“I thought girls in their teens might like to read [Anne of Green Gables], that was the only audience I hoped to reach.” — L.M. Montgomery

As with Sylvia Plath, my relationship with Lucy Maud Montgomery has spanned the entirety of my life. It graduated from a childhood voracious yearning to read all the books immediately to a longer period when I “grew out of them”, to a re-discovery of them later, seasoned with life experience, a renewed interest leading to seeking out her lesser known books, many of which I had never even heard of in the first flush of LMM adoration.

In the wake of the original Anne of Green Gables mini-series, it seems there was even more of a hunger for Montgomery’s work – and thankfully she published so much! Some of it isn’t very good but if you are a completist, as I am, you had to read all the things. Montgomery was a working writer since she was in her late teens. She was dogged and determined. She sent stuff out, got rejection letters, sent them out again. At any given time, she had about 10 stories “out”, waiting to hear back. She upped her odds. She was full on in this game before she sat down to write an actual novel. Her short stories could fill an entire bookshelf. She wrote prolifically and wrote to the specificity of the genre. She wrote stories for boys. She wrote of tragic thwarted love affairs. She wrote home-spun ladies-magazine tales, filled with sewing circles and recipes. All of these stories, naturally, took place on Prince Edward Island. She didn’t want to just appeal to one demographic. She was very smart in her approach. I admire her determination and stick-to-it-iveness.

If all you know of her work is Anne of Green Gables, some of these stories might be a total revelation (particularly the romantic melodramas, written with a torrid turgid purple pen.). Montgomery wasn’t trying to be a grand artist. She HAD to write, and she would write ANYthing. So a series of short story collections started coming out in the ’90s, I think? I bought them all. Read them all. Plus, as I mentioned, some of her lesser-known books: Magic for Marigold, The Story Girl, Jane of Lantern Hill, the tedious Pat of Silver Bush, and … the mighty The Blue Castle. I fell madly in love with The Blue Castle. Anne of Green Gables was the gateway drug, but when I branched out into the Emily series I found my real place. Anne was adorable. Emily was profound. Those Emily books are much sadder and much more disturbing than Anne, and as a dark twisty little child I related.

Around the same time as the short story collections started appearing, there was the additional joy of the publication of Montgomery’s FIVE volumes of journals. I inhaled them. So many revelations. You can gather a lot of information about Montgomery from her books: she re-works stories, she submerges her life’s facts (so many of her heroines are parent-less. Montgomery DID have a father but he abandoned her and went off and had a whole new family). The journals, though, filled in so many of the pieces. The love affair she had with “Herman”, the farmer, which … if I am reading between the lines … or maybe NOT even between the lines … was passionate and sexual. They did everything but, in other words. And yet she renounced him, because … he was a farmer and it would never work. In her mind. It took everything she had to give him up and literally 30 years later, an old married lady, she was still mentioning him in her journal. (Tragically, he died about a year after she broke off their relationship. She never stopped grieving him.) Meanwhile, the man she DID marry – a minister – turned out to be a religious maniac, a madman, moaning about hellfire, wrapping his head in cloth, moaning and crying … on their honeymoon, practically. Because she married him without having lived with him, without even really knowing him, and he had seemed nice and respectable, she had no way of knowing the HELL she was putting herself into.

She would have been well within her rights to leave him. He suffered his entire life with this mania. Sometimes he’d be okay, but then the mood would descend, and it was all she could do to keep him comfortable and hide his illness from the parishioners. It was a full-time job, taking care of this poor man. I say “poor man” but reading the journals I want to push him into hellfire myself. Leave Lucy ALONE. Let her WRITE. You are dragging her DOWN. They had two sons. She ran the entire household because her husband was useless. Through her journals, learning how busy her life was – especially because being the minister’s wife was a public-facing position with a lot of duties attached to it – it’s even more astonishing she was able to write as much as she did. A novel a year for 20 years. Plus innumerable short stories.

