back and try again.

[stillshimpy]

You're welcome, Miss Dee. I can't bold on this device by the way. I know I always seem to show up and answer questions about LMM...and that's partially because I read the journals,in part because someone on TWOP brought them up in answer to someone's specific question about LMM's attitudes about sexuality and feminism by referencing the journals , but never expounded on what she read.

So I started reading them because of that. To sum up? Holy white star density, Batman, those were not light reads! I then read four other biographies. Basically I show up to share on that so if anyone has a question, they won't spend a year of their life answering it without being forewarned!

[Athena]

Today is LMM's birthday. Google is celebrating it with various Doodles.

[SomeTameGazelle]

I wonder if that's why I could never get into the Emily series. As much as I love Anne, I kept trying and trying to read Emily and always ended up putting it down. I never really could explain why I didn't like it. I may have to go back and try again.

I enjoyed both Emily and Anne, but found Pat of Silver Bush very dull and uninspiring. Anne has more of a sense of humour, while Emily has pride and drama and several episodes of some kind of second sight.

 

 

There are long passages in her journals about how she hated modern fashions and much preferred the (in her mind) more attractive fashions of the 1890s....and in a lot of ways, that's where her ideals always stayed.

 

 

That's very interesting because in The Blue Castle her descriptions of Valancy blossoming into a modern young woman so clearly put Cousin Olive in the shade -- I would have thought that she completely approved of her attire.

[stillshimpy]

That's very interesting because in The Blue Castle her descriptions of Valancy blossoming into a modern young woman so clearly put Cousin Olive in the shade -- I would have thought that she completely approved of her attire.

 

I completely understand why it's a surprise, because it was to me too.  She was merciless to the fashions of the twenties and literally wrote that she thought they had better style, fashion and elegance in the 1890s and that she preferred the fashions from that time.  

 

She thought seeing women's pale legs was ugly and that someone wearing lipstick looked as if she 'had made a meal of blood'.   Again it's really difficult to know who she really was as a person, because much of what was in the journals was a very carefully crafted image of herself that concealed things and redirected others.  It's entirely possible that she felt it was closer to her -- again influenced by the time period in which she lived -- idea of proper and they may or may not have been what she truly believed. 

 

However, she was at least a bit vain and seldom met another an old acquaintance without observing in her journal that the person had gotten fat.  Then she would go on about how she was slim.  I think she viewed other women as competition, but not in some "so clearly, she was a shrew" sort of way.  It's just that's the atmosphere in which she grew up and she was always made to feel (or felt herself, which may not be the same thing) to be viewed as something of a beggar within her own family.  There are a lot of complex reasons for that, but it's part of the reason she compromised her own finances so much loaning money to her relatives (none of whom paid her back and most of whom took terrible advantage of her).  Her mother died when she was very small.  LMM pretty clearly had issues of abandonment and struggled with her feelings of self-worth and she was terribly lonely after her cousin Frederica died during the Spanish influenza outbreak.  

 

So that's another thing, her journals are part PR, part confidante, part evidence of a lot of conflict within and then as time went on, the whole "was almost always taking Veranol (which was a barbiturate) and that was combined with opiates" thing.  Her last journal is her the least edited and it's a grim slog.  

 

She was an interesting person, but she went through a lot and put herself through a lot. I think that it would only be natural for a woman who had spent her entire life trying to feel worthy of approval and love (crafting journals for how she would be viewed after death) to resent a change in the attitudes of what made women desirable, attractive or worthy of approval.  Her "I confess, I find them ugly" about more modern fashions may have a great deal to do with the fact that by the time hemlines went up, she was matronly and a bit stout (and had stopped observing the weight of others, by the way, so she wasn't lacking in self-awareness entirely, she just struggled with what would constitute her self-worth).  There are a few pictures of her in the fashions of the twenties and thirties and they mostly didn't do her, or anyone past the age of young adulthood, a great many favors.  Having a dropped waistline is for willowy, young things.  

 

So it's just as likely that she expressed distaste for them, because they didn't suit her.  They were evidence that time had passed and she could no longer attract approval (which was really sold to women as the end-all-be-all of worth).  So she said she found them ugly, perhaps while secretly regretting that she wasn't young any longer, which seems the more likely cause. 

 

By the way, there is something in Rubio's biography that stunned the hell out of me, because for real, I read at least 3 thousand pages likely much more, or her personal journals and this dude did not even warrant a mention:  Rubio hints that she had some kind of love affair with a guy never mentioned in her journals.  There's a picture of her with him, by a convertible and she would have been well into her forties.  Rubio makes an observation about this man ....Captain Carter I think was the name....that indicates some kind of attachment, if not an actual "they did the deed" (which I firmly believe she did not).  

 

But something must have gone on, as that man does not even exist in her journals.  So it startled me when Rubio kind of hinted at a mutual flirtation between the two and how they would go driving together.  

