A peek into L. M. Montgomery's life proved to be more fascinating and inspiring than Kate expected.
32. Maud, not Anne (May 2013)
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| Silver Brook |
Kate
stepped inside Silver Brook and instantly felt at home. The little entrance had
a door to the gift shop to one side, and a doorway leading to rooms full of
history and imagination. But there, by the entrance, was a desk with a middle-aged
woman with a blonde bob, a large display of L. M. Montgomery’s entire set of
works, and an enormous and beautiful old fashioned wood stove that Kate coveted
briefly before she considered the hassle of smoke and cleaning.
Pam (the
blonde woman) was, in fact, the great granddaughter of L. M. Montgomery’s aunt
and uncle who had owned Silver Brook. She still lived in part of the house and
showed the rest to guests and visitors as they came. Kate had always imagined
things about Anne’s author, but here was a bit of real history, with a
story-telling family member to boot! Kate and Mister quickly learned to think
of L. M. Montgomery as Maud, not Lucy. Lucy was the name of Maud’s grandmother,
who she lived with for most of her growing up years, and Maud had no desire to
follow in her footsteps. Maud, Pam assured them, always said that she was not like the Anne of her stories. “Anne
was much more spunky,” Pam said, “though they certainly shared their love of
nature.”
Pam
described Maud’s life and Kate was surprised by how “normal” it seemed for that
time in history. She had lost her mother as a baby. Her father had left to find
work and ended up remarrying (very normal situation back then.) She lived with
her extremely strict grandparents, and struggled against a society that scoffed
at the idea of a woman author and gossiped about her strange habits of
wandering in the woods. She spent most summers at Silver Brook, and the aunt
and uncle there were her only encouragement to keep writing.
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| Maud's room |
Pam pointed to the displays of
books and described some of the true elements of Maud’s stories, suddenly
illuminating Kate’s understanding as she picked out truth from fiction. And far
from cheapening the effect of the stories, Kate was even more delighted and
entranced. How clever and fun and imaginative this young lady must have been as
she haphazardly (it seemed) incorporated various places, events, people, and
imaginings into her fictional stories, weaving them all together with dreams of
girls and boys who seemed so real to her that they almost took on a life of
their own! Suddenly Maud became a real person—not just the author of Anne.
Kate liked to write. In fact, she
couldn’t remember a time in her life when she didn’t long to write stories, and
she attributed part of that longing to a deep love of Anne of Green Gables, who
had her own literary struggles. As a child, she had committed Anne’s same
blunder of trying to write about things far beyond her knowledge or experience.
Her parents had told her (as Mr. Harrison had told Anne) that she should write
about things she knew…but, also like Anne, she had protested that such writings
would be interesting to no one but herself. But in seeing the reality of Maud’s
success—how she wrote about what she knew and loved and experienced—this
renewed Kate’s desire to write, and inspired her to continue searching for
those golden nuggets in her own life, worthy of capturing in story form.
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| Maud's quilt, which she finished after four years, just as crazy quilts were going out of style... |
Of all the “Anne’s Country” things
that Kate got to see on Prince Edward
Island , Silver Brook was her favorite. She and Kelsey
and Mister wandered over the house and read the signs and newspaper clippings
long after James had taken the children out to play on the swing set
overlooking the “Lake
of Shining Waters
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| The enchanted bookcase |
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| one of the delightful, true elements of the story |
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