If she HAD to write, then you can see how much of an escape it must have been for her, to create these new worlds – made up of the familiar parts of her own life, the landscapes, the people. Imagine, too, that AS she’s writing Emily of New Moon, typing away in her office … imagine that her husband’s moans of agony can be heard down the hall. This is the reality, this is the sound Montgomery was drowning out as she wrote her magical books.

This is one of the reasons why I think Blue Castle has such an uncanny power. Literally “uncanny”. I didn’t read it in the first wave of my Montgomery experience, when I was a kid. I picked it up later, when all of these books came out in cheap paperbacks. The book weaves an almost eerie the spell. It’s a conjuring act. What she is doing is clear wish-fulfillment, yes, particularly when you know what her life was like behind the scenes. Blue Castle is about an awkward spinster, hen-pecked by her horrific family, who learns she only has a year to live. She tells no one, and decides to make a break for it while she still has time. She proposes marriage to a guy she’s always liked, a loner with a mysterious past who lives off in the woods. They have barely had any interactions beyond “Hi, how are you”, so he is, of course, dumbfounded by the proposal. He’s self-sufficient and taciturn and private but guys like that are often more kind, more sensitive and aware than the big loud extroverts. She tells him “It’ll only be for a year, I’m going to die, but I want to spend it with you.” So he accepts her proposal. She lives a rapturous year with him out in the woods. It’s one of the most romantic books ever, but it has this background of sadness and mortality, of the cruelty and meanness of small-town life, the gossip, the horrible shame of being an “ugly” woman no man wants, and blah blah … and then also the incandescent joy of open rebellion against the forces trying to keep you down. In Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery wove together the landscape of her childhood with everything else she knew about the place where she grew up, and created a heroine who still lives on today, as famous as the famous Alice. Everything she wrote was personal, in some way: it came from the ground where she lived. But Blue Castle feels like it’s pouring directly out of her soul.

As she wrote it, her husband’s screams of agony came to her from down the hall.

This adds poignancy to what she was doing, what she was attempting to describe: a way OUT. Into a better life. A happier partnership of equals.

Montgomery did not have a happy life. Reading her journals is to watch her descend into an unshakeable depression and much of it is harrowing to read. WWI devastated her (she wrote one of her best books – Rilla of Ingleside – about WWI – it’s a great in-real-time look at Canada’s response to the war). And as WWII became inevitable, Montgomery didn’t think she could go through it again. It’s hard to say what was upsetting her so much. Like, her son getting in a mild car crash decimated her resiliency for months. She seems like she’s over-reacting to everything. But I understand it. If you have a mental sickness, you can’t withstand “blows” which other people consider small. You ache for her. She is hopeless. Fatalistic. Completely bereft. Her journals shrink to small howls of inarticulate anguish. She would write 10-page biographies of all of her cats. Really tough reading.

BUT. BUT. She was still publishing a book a year. She STILL had the strength to gather herself together and write.

Astonishing. Her death was most probably a suicide. Which is very difficult to deal with and absorb … but it deepens our understanding of her art.

Montgomery was quite firm in her belief that happy endings were as valid as sad ones. She was determined to give her characters happy endings. She made many public statements about this. It was a strong belief, especially since the literary establishment tended to view sad endings as more artistic.

It wasn’t until I read her journals that I really understood why she believed so strongly in happy endings.

I had assumed it was because she had an optimistic outlook on life, and she didn’t care if it went against the grain, happy endings were valid too.

After the journals I understood she believed in happy endings because she felt hers were so unhappy. If she couldn’t be happy, at least her characters could. So somewhere … out there … people could be happy, happiness existed, things did work out sometimes. Out there somewhere. Not here. But there. This firm belief is the source of The Blue Castle‘s real power. It was written from a place of deep sadness and loss, but the ultimate expression is one of transcendent joy and responsiveness to pleasure. The direct experience of joy.

I always loved her. After reading the journals, and learning of the uphill battle (“the Alpine path” as she called it) she had to go through to be able to write at all … I admire her.
 
 
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