 

So even having read extensively on this person, there are still things about her that are entirely mystifying and contradictory.  That Carter thing was a needle scratch for me.  "Wha....?" In the end, after reading all of that, I mostly felt so sorry for her.  She lived at a time when women weren't supposed to laugh aloud.  It was unladylike.   She was such a neat person, but she lived in a world that isolated her partially because of who she married, partially because of what was deemed success.  

 

Within her lifetime she saw what was prized in fiction have a sea change from the really detailed style she favored, to the more minimal style of modern fiction (which she hated and that I fully believe without reservation) and she was deemed old-fashioned within her lifetime.  There are reasons beyond, "I wonder what she thought of that dress" that she might have viewed time periods changing with a dim eye.  

 

She was once invited to meet the prime minister of Canada, who had read her books and to attend a reception of the Prince of Wales when he was in Canada.  She met heads of state and was praised throughout several countries.  Then within her own lifetime, she found herself branded as an author of children's literature (which she viewed as...if not an outright insult...at least rather dimly), out-dated, old-fashioned and no longer needed on the literary scene.  She was past thirty when she became a literary star and died at 67, so her shelf-date must have painfully short to her. 

 

There are reasons in both directions that she wrote something like the Blue Castle , to try and be part of the modern day (at the time) fictional landscape.  To try and be more progressive and it was all done with the knowledge that people had come to view her writing as close to quaint.  

 

I get why she didn't have the best opinion of all things modern, you know? 

Edited December 8, 2015 by stillshimpy

[Brn2bwild]

Though LM Montgomery might have been projecting her own insecurities, I could see how one would genuinely hate the post-WWI fashions compared to fashions of the 1890s.  I absolutely love women's fashions circa 1893-1894, before puffed sleeves became all the rage.  The skirts were normal, not puffed out with crinoline or a ridiculous bustle, yet there was real shape to the dresses, from the waistline to the angle of the shoulders.  A lot of women looked really elegant in those fashions (it didn't hurt that the hair styles had vastly improved from the 1860s).

 

By contrast, women's clothes from the 1920s look like... sacks.  They were probably much more comfortable, but the lack of support is really shocking compared to earlier fashions.  Maybe if you had wealth, you could pull off the fashions like in Downton Abbey, but otherwise, they probably didn't flatter many people.

[ulkis]

http://www.academia.edu/744712/Walters_Closet

 

Interesting article about Walter and whether he was coded as gay. I'm torn. While I do think it seems that way I don't know if Montgomery was that open-minded.

[SmithW6079]

http://www.academia.edu/744712/Walters_Closet

Interesting article about Walter and whether he was coded as gay. I'm torn. While I do think it seems that way I don't know if Montgomery was that open-minded.

I think I always read Walter as homosexual, in the best tradition of British WWI warrior-poets, but then, I'm always on the alert for "coding."

[SomeTameGazelle]

http://www.academia.edu/744712/Walters_Closet

 

Interesting article about Walter and whether he was coded as gay. I'm torn. While I do think it seems that way I don't know if Montgomery was that open-minded.

 

There is no question that he was depicted as poetic and sensitive and unmasculine, and that he was either oblivious to or actively not interested in Una romantically.

 

I am not sure that LMM had to be open-minded in this case since Walter does die and the general consensus is that he was too sensitive to be able to continue living after having seen the horrors of war. Is tragic death a common problem for coded gay male characters? I know it used to be a common complaint for lesbians. If Walter had at least lived as a bachelor maybe we could make the case for open-mindedness.

[ulkis]

There is no question that he was depicted as poetic and sensitive and unmasculine, and that he was either oblivious to or actively not interested in Una romantically.

 

I think he was oblivious, but I always thought Walter saying he felt like writing to Una felt like a bit of a hint that if Walter had lived maybe he would have developed feelings for Una, but that could have been just Montgomery trying to keep things ambiguous.

 

I am not sure that LMM had to be open-minded in this case since Walter does die and the general consensus is that he was too sensitive to be able to continue living after having seen the horrors of war. Is tragic death a common problem for coded gay male characters?

 

I'm not too well-versed in the topic, but I'm pretty sure it was.

[stlbf]

Anybody else see the news that the CBC is remaking the Anne of Green Gables mini series? I guess with the possibility of it getting picked up as an actual series if the ratings warrant it. The good news is that I didn't see the Sullivan name on the project.

[SomeTameGazelle]

Anybody else see the news that the CBC is remaking the Anne of Green Gables mini series? I guess with the possibility of it getting picked up as an actual series if the ratings warrant it. The good news is that I didn't see the Sullivan name on the project.

 

Yes -- I heard about it and was very confused because they haven't started airing the one with Martin Sheen and Sara Botsford yet. (That one will apparently start on YTV on February 15.) The news has mostly focused on the fact that the writer worked on Breaking Bad but now I read that the producer played Josie Pye in the Kevin Sullivan production with Megan Follows.

