Sapphic Undertones Littered L.M. Montgomery’s Fiction, as Well as Her Female Friendships

My favorite book is a pale, mint green, Illustrated Junior Library edition with edges sprayed indigo blue. The girl on the cover wears a white pinafore over a practical plaid dress. Her two orangey-red braids fall around her shoulders, topped off with a wide-brimmed straw hat covered in freshly-picked flowers. She balances the hat with one hand as she gazes off into the distance, past farms and a quaint town of yellow houses and a modest church. On the back cover, beneath a shady tree, there’s a two-story farmhouse with green shutters and green gables, and when the book opens flat, the whole picture is revealed: the red-haired girl walks along the white picket fence of the house’s property, apart from the small town, lost in a world of her own making. 

It was a birthday gift from my aunt the year I turned nine. “I know you’ll love this,” she’d said, beaming, when I opened it. I thanked her but kept the book up high on a shelf, where it remained for many months. I looked at it sometimes, intrigued by the girl on the cover and the charming watercolor illustrations inside, but never read it, convinced it was a boring, childish story about old-fashioned manners and puffed sleeves. Sure, I’d worn out an animated VHS and at least one paperback copy of Little Women, but I’d since moved on to John Bellairs books and ghost stories like The Dollhouse Murders and Behind the Attic Wall, scary tales of weird, lonely kids doing things they weren’t supposed to do. 

Reading was my primary form of entertainment and my emotional escape hatch. In the days before smart phones and the internet, childhood evenings stretched on for days, especially when you were socially awkward with few friends. Books were a place to hide.

One cold winter night, it was pitch-dark outside, the house still and quiet, other than the sound of the evening news playing in living room. I was lying on my floor, staring at the ceiling. Janet Jackson’s Rhythm Nation played faintly from my boombox radio. I glanced at the collection of paperbacks piled by my bed, all of them dog-eared, their covers bent. My mother told me that might ruin them, but as far as I was concerned my teacher sanctioned it when she told us, “I don’t read books; I devour them.” To bend a spine and fold a page was therefore the greatest compliment. It was proof of love. It was also proof I’d already read them all. 

Except there was still that copy of Anne of Green Gables. Resigned, I took it out and inspected the cover again. What was she—Anne (I did like that she shared my middle name)—looking at? What pulled her attention beyond the edge? I wished I could step into the picture and see for myself. The house on the back did look sort of eerie, in a way. Empty, beneath a darkening sky, yet still enticing, like I could somehow open the door and step inside. I flipped through the pages and read some of the chapter titles. I had no idea what “epoch” and “vexation” meant, but I was curious. Plus, the clothes in the illustrations reminded me of the Victorian ghosts I’d been reading about.  

I stopped on a painting of Anne and another girl walking through the snowy woods at night. The two little girls hastened out hand in hand and hurried through Lover’s Lane… the caption read. There were other pictures of this pretty brown-haired girl, Diana, with Anne. In one, they were about my age, standing in a garden of flowers. Anne implores her, “Do you think you can like me a little—enough to be my bosom friend?” 

Something clicked then. I needed to know what was going on in this book. I turned back to the beginning and started reading. Eventually the television went silent; the hallway light turned off. My cat scratched at the bedroom door to be let in, and outside my window, cold wind whistled through the trees. But I was fully immersed in the world of Avonlea. I’d fallen in love with Anne, her “bosom friend” Diana, stern Marilla, soft-hearted Matthew, even the awful Mrs. Rachel Lynde. I cheered when Anne stood up for herself, calling Mrs. Lynde “a rude, impolite, unfeeling woman” and when she smashed her slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head, and I was determined to find my own copy of the mysterious “Lady of Shalott.” 

It turns out there was an even bigger compliment than dog-earing a book: reading so fervently you can’t even stop to mark your place. 

