The Alpine Path

The Alpine Path: L. M. Montgomery: 9781450581912: Amazon.com: Books

The Alpine Path is the title of a memoir Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote in 1917. On the cruise to Canada (mentioned in my last post), I had expected to visit her home and the museum on Prince Edward Island. We actually went by the house that inspired, Anne of Green Gables and the rest of the series. But we did not go into the Anne of Green Gables Museum, housed in her cousins' home and used as the setting for a later series. (An excursion had been planned for the entire group that was wonderful in a different way and that I will be sharing in a few days on my Fourth Wish Blog.)

 We did pass the Green Gables Farmhouse in Cavendish that had been Montgomery's setting for the Anne books (actually her grandparents' home in which she lived during her early years), and the cemetery where she was buried. (Her grave is between those two dark green bushes a little right of center and far back.)

Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1874-1942

The MacNeil farmhouse, prototype
for Green Gables in the series

Though I didn't get a chance to go into the museum, I visited the book section in a souvenir shop at one of our stops and was lucky enough to come across a copy of her memoir. It was an intriguing read. Born in the Victorian Era, she went on to become one of the most popular children's writers of the early 20th century. The memoir ends in 1912, describing her honeymoon trip to the British Isles, but she went on to write many books after that.

Her memoir's title, The Alpine Path, is taken from the last lines of a poem she clipped out of a magazine when she was young, "The Fringed Gentian." (She doesn't name the author, but it is not William Cullen Bryant's poem, nor Emily Dickinson's.) She describes her own path to publication as being the hard, steep path described in these lines of the poem: 

                Then whisper, blossom, in thy sleep

                   How I may upward climb

               The Alpine path, so hard, so steep,

                   That leads to heights sublime.

When Anne was twenty-one months old, her mother died of tuberculosis and her grieving father sent her to live with her maternal grandparents, the MacNeils, at the farmhouse in Cavendish. From an early age, she kept journals full of poems and stories. In her own words, "I wrote aout all the little incidents of my existence . . . descriptions of my favorite haunts, biographies of my many cats, histories of visits . . . even critical reviews of the books I had read." The MacNeils home is the one that inspired her Anne books.

Poems and stories are what gave her her start in the publishing world. She had written them all through her college years and through three years of teaching. Always she persevered, and if there is one recurring theme throughout this memoir, it is the necessity for a writer to persevere. In time, it payed off. She had been published without payment for some time, but in 1895, while taking an English literature course at Dalhousie College in Halifax, she started getting paid for her verses.

When her grandfather died in 1898, she returned to the farm and stayed with her grandmother for the next thirteen years, except for a brief period as proof reader for the Daily Echo in Halifax. By then, she was making a living from her stories and poems, although she fretted about having to write "potboilers" with morals tacked on at the end. It's ironic that I never have thought  of Montgomery as a poet or short story writer--mainly because she is so famous for her novels, particularly the Anne series, which bought her international fame. 

The book that made her famous.

It bothered her that her later books never were quite as famous as the Anne series. After eight books, Montgomery had grown tired of the character of Anne, and wrote the Emily trilogy, Pat of Silverbush, and its sequel, and The Story Girl and its sequel. The Story Girl was her favourite of all her novels, but none of them ever achieved the popularity of the Anne books. She also wrote two adult novels, Magic for Marigold, and The Blue Castle, and, as if proving her point, I have never heard of either of these books until I read the preface to her memoir.

She married Ewen MacDonald in July of 1912 after her grandmother died the previous winter. She  continued to write many of the books listed in the paragraph above. She was writing a new book as late as 1939, a sequel to Jane of Lantern Hill, a more serious novel that was apparently the beginning of a new series. But she never finished the sequel. She died three years later, at the age of 68, survived by her husband and two sons. 

I was moved to learn that she wasn't pleased to have her other work shadowed by the Anne books. I suppose the earmark of a fine writer is to want to keep reaching out for new ventures, and she certainly did that. Speaking for myself, though, I would be more than thrilled to create a character of such lasting, international fame as Anne, who continues to captivate even today.

Anne of Green Gables, a character who still endures