title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In a contemporary service, the music generally features modern songs led by a praise team or similarly named group with featured singers. Choirs are not as common. An altar call may or may not be given at the end; if it is not, interested persons are directed to seek out people in the lobby who can address any questions. Baptismal services are usually scheduled as specific and special events. Also, church membership is usually done on a periodic basis by attending specific classes about the church's history, beliefs, what it seeks to accomplish, and what is expected of a prospective member. Controversially, a member may be asked to sign a "membership covenant", a document that has the prospective member promise to perform certain tasks (regular church attendance both at main services and small groups, regular giving—sometimes even requiring tithing, and service within the church). Such covenants are highly controversial: among other things, such a covenant may not permit a member to voluntarily withdraw from membership to avoid church discipline or, in some cases, the member cannot leave at all (even when not under discipline) without the approval of church leadership. A Dallas-Fort Worth church was forced to apologize to a member who attempted to do so for failing to request permission to annul her marriage after her husband admitted to viewing child pornography.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: During the 19th and most of the 20th century, the organization supported white supremacy, racial segregation, the Confederacy, and the Lost Cause. The organization also denounced interracial marriage as an "abomination", citing the Bible.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The SBC has 1,161 local associations and 42 state conventions, and fellowships covering all fifty states and territories of the United States. The five states with the highest rates of membership in the SBC are Texas, Georgia, North Carolina, Florida, and Tennessee. Texas has the largest number of members with an estimated 2.75 million.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Through their Cooperative Program, Southern Baptists support thousands of missionaries in the United States and worldwide.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Data from church sources and independent surveys indicate that since 1990 membership of SBC churches has declined as a proportion of the American population. Historically, the convention grew throughout its history until 2007, when membership decreased by a net figure of nearly 40,000 members. The total membership, of about 16.2 million, was flat over the same period, falling by 38,482 or 0.2%. An important indicator for the health of the denomination is new baptisms, which have decreased every year for seven of the last eight years. , they had reached their lowest levels since 1987. Membership continued to decline from 2008 to 2012. SBC's statistical summary of 2014 recorded a loss of 236,467 members, their biggest one-year decline since 1881. In 2018, membership fell below 15 million for the first time since 1989 and reached its lowest level for over 30 years.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: This decline in membership and baptisms has prompted some SBC researchers to describe the convention as a "denomination in decline". In 2008, former SBC president Frank Page suggested that if current conditions continue, half of all SBC churches will close their doors permanently by 2030. This assessment is supported by a 2004 survey of SBC churches which indicated that 70 percent of all SBC churches are declining or are plateaued with regards to their membership.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The decline in membership of the SBC was an issue discussed during the June 2008 Annual Convention. Curt Watke, a former researcher for the SBC, noted four reasons for the decline of the SBC based on his research: the increase in immigration by non-European groups, decline in growth among predominantly European American (white) churches, the aging of the current membership, and a decrease in the percentage of younger generations participating in any church life. Some believe that the Baptists have not worked sufficiently to attract minorities.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On the other hand, the state conventions of Mississippi and Texas report an increasing portion of minority members. In 1990, five percent of SBC congregations were non-white. In 2012, the proportion of SBC congregations that were of other ethnic groups (African American, Latino, and Asian) had increased to twenty percent. Sixty percent of the minority congregations were found in Texas, particularly in the suburbs of Houston and Dallas.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The decline in SBC membership may be more pronounced than these statistics indicate because Baptist churches are not required to remove inactive members from their rolls, likely leading to greatly inflated membership numbers. In addition, hundreds of large moderate congregations have shifted their primary allegiance to other Baptist groups such as the American Baptist Churches USA, the Alliance of Baptists or the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship but have continued to remain nominally on the books of the convention. Their members are thus counted in the SBC's totals although these churches no longer participate in the annual SBC meetings or make more than the minimum financial contributions.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In some cases, groups have withdrawn from the SBC because of its conservative trends. On November 6, 2000, The Baptist General Convention of Texas voted to cut its contributions to SBC seminaries and reallocate more than five million dollars in funds to three theological seminaries in the state which members believe were more moderate. These include the Hispanic Baptist Theological School in San Antonio, Baylor University's George W. Truett Theological Seminary in Waco, and Hardin–Simmons University's Logsdon School of Theology in Abilene. Since the controversies of the 1980s, more than twenty theological or divinity programs directed toward moderate and progressive Baptists have been established in the Southeast. In addition to Texas, schools in Virginia, Georgia, North Carolina and Alabama were established in the 1990s. These include the Baptist Theological Seminary in Richmond, McAfee School of Theology of Mercer University in Atlanta, Wake Forest, Gardner Webb and Campbell Divinity schools in North Carolina and Beeson Divinity School at Samford University, to name a few. These schools contributed to the flat and declining enrollment at Southern Baptist seminaries operating in the same region of the United States. Texas and Virginia have the largest state conventions identified as moderate in theological approach.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On June 4, 2020, the Southern Baptist Convention reported a drop in its membership - the 13th consecutive year that membership has declined. "Total membership in the Southern Baptist Convention fell almost 2 percent to 14,525,579 from 2018 to 2019. The decline of 287,655 members is the largest single-year drop in more than 100 years."