 

The CBC one talks up the grittiness, which I think was also described as a selling point of the prequel Before Green Gables. I am mildly skeptical because my first thought is always "Pine woods are just as real as pigsties, and a darn sight pleasanter to be in."

[Miss Dee]

I don't know about Walter, but I'm always interested in the bachelors who lived alone and the women who lived together in pairs. Not that that made them gay - they could have been asexual, if not straight - but I always keep my ear out for hints.

[stlbf]

It would be very interesting if the new series does cover Anne' s early life. Which seemed to be very miserable. And the fact that orphans usually did seem to have troubled homelife in their "adoptive" homes. Plenty of kids were treated like slaves, wanted only for free labor. Nobody knew the dead/lost family, and blood ties were important. Who knew if this child came from "bad stock"?

[SomeTameGazelle]

It would be very interesting if the new series does cover Anne' s early life. Which seemed to be very miserable. And the fact that orphans usually did seem to have troubled homelife in their "adoptive" homes. Plenty of kids were treated like slaves, wanted only for free labor. Nobody knew the dead/lost family, and blood ties were important. Who knew if this child came from "bad stock"?

 

In Anne's case Mrs Thomas who took her as a baby had done rough housework for the Shirleys, so I don't think being unknown was an issue there. And although Mrs Thomas and Mrs Hammond treated her as a servant, Anne seems to have preferred that to the orphan asylum; as she says to Matthew on the ride from the train station

 

"I don't suppose you ever were an orphan in an asylum, so you

can't possibly understand what it is like. It's worse than anything you

could imagine."

 

But that was only a few months out of her life  between Mrs Hammond and Green Gables.

[stlbf]

I imagine that the 19th century orphanage would be similar to the old workhouses of the day. Pretty much hell on earth according to the few books I've read. Call the Midwife books did touch on the subject. Not pleasant at all. Nightmarish in fact. I suppose that it all depended on who ran the place. But child labor was commonplace and people just didn't give the thought of a childhood (much less a happy one) any thought.

[SomeTameGazelle]

Since the new YTV version (apparently a one-off movie rather than a miniseries) airs Monday in Canada, I have started a topic in the miscellaneous TV section to discuss the movie specifically since this topic here is technically for books.

 

http://forums.previously.tv/topic/38540-anne-of-green-gables-2016/#entry1945986

[satrunrose]

It's interesting, I think "Anne's early years" is the part of the story that hasn't exactly stood up to the test of time. I think LMM really bought into the idea of "good stock" by making Anne's parents poor but very respectable high school teachers. For her, I think that is enough to explain why Anne turns out like Anne and not, say, Mary Vance. Realistically, Anne wasn't ever nurtured or cared for. She spent a brief time in an institution in the age of very scary institutions and very little time in school. She's about a billion times better adjusted than she should be (and I love her anyway!).

[stlbf]

On Wednesday, March 16, 2016 at 9:29 AM, satrunrose said:

It's interesting, I think "Anne's early years" is the part of the story that hasn't exactly stood up to the test of time. I think LMM really bought into the idea of "good stock" by making Anne's parents poor but very respectable high school teachers. For her, I think that is enough to explain why Anne turns out like Anne and not, say, Mary Vance. Realistically, Anne wasn't ever nurtured or cared for. She spent a brief time in an institution in the age of very scary institutions and very little time in school. She's about a billion times better adjusted than she should be (and I love her anyway!).

It really would've been interesting to have LLM tell us about Anne's very early upbringing.  We really do know very little via the books. Who taught her how to read and write? How to love doing them? Since it seemed like her previous foster families were lower working class and not very likely to send her off to school every day. Much less encourage her vivid imagination and love of reading.  Alot of orphans in Anne's time were given treatment more akin to slaves or cheap hired help rather than family. Schooling wasn't a high priority for many families for their biological kids. Much less for some kid from most likely unknown origins they take in for whatever reasons. And those reasons rarely were for love and kindness.

[stillshimpy]

Okay, someone linked to an article wondering if Walter was coded as gay.  

Quote

Interesting article about Walter and whether he was coded as gay. I'm torn. While I do think it seems that way I don't know if Montgomery was thatopen-minded.

 

 

She was decidedly not open-minded about people being gay.  LMM had a fan who was prone to obsessiveness and wrote her love letters, talking about wanting to hold her close, etc. etc. and this fan happened to be a woman.  Now here's where it gets really a little eyebrow raising:  LMM would go and stay with this fan, sleeping in the same bed with her, even after she had received letters about how the bed was being thought of as this woman's marital bed.  

Rubio never concludes the incredibly obvious, that LMM may have been gay, but the only close relationship she ever had in her life was with her cousin Frederica who when that woman died, the journal entries were epic and it was incredibly clear that LMM loved her dearly.  Mary Rubio, who both edited the journals and then also wrote The Gift of Wings (I loath that title) never, ever concludes that there is even the hint of a possibility that Lucy Maud Montgomery may have been gay.  I don't know if that's because she never had reason to, or if Rubio (who is an older woman) actually is from a time before it would simply be a fact about LMM.  

