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Maud Lewis The Heart on the Door
Maud Lewis THE HEART ON THE DOOR is the first full-length biography of Maud Lewis (1901-1970), the famous Nova Scotia folk artist. It includes detailed accounts of her disabilities, including a childhood battle with the juvenile rheumatoid arthritis which twisted her hands and joints. Despite this deepening and painful affliction she completed and sold thousands of bright pictures and Christmas cards from her little one-room house in Marshalltown, Digby County, Nova Scotia, Canada. Throughout her marriage to the illiterate Poor Farm watchman, Everett Lewis, she suffered from poverty and loneliness, yet triumphed over all with her brilliant, colourful and happy paintings. Her husband would be murdered for his lockbox of savings taken from the sales of Maud's pictures, on New Year's Day of 1979. This book also gives a detailed account of the life of Everett Lewis and his incarceration as a child in the Digby County Poor Farm. This biography concludes that Maud Lewis, born Maud Catherine Dowley in Yarmouth, Nova Scotia in 1901, gave birth to a daughter, Catherine Dowley, in 1928, and traces the life of Maud's daughter until her passing. Catherine's attempts to contact and be accepted by her mother, Maud Lewis, are documented. Catherine's father, Emery Allen, the love of Maud's life, abandoned Maud to the scandal of small-town life and to her increasing disabilities and loneliness. Excerpts: "This is a story written in heartbreak. It is the story of a child's wish to be accepted as a human being. It is a story of murder, poverty and treasure. It is the story of the worth of art in the struggle against pain. This is a story of broken families, of lonely lives, of a lost love and abandonment. It is a story of murder and a lockbox treasure. It is the story of a man who made a woman pay for his own frailties. All must be taken together. They belong to each other." "Many of the famous of our time - the actor Peter Falk, Premier Robert L. Stanfield, the actor Judy Dench - would come to admire Maud's pictures. Her pictures cheered them up. As with many, however, who came to visit with Maud in her crooked little house, these famous would never know the strange secrets of this difficult life. Lance Woolaver, Digby County, Nova Scotia, 2016
492 pages, Paperback
Published March 16, 2016
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Displaying 1 - 13 of 13 reviews
July 9, 2021
To quote from the beginning of this book, in the author's words:
" This story is writ In heartbreak. It is the story of a child's wish to be accepted as a human being. It is the story of the worth of art and the struggle against pain. This is the story of broken families, of lonely lives, of a lost love and of abandonment. It is a story of murder and a lockbox treasure. It is the story of a man who made a woman pay for his own frailties. All must be taken together. They belong together."
As a long time of admirer of Maud Lewis's dazzling folk paintings I am very glad this book exists. It reveals to me a lot about Maud Lewis's sad life not previously known. I am grateful for Mr. Woolaver's many years of interviews, research and correspondence with relatives and acquaintances, many who have passed away.
At 669 pages, Maud's story could be told in a book 1/3 of the length and still contain all the information compiled about her life. I found it an enlightening read, but not a cohesive one. There was much repetition, history and other facts with little or no connection to the story of her tragic life. More bothersome were the author's speculations about what might been said , thought or done. 'Perhaps, possibility, probability, maybe' were words frequently used to describe events and conversations which might have happened. These were based on guesses by the author based on his knowledge of people, society and attitudes at the time. Mr. Woolaver refers us to Graham Greene' belief 'that imagination is superior to facts, and he (Greene) would note that biographies where they are good, are nothing but imagination'.
I would definitely rate the book 5 stars, as it made me feel like I knew its subject, and it made me emotional learning about the sadness, heartbreak and abuse of her talents. The description of how she created her colorful paintings gave me greater appreciation of the two I own. I have to deduct points for the book's structure and organization. 2.5 stars
" This story is writ In heartbreak. It is the story of a child's wish to be accepted as a human being. It is the story of the worth of art and the struggle against pain. This is the story of broken families, of lonely lives, of a lost love and of abandonment. It is a story of murder and a lockbox treasure. It is the story of a man who made a woman pay for his own frailties. All must be taken together. They belong together."
