Montgomery’s “suicide” questioned
Last Saturday, a descendant of Anne of Green Gables author Lucy Maud Montgomery revealed, for the first time, that her grandmother committed suicide.
In the wake of this revelation, however, Montgomery’s biographer is publicly questioning whether it is actually true. According to The Globe and Mail:
One of the foremost experts on the life and literature of Lucy Maud Montgomery says she has “a totally different interpretation” of the death of the creator of Anne of Green Gables, one that does not necessarily point to Montgomery having committed suicide in her Toronto home in late April, 1942.
Mary Henley Rubio, professor emeritus of English at Ontario’s University of Guelph, said in an e-mail interview that a note found on Montgomery’s bedside table the afternoon she was found dead doesn’t conclusively demonstrate that Montgomery willfully killed herself at 67 with a drug overdose.
Dr. Rubio, 68, said that there’s “a much wider context for understanding that final ‘note,’” which she believes she provides in her much anticipated biography of Montgomery, more than 30 years in preparation, to be released by Doubleday Canada next month, the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables.
And isn’t it interesting that this is coming up so close to that significant date…
I agree with Rubio on this. I read the note in the Globe and Mail, and I don’t read it as a suicide letter.
You can read the bedsite note at the Globe and Mail’s website:
http://www.theglobeandmail.com/servlet/story/RTGAM.20080924.wmontgomeryside24/BNStory/mentalhealth/home
Always the academic biographer knows more than the actual family member. Heh.
I think academics truly know what suicide is.