The Complete Journals of L.M.
These journals, more than anything else are the real mirror of her character.
If Anne of Green Gable has been her alter ego, the fictional character where she projected her dreams, fear, desires, imagination, expectations, her desire of being loved, but also her escapism when sufferance was too big, arriving to feel Anne as a real human being, the same Montgomery and her first phase of the existence, pretty suffered, meant also the formation of a character undoubitly conflictual and plenty, unfortunately of sufferance also when life was smiling pretty generously to her.
Under many ways reading these journals has meant "feeling" her sufferances. I am emphatic and sometimes it was very difficult to going on. Sometimes I felt irritation because Lucy Maud was an estimated writer but she didn't live it withcomplete joy. Her frequent illnesses put me down a lot, like also her inability of appreciating sometimes the existence. She frequently wrote she hated life, for then reassuring the journal that no, after all she loved life. Life upsetted her in many different ways.
The idea, developed, while I was reading the journals is that Montgomery has never been realistically happy wherever she lived in, too.
She joined a great reality, Echo in Halifax, one of the few female journalists in that work-place so I guess with brilliant people close to her, intellectuals; I imagine the fertile, pulsating activity of a newsroom, but no, she didn't see it; she regretted she wasn't in Cavendish. She hated Halifax.
She complained about her colleagues: she was extremely selective and in most cases the imagine and idea the reader can see is the one of a distant girl.
More than that, she was happy to leaving and to return to Cavendish: she told she didn't sleep at all the first night for the excitement.
She complained later because, there is a rigid, strong winter in Cavendish, part of Prince Edwad Island; the house was cold, she started to suffering of many illnesses more or less importants; her granny being old became deaf and irritated if during the winter-time Lucy Maud, still a girl, wanted to stay awoken at long; all of it because they needed to save money and wood.
Professionally Lucy Maud has been incredibly lucky, because requested and published in many prestigious realities and paid very well. A year she earned 500 dollar.
Being a sensible girl Lucy Maud admitted in an entry that she was realizing her dreams, but she remarked that she couldn't see the people of Cavendish a lot, although she loved Cavendish so badly, because they were distant from her and her ideals and, most important, no one encouraged her dreams of becoming a writer. Just her father, as she remarks, for the rest, she met a lot of walls, although sadly and with a certain asperity, she writes that now, people, seeing the dollars that were arriving in her wallet stopped to gossiping about her and her ideal work.
She was a brain, a sophisticated brain, pretty modern, a feminist hidden behind a shy, good and uncertain smile. Her ideas regarding a Church, projected in the condemnation of carnal intercourses and that purity encouraged by priests was seen by her as a big hypocrisy; without our body, the idea of Lucy Maud, we can't express any part of who we are.
She also criticized a church that was continously asking for money; and considered going to the mass more a ritual where to seeing people than not anything else.
Lucy Maud had had an important fiancee, Ed but later they broke up; Lucy Maud broke up and once Ed returned to Cavendish because a priest, she didn't tolerate to see him anymore. She also was altered when Ed wrote him letters later, when she left Cavendish. She suffered a lot because of this boy.
She was attracted by mails, most of the time the only way of communication with the external world and in particular during the winter-time when the post-man sometimes was blocked because of some snow storm. Avid letter-writer, she was for sure a real journal-writer.
Affectively Lucy Maud was complicated. She wrote that she wouldn't never have wanted to marry a man just because she needed to do that; for a sort of obligation. It was important, to her point of view, "feeling" that person, searching affinities, staying well together. I am no sure she fell completely in love for her future husband, but I am sure she found a lot of affinities. Lucy Maud was incredibly complicated in her thoughts, sometimes discouraged, other densperate, other ones incredibly happy and joyous. These alternations of moods keeps her absolutely interesting.
Her complexity is also expressed when, in Cavendish, she expressed the idea of seeing someone because too alone. When company appeared to the horizon maybe old friends, maybe relatives, she constantly complained, because they irritated her, or she didn't find strong affinities anymore, that people became with the time like strangers, they upsetted her etc and was happy when they left her territory.
