Before her marriage, L.M. Montgomery had many romances. She turned down two proposals before getting engaged to her second cousin, Edwin Simpson. She soon realised she didn’t love Simpson and couldn’t marry him, but instead of rejecting him, she strung him along. Meanwhile, she fell in love with Herman Leard, a farmer’s son. Though Montgomery felt strongly about Leard, he didn’t have the intelligence she wanted in a mate. When both men visited her at the same time, she wrote in her journal: “There I was under the same roof with two men, one of whom I loved and could never marry, the other whom I had promised to marry, but could never love!” [1]
Shortly after her grandmother’s death, Lucy Maud Montgomery married Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald, in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island, the home of her maternal relatives. She had been secretly engaged to him since late 1906.
After a honeymoon in Scotland and England, they left Prince Edward Island for Leaskdale, Ontario, where Ewen took up the position of minister of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church. Montgomery and Ewen’s first son, Chester, was born in 1912. A second son, Hugh, was stillborn in 1914. The third, Stuart, was born in 1915. Montgomery wrote her next 11 books from the Leaskdale manse that she complained had neither a bathroom nor a toilet.
Montgomery’s roles as minister’s wife and mother made strong demands on her time and Ewen proved in many ways to be a difficult husband. He resented her success as an author and had increasingly unstable mental health. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1934 and resigned from his parish in Norval in 1935. Montgomery continually sought to find a balance between her writing and her domestic responsibilities and believed it was her duty as a woman to make her marriage work. She repeatedly demonstrated in her writing and in interviews that she believed motherhood to be the most important work for women. No photographs of the wedding or of Montgomery wearing her wedding dress survive.
Lucy Maud Montgomery Macdonald died of congestive heart failure in Toronto, Ontario, on 24 April 1942, aged 67, and Ewan Macdonald died in November 1943 aged 73.
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