House of Dreams: The Life of L.M. Montgomery

by Liz Rosenberg

Maud and Clara stood out from their little clan. Both loved beauty to a degree that was considered almost madness.

I know now that they loved me after a fashion. But they never expressed or showed that love in word or action. I never thought they loved me.

“Materially, I was well cared for . . . It was emotionally and socially that my nature was starved and restricted.”

“You are never poor,” she declared, “as long as you’ve got something to love.”

Maud had no chance to say good-bye.

Alone once more, Maud turned back to her twin comforts: the worlds of nature and of books.

Maud was honing her special genius — to make the most of any situation, and to find humor under the most trying circumstances. It was a

gift she would pass along to her own young fictional heroines, and a resource that upheld her for years to come.

Maud performed the great alchemy of art. She transformed her own history of abandonment into a story of rescue.

Maud put herself into the fictional Anne: her own vivid imagination; a passionate love of nature; her habit of naming inanimate objects; the imaginary cupboard friend; her hungry affection for books; her own vanity, pride, stubbornness; and a deep, abiding attachment to those she loves.

Fiction is the art of transformation. For many writers, including L. M. Montgomery, it allows for happy reconciliations they cannot achieve in real life.

Anne of Green Gables is a book about creating lasting family. It is a celebration of place, a story about belonging. No one but Maud Montgomery, with all her checkered history and heart-hungry longing, could have created it.

“Books are not written about proper children. They would be so dull nobody would read them.”

If we write truly out of our own heart and experience that truth will find out and reach its own.”

sort of literary antidepressant.

“Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work,” she wrote. “I would not wish to darken any other life — I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine.”

The Story Girl, and it became Maud’s favorite of all of her books —

“Color is to me what music is to some. Everybody likes color; with me it is a passion.”

She was “content,” the bland word she used over and over regarding this marriage. The blandness hid a deeper loss: “I think I wept a lost dream — a dream that could never be fulfilled — a girl’s dream of the lover who should be her perfect mate, to whom she might splendidly give herself with no reservations. We all dream that dream. And when we surrender it unfulfilled we feel that something wild and sweet and unutterable has gone out of life!”

I was homesick — and yet I felt as if I had come home.”

Perhaps in the end they were not different enough to be lovers, nor kindred enough to be friends.

“But to be in the arms of a man whom I loved with all my heart . . . is, after all, every woman’s real idea of happiness, if she would be honest enough to admit it. There are dear and sweet minor happinesses. But that is the only perfect one.”

more than ten predictive dreams during the course of the war.

she meant to be a “messenger of optimism and sunshine.”

Writing, for Maud, was an act of preservation.

celebrates the joy of belonging to a close-knit community — even while Maud was mourning its loss.

this was not Ewan’s first brush with madness — he had suffered from religious melancholia

Emily Starr resembles her creator, L. M. Montgomery — and her earlier creation, Anne — in many ways.

She prevailed where other writers would have long ago surrendered.

In 1923, Maud became the first Canadian woman admitted to the British Royal Society of the Arts.

Muskoka, the beautiful lake district ninety miles north of Toronto.

her first novel for adults, The Blue Castle.

Another night, in the “little violet-blue hour,” they spent two wordless hours absorbing the beauty of an apple orchard.

“I have spent two days in hell. I cannot see how I am to go on living. I have suffered so dreadfully that I feel as if I were going insane. And I have had to keep up a face to the world when something in my soul was bleeding to death.”

Jane of Lantern Hill

The book evokes the delights of both Toronto and Prince Edward Island; it is arguably L. M. Montgomery’s last masterwork,

sent countless letters of encouragement to young writers. Even in the depths of despair, she reached out to aspiring artists. Younger Canadian writers remember Montgomery as a kind and consistent mentor, always willing to help, edit, and introduce. She spared herself no time or trouble on behalf of others.

“I have come to feel very strongly that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us — and most certainly not to our heroes and icons,” Kate wrote.

The 1986 television miniseries Anne of Green Gables won an Emmy Award and swept television’s other honors,

The wonder is not that L. M. Montgomery struggled, but that she rose above her suffering

for so long and accomplished so much in the face of it.

Maud suffered from chronic depression, and likely also from bouts of manic depression, yet she produced twenty novels and hundreds of short stories, even in her most difficult and desperate years.

In Anne of Green Gables, she transformed her personal story of abandonment into a glorious tale of love and rescue. Often sad, Maud provided laughter and joy for others.

“Perfect happiness I have never had — never will have,” she confided to her journal. “Yet there have been, after all, many wonderful and exquisite hours in my life.”

“Dead and in your grave, your charm is still potent enough to weave a tissue of sunshine over the darkness of the day. I thank you.”