The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career

This was a lovely little book that gives insight into the history of LMM - my favourite author. I loved learning about her early life and how she began writing. There were some absolute gems in there about writing and how it takes time and effort. (if I remember I might find some to share on here) All in all, I thoroughly enjoyed it! The only thing I wish is that it would've been longer. But seeing as LMM wrote it, it's not exactly possible to request that nearly 100 years after the fact... xD

I only wish there was more of it!

In her wonderful little autobiography, L.M. Montgomery spends much of its pages detailing her childhood, despite the fact this is "The story of her career". However, it quickly becomes clear why. Her childhood home and memories on Prince Edward Island are the reason her books are the way they are. Anne, Emily, Pat and all the rest were not just born when LMM put them to paper -- their origins are in the adventures she herself had on the Island. Much of her own soul is in her characters.

“I am grateful that my childhood was spent in a spot where there were many trees, trees of personality, planted and tended by hands long dead, bound up with everything of joy or sorrow that visited our lives. When I have "lived with" a tree for many years it seems to me like a beloved human companion.”

I also enjoyed this as she intended it -- as an inspiration for my own writing craft. LMM worked hard -- so very hard. She was more than talented, she was driven and determined. Her writing routines adapted to fit whatever stage of life she was in, but it did not falter. She wrote so very much, incredibly so. I am in awe of her dedication. She also detailed how writing meant so much to her and did so much for her. She loved it wholly, found so much fulfillment in it. Through all her struggles (and her life is very much one of tragedy) she continued to climb the Alpine Path.

3.5 stars

It was very interesting to see how the stories in Montgomery's books related to real-life incidents and I liked her childhood memories. However, I found some of the included diary entries too lenghty and out of place, especially those of her honeymoon.

Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of my favorite authors and she is the renowned author of Anne of Green Gables as well as several other novels, short stories, and poems. Her memoir, The Alpine Path was published as a series of articles in 1917. This book is seventy pages in length and can easily be read in one sitting.

The Alpine Path delineates the story of Maud's career from her childhood and teenage years when she developed her insatiable love for literature and writing, her family traditions on Prince Edward Island, furthering her education, her first publications, writing amid her hectic schedule as a teacher, writing her first novel, and her honeymoon in England and Scotland with her husband, Ewan Macdonald. This book is about climbing the alpine path, a long and treacherous path to journey with tenacity and endeavor along with great toil to ultimately lead to a divine state of happiness. Maud's autobiographical character, Emily Starr from the Emily trilogy also ascends the alpine path. This journey of The Alpine Path was inspired from a poem that Maud read in a magazine as a teenager. Maud particularly was stern about her reputation being affected, and therefore did not write about her long and arduous years of depression and mental illness, which began at a young age.

This personal story really commences with the Presbyterian families of the Macneills and Montgomerys fleeing Scotland to settle on the hills and farms in rural communities of Prince Edward Island, an island once belonging to the British Isles and would soon be annexed as a Canadian province. There is the tale of Maud's paternal great-grandmother, a seasick woman exploring the island with her husband, and the horrifying account of the inscriptions on the graveyard and her maternal uncle, Hector Macneill, a Scottish poet, through whom Maud inherited her writing talent from. Maud was born to Hugh John Montgomery and Clara Macneill in 1874, being a namesake of her maternal grandmother, Lucy Woolner Macneill, and Queen Victoria's daughter, Princess Alice Maud Mary. Maud always preferred being called by her middle name, Maud. Lucy was a name she never liked or used. Three months short of her second birthday, Maud's mother, Clara died of tuberculosis and she was left in care of her maternal grandparents in Cavendish. She vividly remembers her earliest memory of the cold touch where she lay her hand on her mother's coffin and she wondered why her mother was so still, cold, and grave and why her father was crying. She later learned what the world called death.