Though there were indeed plenty of manners and puffed sleeves involved, Anne Shirley was no shrinking violet. Instead of the dull morality tale I’d expected, I read about the pain of social ostracization, struggling with bone-deep loneliness and emotional dysregulation, and coping with childhood trauma by escaping into idealized fantasies. I didn’t have any of that language yet, of course—I just instantly identified with the experiences of a rural, Canadian orphan born a century earlier, despite the fact that we had nothing in common on the surface. 

In a way, Anne of Green Gables was arguably more horror story than the ghost stories I’d been consuming. It has certainly haunted me ever since.

Decades after that night, right before Covid shut down the world, I attended a weekend writing workshop at Ragdale, the artist’s retreat in Lake Forest, Illinois. When I pulled up to the house, I was struck with the strangest déjà vu. Something about it felt so familiar, like I was walking into a dream I’d once had. 

It was only after I left, when I looked back at a photo of the Arts & Crafts style white house with green shutters, that I realized it resembled the house on the back of my original copy of Green Gables. No wonder, then, my mind conjured it as a strange sort of memory. I pulled out the book again, cover faded now, its corners battered and pages slightly yellowed from time, and wondered why something kept bringing me back to that place, prodding me to look deeper into L.M. Montgomery. To make some sense of my immediate, and persistent, affinity to her worlds. 

Except, from what I knew, the author wasn’t particularly interesting. Unlike Louisa May Alcott, author of my first literary crush (Jo March), Montgomery didn’t leave any provocative quotes or politically-charged content behind. According to her official back-of-the-book bio, she lived a quiet, seemingly easy life as a college-educated preacher’s wife on Prince Edward Island. I’d chalked her books up to pure fiction, and concluded that reading more into them—like a romantic longing between Anne and Diana—was projecting modern context onto the past. There didn’t seem to be much more to Montgomery than was written plainly on the page.

However, I had plenty of time during the pandemic to watch TV and burrow into rabbit holes, so that’s what I did. And wow, was I (once again) wrong. 

In Netflix’s Russian Doll, Nadia, played by Natasha Lyonne, carries around a tattered copy of Montgomery’s lesser known, but equally adored, Emily of New Moon. “Everybody loves Anne,” she says. “But I like Emily. She’s dark.” 

I was thrilled by the reference to Emily Starr, and yet that declaration irked me, for what I thought was a misrepresentation, or misunderstanding, of Anne Shirley. Yes, New Moon has the reputation of being Green Gables’ grittier sister story. The protagonist a little less sanguine, the adversaries a bit more callous. But as I long suspected and soon learned, most of Montgomery’s stories are pretty dark if you scratch, even faintly, on the surface—a trait they apparently share with the author herself. 

Lucy Maud Montgomery (“Maud” to her friends) may be remembered as a prim and proper minister’s wife and author of saccharine children’s stories, but according to her biographers, she regretted her joyless marriage, pined over her female friends, battled what doctors diagnosed as “manic-depressive episodes,” believed in astrology and prophetic dreams, proclaimed she did not believe in the Christian afterlife, and struggled to reconcile her inner turmoil with her brighter public persona. Quite the departure from my original impression. 

She’d even penned a wide variety of gothic ghost and crime stories for magazines, alongside snarky—and revealing—personal journals that scandalized those close to her after her death. But because they challenged the virtuous image of Anne and her creator, those stories were buried for decades, until they were compiled into a collection titled Among the Shadows: Tales From the Darker Side (1990) which has since gone out of print, and like her journals, received little public attention.

Montgomery’s body of work, especially those forbidden diaries, reveals a complicated picture of the lauded writer, one that gives more depth and dimension to both the woman herself and her beloved characters.

Though she was a master of balancing gloomy topics like death and abuse with an expansive optimism in fiction, she had very little of the latter in her real life. She waged a constant battle against loneliness and in true queer fashion, struggled between doing what was expected of her—what was socially acceptable—and being true to herself. 