As a long time of admirer of Maud Lewis's dazzling folk paintings I am very glad this book exists. It reveals to me a lot about Maud Lewis's sad life not previously known. I am grateful for Mr. Woolaver's many years of interviews, research and correspondence with relatives and acquaintances, many who have passed away.
At 669 pages, Maud's story could be told in a book 1/3 of the length and still contain all the information compiled about her life. I found it an enlightening read, but not a cohesive one. There was much repetition, history and other facts with little or no connection to the story of her tragic life. More bothersome were the author's speculations about what might been said , thought or done. 'Perhaps, possibility, probability, maybe' were words frequently used to describe events and conversations which might have happened. These were based on guesses by the author based on his knowledge of people, society and attitudes at the time. Mr. Woolaver refers us to Graham Greene' belief 'that imagination is superior to facts, and he (Greene) would note that biographies where they are good, are nothing but imagination'.
I would definitely rate the book 5 stars, as it made me feel like I knew its subject, and it made me emotional learning about the sadness, heartbreak and abuse of her talents. The description of how she created her colorful paintings gave me greater appreciation of the two I own. I have to deduct points for the book's structure and organization. 2.5 stars
May 3, 2017
Maud and Everett and Everything Else This gigantic book (492 pages about a woman whose life was, apart from a few major exceptions, uneventful) is a candidate for being one of the strangest pieces of writing I’ve ever encountered. The title promises a biography of the Nova Scotia folk artist Maud Lewis, and indeed, there’s a lot about her here, as much as anyone actually knows about her (and more that Woolaver has invented; but more about that later). But Maud is not by any means the only subject. Woolaver spends many chapters discussing not only the Poor Farm located next door to the little house Maud shared with her husband Everett, but also, the history of Poor Farms in Nova Scotia and elsewhere. He quite rightly justifies the significance of the Poor Farm in Everett’s childhood—he was kept there along with his entire family — and later also in Everett’s years with Maud—he was its night watchman for a long time; and he also points out that Maud, in the absence of indoor plumbing at home, often visited there to take baths and have her hair done. But Woolaver speaks often of his long-standing ambition to produce a book that would widen knowledge of the shameful Poor Farm system, and apparently thwarted by widespread lack of interest by publishers, etc., in revisiting this sad history, he has, in effect snuck the book about the Poor Farms into this one claiming to be about Maud. There’s a point where what feels like a hundred pages in a row about the Poor Farms lose sight of Maud altogether.
Nor is that the only way in which Woolaver interrupts his biography of Maud with lengthy discussions of other barely relevant matters—quite often, matters concerning himself. Attentive readers can learn at least as much about the forebears, family connections, education, work, publication and travel history, artistic and literary tastes, intense dislike of all current and past administrators of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, friendships and falling-outs, relatives, physical and mental illnesses, financial crises, bookshelf contents, filing habits, and character strengths and failings of Lance Woolaver as they can about Maud and Everett Lewis. This is endearingly wacky, but also, quite annoying.
Even when Woolaver does get around to talking about the Lewises, he tends to do so through a focus on how he learned what he knows about them—who he interviewed, what archives he visited, and so on. The first few chapters describe at astonishing length the various kinds of evidence Woolaver has gathered to support his theory that Maud was born in 1901 and not, as usually assumed, two years later. There are similar lengthy discussions of whether or not she married Everett in a church, whether she knew the work of the American artist known as Grandma Moses, and so on. At times, also, whole chapters are filled with what appear to be fictional short stories Woolaver has written, sometimes about Maud and in what purports to be her point of view, sometimes about the places she lived in and his version of what it feels like to be there.