At the Macneill Homestead in Cavendish, Maud had her place for dreaming. She came from a family of storytellers; her maternal grandfather, Alexander Macneill narrated the tale of Cape LeForce on Cavendish beach. Her great-aunt, Mary Lawson was a skilled storyteller who had a brilliant memory and was an eloquent conversationalist, having the capacity for amusing stories. Maud's novel, The Story Girl includes many of Mary Lawson's tales. At the age of five, Maud was infected with typhoid fever and confused Mrs. Murphy for being her grandmother. There is the incident of James and William Forbes, calling her Johnny and Maud learned the lesson to never tease a child. She drew upon this experience with Gilbert Blythe accidentally vexing Anne Shirley about her red hair in Anne of Green Gables. The Judgement Sunday in The Story Girl was an actual occurrence in Maud's life where she feared that the world would end on Sunday afternoon because she believed every word that was printed. Peg Bowen from The Story Girl was one of Maud's only characters taken directly from her own life because she was the local witch in town used to scare children. Nevertheless, she added flavors to this character and painted it as a free lily. At the age of seven, Maud's father moved to Saskatchewan and remarried and her Aunt Emily also left to get married. This certainly left our Maud to be lonely and desolate, but she found comfort in her visits to Park Corner where she would spend hours with her cousin, Frederica Campbell. Charlottetown was simply a lovely city. At this time, Maud invented imaginary worlds and had the comfort of her imagined friends that lived in the cupboard glass, Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray. She could also read fluently and understand poetry well compared to her schoolmates and found joy in occasional scribblings that would form the basis for her writing. She did not have a great many novels at home when she was young but she constantly reread The Pickwick Papers by Charles Dickens, Rob Roy by Sir Walter Scott, and Zanoni by Edward Bulwer-Lytton and pored over these volumes until she knew them by heart. Novels were frowned upon as reading material for children, but poetry did not share this ban. Therefore, she extensively read poetry and it influenced her writing style for her life. Soon enough, Well and Dave Nelson, two orphaned boys came to live with her family for the four jolly years. Their golden days were whimsical and delightful and they had the habit of imagining haunted woods, which would again appear in Anne of Green Gables. At the age of nine, the events of the shipwreck of Marco Polo came and Maud wrote her first poem, Autumn. After her father's disappointment, she wrote The Monarch of the Forest to please him. At the age of eleven, she started a story club with her friends, Amanda Macneill and Alma Simpson, which happened to also be included in the Anne of Green Gables story. She focused her attention on the stories, My Graves and The History of Flossy Briteyes. Her first few stories were tragic where most of the characters would be killed. At the age of twelve, she wrote another poem, Evening Dreams and she spent most of her thirteenth year trying to publish it, but every literary magazine rejected it. The next years were spent on writing and polishing her composition style. At the age of fifteen, she was sent off to Saskatchewan for a year to live with her father and her stepmother, Mary Ann McRae. She was primarily used as a maid and was tormented by her stepmother. She began to experience chronic headaches and was dependent on writing for comfort and escape. Her poem, On Cape LeForce, was published in the Charlottetown Patriot during her sixteenth year. Her essay about her visit to the plains of Western Canada was published in The Prince Albert Times that spring. Upon her return to Prince Edward Island, Maud wrote children's stories for Sunday school magazines and began studying for the Prince of Wales College entrance exams. During her year at Prince of Wales College, Maud studied an arts and humanities degree with teacher's training to earn her teaching certificate by the end of the year. That spring, her poem, The Violet's Spell was published in the Toronto Ladies World Journal. She spent her first year teaching at Bideford. While teaching, she could easily find time to write stories and poems. The next year was spent studying literature at Dalhousie University. During this year, Maud earned her first five-dollar check from a literary magazine for a poem. She spent the next two years teaching at Belmont and Lower Bedeque. After the death of her maternal grandfather, Maud returned to Cavendish to care for her widowed grandmother and she took up writing as a full-time career. Periodicals and magazines began requesting new work from her. In 1901, she worked as an editor in Halifax for nine months. A few years later, she began writing Anne of Green Gables. She did not want to waste her endearing character on an ephemeral serial. Instead, she wrote it as her first novel. After five rejections, Anne of Green Gables was published and Maud wrote her next few novels. She wrote a sequel, Anne of Avonlea, a stand-alone novel, Kilmeny of the Orchard, and another novel, The Story Girl. After her marriage to Ewan Macdonald, she visited the many literary locations in Europe. The book ceases with hope and Maud expressing that she is now very near ultimate happiness.

I could relate with this memoir because I am an author and I love weaving stories, writing up verses, and elucidating thoughts through words. Maud was so actuating and she desperately wanted to convey that writing must be out of love, not constant desire for fame and glory.

So yes, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career is, I believe, the only L.M. Montgomery piece of writing which I had not yet read and reviewed (except for her journals). And really, should The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career not more appropriately be titled that it is the story of L.M. Montgomery's life until 1917 (when she published this as a series of autobiographical essays in a Toronto, Ontario magazine), as while describing her development as a (published) writer is of course a very large and important part of Montgomery's presented text, the development and flourishing of her career as an author is also and nevertheless not the only aspect of L.M. Montgomery's existence in Prince Edward Island and her first years of married life in Ontario being touched upon in The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career.

Generally though and happily, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career is and shows potential readers a sweetly expressive autobiographical portrait (and often delightfully poetic when L.M. Montgomery describes her intense love and appreciation of nature, of trees and especially of the ocean, of how Prince Edward Island is basically a lovely and glowing jewel resting in the Gulf of St. Lawrence), and with my favourite parts most definitely being those snippets where L.M. Montgomery lists and describes episodes and scenarios from her childhood that she then ended up incorporating into in particular the Anne of Green Gables and The Story Girl novels (but of course, because The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career was published in 1917 one will naturally not find any references to novels later than this date, such as for example to the Emily of New Moon series).

Warmly recommended as a short and basic autobiographical and personal introduction to L.M. Montgomery's life and career as a writer, but indeed a presented narrative that is also (at least in my humble opinion) rather lacking in both introspection and L.M. Montgomery daring to be critical of her family. For since having read many biographies on L.M. Montgomery over the years and how both her childhood and her married life were often intensely unhappy and emotionally starved, I guess I had kind of expected, or rather I had kind of wanted her to wield her pen a bit more critically with regard to in particular her maternal grandparents and her father (even though if truth be told, I am also not really all that surprised that this has not been the case in The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, that L.M. Montgomery's descriptions of her grandparents and of her father are for the most part generally uncritical and positive, but yes indeed, often much too much so for my reading tastes, as, well, having read biographies on Lucy Maud Montgomery, I also do now know that she was abandoned by her father and that her maternal grandparents raised her in a physically adequate but emotionally and spiritually quite majorly lacking and inadequate manner).

I really enjoyed this, especially since I recently visited several of the places in the book. If you have a child who is interested in learning more about LM Montgomery, this is the book to hand to them rather than a biography. It is positive and written in the style of her novels, and ends not long after she moves to Ontario.

Montgomery begins the book by staying that she was asked to write it for her fans, generally meaning Anne's fans. It serves its purpose: Montgomery shares what details of her life she feels are relative to her career, providing several anecdotes and sources for her inspiration. She paints a pleasant picture for her audience, rarely mentioning any emotion other than happiness or wonder.

It is measured and careful but straight from the author's pen. It was written to be shared and to maintain her image. It is a very pleasant read with some lovely insights, but it isn't as invasively informative as her journals, or the biographies they later spawned.