But it's a very strange part of the journals and the biography.  LMM rips this poor woman to shreds in the journals, calling her all kinds of names I won't repeat, but then goes off and stays with her, sleeping in the same bed on multiple occasions.  Rubio concludes that she did this because LMM feared the fan -- who did end up eventually obsessed with a male minister in much the same way -- would blackmail her with letters.  So that LMM kept going to see this woman, who was sexually obsessed with her and wrote about it a fair amount, to preserve her reputation?  Yeah, it didn't make sense to me either. 

Anyway, I've never seen any biographer or anyone suggest this, but I still would not be shocked to learn that LMM was actually gay.  Her friendship with Frederica was the most emotionally intimate one she had in her life, she paid for Frederica to go to college.  The whole Herman Leard thing always seemed like primarily a fabrication to me.  LMM broke up with her first fiance because among other things, she was physically disgusted by being touched by him.  Later when she meets him again, and he's finally married but has no children, she suggests that perhaps her long ago abhorrence of his touch was actually indicating that he was gay (this is incredibly unlikely).  

I actually am not looking to lob out any weird grenades here, but when I started reading those incredibly long journals, I actually expected to find out LMM was gay because of Walter and because of the way she wrote Anne's friendships with women.  When that didn't prove to be the case for the first couple of journals I figured, "Hey, I'm wrong" but then the stuff with Herman Leard was so peculiar (I'm convinced she primarily made it up) , but then the thing that gives me pause on that is that apparently Leard's sisters were very, very aware of LMM having a crush on Leard....and his not returning her feelings and actually being engaged to someone else at the time.  

The fairly long interlude with that obsessive female fan is just incredibly strange though.  The twenty pages LMM wrote about her emotional devastation over Frederica's death (and that's just from the night she died), there are still things that make me uncertain.  

If I had to guess, yes, Walter's meant to be gay.  LMM did a lot of things in those journals that were centered around keeping up appearances.  She was obsessed with them.  A lot of that stuff was for show.  So the overly savage treatment of this fan, who she would then go and visit and stay with may have been a case of that.  

LMM was very, very prudish though which in a lot of ways just made her a product of her time.  However, there was a great deal of material in the journals that made we wonder anew if she was simply gay and too terrified to admit to anyone.  There was precious little to contradict the possibility and when it comes to Mary Rubio, I did wonder if she was simply uncomfortable with the concept and therefore did backbends to explain away that relationship with her fan.  

Regardless, LMM was obsessed with appearing to have a perfect life and how history would judge her, but she cannot have been unaware of some of the things she implied with Walter's characterization.  

Edited July 14, 2016 by stillshimpy

[Blergh]

Who Miss Montgomery may have loved, how and to what extent is NOT the saddest irony re her story. What IMO is the saddest irony is that she struggled with a tsunami of depression for so long and yet expended so much energy trying to cover up that fact rather than solely trying to combat it or confront its causes. It seems a virtual certainty to me that she seems to have ended her life (or, at the very least, put up zero resistance to whatever physical ailment may have ended it) but it seems the walls of denial got thrown up almost instantly once this news was released so many decades after her death. I wonder who it was who found her & under what circumstances and did they agree to obscure the details to ensure a Christian burial?  This doesn't take away from her literary works or talents but, rather shows that a tortured genius could produce amazing works despite the torments in her life.

  Boiled down to essentials- it seems to me LMM may have wanted the world to think she was Anne Shirley but the reality seems more as though she was a far more troubled Rachel Lynde.

[stillshimpy]

She did write about her sadness a great deal and talked openly -- or as openly as she ever talked about anything -- about taking veronal for sleep and other issues.  She wrote at length about her husband, Ewan's mental health issues.  Rubio actually broke that down and concluded that his symptoms fit bromide poisoning.  So the treatments used for his illness actually made him worse.  However, she really did conceal that she was addicted to a variety of opiates by the end of her life. 

Her granddaughter, Stuart's daughter, actually announced to the press on something like the 100th anniversary of Anne Green Gables that Lucy Maud Montgomery had committed suicide.  So it was known to her family and Stuart knew.  To anyone who read the journals it came as very little shock.  I've got them here, so I'll go ahead and quote the last entry in its entirety, dated March 23rd, 1942:

"Since then my life has been hell, hell, hell.  My mind is gone -- everything in the world I lived for has gone -- the world has gone mad.  I shall be driven to end my life.  Oh God, forgive me.  Nobody dreams what my awful position is."  

That's a verbatim quote.  I had finished the journals before then and it's pretty clear from that material that she took her own life.  Those journals were kept by her son Stuart until he gave them to the University of Guelph and Rubio and Waterson edited them.   