At one point, Woolaver reveals his own awareness of how annoying all these dissertations and digressions might be: “Oh My,” he says after a lengthy aside about a raft of eccentric and otherwise interesting characters he has known in Digby county,“If we effect a limit on biography, and bow before convention, not much of this has to do with Maud and Everett.” He then goes on to insist that it does, since the people he has described are somehow related to or otherwise connected to people with connections to the Lewises. By this logic he might as well have included me in the book, for I bet I know people whose cousins or uncles once dated the granddaughters of people who went to school with other people who lived down the highway from Maud and Everett. And forgive me for being conventional, but somehow, I retain the conviction that a biography should actually be about the people it purports to be about, not about friends of their friends and relations of their relations, and certainly not about the biographer’s own distant friends and relations.
Woolaver has clearly spend a lot of time and effort in putting together his body of knowledge of Maud and Everett Lewis. He has learned enough about them that he seems to have come to believe that he knows them intimately—so intimately that he’s entitled to reach very specific conclusions not just about what they did, but also, about who they are—what motivated them, sometimes even what they must have been thinking and feeling at certain moments in their lives. Maud and Everett Lewis may or may not have had the attitudes and motivations Woolaver is all too willing to provide for them, first as suppositions and then taken for granted as if they are incontrovertibly true. In his eyes, Maud emerges as something of a angel, and Everett an evil, self-seeking monster. I found both the overly angelic Maud and the overly malevolent Everett equally hard to believe in. Woolaver’s hostile and almost purely negative portrayal of Everett Lewis is particularly hard to accept.
It’s a pity that Woolaver felt so willing to invent reasons for Maud and Everett’s behaviour and then in later pages simply assume his inventions are the truth. It’s a pity that he has allowed himself to include everything he has felt like including, even poetic fictional scenes in which he imagines, for instance, what Maud is feeling and thinking as she has a conversation with a visiting moth. It's a pity that, having chosen to publish the book himself, he didn’t consider also hiring an editor less forgiving than himself—one who would have suggested massive cuts and who would have pointed out that the author Woolaver wants to refer to is Virginia Woolf, not Wolfe, or that the interview of one of Maud’s supportors he refers to is in a different documentary film than the one he names, or that it’s not safe for him to assume that readers will have read the same books as he has and thus immediately be able to make sense of cryptic references to Woolf or W.H. Auden or Graham Greene.
It's a pity especially because Woolaver has in fact, gathered an impressive amount of material on Maud Lewis, her work, her house, and her life in general--public records, school records, reminiscences from people who knew her, and much more. Learning about someone so far from the public eye for so much of her life and therefore, so unrecorded, is not easy. Among other things, Woolaver offers a convincing argument that the illness Maud suffered from in childhood and beyond was juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and provides evidence and makes a persuasive case for the existence of a daughter Maud had and put up for adoption while in her twenties; and his discussion of the ways in which the poor farm affected both Maud and Everett is revealing and instructive. At a quarter of the length and more rigorously centred on its subject, this could have been an excellent book—the materials to make it one are all there, buried in and overwhelmed by a huge excess of far less relevant material. I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to know as much as there is currently to be known about the life of Maud Lewis—but with a strong warning about everything else you’ll have to put up with in order to learn about the book’s actual subject, and an equally strong warning about accepting Woolaver’s one-sided interpretations of his central characters.
Nor is that the only way in which Woolaver interrupts his biography of Maud with lengthy discussions of other barely relevant matters—quite often, matters concerning himself. Attentive readers can learn at least as much about the forebears, family connections, education, work, publication and travel history, artistic and literary tastes, intense dislike of all current and past administrators of the Art Gallery of Nova Scotia, friendships and falling-outs, relatives, physical and mental illnesses, financial crises, bookshelf contents, filing habits, and character strengths and failings of Lance Woolaver as they can about Maud and Everett Lewis. This is endearingly wacky, but also, quite annoying.
