Well this is just plain sad: The granddaughter of L.M. Montgomery, beloved author of the Anne Of Green Gables books revealed recently to the Toronto Globe and Mail that her grandmother’s death at the age of 67 was in fact suicide via a drug overdose.
Montgomery had apparently suffered from deep feelings of anxiety and dread and felt isolated and sad for much of her life. None of this was a secret to her descendents, or to scholars who have written biographies of Montgomery or studied her work.
Kate MacDonald Butler told the Globe and Mail that she and her family decided to come forward because of a series on the Canadian mental health system the paper did this year, and also the renewed attention to Montgomery on the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables’ publication.
They wanted to bring attention to the idea that mental illness can and does strike anyone, Butler said. It’s likely her sense of isolation was exacerbated by the times in which she lived, when depression and other mental illnesses were seen more as weaknesses of character than imbalances of chemistry.
I loved Anne of Green Gables when I was a girl (really, between this and Little Women, I didn’t grow up in the 1930s or anything, I just loved classic books) and still envy redheads and harbor dreams of seeing Prince Edward Island because of reading them.
While it’s not surprising that someone who wrote so prolifically struggled with sadness – perhaps she was so prolific exactly because the idyllic worlds of Avonlea and Ingleside provided an escape from the sadness that engulfed her daily life – it’s still sad to think that she took her own life. As much joy and pleasure as she brought to others through the characters she created, I wish for her sake and that of her family’s that she could have enjoyed some joy of her own as well.