But that's part of the reason that I think it is Rubio who believes she is in some way protecting Montgomery's legacy and reputation:  It's Mary Rubio who argues that Lucy Maud Montgomery did not commit suicide and it's Montgomery's family who says that she did.  LMM did not leave a note and Rubio believes her overdose was accidental.  She died a month after writing that last entry, so it was not immediate.  Rubio argues that she simply was too sick, from an addiction to opiates and depression, to edit the journals as she normally would have.  

Stuart MacDonald did not want the journals published until a figure from his own life had died.  His first love, who he felt his mother had been very unfair to in the journals (and truly, she was very unkind to that woman for little reason) .  So it wasn't about concealing his mother's illnesses or his father's.  He had ample opportunity to simply remove that material, but chose not to.  

It's Mary Rubio who has a hard time accepting that LMM killed herself purposefully and that's part of why the subject of LMM sexual identity and orientation is still not a settled question for me.  Mary Rubio spent close to 20 years  editing those journals.  She didn't and doesn't have adequate distance from her subject.  I don't know how old Mary Henley Rubio is, but her odd insistence that LMM died of an accidental overdose when LMM's own family was the source of the information in the first place is peculiar.  We live in different times now, when mental illness is simply illness and someone's sexual identity wouldn't need to be hidden.  I just don't have any real reason to believe that Mary Rubio had caught up to those times.  

Quote

 it seems to me LMM may have wanted the world to think she was Anne Shirley but the reality seems more as though she was a far more troubled Rachel Lynde.

 

 

 

I definitely agree with the sentiment, if not the particulars of that sentence.  She did want to be seen as Anne or Emily (of the New Moon) but she wasn't much like Rachel Lynde, she was more like the matriarch of -- was it he Pringle clan?  the one who cames tearing over when Anne sends over the journal that reveals their storied ancestor may have participated in cannibalism during a shipwreck --  from Anne of Windy Poplars.  Painfully proper and terrified of anything resembling scandal.  LMM did backbends in those journals trying to invent cover stories for all of Chester's  (Stuart was the good son, Chester was the son I wouldn't wish on I person I actively hated ) many, many failings.  

What's really nice about the first journal is she started them when she was fifteen and was a lot like Anne.  That was clearly a part of her.  There was sort of a minor scandal when the journals were released, because they were in such contrast to all previous biographies and neighborly recollections that painted LMM as a near saint.   Even Rubio has admitted it's almost impossible to know who she really was, as even the journals were things she edited over and over trying to craft an image.  

Edited July 14, 2016 by stillshimpy

[stillshimpy]

By the way, here's the piece about LMM's suicide.  According to the granddaughter, there was a note which she has never seen, and that it asked for forgiveness.  Rubio believes that it is the last journal entry to which she refers.  I personally think that Stuart MacDonald left that journal entry in there purposefully and that makes it fairly obvious that LMM was suicidal, but the delay in publishing the journals had to do with waiting for a different reason.  

I don't know.  Rubio was convinced that there was no note and that it was to that last journal entry Stuart had referred.   I don't think there's any way to know that from her position, but Rubio did talk about the final journal entries being found on LMM's bedside table.  The entry references both suicide and forgiveness.  Either way, I found it very odd that Rubio is so invested in trying to argue against LMM's suicide. 

Admittedly, it made me wonder if Kate MacDonald had actually read her journals, as again, above is the final entry and it's sort of obvious from that entry alone, particularly as it was the last entry. 

Edited July 14, 2016 by stillshimpy

[Miss Dee]

Poor woman, to have given the world so much joy through her writing and yet to have suffered so much herself.

[ulkis]

merged my posts.

Edited January 6, 2017 by ulkis

[ulkis]

On 7/7/2014 at 1:30 AM, Anna Yolei said:

Jane of Lantern Hill is my fave non-Anne book, but I could not find this book on Amazon. No Kindle version, and the last time I looked, the only copy was a first edition hardback...which would've been cool if I had 200 spare bucks lying around. LOL!

Reading some of the old posts in the thread . . . there's definitely a copies of Jane of Lantern Hill now:

https://www.amazon.com/Jane-Lantern-Hill-L-M-Montgomery/dp/1402289308/ref=pd_sbs_14_2?_encoding=UTF8&pd_rd_i=1402289308&pd_rd_r=3WA032KYJRXR2FGPHVWJ&pd_rd_w=r4JPz&pd_rd_wg=oRylU&psc=1&refRID=3WA032KYJRXR2FGPHVWJ

http://www.ebay.com/itm/Jane-of-Lantern-Hill-Virago-Modern-Classics-Montgomery-L-M-/291976854328?hash=item43fb2d3b38:g:F74AAOSwOVpXWEPq

Edited January 6, 2017 by ulkis

[ulkis]

edited to merge my two posts.

Edited January 3, 2017 by ulkis

[SomeTameGazelle]

Just wanted to make sure that anyone interested has seen the new Previously.tv forum for the upcoming CBC Anne with RH Thomson as Matthew and Amybeth McNulty as Anne. It has space for discussing the books and other adaptations. Starts airing March 19.