The best word to describe Montgomery’s life is “contradiction.” Her public life and private life were two very different things, and both contrasted with her unedited inner life. This was no accident, either. She diligently separated the different parts of herself and worked hard to keep them that way. Then she curated them even further. She wrote her journal (which she called her “grumble book”) by hand first, then typed the entries later, editing as she went. Toward the end of her life, aware they might actually have a larger audience, she edited them yet again; some were burned. Still more—at least 175 pages worth, according to Liz Rosenberg in her Montgomery biography House of Dreams—went missing after her death. 

In New Moon, Emily burns all her journals so Aunt Elizabeth can’t read them. “You have evidently something there that you are ashamed to have seen and I mean to see it. Give me that book,” Aunt Elizabeth demands. Emily shoves them inside the kitchen stove instead. 

What was Montgomery hiding when she burned her own diaries, if so much of what remained was still unflattering, including copious insults to her husband? One tantalizing possibility, considering how much speculation there’s long been about the sapphic undertones in Anne Shirley and Diana Barry’s relationship (at least on Anne’s part), is the true nature of her female friendships. While L.M. Montgomery’s sexuality is a hotly debated academic topic (see: The Bosom Friends Affair), and it’s impossible to draw any absolute conclusions from such a distance, there’s quite a bit to consider there. 

All throughout her life, Montgomery had intense, romantic relationships with women, despite her defensive declaration, “I am not a lesbian” in one 1932 journal entry. It’s clear that she valued men as friends, but rarely lovers, save one misguided tryst she cut off at the knees, and that the most cherished people in her life, including the one person she wanted to be with at the end of it, were women. 

The first boy in her life, Nate Lockhart, like Anne’s Gilbert Blythe, was her academic rival at their one room schoolhouse in Cavendish. They seemed like a great match, with similar interests, and Montgomery spent a lot of time talking about him with her best friend Penzie Macneill. For all outward appearances, Montgomery had a crush on Nate. But when he reciprocated, she pulled away. After he declared his love, she avoided him, and wrote in her journal, “Why is it that all through my life the men I’ve liked best were the ones I couldn’t love?” Similarly, Emily Starr bemoans that all boys automatically become beaux just because “he happened to give you a pencil or an apple and picked you out frequently for his partner.” 

Meanwhile Montgomery wrote Penzie letters addressed to “My own dearest love” and told her, “I wish that instead of writing to you I could go to you and get my arms around you and kiss you.” She referred to Penzie as “My own sweet wildwood rose” (a reference to her hair, red like Anne Shirley’s) while saying Nate was a “detestable pig.” 

Anne writes similar letters to Diana, complete with terms of endearment, and kisses them. Likewise, in New Moon, when Emily thinks she ate a poisoned apple, she writes to her dearest friend Ilse in what she fears are her final moments, to tell her she loves her, and to leave her a necklace, the only thing of value she owns. 

The two of them also have an argument over whether they’d rather be Joan of Arc (infamously burned at the stake, in part, for the crime of witchcraft and “bearing man’s dress”) or Francis Willard—a 19^th century suffragist who, like Montgomery, had a number of passionate same sex friendships, including a “living and traveling companion” of over 20 years. 

While it’s true that pseudo-romantic relationships between girls were common in the 19^th century, Penzie’s responses were apparently not as enthusiastic or frequent, causing a desperate Montgomery to accuse her of abandonment. 

These letters survive only because Penzie’s son saved them. When Montgomery found out he still had them decades later, she begged him to burn them. 

As Irene Gammel writes in Looking for Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery also burned a keepsake box filled with mementos, which included a love poem titled “A Moonlight Walk” she wrote for another childhood friend named Amanda (the two were nicknamed “Mollie” and “Pollie” and formed a lot of the inspiration for Anne and Diana). Nate Lockhart and another boy found the poem, copied it, and shared it with the entire school. Due to its romantic content, they’d assumed she’d written for one of the boys in class. 

The box also contained fur from a pet cat that Montgomery and her dearest friend in adulthood, Frede (pronounced “Fred”) Campbell, had named “Mignonnette Carissima Montgomery Campbell,” combining their last names. 