Once she had a man interested in her; she lived that month spent in evening walks in the beautiful countryside pretty conflictually because she wouldn't never have wanted to go out every night with this man and after all she was happy when he left, but later she was also incredibly sad that this man went away forever because, anyway, he represented a distraction for her and her monotonous, sometimes, existence.
Ewan will become her husband. He proposed to marrying her and although I imagine Lucy Maud didn't feel any butterflies in her stomach, she rationally accepted the proposal although she asked him of waiting, because she couldn't abandon her grand-mother; so only once her granny would have passed away, she would have taken in consideration the marriage proposal. And it happened. The granny died and Lucy Maud married Ewan. These part of her journals you will see will end with her marriage
Lucy Maud suffered often, very often of headaches or nerves, and reading that entries made me feel sick for her; but she was also a mysterious, weird soul, under many ways.
Once her first book Anne of Green Gables was released someone asked for an interview and she wrote in an entry that she would have sent to that reporter all the necessary, without revealing him her real self as if that man would have stolen her soul.
She was a private person and she refused many invitations related to the book because, she wrote, she didn't feel anymore the sensation of wanting to travelling.
Lucy Maud discovered in many ways Anne. First of all, there is to say that she picked up books of great quality, like Keats, Browing, Jack London, Dickens, Jean Ingelow, Barrie, Sir Walter Scott, and many other classics; and it says a lot.
Once she met along her....reading a book called The House of Seven Gables and later she spotted an article in a newsmagazine where there was reported the news of an orphan girl arrived to the house of a family where, viceversa they would have preffered, because requested, a boy.
Anne of Green Gables was borning.
The book at first was rejected by MacMillan and many other prestigious publishing houses. It's the destiny of biggest authors. No one of the biggest publishing houses want them. Their destiny is the one of growing up and letting grow the reality that will give them trust and success.
Montgomery was a sensible person and she cried a lot for all these rejections, putting aside the book. Then, she tried with an unknown Boston's publishing house. They were not just excited for that first book, but they requested her five books. They thought that Anne of Green Gables would have make the difference. And it was as predicted by the publishing house.
If the first book, Anne of Green Gables, was written with excitement, (although the idea is that Lucy Maud has never been happy also when she could be not just happy, but much much more), the second one, Anne of Avonlea didn't say anything to her and she told she wasn't excited at all for the release-day, because she just wrote it because she had to write it.
She was a person who analyzed people and situations with great profoundity adding many filters. Substantially the only object she trusted, realistically trusted and loved were her journals. These journals, sometimes I think, have been her best friends because thanks to them Lucy Maud revealed who she realistically was; differently she couldn't because maybe of her diffidence and because she loved to protect herself from the life's assaults.
In terms of friendship, she was an exclusivist. When she fell in friendship she dedicated to that girlfriend all her time. She was profoundly affectionated but she wasn't a person of great company if put in a gang of friends, I suppose.
She found most of her friends distants; they had grown up differently, some of them were married; she still wasn't; they had had children and she hadn't had still children; regarding children she told to the journal she was pretty cold with children in general and she didn't like children; she could fall affectionate with some of them but it wasn't a general guidelines. She would have wanted children because she added it is senseless an excistence without children and becoming old without children is very sad.
She analyzed death and departures, making big differences; if a person disappeared very old it was something that was unfortunately inevitable; she read as a big disgrace the disappearance of a person who left the world too soon.
There are many hints of what would have happened later. In one of the most important ones she wished to remain in health, writing till the end because in opposite case she wouldn't have been in grade to survive. In fact, one of the reasons why Lucy Maud killed herself was this one: her impossibility, at the end, of writing, exactly as happened to Ernest Hemingway.
Beautiful book for sure! Intense, sometimes disturbing, because you feel for sure the sufferance of Lucy Maud, but at the same time also an important instrument of knowledge if you want to discover more, for study or just for hobby about the creator of Anne of Green Gables. These journals are the strongest witnesses of her passage on this Earth and they give us back the real author hidden also in the always smiling, suffering tribulated, intelligent, sunny troublemaker Anne of Green Gables.
I thank Oxford University Press for the physical copy of this book.
Anna Maria Polidori
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