An article in the Ontario Intelligencer of Belleville tells of an author event that L.M. Montgomery opted not to mention in her journals.
Contents
Preamble
Writer of “Anne” Books Delights Large Audience
Notes
Bibliography
Image Credit
Preamble
In a journal entry dated 6 December 1938, L.M. Montgomery wrote that she’d gone the previous evening “to a Horticultural Banquet at Thornhill,” a suburban district north of Toronto, accompanying her neighbour, Mrs. Cowan, and Mrs. Cowan’s daughter Elaine. “I have not been doing any public speaking for a long while but Mrs. Cowan’s brother is president of the Society and to oblige her I consented to go” (SJLMM, 5: 293). Three days later, the Richmond Hill Liberal wrote about the annual banquet of the Thornhill Horticultural Society, with an attendance of more than two hundred people.
L.M. Montgomery, guest speaker[,] delighted the large audience while she told, in her winning way, her experiences in becoming an author. She described her early home at Prince Edward Island and told of the ups and downs while she was making a career, but . . . did not give up till she made herself famous writing Anne of Green Gables and 19 other books. Her home is in Toronto now and is a neighbor of Mrs. Cowan, Mr. Bone’s sister, who accompanied her to Thornhill. L.M. Montgomery is a great lover of flowers as well as books, and thinks one gets the joy from them by working among them and not leaving the work to a gardener.
A beautiful bouquet of roses was presented to the author at the close of her address, by Mrs. Neal, president of the Home and School Association. It was said by all present that this was the best banquet the Society has ever had. (Liberal, “Thornhill,” 8)
Curiously given Montgomery’s claim that she hadn’t done “any public speaking for a long while,” there’s no mention in her journal of another speech she’d given just days earlier, at Belleville Collegiate Institute and Vocational School. Thankfully, the Ontario Intelligencer, a daily newspaper published in Belleville, published an extensive summary of this author event. Although the article consistently misspelled Montgomery’s married surname as “MacDonald” rather than as “Macdonald,” it nevertheless offers us a sense of what it would have been like to attend an author event featuring L.M. Montgomery.
Writer of “Anne” Books Delights Large Audience
Ontario Intelligencer (Belleville), 2 December 1938, 8. https://archive.org/details/intelligencer-december-1938/page/n23/.
Can’t Remember When When [sic] I First Started to Write Says L.M. Montgomery
Native of P.E.I.
Tea Served at Collegiate and Autograph Hunters Accommodated
As charming, human and lovable as Anne herself, Mrs. Ewan MacDonald (L.M. Montgomery), author of Anne of Green Gables and other delightful novels, addressed a large audience at the Book Fair in the Collegiate Institute yesterday afternoon. Her fascinated listeners, young and old, could readily see why her books are refreshing and entertaining for these are qualities Mrs. MacDonald possesses to a marked degree. Her address was one of inspiration to aspiring writers, and a sheer delight to her entire audience.
P.C. MacLaurin, principal of Belleville Collegiate Institute and Vocational School, was chairman for the afternoon’s program. He welcomed the visitors on behalf of the scholars and Book Fair officials and extended to Mrs. MacDonald a sincere welcome. Some already knew L.M. Montgomery, others knew her through her books. At the local library her works were in constant demand, her latest Anne book exceeding all others in popularity. All were pleased with the honor her coming conferred on the city. Mr. MacLaurin referred to Mrs. MacDonald’s pride in her native Prince Edward Island and told of her early days in that province which has so many distinguished sons and daughters. At present she lives in Toronto.
From Prince Edward Island
Mrs. MacDonald sincerely thanked Mr. MacLaurin for his words of welcome. She was a native of Prince Edward Island, it was true but Quebec almost became her birthplace. It was for Quebec that the sailing vessel chartered by the Clan Montgomery was bound in 1770 when scarcity of fresh water caused the boat to stop at the Island of St. John (now Prince Edward Island). Mrs. Hugh Montgomery, sea sick during her voyage, was so revived by a brief stay in the Island that she persuaded her husband and others of the clan to settle there while the rest continued to Quebec. So it was that L.M. Montgomery’s ancestors dwelt in the island of deep green foliage, rich, red soil, encircled with dark blue sea.
First Poem
Mrs. MacDonald could hardly remember when she began to write. She seemed always to have done so. She recalled vividly her first poem on Autumn. Her father on reading it said it wasn’t poetry at all. She assured him it was blank verse.
“Very blank, indeed!” he commented.
So she turned to stories, about cats and dogs of the farm, then tragic imaginative tales, all with sad endings. She wrote and wrote and decided on literature as a career.
When asked by young writers if their choice of a career is wise, she always tells them that it is not an easy one, but it is delightful and a joy.
“I tell them to put it off as long as possible—but if they all meant to be writers they simply have to write.”
The people in her community did not approve of her writing. They felt though that in time she might outgrow the habit.
“I was faced with the difficulty of obtaining paper. Nowadays I envy boys and girls their abundance of scribbling paper.
“It was so hard to find paper that I almost gave up writing. Two things saved my writing career[:] the fact that my grandfather kept the post office and the government sent letter bills yards long, a bilious pink, but still good paper and secondly Dr. Pierce’s Medical Institute.
[“]The latter sent once a year yellow covered notebooks, one page a blank the other an advertisement; these were to be sent in everybody’s mail. What was left over came to me.”
Undaunted by Rejections
Patience, perseverance and postage stamps are the requisite of the successful writer. Mrs. MacDonald has had manuscripts returned as many as forty times, and accepted the forty-first.