Even when Woolaver does get around to talking about the Lewises, he tends to do so through a focus on how he learned what he knows about them—who he interviewed, what archives he visited, and so on. The first few chapters describe at astonishing length the various kinds of evidence Woolaver has gathered to support his theory that Maud was born in 1901 and not, as usually assumed, two years later. There are similar lengthy discussions of whether or not she married Everett in a church, whether she knew the work of the American artist known as Grandma Moses, and so on. At times, also, whole chapters are filled with what appear to be fictional short stories Woolaver has written, sometimes about Maud and in what purports to be her point of view, sometimes about the places she lived in and his version of what it feels like to be there.
At one point, Woolaver reveals his own awareness of how annoying all these dissertations and digressions might be: “Oh My,” he says after a lengthy aside about a raft of eccentric and otherwise interesting characters he has known in Digby county,“If we effect a limit on biography, and bow before convention, not much of this has to do with Maud and Everett.” He then goes on to insist that it does, since the people he has described are somehow related to or otherwise connected to people with connections to the Lewises. By this logic he might as well have included me in the book, for I bet I know people whose cousins or uncles once dated the granddaughters of people who went to school with other people who lived down the highway from Maud and Everett. And forgive me for being conventional, but somehow, I retain the conviction that a biography should actually be about the people it purports to be about, not about friends of their friends and relations of their relations, and certainly not about the biographer’s own distant friends and relations.
Woolaver has clearly spend a lot of time and effort in putting together his body of knowledge of Maud and Everett Lewis. He has learned enough about them that he seems to have come to believe that he knows them intimately—so intimately that he’s entitled to reach very specific conclusions not just about what they did, but also, about who they are—what motivated them, sometimes even what they must have been thinking and feeling at certain moments in their lives. Maud and Everett Lewis may or may not have had the attitudes and motivations Woolaver is all too willing to provide for them, first as suppositions and then taken for granted as if they are incontrovertibly true. In his eyes, Maud emerges as something of a angel, and Everett an evil, self-seeking monster. I found both the overly angelic Maud and the overly malevolent Everett equally hard to believe in. Woolaver’s hostile and almost purely negative portrayal of Everett Lewis is particularly hard to accept.
It’s a pity that Woolaver felt so willing to invent reasons for Maud and Everett’s behaviour and then in later pages simply assume his inventions are the truth. It’s a pity that he has allowed himself to include everything he has felt like including, even poetic fictional scenes in which he imagines, for instance, what Maud is feeling and thinking as she has a conversation with a visiting moth. It's a pity that, having chosen to publish the book himself, he didn’t consider also hiring an editor less forgiving than himself—one who would have suggested massive cuts and who would have pointed out that the author Woolaver wants to refer to is Virginia Woolf, not Wolfe, or that the interview of one of Maud’s supportors he refers to is in a different documentary film than the one he names, or that it’s not safe for him to assume that readers will have read the same books as he has and thus immediately be able to make sense of cryptic references to Woolf or W.H. Auden or Graham Greene.
It's a pity especially because Woolaver has in fact, gathered an impressive amount of material on Maud Lewis, her work, her house, and her life in general--public records, school records, reminiscences from people who knew her, and much more. Learning about someone so far from the public eye for so much of her life and therefore, so unrecorded, is not easy. Among other things, Woolaver offers a convincing argument that the illness Maud suffered from in childhood and beyond was juvenile rheumatoid arthritis, and provides evidence and makes a persuasive case for the existence of a daughter Maud had and put up for adoption while in her twenties; and his discussion of the ways in which the poor farm affected both Maud and Everett is revealing and instructive. At a quarter of the length and more rigorously centred on its subject, this could have been an excellent book—the materials to make it one are all there, buried in and overwhelmed by a huge excess of far less relevant material. I’d recommend this book to anyone who wants to know as much as there is currently to be known about the life of Maud Lewis—but with a strong warning about everything else you’ll have to put up with in order to learn about the book’s actual subject, and an equally strong warning about accepting Woolaver’s one-sided interpretations of his central characters.
