Saturday, October 31, 2009

"Was it a Ghost of the future?" - the red-haired girl behind the screen


I love this little entry in Maud's journal and I've always wanted to post it. By chance, I landed on it this morning as I was scanning through Journal V-- so I deeked it appropriate to post it here today on All Hallow's Eve.

Wednesday, June 24, 1936
"I felt worried and nervous all day....

Twelve o'clock
"I have just had a very peculiar experience! I was lying in bed, having just laid down my book for a moment. The light was on. Ewan was reading beside me. I was not asleep. Suddenly around the screen that stood across the door came a young girl and sat down on the edge of my bed, and bent forward with a smile, opening her lips to speak. She was pretty, fresh-colored with red hair. When she first appeared around the screen I thought it must be Ethel and wondered had she gone crazy to come into our room like that. Then I realized it was not Ethel but someone I had never seen and in my amazement I cried out--and she was gone! I sprang up, crying out "Who was that? Who was here just now?" Ewan said nobody had been here.

Well, I saw her. That is all I can say. I remember distinctly what she looked like. And I am convinced she was on the point of telling me something when I cried out. What would she have told me? I shall never know.

I feel rather strange. It has been an uncanny experience....."

The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Rubio & Waterston, Vol V. pp. 73 -74



Sunday, October 11, 2009

Maud and Charlotte Bronte



Monday, July 18, 1932
...In the afternoon I made my escape and in a corner of the lake among the pines read Bensons new book on Charlotte Bronte. A fascinating volume. But I do not think Charlotte was in the least like the domineering little shrew he pictures her, any more, perhaps than she was like the rather saintly heroine of Mrs. Gaskell's biography. I doubt if anyone knows, or knew , or ever will know the real Charlotte Bronte.
The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol. IV, Rubio - Waterston) pp. 187 - 188

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Thursday, March 29, 1934
These past ten days have generally been cold or stormy, filled with a lot of routine duties. I find it hard to put any heart in them. But yesternight, after enduring a chilly house all day I hied me to bed with a new book--Benson's Bronte--and forgot the world and its worries and heartbreaks for a few hours. The book is very fascinating. But he is too hard on Charlotte and his idea of Branwell's helping Emily to write Wuthering Heights is simply silly. What a fascination that strange family exercise on the world!! Every year fresh books, filled with fresh guesses about them, pour from the press. How furious they would have been had they dreamed how every action and motive of their lives would be thus raked over and held up to the world, with all sorts of absurd interpretations and suppositions.
The Selected Journals of LM Montgomery, Vol IV, Rubio - Waterston, p 257

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Yesterday, I hied myself out the back gate of the garden and took the few steps to the library to pick up some books on The Brontes. Yesterday was errand day but I never made it very far as I spent most of the afternoon sitting in my car in the parking lot of the grocery store and devouring the lives of the Brontes. I stayed so long in the car that I was too hungry to do the grocery shopping and then to go home and make a meal, so it seemed by luck I espied a Chinese Buffet in the same shopping center. Boy was I hungry! So, the books went with me and there was I able to be left in peace to do exactly as Maud was wont to do on occasions of her life, to escape the mundane world of the present and slip into the fascinating lives of the Brontes.

Friday, October 9, 2009

Light and Shadows



In the long ago days of my childhood there was an alcove near the altar that served as the library for our little Baptist Church. On one Sunday morning I found myself there, glancing at the titles which were lined up neatly on a lonely bookshelf. The room appeared or rather seemed to be dusky, but there was a little spray of light swimming through the smoky window above me which diffused into the shadows of the shallow room and made it seem a deeper, different dimension. It was on the dusty bookshelf that I spied a book whose spine appeared to me to look straighter than the others.. The book was clean , but jacket-less, and it gave the impression of having held it's sway amongst the other, similarly aged titles. The title on the spine read as follows: "Anne of Green Gables." The book, in my memory, seems to have shivered and quivered on the shelf. It shouldn't be hard to guess the rest of this story. "Anne of Green Gables" is the book that came home with me that day. From the first page to the end I was enveloped with a keen consciousness of feeling that the magic of my life had finally fallen upon me.

Over a span of 40 years since, I have read many other books and short stories written by Lucy Maud.Montgomery. Though I looked and tried over most of those years, there was scant information to be found concerning the life of Maud herself, so it wasn't until my Mother took a trip to Prince Edward Island back in the 1980's and returned home with a gift which was happily a bio, "The Years Before Anne" by Mr. Bolger, where I finally was able to get an idea of the life of my favorite author. I learned from Bolger's book, or rather was given a hint, of the heartache and unhappiness that seemed to have grabbed on to Maud and followed her throughout her life. Of course, there must have been some happiness for her. There had to be. How else could she know it and write it so well?

There has been scant information over the years concerning Maud Montgomery that I could find in the bookstores of the sandy plains of North Carolina. So, imagine my delight when the Internet Age came upon me, and there I discovered that diaries, 5 volumes of diaries, had scupulously been kept by Maud and then published 40 some years after her death, beginning in the late 1980's. It's hard to fathom the time and work that it took in order to decipher the old fashioned scrawl as was written by hand on the lined pages of ledger books. But thanks to Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, the work was done, and all were published by the time I found them in the late 1990's. It was in the diaries that I discovered Maud's unhappiness for real. However, I drew the conclusion on reading the journals that Maud in writing about her own life, was rather ambiguous and almost manipulative in what she presented , knowing that someday the world would see what she wrote. The biographies are truly just a rendering of her side of the story, a terrible story really.


So, with my deep interest in the subject and because of a characteristic curiosity about things, I have spent a great deal of time in reading all that I can about the life of Maud Montgomery, and mostly reading between the lines. I get impressions and perceptions as I'm reading. These intuitions, right or wrong, run deep with me.