“It was very fortunate that my grandfather was postmaster. My literary career would have been blighted if the whole village knew of my many times rejected efforts.”
Aspiring writers need not feel that it is always because a story is poor that it is not accepted. It may be that the editor has previously bought a similar article, the article may be too long or too short. It may have some faulty construction that on revision makes it saleable.
Origin of Anne
Finally her stories began to be published and she had quite a reputation for short stories for young people. Anne of Green Gables came into being because of a request for a serial story, which was soon too long for anything but a full length novel. Anne was entirely a creature of the author’s imagination, yet somehow so real to her that she felt she must be a real character. Anne popped into the writer’s head, ready-made, red hair and green eyes, and name spelled with an “E.”
Mrs. MacDonald had always intended to write a novel [of] a serious work—in fact THE great Canadian novel. Instead she wrote of Anne and Anne’s followers and she sighed, might now never write that great volume.
But Anne of Green Gables, for years a world-wide favorite and perhaps the most popular of all girls’ books, was rejected by five publishers, was discarded by a discouraged author for two years.
Its acceptance, finally provided the greatest thrill of her life, a thrill unequalled by the publication of her nineteen other volumes.
Behind the Scenes
Mrs. MacDonald captivated her audience with behind the scenes’ views of an author’s public, of the daily letters received on all topics, from the one claiming [that] “Mr. L.M. Montgomery” was the letter writer’s long lost uncle, to those requesting a photograph of the author or a lock of her hair, those denouncing her for mentioning that a character had a birthmark, and those revealing an uncanny co-incidence in her choice of a character’s name. Of the most interesting she received was one from a monk in Tibet who had read her book while a letter from a Mohammedan girl said Mrs. MacDonald’s success as a writer (although a woman) had inspired her to undertake [the] study of medicine and bring a great service to the women of her faith and nation.
To all those who aspired to be writers, Mrs. MacDonald would say that while the career was not easy success with its joy and light was not any sweeter than the satisfaction one felt in the work, itself.
Honored at Tea
Following Mrs. MacDonald’s delightful address little Miss Frances Jean Finkle presented her with [a] corsage of orchids. A tea and reception took place in the Collegiate apartment. Mrs. E.R. Logie presided at the tea table, and Mrs. R. Hamilton, convener of the social committee was assisted in serving by Mrs. W.B. Clarke, Mrs. H.R. Muir, Mrs. C.E. Myers, Miss W. Wilkins, Mrs. H. Seldon and Mrs. J.A. Barclay. Among the guests was Mrs. MacDonald’s first cousin, Mrs. R.B. Aylsworth of Trenton.
Bevies of “Anne” devotees, young and old, surged about Mrs. MacDonald for autographs which she signed graciously and tirelessly.
Notes
her latest Anne book. Anne of Windy Poplars, released in 1936, narrated the three-year gap between Montgomery’s preceding novels Anne of the Island (1915) and Anne’s House of Dreams (1917).
her first poem on Autumn. Montgomery told the story of her father’s disappointing reaction to her first attempt at writing poetry several times, including in a 1921 essay entitled “Blank Verse? ‘Very Blank,’ Said Father,” published in the Winnipeg Evening Tribune and included in volume 1 of The L.M. Montgomery Reader.
Dr. Pierce’s Medical Institute. Montgomery mentioned writing on “letter bills” during childhood in several retrospective essays (“How I Began to Write,” 68; “How I Began,” 145), in “The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career” (NH, 274), and in at least one interview (“Author to Get No Profit,” 318), and she shared this part of her early writing life with Emily Byrd Starr in Emily of New Moon. These notebooks from Dr. Pierce’s Medical Institute of Buffalo, New York, are not mentioned in these sources, but Montgomery did write about the impact they had on her childhood writing in a journal entry dated 7 January 1910 (see CJLMM, 1: 259).
Mrs. R.B. Aylsworth of Toronto. In their annotations to the fourth volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston identify “Laura McIntyre Aylsworth, LMM’s first cousin on the Montgomery side, [who] had visited Leaskdale and Norval since moving to Ontario” (Rubio and Waterston, in SJLMM, 4: 384).
Bibliography
“Author to Get No Profit as Green Gables Filmed.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1: 316–19.
“Belleville Collegiate Institute and Vocational School, 1928–1992.” The Historical Marker Database, 9 December 2024. https://www.hmdb.org/m.asp?m=262551.
Lefebvre, Benjamin, ed. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2013.
Liberal (Richmond Hill, ON). “Thornhill.” 8 December 1938, 8. https://news.ourontario.ca/3214903/page/9.
Montgomery, L.M. Anne of the Island. Boston: The Page Company, 1915.
—. Anne of Windy Poplars. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1936.
—. Anne’s House of Dreams. Toronto: McClelland, Goodchild, and Stewart, 1917.
—. “Blank Verse? ‘Very Blank,’ Said Father.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1: 180–81.
—. The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911. Edited by Mary Henley Rubio and Elizabeth Hillman Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2013.
—. Emily of New Moon. Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1923.
—. “How I Began.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1: 144–47.
—. “How I Began to Write.” In Lefebvre, The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 1: 67–72.
—. A Name for Herself: Selected Writings, 1891–1917. Edited by Benjamin Lefebvre. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2018. The L.M. Montgomery Library.
—. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 4: 1929–1935. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1998.
—. The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume 5: 1935–1942. Edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. Toronto: Oxford University Press, 2004.
Image Credit
Featured image by Benjamin Lefebvre, mimicking the headline for this article in the Ontario Intelligencer.
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