June 30, 2017
I had to stop 1/3 of the way through. I enjoyed the book as I followed the research in the genealogy records, archives and retracing the steps of the Dowley and Germaine families. I enjoyed being familiarized with the area, the towns and the roads. I didn't mind (for awhile) retracing the steps of the author's life. But eventually it wore on me that he didn't seem to think the reader could remember anything and repeated it over and over. As there isn't a lot of existing history on Everett and Maud Lewis the author felt he needed to flesh it out, and repeat it. Clearly it is a topic and area that he has devoted much of his life to and he didn't want to leave anything out, no matter how many times he uncovered the same nugget. It seemed a bit as if he may have written numerous papers on the subject and just put them all together into a book, without editing out the parts he had used previously. I may have marked it higher if I had stopped 1/4 of the way through. I think a re-edit and a re-release could do well. All could be told in under 200 pages. I do understand as I am a long-time genealogist - love collecting reams of material and background but really shy away from consolidating, condensing and editing it into a cohesive and concise retelling.
July 12, 2021
I am not sure where to begin with reviewing this book. I grew up in Digby and remember the little house where Maud and Everett Lewis lived. I may even have stopped by once although not positive about that. Having lived in the area, I know a lot of the people and places referred to in the book. In fact, to my surprise, my grandfather, Fred Wilson, is mentioned a few times. He apparently did some mechanical work on Everett's model t and his compensation at one time was a painting done by Maud. This got passed down to my aunt, Pat Wilson. I have vague memories of this and do recall my grandmother having a Maud Lewis painting of two oxen but not sure if this was the same painting my grandfather had or not as they were separated but she may have inherited it after his death. The oxen painting was in my grandmothers living room & was very special to her. The book is interesting but seemed oddly put together. Many things are repeated over and over again in the many short chapters. Woolaver spends the first several chapters just talking about Maud's real birth year and it got rather tiresome. It seemed to ramble about a lot of things that were irrelevant to the real story. The writing style is as if someone is talking at you. A good portion of the book is devoted to the Poor Farm, next door to the Lewis home and where Everett spent a good part of his childhood & also worked as the night watchman for many years. Although there is relevance, it was drawn out too long and began to feel like he was beating a dead horse. He seems to have an intense dislike of Everett and referred to him negatively throughout much of the book. Perhaps it is justified but it did seem overkill at times. If I were not from the area, I probably would have gotten a bit tired with the constant repetition of facts but, for the most part, I was engaged because of my connection to the area.
January 29, 2018
The subtitle of this book "A Biography of Maud and Everett Lewis and Digby County, Nova Scotia" should be amended to: "A Biography of Maud and Everett Lewis, Lance Woolaver and Digby County, Nova Scotia" and made the formal title of the book.
If one is truly interested in all the subjects of this book - Maud, Everett, Mr. Woolaver and Digby County it is worth slogging through the repetition and intricate details (both genealogical, county specific and imagined).
Mr. Woolaver does bring light to Maud's life and his inclusion of the circumstances surrounding it are necessary to his revelations - however the repetition of many points and his own intersection with Maud, the history of Digby county and its people make this a daunting read.
If one is truly interested in all the subjects of this book - Maud, Everett, Mr. Woolaver and Digby County it is worth slogging through the repetition and intricate details (both genealogical, county specific and imagined).
Mr. Woolaver does bring light to Maud's life and his inclusion of the circumstances surrounding it are necessary to his revelations - however the repetition of many points and his own intersection with Maud, the history of Digby county and its people make this a daunting read.
September 3, 2017
I so enjoyed the movie "Maudie" that I immediately purchased this book. I wanted to read the in depth story of Maud Lewis' life.
In my opinion, this book is poorly written...and very boring. It is so repetitive and does not clearly tell Maud's story. I am so disappointed and do not recommend that anyone waste their money nor time on this book.
In my opinion, this book is poorly written...and very boring. It is so repetitive and does not clearly tell Maud's story. I am so disappointed and do not recommend that anyone waste their money nor time on this book.
