"When I am asked, 'Is Anne real?'"

"When I am asked if Anne herself is a "real person" I always answer "no" with an odd reluctance and uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real tome that I feel i am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save Dreamland. Does she not stand at my elbow even now--if I turned my head quickly should I not see her--with her eager, starry eyes and her long braids of red-hair and her little pointed chin? To tell that haunting elf that she is not real, because, forsooth, I never met her in the flesh! No, I cannot do it! She is so real that, although I've never met her, i feel quite sure I shall do so some day--perhaps in a stroll through Lover's Lane in the twilight--or in the moonlit Birch Path--I shall lift my eyes and find her, child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I have always known she was somewhere." The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol I, p 39, Rubio & Waterston

Though this entry was written before her marriage to Ewan in June of the same year, Maud's manner in speaking of Anne causes me to jump ahead into the long future that was to be her life with her husband. It occurs to me that Ewan, being an extremely short sighted human being, probably never had the slightest idea of whom he was married to-- beyond the fact that Maud was famous and provided money for his comfort.  This passage gives rise to an image that Anne, in reality, was never very far from Maud;  so, with tongue in cheek, I wonder if Ewan ever had the slightest idea that an extra person was living in their house? Knowing the probable answer to this question gives rise to another idea, of how lonely and unknown Maud must have felt in her marriage to Ewan.

Maud always maintained throughout her life that she was "fond" of Ewan and that she "liked" him.  Her long suffering devotion, for whatever reason,  is a reflection of her own honour.

New Moon Pudding - Aunt Annie Campbell's Recipe

Saturday, June 25, 1927
...today I made a certain special pudding which I make on special occasions-and on special occasions only, it being rather merciless on the eggs. It is an old Park Corner recipe and as it was nameless I have christened it "New Moon Pudding."

The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery,
Volume III,  p. 338

Ingredients

1 quart of milk                                    

2 cups breadcrumbs

1 and 1/6 cups sugar

rind of one lemon (grated)

juice of 1 lemon

6 eggs

1/2 teaspoons salt

Directions:

"Into one quart of milk put two full cups of bread crumbs, 2/3 cup sugar, the rind of one lemon grated, the slightly beaten yolks of six eggs and 1/2 teaspoon salt. Bake in oven until a silver knife comes out clean. Beat the whites of the eggs stiff with 1/2 cup of white sugar and the juice of one lemon. Spread on top. Return to oven and brown. Serve cold with cream."

A "Shadowy Tryst" in Cavendish

This entry gives a thrilling feeling of Holiday joy.  Yet, it has nothing at all to do with a Holiday.

  I suppose it is the wonderful feeling of  a "homecoming" that Maud's experience evokes...

Sunday, June 27, 1915

The Manse, Cavendish, PEI

"...Last night I had a very dear, very sad, very strange and unlooked for experience."

"When I was on the Island before, I shrank from the very thought of going near my old home. This year I felt the same until last night. I was on the manse veranda. The dew was falling. In the south-east a large, hazy, full moon was rising. To my left lay the dark trees that screened the old house from sight. Suddenly an irresistible longing took possession of me to go to it once more--in that pale enchantment of moonlight when one might chance to slip back through some magic loophole into the olden years. I could not withstand it. I slipped over to the church grounds and through the old gap in the fence through which I used to go to church. I walked along the meadow edge where the foot path used to be, past the grove of spruces, and on till the old house lay before me in a soft, silvery shadow. I turned aside for a moment to the old well and looked down it. The ferns that always lined its sides had grown completely across it.....

...How lovely and lonely it all was, and yet how unreal. I seemed to be in a dream--and yet it seemed the only waking. Oh, as long as that moonlit magic worked the past was mine once more--the old past, before the last sad years I had spent in the old home. Oh, beloved old place, that half hour I spent with you last night was worth the coming from a far land. You were glad, I think to have me back--me, who loved you so. For there is not one living now but me who loves you--not one. As I stood there I seemed to feel a presence enfolding me as if it claimed me--as if something that had been forsaken and desolate were once more rejoicing in my affection. Have not old homesteads souls that cling to them until they crumble to dust?...