Montgomery’s emotional tie to that keepsake box seems to be mirrored in her short story The Old Chest at Wyther Grange, in which a child finds an old chest at her grandmother’s house and is told the sad story of its original owner, a woman deserted by her lover. “Let us put all these things back in their grave,” the grandma says. “They are of no use to anyone now.” 

Until she married (reluctantly) at age 36, the only men Montgomery seemed to tolerate in her life were those kept firmly at arm’s length. For instance, during her stay in Saskatchewan, she’d made friends with brother and sister Will and Laura Pritchard. Like so many others, Will declared his love for her while she wrote him off as a brother or “jolly comrade.” Laura, on the other hand, was her “twin spirit.” 

Years later, when she found out Will had died, she was heartbroken, and maybe feeling guilty, impulsively agreed to marry another man who had been pursuing her, Edwin Simpson. But almost as soon as she accepted Edwin’s proposal, she was frantic with regret. She felt caged and his very touch “repulsed” her. Unfortunately, there were severe social and legal consequences to breaking it off. Montgomery was trapped. The best she could do was insist on a long engagement. 

So she found a teaching position that allowed her to move as far away from Edwin as possible. While there, she had a fling with a young farmer named Herman Leard, the first and only time she seemed to enjoy being physically involved with a man. But as with Will, she more comfortably proclaimed that in hindsight, after Herman had passed from the flu in 1899. Herman was also engaged to someone else at the time, so perhaps that’s why she felt safe enough to experiment with him—no risk of commitment in that dalliance. She even invited him to her room at night, though she didn’t allow much more than kissing. After he pushed her to go a little too far, she ended the arrangement abruptly, though she still didn’t find the courage to dump Edwin until her grandfather died and she was called home. Edwin didn’t take it lightly, either; in fact, he became threatening and refused to let her go. But she dug in her heels and was eventually freed from him. 

After shaking off Edwin, Montgomery worked at a newspaper in Halifax and made money writing her “potboilers”—stories like The Girl at the Gate, the tale of a young woman’s ghost returning to fulfill a lover’s vow she’d made in life. She’d pledged: “I promise I will be true to you forever, through as many years of lonely heaven as I must know before you come. And when your time is at hand, I will come to make your deathbed easy as you have made mine.” 

Montgomery believed spirits could come back for those they loved, and she took solemn oaths very seriously, both in her fiction and her own life. Any fan will remember the oath Anne and Diana took to be bosom friends “as long as the sun and moon shall endure.” In the sequel Anne of Ingleside, Diana says, “…but we have kept our old ‘solemn vow and promise, haven’t we?” Anne replies: “Always…and always will.” 

Her attachments to women only intensified in adulthood. When Nora Lefurgey arrived to board with Montgomery and her grandmother, the two became immediate friends. They slept in the same bed together, which was a common practice, but despite mentioning that Nora sometimes knocked her from the mattress onto a chair, when her friend was away, Montgomery wrote that she was “lonesome” sleeping without her. They walked together on Lover’s Lane (the same featured in Green Gables) and shared a secret diary in which they wrote back and forth, skewering Victorian social mores and even making fun of Montgomery’s future husband, a local minister they nicknamed “The Highlander.” In L.M. Montgomery and Gender, Vappu Kannas says of the two, “Female intimacy also presents itself in the two women flirting with each other on the pages of the diary, so much so that the actual romantic lead couple of this mock-serious romance seems to be Nora and Maud.” 

And yet, in the midst of this apparent happiness, in her own journal, Montgomery wrote that she was feeling “dull and depressed” and “sick of existence.” She also worried that she was “practically alone in the world.”

After Nora moved on, depressed Montgomery agreed to marry the oft-maligned Ewan “The Highlander” Macdonald, but she didn’t celebrate what should’ve been a happy occasion. She dragged the engagement out for as long as possible, telling him that she wouldn’t marry until her grandmother was gone. By the time that happened, Montgomery was 36 and Anne of Green Gables was already a bestseller.