[SomeTameGazelle]

On 2/12/2017 at 9:15 PM, SomeTameGazelle said:

Just wanted to make sure that anyone interested has seen the new Previously.tv forum for the upcoming CBC Anne with RH Thomson as Matthew and Amybeth McNulty as Anne. It has space for discussing the books and other adaptations. Starts airing March 19.

Has that link always been wrong? I meant  this forum: http://forums.previously.tv/forum/3007-anne/

[Roseanna]

On ‎4‎.‎5‎.‎2015 at 0:32 AM, ulkis said:

I don't think she was lost in the other books per se . . . they weren't really "Anne" books. At least, "Rainbow Valley" and "Rilla" weren't. I am pretty convinced that Montgomery wanted to write a book about the war and just decided to have the main character be Anne's daughter to make sure it would be read more widely. 

As I child I thought that Anne became uninteresting and interpreted that also generally the life of an adult and especially that of a wife and mother is boring.  No more adventures, no more fun, just weekday chores.  

[Roseanna]

Continueing: I remember when Anne came back from Europe which hadn't been such a great experience as she had dreamed for years. She told that in some lovely Place she had begun to think about people in Avonlea!

That was what happened to Anne all the time. The things she had dreamed about weren't at all wonderful in reality.

I feel really sorry for her, as I have had just the opposite experiebce: the reality is much better than dreams and worthy of all waiting and working.   

[Roseanna]

On ‎15‎.‎12‎.‎2015 at 9:42 AM, Brn2bwild said:

Though LM Montgomery might have been projecting her own insecurities, I could see how one would genuinely hate the post-WWI fashions compared to fashions of the 1890s.  I absolutely love women's fashions circa 1893-1894, before puffed sleeves became all the rage.  The skirts were normal, not puffed out with crinoline or a ridiculous bustle, yet there was real shape to the dresses, from the waistline to the angle of the shoulders.  A lot of women looked really elegant in those fashions (it didn't hurt that the hair styles had vastly improved from the 1860s).

 

By contrast, women's clothes from the 1920s look like... sacks.  They were probably much more comfortable, but the lack of support is really shocking compared to earlier fashions.  Maybe if you had wealth, you could pull off the fashions like in Downton Abbey, but otherwise, they probably didn't flatter many people.

It wasn't primarily about how the clothes looked like but that the clothes in the 1920ies gave women freedom to move, both in a concret way and in society.  

As for Downton Abbey, even if Mary and her mother still had a maid, Edith didn't. Which meant that upper-class women didn't need a maid in order to dress and undress. That was freedom both to Edith and servants who could find a job where there was no need to live in the employer's home.   

[ulkis]

edit.

Edited June 9, 2017 by ulkis

[Roseanna]

1 hour ago, ulkis said:

Anne in that scene talks about how she likes to gossip, and jokes that she was thinking about which suitor some woman was going to pick while she was in Westminster Abbey. 

I can't understand that she thought about such a trivial matter instead of enjoying fully the unique experience. Evidently Anne has no imagination left but she has become petis bourgeois.   

[ulkis]

edit.

Edited June 9, 2017 by ulkis

[Roseanna]

1 hour ago, ulkis said:

Wow, I've never looked upon it like that all. It's interesting. For me, thinking about gossip for a moment doesn't mean she didn't fully enjoy it. It was just her mind wandering. She had been gone for weeks without hearing anything from her town and it sounded like that was a thing everyone had been wondering about. 

But why were "everybody" wondering about it? Because they had small minds that could think only trivial matters. And Anne had been just like them.

And I can't understand how Anne's mind can wander instead of imagining f.ex. coronations, weddings and funerals that had happened in Westminister Abbey. 

[ulkis]

edit.

Edited June 9, 2017 by ulkis

[Brn2bwild]

12 hours ago, Roseanna said:

It wasn't primarily about how the clothes looked like but that the clothes in the 1920ies gave women freedom to move, both in a concret way and in society.  

As for Downton Abbey, even if Mary and her mother still had a maid, Edith didn't. Which meant that upper-class women didn't need a maid in order to dress and undress. That was freedom both to Edith and servants who could find a job where there was no need to live in the employer's home.   

I never suggested the clothes didn't provide more freedom of movement - note that I said they were probably more comfortable.  My point was that from a purely visual standpoint, the clothes from the 1920s do not appear to be as flattering.  To someone like L.M. Montgomery, who greatly prized appearances, uncomfortable reality be damned, that would likely be a significant factor in whether she liked/disliked clothes from that time period. 

[Roseanna]

10 hours ago, Brn2bwild said:

I never suggested the clothes didn't provide more freedom of movement - note that I said they were probably more comfortable.  My point was that from a purely visual standpoint, the clothes from the 1920s do not appear to be as flattering.  To someone like L.M. Montgomery, who greatly prized appearances, uncomfortable reality be damned, that would likely be a significant factor in whether she liked/disliked clothes from that time period. 

