IT TOOK ME TEN YEARS TO FINISH LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY'S JOURNALS. I read them slowly, in small sips, whenever I felt sad or overwhelmed. There were my “grumble books” as L.M.M herself called them.
It is the story of a 20th century woman writer in a world rapidly changing. From a distance, she admires the spunk of modern women, women who smoke cigarettes and cross their legs, but she is too rooted in her ways, Victorian ways, to join them. Instead, she chooses what she thinks is the safer path: marrying a minister, only to find that he is a pitiful husband and father, consumed by the fear of burning in hell, and to watch the social role of the church gradually lose its importance. By the end, she has made practically every life decision out of fear of judgment. And for what? For nothing, when you know how she died.
Reading her journals was a constant reminder that we are freer than we think, and that we shouldn't let social expectations dictate our entire lives. Had Maud allowed herself to be a little more selfish, a little more honest — not marry... or at least divorce her husband when his fear of hell became all-consuming... or at least refused to organize every church function simply because it was expected of her—perhaps she would have been less resentful, and might have known some of the happiness she describes in her novels.
This was my main takeaway from reading the journals, but I knew it was not the full story. I was aware of theories suggesting that Maud may have been a closeted lesbian. I also knew that her eldest son was said to be an exhibitionist, and that he was later arrested for embezzlement.
As I neared the end of the final volume, I came across an online forum that painted a far darker picture. It claimed that Chester, the eldest son, had molested a servant’s young daughter, behaved in a disturbingly affectionate and manipulative way toward his mother, laying in bed with her, and that the death of a cat—described in the journals as an accident—may not have been accidental at all.
The biography most often cited in these discussions was Mary Rubio’s The Gift of Wings. When I finally finished the journals—after ten years—I immediately bought the book and read it in a feverish week.
The cat-killing and the queer icon theories are not discussed, unfortunately, but what is uncovered is unsettling.
First, there is the tragedy of both Maud and her husband being failed by medicine. Despite being set in her Victorian ways, Maud was optimistic about the future: pro-flapper, pro-progress, pro-sex education and pro-science. Yet this very faith in modernity led her to place too much trust in prescription pills. She self-medicated with bromide and chloral, sedatives we now know to be toxic, addictive, in the case of chloral, and capable of worsening depression.
Her husband, too, was a victim of this medical failure. Unwilling, because of social taboo, to acknowledge the psychological nature of his suffering, he reported his symptoms as physical. As a result, doctors repeatedly prescribed the same dangerous medications, deepening rather than relieving his condition. How much of his odd behavior, then, might have been the result of these pills—or of their withdrawal? Would Maud have been so resentful towards her husband, had she known the medicine was zombifying him, and had he had gotten therapy (and not the lobotomy kind)? He is scarcely mentioned in the journals, and when he is, he is characterized as self-absorbed, dull, and a burden.
How curious that L.M.M. pokes fun at harmless quack medicine in her novels—most notably in my favorite of hers, The Blue Castle. Was she, perhaps, poking fun at herself and the “harmless” pills she believed she and her husband were taking?
It just seems so tragic to me, that they ruined their lives trying to be modern and open to science.
Then comes the utter heartbreak of realizing that one of your women writer heroes was cowardly: protecting her sexual predator son, and her reputation, at the expense of protecting her servants.
And yet, the coup de grâce for me is reading about just how at the dinner table, they all ate in silence, reading rather than speaking. If I have learned anything from this biography, it is this: I'd rather a life full of joy and laughter like Anne Shirley's then have written a book as successful as Anne of Green Gables. •
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