It’s anyone’s guess why she felt like she had to get married when she was already supporting herself, except that she always seemed torn between doing what she wanted to do and what was expected of her in polite society. From a young age, she traveled alone in a time when that was simply not done; she managed to go to college, without support, and became a teacher, resisting her grandparents’ attempts to marry her off in her teens and twenties, and when she couldn’t find a job as a journalist, she published poems and salacious stories instead. She’d always been driven to succeed, and she had the ability to do so. The local paper called her college graduation speech a “literary gem” and compared her to the likes of George Eliot. But ultimately, she chose to roll the dice on rural married life rather than face what she described as a “drab, solitary, struggling middle age.” 

There wasn’t even a honeymoon period. In the early days of her marriage, she longed for her latest best friend, Frede, who was away at college (paid for by Montgomery). During one of her so-called “3 a.m. moods” she wrote of her wedding day, “I felt a horrible inrush of rebellion and despair… I felt like a prisoner.” She was not in love with Ewan and she did not want to be a minister’s wife. She wrote, “I would not want him for a lover, but I hope at first that I might find a friend in him.” 

Sadly, rather than stability, Montgomery’s marriage brought more turmoil. She and her husband argued when she refused to write under her married name, and despite being the primary source of income, Ewan disparaged her books and never read a single one (she in turn never dedicated one to him). She suffered from postpartum depression and the tragedy of a stillborn child. Her husband also had “moods,” and believed their entire family, including their two sons, were doomed to “eternal damnation.” He spent days at a time unable to function. She explained away these humiliating periods as physical illness to their friends and neighbors. 

Montgomery regretted getting married and even considered divorce, but ultimately her desire to do the socially acceptable thing won out once again. 

For a while, Frede was the one bright spot in her life. When they’d first connected, Montgomery was in the early stages of writing Green Gables. Over time the two became inseparable. Frede made Montgomery’s wedding feast and came to stay with her after her first child was born. The two of them were in “beautiful concord” and Montgomery proclaimed she finally had “the home I had dreamed of having” with Frede.  

Montgomery was pregnant with her third child when Frede, by then living in Montreal, came down with typhoid fever and nearly died. Without concern for herself or her pregnancy, Montgomery rushed to be with Frede until she recovered, as she couldn’t “face a world without Frede in it.” 

Afterwards, when Frede married a soldier, Montgomery wrote that she was “dumbfounded, flabbergasted, knocked out and rendered speechless.”

 In her short story The Promise of Lucy Ellen, similar to the earlier Girl at the Gate, Cecily and Lucy Ellen, two women who vowed to live together forever as a married couple, are torn apart when Lucy Ellen agrees to marry a man. Cecily is furious, and tries to stop it, but Lucy Ellen is so despondent that in the end Cecily chooses to make her happy rather than hold her to their prior promise. “Here’s your beau, Lucy Ellen,” she says. “and I give you back your promise.” After she makes that sacrifice, Cecily goes upstairs with “tears rolling down her cheeks” and declares, “It’s my turn to wish I was dead.”

After the first World War ended, Frede came down with pneumonia in the global flu epidemic. Montgomery ran to be with her again, but this time, already weak from her previous illness, doctors said there was no chance Frede would pull through. 

As she lay dying, Montgomery reminded Frede of a promise they’d made to visit one another after death, à la The Girl at the Gate. “You’ll be sure to come, won’t you?” 

“Certainly,” Frede swore.

Montgomery said she even wanted them to share the same epitaph on their gravestones: After life’s fitful fevers she sleeps well.

When Frede died in 1919, “the most terrible year of [her] life,” Montgomery had another breakdown she never fully recovered from. Despite all her wealth and success, Montgomery lamented that she could not buy happiness. Her mental health declined rapidly in that second half of her life, even as she continued writing bestseller after bestseller, escaping deeper into dream worlds as her own deteriorated around her. 

To the community, she was the minister’s wife, dutifully caring for him during his frequent illnesses, raising their children and writing sweet books about childhood. The truth was she’d become addicted to the medications intended to help her debilitating depression. She was tortured by the many losses she’d endured and the state of the world, with a second World War triggering her trauma from the first. Her wayward oldest son was a constant source of strife, and her husband, who she never really loved, was entirely dependent on her. 

