Canadian writer Lucy Maud
Montgomery published as L. M. Montgomery, is best known for her series of
novels beginning 1908’s Anne of Green Gables. In her lifetime she would publish 20 novels, 530 short stories, 500
poems, and 30 essays.
She married Ewen Macdonald a
Presbyterian minister who was known as a dense man, not interested in
literature or his wife’s writings. Macdonald was probably mentally ill when
Montgomery married him.
It appears to have been a
strained and loveless marriage with Montgomery once telling a reporter that
those women whom God wanted to destroy He would make into the wives of
ministers.
Soon after the marriage started
she fell victim to mental depression in part due to her husband's attacks of
religious melancholia (endogenous major depressive disorder) and deteriorating
health.
(Montgomery wrote in her diary that she could
not stand looking at her husband's face, when he had that "horrible
imbecile expression on his face" and that to her husband "A woman is
a thing of no importance intellectually-the plaything and servant of man-and
couldn't possibly do anything that would be worthy of a real tribute".)
In 1918, she was struck with and almost died
from the Spanish Flu pandemic (It would kill between 50-100 million people all
over the world in 1918-1919) Although she nearly died her husband was
indifferent to it all. But she stayed with the marriage even while her husband,
who believed in predestination, had become convinced that he was not one of
"the Elect" chosen by God to go to Heaven, leading him to spend hours
depressed and staring into space. He often told his wife that he wished she and
their children had never been born as they were also not of "the
Elect", and all of them were going to Hell when they died as he believed
that they were all predestined to be among the "damned".
MacDonald refused to assist with
raising the children or the housework, and was given over to erratic, reckless
driving as if he was deliberately trying to get himself killed in a car crash,
as perhaps he was. In 1925, MacDonald ran over a Methodist minister he had a
dispute with, however he wasn’t charged.
In 1934, Montgomery's husband
signed himself into a sanatorium in Canada and after his release a drug store
accidently sold him a pill laced with insecticide instead of an antidepressant.
He became notably paranoid after this
incident, accusing Montgomery of attempting to murder him, and in his more
lucid mental states, he beat her. Otherwise he alternated between moments of
passivity, where he became catatonic, staring into space for hours with blank,
empty eyes; and more cogent mental states, where he declared he hated God for
making him one of "the damned", would never preach again, and beat
Montgomery for supposedly trying to kill him.
Montgomery in the meantime, was battling
depression and eventually became addicted to bromides and barbiturates that the
doctors had given her to help treat her depression. On April 24, 1942,
Montgomery was found dead in her bed in her Toronto home. The primary cause of
death recorded on her death certificate was coronary thrombosis. However, her
granddaughter revealed that Montgomery may
have taken her own life through a drug overdose.