When L.M. Montgomery died on 24 April 1942, obituaries and tributes celebrated her life and her work while leaving out cause of death.
Contents
Preamble
Tributes
Bibliography
Image Credit
Preamble
On 24 April 1942, L.M. Montgomery died at her home in Toronto, at the age of sixty-seven. Her family and her physician interpreted her death as a suicide through a drug overdose, but the dozens of obituaries and tributes that appeared in newspapers across North America started the following day kept the focus on Montgomery’s life, work, and legacy, including one from the Calgary Daily Herald entitled “Noted Canadian Authoress Dies”:
Mrs. Ewan Macdonald, known to the literary world as L.M. Montgomery, died here Friday. Native of Clifton, P.E.I., she was 67 years old.
Mrs. Macdonald was probably best known for her series that started with “Anne of Green Gables,” the saga of a country girl. Green Gables, a stately old manse that nestled just back from the gulf shore of Cavendish, P.E.I., for many years, has attracted visitors from far parts of the continent.
Her reputation as a writer was established even before the “Anne” series and, despite the busy life of a minister’s wife, she found time to continue writing after her marriage to Rev. Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister.
From Prince Edward Island the family moved to Ontario, and since her husband’s retirement from the ministry Mrs. Macdonald had been living in Toronto.
Moreover, the obituary appearing in the Globe and Mail, entitled “Noted Author Dies Suddenly at Home Here,” noted that “for the past two years she had been in ill health, but during the past winter Mrs. Macdonald compiled a collection of magazine stories she had written many years ago, and these were placed in the hands of a publishing firm only yesterday.” That book was The Blythes Are Quoted, and it was published in its entirety only in 2009.
Tributes
In addition to obituaries and coverage of her burial in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, a number of tribute pieces appeared in daily newspapers in the days and weeks following Montgomery’s death, including two unsigned editorials published on the same day in the Windsor Daily Star:
When L.M. Montgomery (Mrs. Ewan Macdonald) died in Toronto at the age of 67, a literary career that was built upon an appreciation of the simpler things of Canadian life was brought to a close. No cold realist, no pseudo-sophisticate, she wrote of life as she knew and lived it in her girlhood in Prince Edward Island, and the homely truth and honesty of those works brought her international renown. [. . .]
It was not only a flair for plot and facility of expression that made Mrs. Macdonald a great writer. Her understanding of human nature was deep and thorough, and her interest in the loves, joys and sorrows of everyday folk transcended professional curiosity. It was from all these gifts that she wove her stories, and it was from them that her novels drew their wide-ranging appeal. (Windsor Daily Star, “L.M. Montgomery,” 4)
Another tribute, appearing two pages earlier, acts as a reminder of the fact that Montgomery’s death occurred in the midst of the Second World War:
People were beginning to discover the delights of Cavendish and other parts of Prince Edward Island. The war and the consequent curtailment of travel have meant many journeys to the island will have to be postponed. But, after the war has been won, people will be going in ever-increasing numbers of Prince Edward Island, a province which Lucy Maud Montgomery helped to make famous. (Windsor Daily Star, “Anne of Green Gables,” 2)
As these and several more tribute pieces make clear, L.M. Montgomery’s work touched a chord with many readers during her lifetime, and part of its uniqueness is that her readership has only grown in the seven decades since her death, especially since volumes of journals, letters, and periodical pieces began to appear in the last few decades of the twentieth century, alongside popular television adaptations of her books. Her work continues to gather an international community of readers and researchers whose interest in all things L.M. Montgomery shows no signs of slowing down.
Montgomery’s Globe and Mail obituary, several tributes, and extensive coverage of her funeral all appear in volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader.
Bibliography
Calgary Herald. “Noted Canadian Authoress Dies.” 25 April 1942, 1.
“Noted Author Dies Suddenly at Home Here.” In The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, 359–62. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Windsor Daily Star. “Anne of Green Gables.” 27 April 1942, 2.
—. “L.M. Montgomery.” 27 April 1942, 4.
Image Credit
Montage of images: undated photograph appearing in a July 1946 printing of Anne of Avonlea (published by the Ryerson Press in 1942); detail from “Noted Author Dies Suddenly at Home Here,” Globe and Mail (Toronto), 25 April 1942, 5; undated photo of Green Gables in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, appearing on the back cover of the Cavendish Library edition of Jane of Lantern Hill, published by McClelland and Stewart, in 1947.
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