November 11, 2017
Unfortunately I don’t think this biography works at all. It is overburdened with repetition. There are also numerous unnecessary detailed references to research documents that serves little purpose other than to totally disrupt the flow of what can only be described as an unentertaining and boring style of writing. Why at least half the content of this book was not edited out by the publishers I will never know. Reading this book is like wading through a swamp. In the end I just gave up on it. It is a shame because the author had obviously gone to a lot of trouble to research this book, but just did not have the skills to put it together in a way that flowed and gave the reader a sense of this artist.
July 26, 2017
Lots of facts. Much better with giving the real picture than the movie version.
But I got bogged down with too much detail about the research. I wished for more of just telling the story about her life and listing a lot of the other research and details in the back of the book.
But I got bogged down with too much detail about the research. I wished for more of just telling the story about her life and listing a lot of the other research and details in the back of the book.
October 10, 2019
This book is almost unreadable with its flowery, over the top, strangled prose and its focus on the author as much as on the purported subject, Maud Lewis.
January 3, 2025
This was almost a 500-page book written about a woman called Maud Lewis. Its devastatingly heartbreaking and tragic. Mostly because it's true and because people deserve the truth not the glossed over story of a movie that only tells half the story.
A lot of the Author's book was repetitious. I kind of think of it like this: a person who just can't get over the hard parts, so they keep repeating the traumas to get it out, but it never goes away. I found it quite enduring the author cared so much for a tiny little crippled up woman who tried to survive, abandonment, loss, abuse, illness, and endured as long as she could plus had a talent no one could take from her.
There are little parts in the book where in italics the author leaves little quotes he's feeling, and they were meaningful. Some people may complain about the length of the book, the sadness of the book, but as the author stated he only writes about sad things. I get that. That is what he knows, . The Netflix movie made Maude and Everetts story more happy and cheerful and nothing like it really was. It was so glossed over it makes me sick. It took me two weeks to finish this book because it was so heart breaking, I had to take breaks. If you ask me why I continued to read it, I guess it's for the same reason the author wrote it. Maude Lewis deserved to be known. She mattered.
A part that caught me was this:
There are things of which I may not speak
There are dreams that cannot die
There are thoughts that made the strong heart weak
And a mist before the eye
Longfellow, 1858
A lot of the Author's book was repetitious. I kind of think of it like this: a person who just can't get over the hard parts, so they keep repeating the traumas to get it out, but it never goes away. I found it quite enduring the author cared so much for a tiny little crippled up woman who tried to survive, abandonment, loss, abuse, illness, and endured as long as she could plus had a talent no one could take from her.
There are little parts in the book where in italics the author leaves little quotes he's feeling, and they were meaningful. Some people may complain about the length of the book, the sadness of the book, but as the author stated he only writes about sad things. I get that. That is what he knows, . The Netflix movie made Maude and Everetts story more happy and cheerful and nothing like it really was. It was so glossed over it makes me sick. It took me two weeks to finish this book because it was so heart breaking, I had to take breaks. If you ask me why I continued to read it, I guess it's for the same reason the author wrote it. Maude Lewis deserved to be known. She mattered.
A part that caught me was this:
There are things of which I may not speak
There are dreams that cannot die
There are thoughts that made the strong heart weak
And a mist before the eye
Longfellow, 1858
September 3, 2023
The book is very good at the beginning but drags in the middle. The previous owner of the book stopped reading about half way through it; I, on the other hand, read it through to the end. The last third of the book is very good. After focussing on Maud’s final years and her death in 1970, Woolaver moves on to discuss her husband, Everett. I had heard some about Everett’s final years but here Woolaver lays it out in black and white. As terrible as Everett was with Maud and after her death, Woolaver places his story the context of his life and experiences from a little boy living in the Poor Farm until his death in 1979.
July 12, 2021
Not a biography at all.
October 16, 2021
Though I was interested in learning more about Maud, this book was unorganized, scattered and redundancies abound with endless judgements and irrelevant assumptions. Poorly added photos as well.
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