Maud's House of Dreams: The Life of Lucy Maud Montgomery Hardcover - 2002

Excerpt

Chapter 1: Story Girl

“ . . . she could see it plainly with its turrets and banners on the pine-clad mountain height, wrapped in its fain, blue loveliness, against the sunset skies of a fair and unknown land. Everything wonderful and beautiful was in that castle.” -- The Blue Castle

Maud Montgomery was not quite two years old when she saw her mother for the last time. Dressed in a lace-trimmed white muslin dress, held tightly in her father’s arms, she looked down at the beautiful face in the coffin. She could feel her father’s tears on her cheeks. She could hear someone in the room sobbing. Outside the open parlour window behind the sofa across the room, a breeze was making the bright green vines dance. She leaned down and put her hand on Mama’s face. It was cold. She turned and buried her face in her father’s neck. As young as she was, she remembered every detail of that moment all her life.

That sad scene was revisited over and over again in the books the grown-up Maud wrote: Emily Starr crying her heart out on her father’s coffin in Emily of New Moon, Marigold Lesley imagining her father’s dead face in Magic for Marigold. But those books came many years later and the journey from the day her mother was buried to the day Maud wrote “Lucy Maud Montgomery” at the end of her first published story was long and often painful.

Maud was born on November 30, 1874 in the tiny hamlet of Clifton (now New London) on an inlet along the north shore of Prince Edward Island. The cradle-shaped island, the smallest province in Canada, is a soft and beautiful place where the sea wind blows almost constantly over the rolling green hills and the white farm houses. The island is just over two hundred kilometres long and sixty kilometres wide at its widest spot (only four at its narrowest). It lies in the Gulf of the St. Lawrence, just off the coasts of Nova Scotia and New Brunswick. Hundreds of years ago, when the Miqmaq people were the only people who lived there, they named it Abegweit, which means cradled on the waves. More often, they called it Minagoo which means, simply, the island. Centuries later, when the the French owned the island, they named it Ile St Jean but they, too, more often just called it l’ile, the island. By the time Maud Montgomery was born, the island was part of Canada and was officially named Prince Edward Island, but it was still just the Island to its people, as though there were no other in the world.

The hills rise highest along the Island’s north shore near Cavendish. They end in steep, rust-red sandstone cliffs that drop down onto rocks and towering sand dunes at the edge of the sea. Back from the cliffs, the roads, as red as the rocks and the cliff sides, wind among farms and meadows, through woods and along bubbling brooks. When Maud was growing up there were no telephone poles or wires strung along those red dirt roads, no cars on them, and no airplanes droned overhead. Instead there were wagons and carts, buggies and fashionable carriages, pulled by horses clip-clopping on the roads and only birds flew overhead. There were great sailing ships and steamships in the big harbours of Sunnyside and Charlottetown and fishing boats in every small harbour and cove and along all the beaches. Trains chugged along the narrow-gauge tracks that zig-zagged through the province, their shrill whistles loudly announcing their arrivals and departures at the stations along the way. In 1873, only a year before Maud was born, the Island had become the newest province in Canada and Maud’s grandfather, Donald Montgomery, had been named its first member of the Canadian senate.

None of this meant anything to the baby who was baptised Lucy Maud Montgomery in the Presbyterian church in Cavendish, where her mother’s people lived. She was named Lucy for her mother’s mother and Maud for one of the daughters of Queen Victoria but she was never called either Lucy or Lucy Maud. She was always just Maud -- or Maudie to her father.

Hugh John Montgomery and his wife Clara Macneill Montgomery had been happy with their new baby in their little yellow house in Clifton. Hugh John was a storekeeper there and Clara kept house, dropping her work every few minutes to croon over her golden-haired, bright-eyed baby. Maud later put her own daydreams about the Clifton house into Anne of Green Gables when Anne imagined her mother’s and father’s little yellow house with “honeysuckle over the parlour window and lilacs in the front yard . . .” But bliss soon turned to sorrow when Clara fell ill with tuberculosis and had to go home to Cavendish to be cared for by her mother. A few months later she died there.

A heart-broken Hugh John left Maud with her Macneill grandparents. The store in Clifton was bankrupt and he needed to be free to move wherever work took him. When he settled again, he told Maud’s grandparents, he would have his Maudie to live with him. But he did not soon settle and the bed Grandmother Macneill had made up for Maud in the little room off the sitting room in the big farmhouse became hers for all her growing years.

So, in a way, Maud Montgomery was as much an orphan as Anne Shirley, or Emily Starr, the heroines of her imagination, with an absent father she adored as Jane Stuart did hers in Jane of Lantern Hill. She was a small, spindly, sparrow of a child with long, straight, gold-brown hair usually pulled back from her small, intense face in two tight braids. She had a delicate mouth and nose and clear grey eyes that noticed everything around her. She had the same sharp, determined chin she gave both Anne and Emily and she, too, could have been described as “elfin.” She was quick-witted and clever and she felt every pleasure and every pain so keenly that life was a constant succession of acute joys and griefs.

Maud was like both Anne and Emily, too, in that she loved big, interesting words and was always making up stories -- even before she could read and write. She had the kind of imagination that could change her everyday world into a beautiful and magical realm or, as readily, into one that was ugly and terrifying. She believed -- as Anne did -- that the gossamer webs on the delicate fern leaves on dewy mornings were fairy tablecloths and, then, when her grandmother locked her in the dark spare room for punishment, as Aunt Elizabeth did Emily, the room was instantly full of “great black hands” and grey, menacing shapes.