It's not the same as we look at the former modes as the people who lived looked at the mode of their time. Young people usually like the mode of their own age, even of they later noticed that it didn't suit them at all. The visual standpoint isn't neutral. 

On the other hand, women in their forties and fifties at the age Montgomery lived (unlike now) were probably so accustumed to their pwn style that they saw no reason to change it. Many even saw it immoral to show legs. 

On ‎24‎.‎11‎.‎2015 at 4:41 AM, stillshimpy said:

She enjoyed writing young characters, children and actually resented the need to make Anne grow up and marry.   One of the notes in her journal -- and there were very few about what she was writing -- was her declaring that she supposed she must have Anne marry.  Frankly, even though it was clearly not a sexual thing, LMM liked the world of writing children much more than writing young adults.  She found the fanciful nature of them FAR more interesting than adults.  But you have to remember, that even though she was not a feminist -- she sort of was, she just would never have thought to frame it that way -- she did find the role of adult women in everything other than motherhood to be terribly repressive.  Having a sense of humor and laughing aloud were considered bad things in a grown woman.  

And her attitude shows: as a girl Anne was unique and her becoming an adult was presented as being tamed. 

[Felix]

On 2016-7-14 at 5:32 AM, stillshimpy said:

Okay, someone linked to an article wondering if Walter was coded as gay.  

She was decidedly not open-minded about people being gay.  LMM had a fan who was prone to obsessiveness and wrote her love letters, talking about wanting to hold her close, etc. etc. and this fan happened to be a woman.  Now here's where it gets really a little eyebrow raising:  LMM would go and stay with this fan, sleeping in the same bed with her, even after she had received letters about how the bed was being thought of as this woman's marital bed.  

Rubio never concludes the incredibly obvious, that LMM may have been gay, but the only close relationship she ever had in her life was with her cousin Frederica who when that woman died, the journal entries were epic and it was incredibly clear that LMM loved her dearly.  Mary Rubio, who both edited the journals and then also wrote The Gift of Wings (I loath that title) never, ever concludes that there is even the hint of a possibility that Lucy Maud Montgomery may have been gay.  I don't know if that's because she never had reason to, or if Rubio (who is an older woman) actually is from a time before it would simply be a fact about LMM.  

But it's a very strange part of the journals and the biography.  LMM rips this poor woman to shreds in the journals, calling her all kinds of names I won't repeat, but then goes off and stays with her, sleeping in the same bed on multiple occasions.  Rubio concludes that she did this because LMM feared the fan -- who did end up eventually obsessed with a male minister in much the same way -- would blackmail her with letters.  So that LMM kept going to see this woman, who was sexually obsessed with her and wrote about it a fair amount, to preserve her reputation?  Yeah, it didn't make sense to me either. 

Anyway, I've never seen any biographer or anyone suggest this, but I still would not be shocked to learn that LMM was actually gay.  Her friendship with Frederica was the most emotionally intimate one she had in her life, she paid for Frederica to go to college.  The whole Herman Leard thing always seemed like primarily a fabrication to me.  LMM broke up with her first fiance because among other things, she was physically disgusted by being touched by him.  Later when she meets him again, and he's finally married but has no children, she suggests that perhaps her long ago abhorrence of his touch was actually indicating that he was gay (this is incredibly unlikely).  

I actually am not looking to lob out any weird grenades here, but when I started reading those incredibly long journals, I actually expected to find out LMM was gay because of Walter and because of the way she wrote Anne's friendships with women.  When that didn't prove to be the case for the first couple of journals I figured, "Hey, I'm wrong" but then the stuff with Herman Leard was so peculiar (I'm convinced she primarily made it up) , but then the thing that gives me pause on that is that apparently Leard's sisters were very, very aware of LMM having a crush on Leard....and his not returning her feelings and actually being engaged to someone else at the time.  

The fairly long interlude with that obsessive female fan is just incredibly strange though.  The twenty pages LMM wrote about her emotional devastation over Frederica's death (and that's just from the night she died), there are still things that make me uncertain.  

If I had to guess, yes, Walter's meant to be gay.  LMM did a lot of things in those journals that were centered around keeping up appearances.  She was obsessed with them.  A lot of that stuff was for show.  So the overly savage treatment of this fan, who she would then go and visit and stay with may have been a case of that.  

LMM was very, very prudish though which in a lot of ways just made her a product of her time.  However, there was a great deal of material in the journals that made we wonder anew if she was simply gay and too terrified to admit to anyone.  There was precious little to contradict the possibility and when it comes to Mary Rubio, I did wonder if she was simply uncomfortable with the concept and therefore did backbends to explain away that relationship with her fan.  

Regardless, LMM was obsessed with appearing to have a perfect life and how history would judge her, but she cannot have been unaware of some of the things she implied with Walter's characterization.  

Hello,

I haven't actually read any work from LMM, but read the complete summary of Blue Castle and something caught my attention enough for me to do some digging.