At the end of her life, after so many fruitless attempts to mold herself into the Edwardian feminine ideal, Montgomery found herself unfulfilled and alone, despite ticking off all the right boxes and overcoming a traumatic, semi-orphaned childhood to raise her own family and have a successful writing career (which was itself skirting the line of acceptability). The one person she wanted with her was gone. 

In a 1939 diary entry, Montgomery pictured her final moments. She wrote that she’d be lying in bed beneath a photo of Frede she’d hung on the bedroom wall. She’d “step into that picture and hold out my hands to her as she stands among the shadows and say, ‘Beloved, we are together again, and the years of our severance are as if they had never been.’”

Her last journal entry read: “My life has been hell, hell, hell. My mind is gone—the world has gone mad. I shall be driven to end my life. Oh God, forgive me.”

On April 24, 1942, Lucy Maud Montgomery died at home in bed. The official cause was coronary thrombosis. But as with so many other things about her personal life, there was a public story and a private one. In 2008, Montgomery’s granddaughter admitted that the world-renowned author had actually taken her own life.

Like her final diary entry pleaded, forgiveness is a recurrent theme in Montgomery’s work. Marilla forgives Anne’s temper; Anne forgives Marilla’s mistakes. Diana Barry’s parents forgive them for drinking the raspberry cordial after Anne nurses Diana’s little sister back to health. Emily begs Aunt Elizabeth’s forgiveness for disgracing the Murrays at a prayer meeting, and for “cutting a bang.” In Among the Shadows, the transgressions are even more serious. Murderers, thieves, people suffering with addiction, spurned lovers, and spirits from beyond the veil all seek compassion and second chances in a world that doesn’t accept them. The “darkness” in her stories is an attempt to make sense of an uncertain, often unfriendly existence in which she often felt very much alone and misunderstood. 

In others, she wrote her characters the happy ending she was unable to give herself. “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” Anne of Green Gables said. “That’s a sentence I read once and I say it over to comfort myself in these times that try the soul.”

Whatever L.M. Montgomery privately wrestled with, or felt she needed absolution from, in friendship or love, and stuck in a time that wasn’t equipped to support her in myriad ways, I hope she’d at least be content to know that her work continues to inspire us generations later.   

On the final page of New Moon, Emily, Montgomery’s literary doppelganger, ready to embark on her writing career, wrote in her brand-new journal: “I am going to write a diary, that it may be published when I die.” 

These revelations about Lucy Maud Montgomery, and by extension her characters, were shocking, but not surprising. Though they challenged everything I thought I knew about one of my favorite stories, they also validated my underlying suspicions: she and I were in fact kindred spirits all along.

Like Maud, I learned to keep certain truths to myself.  

Ultimately, Anne of Green Gables is a Rorschach test. Readers interpret the text through their own worldview. Is it a squeaky-clean, optimistic tale of overcoming adversity, espousing traditional values? Or is it a subversive, proto-feminist work reflecting the psychological struggles and frustrated Sapphic tendencies of the author?

Two things can be true.

As for “The Lady of Shalott,” I finally got around to reading that, too. It was an interesting choice for Anne, and a revealing one on Montgomery’s part. 

Maybe the poem was her own childhood revelation, and like so many other things, she shared it with Anne. I’d like to think young Maud spent a sleepless winter evening reading Tennyson by candlelight, a cat scratching at her door, her heart responding to something her mind can’t quite interpret: the Lady of Shallot’s desire to be seen and not be seen. Because to be seen was dangerous. It meant a type of death, perhaps even literal. But most definitely, social. Being truly free, just like for the Lady of Shallot, was simply not possible. The isolated woman, trapped and alone, can only watch others move through the world in reverse, through a mirror. When she finally gives in to the temptation and ventures out into the world, she is rewarded with death. But she’d already decided it was worth it. She was, after all, half-sick of shadows. 

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