... Certainly, all the pleasures and joys of my real life seemed to grow pale and fade into nothingness beside the strange enchantment of that shadowy tryst."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol II, Rubio & Waterston, pp. 168-169

Herman Leard: the Assessment of 1920 & Unequal Power

 I get a feeling that Maud is playing to an audience here. I don't know why I'm keeping this up....unfinished business, I guess...

When something is written in italics, as you see now, these are my own words being interjected into the context.

Saturday, January 31, 1920
Leaskdale, Ont

"Life," says "Ouida" in one of her novels, "never gives two opposite sets of gifts to the same recipient; it never bestows both the king's dominion and the peasant's peace," Amen! One cannot have imagination and the gift of wings, along with the placidity and contentment of those who creep on the earth's solid surface and never open their eyes on aught but material things. But the gift of wings is better than placidity and contentment after all.
   In Oliver Shreiner's African Farm--which long ago was one of my wonder books--is a very fine and unforgettable paragraph on love.--
   "There are different species of love that go under the same name. There is a love that begins in the head and goes down to the heart and grows slowly; but it lasts till death and asks less than it gives. There is another love that blots out wisdom, that is sweet with the sweetness of life and bitter with the bitterness of death lasting for an hour. But it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour. ...

There is a much longer quote on this subject from African Farm,

but I find myself snoozing over it so, I think I will wield here the absolute power of the ellipsis and skim on down to where Maud is really leading us...

   ....Yes, I think there must be a love which embraces them all--but it is rarer than a blue diamond. Most of us have to content ourselves with far less. I have loved different men in vastly different ways; but I have never loved any man with the whole force of my nature--with passion and friendship and worship. Perhaps it is well, for such a love in spite of its rapture and wonder and happiness, would make a woman an absolute slave, and if the man so loved--the Master--were not something very little lower than the angels I think the result, in one way or another, would be disastrous for the woman.

Please remember that Maud is a married woman
as she is romanticizing these feelings in her journal -
 perhaps it is late at night and Ewan is in the room with her-
 I sense an inner conflict here.

   And yet- such a love might be worth disaster. One would always have its memory at least. My own love for Herman Leard, though so incomplete, is a memory beside which all the rest of life seems gray and dowdy--a memory which I would not barter for anything save the lives of my children and the return of Frede."

  Wow, it sounds like she has really thought this out.

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol II, pp 369 - 370, Mary Rubio & ElizabethWaterston

__________________________________________

Branwell Bronte's unhappy relationship with Mrs. Robinson (a married, older woman) knocked him over the edge of sanity into a world of depression, drugs and alcohol and the result was a premature end to his life.  So it seems to me that Maud's idea of a Master/Slave (unequal power) phenomena between men and women is not particularly gender related.  The 1960's movie, "The Graduate" and the song, "Mrs. Robinson" by Simon & Garfunkle is based on Branwell Bronte's relationship with an older, married woman.

On a rainy Veteran's Day, Holiday 

Ewan, happy at last

It is a very tough piece of the puzzle to figure out how Maud remained "fond" of Ewan throughout the entirety of an emotionally starved marriage. It kind of bums me out to read in The Gift of Wings-- at the funeral-- as a part of "Maud's story" of the epilogue:

"There were whispers asking how she had died:  it was an open casket, and, wasted to nothing,  she did not resemble the woman they had known.

She looked 'horrible', some whispered,  lacking fitting words."

 The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p. 584

 I have a note that is scribbled at the end of "Maud's Story" in my copy of GOW :  "YIKES" , it says, and the note was probably a response to the following:

"Maud had asked in her journals that her tombstone be inscribed with a line she adapted from Shakespeare: "After life's fitful fever, she sleeps well." No one had read the request in her journals, and so she sleeps peacefully among her own folk without it, her grave visited regularly by fans from all over the world."  The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p. 584

If you compare "Maud's Story"  to "Ewan's Story" in the same epilogue, it seems that Ewan's final years were happier and jollier in the nursing home at St. Michael's:

"He was showered with attention there by nurses who loved this gentle, dimpled smiling old man, and made his final year happy."

The Gift of Wings, Mary Rubio, p 585

Can we conclude by comparing the variables of these two endings that Maud was simply a martyr throughout her years of marriage with Ewan???