There is a character called Cissy Gay, which is a pretty explicit name so I just stared for a second when I stumbled upon it, and then found out she was a close friend of Valency, even sharing a bedroom, and that she was a bit of a society reject because she had a child out of wedlock? (Perdon me if this is inaccurate, as I said I haven't read the actual book..) This name, plus the idea of being a social pariah and intimacy with another woman made me wonder if LMM wasn't trying to send a whole another message here, and if she was, then what kind of message, and your post really makes sense to me because of it.

[SomeTameGazelle]

On 6/22/2017 at 6:30 AM, Felix said:

There is a character called Cissy Gay, which is a pretty explicit name so I just stared for a second when I stumbled upon it, and then found out she was a close friend of Valency, even sharing a bedroom, and that she was a bit of a society reject because she had a child out of wedlock? (Perdon me if this is inaccurate, as I said I haven't read the actual book..) This name, plus the idea of being a social pariah and intimacy with another woman made me wonder if LMM wasn't trying to send a whole another message here, and if she was, then what kind of message, and your post really makes sense to me because of it.

"Gay" could also have meant a more general sense of merriment for the formerly repressed and stifled Valancy, or even with a hint of licentiousness with reference to Cissy's baby. Cissy is in no way depicted as a "bad" girl though -- rather she is so good and sweet that it clearly reflects badly on the people who shun her.

Spoiler

Going to nurse Cissy through her illness is the first step of liberation for Valancy. She sleeps on a sofa in Cissy's room because Cissy might need her during the night. They are affectionate with each other but it's more about setting up Valancy's meeting Barney.

If LMM thought of the name Gay as a coded hint at homosexuality then we need to explain Gay Penhallow in A Tangled Web as well.

[Harvey]

Blue Castle is my favorite, everything is perfect about it. That tale of  emancipation is so beautiful.

I desperately want to read all of her journals and the Rubio version, sadly the books are not available in my country. Maybe they will be available in the form of ebooks someday, and then...

[Starleigh]

I don't think the term "gay" was in common use back in the 1920s and 30s? So I don't think LMM was hinting at anything there. With Cissy.

Interesting points about Walter. But my take on him, is more that LMM wanted to portray him as the sensitive poet type, the kind who was dreamy and other worldly, and, tbh, she was not that great at writing realistic male characters, for the most part, most were either over idealized or two dimensional. The sensitive artiste like John Meredith or the rabble rouser like Norman Douglas. I like both Gilbert and Teddy, but they are rather bland. She was definitely limited with depicting a realistic fatherly figure (Rubio's thoughts on the way she romanticized her father while ripping apart her stepmother are fascinating and likely play a role in this).

Her real strength was writing interesting, flawed, but extremely likeable female characters of all ages. She was not that great at writing realistic young boy characters either--they tended to be either mischievous yet manly scalawags like Davy or romanticized ethereal types like Paul. I always thought that  Jem (as a boy) calling Anne "mother dearwums" seemed a bit much, even for those times. I think she tried with Walter, and it is to her credit he isn't as boringly perfect as Paul even if she does portray him as the romantic poet.

(Also, IIRC, there are a couple of hints here and there that he had a bit of a crush on Faith Meredith.)

Now whether or not LMM was gay or had those inclinations, interesting to ponder, but no real proof. The whole way she describes the Herman Laird scenario was a bit odd. I sort of see it as her being a passionate and intense woman, wanting to have that emotional roller coaster and sort of convincing herself she was desperately in love. Because she wanted that experience and didn't sound like she ever met anyone who made her feel that way. And she met this good looking guy she was attracted to, and made a bigger deal out of than it was. True, she had an intense relationship with her cousin Frede. But it seemed more like the intense friendship girls have with their BFF in their teens, then sort of eventually grow a bit detached as they grow up and especially once they form romantic relationships with others. I never read it as romantic. That's my take, anyway.

YMMV with all of the above, of course:)

Just wanted to say, btw, I love this thread and all of the analyses here about LMM, her books, and characters! 

 

10 minutes ago, Starleigh said:

I don

 

 

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10 minutes ago, Starleigh said:

 

 

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Edited June 9, 2020 by Starleigh

[Prairie Rose]

Why I Love Lucy Maud

[Prairie Rose]

I checked my local library system to see if they carry The Gift of Wings. They don't, so I went ahead and ordered a copy (I already had a $10 gift card, so why not?). I hadn't heard of it until I visited this thread. I look forward to reading it!!

[Prairie Rose]

I'm reading it now - and loving it!!!!

[Harvey]

3 hours ago, Prairie Rose said:

I'm reading it now - and loving it!!!!

Funny thing, I started reading it yesterday too! 😄 I found it online as a pdf. It's very good.

It's so wild when it talks about the intermarriage of the 3 families and how it was totally common to marry your cousins. Not great 😵.

Edited March 5, 2022 by Harvey

[Snow Apple]

I read a book about Evelyn Nesbit and it seems LMM based Anne's looks after one of her early modeling pictures. I found that interesting.