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: There are four levels of SBC organization: the local congregation, the local association, the state convention, and the national convention. There are 41 affiliated state conventions or fellowships.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The national and state conventions and local associations are conceived as a cooperative association by which churches can voluntarily pool resources to support missionary and other work undertaken by them. Because of the basic Baptist principle of the autonomy of the local church and the congregationalist polity of the SBC, neither the national convention nor the state conventions or local associations has any administrative or ecclesiastical control over local churches; although such a group may disfellowship a local congregation over an issue, they may not terminate its leadership or members or force its closure. Nor does the national convention have any authority over state conventions or local associations, nor do state conventions have authority over local associations. Furthermore, no individual congregation has any authority over any other individual congregation, except that a church may oversee another congregation voluntarily as a mission work, but that other congregation has the right to become an independent congregation at any time.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The SBC maintains a central administrative organization in Nashville, Tennessee. The SBC's executive committee exercises authority and control over seminaries and other institutions owned by the Southern Baptist Convention.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Commitment to the autonomy of local congregations was the primary force behind the Executive Committee's rejection of a proposal to create a convention-wide database of SBC clergy accused of sexual crimes against congregants or other minors in order to stop the "recurring tide" of clergy sexual abuse within SBC congregations. A 2009 study by Lifeway Christian Resources, the convention's research and publishing arm, revealed that one in eight background checks for potential volunteers or workers in SBC churches revealed a history of crime that could have prevented them from working.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The convention's statement of faith, the "Baptist Faith and Message", is not binding on churches or members due to the autonomy of the local church (though SBC employees and missionaries must agree to its views as a condition of employment or missionary support). Politically and culturally, Southern Baptists tend to be conservative. Most oppose homosexual activity, and abortion with few exceptions.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Generally, Baptists recognize only two scriptural offices: pastor-teacher and deacon. The Southern Baptist Convention passed a resolution in the early 1980s recognizing that offices requiring ordination are restricted to men. According to the "Baptist Faith and Message", the office of "pastor" is limited to men based on certain New Testament scriptures. However, there is no prohibition in the "Baptist Faith and Message" against women serving as deacons. Neither the BF&M or resolutions are binding upon local churches. Each church is responsible to search the Scriptures and establish its own policies based on how they decide to interpret the scripture.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The Southern Baptist Convention Annual Meeting (held in June, over a two-day period) consists of delegates (called "messengers") from cooperating churches. The messengers confer and determine the programs, policies, and budget of the SBC and elect the officers and committees. Each cooperating church is allowed up to two messengers regardless of the amount given to SBC entities, and may have more depending on the amount of giving (either in terms of dollars or percent of the church's budget), but the maximum number of messengers permitted from any church is 12.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The Cooperative Program (CP) is the SBC's unified funds collection and distribution program for the support of regional, national and international ministries. The CP is funded by contributions from SBC congregations.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In the fiscal year ending September 30, 2008, the local congregations of the SBC reported gift receipts of $11.1 billion. From this they sent $548 million, approximately five percent, to their state Baptist conventions through the CP. Of this amount, the state Baptist conventions retained $344 million for their work. Two hundred and four million dollars was sent on to the national CP budget for the support of denomination-wide ministries.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The Southern Baptist Convention was organized in 1845 primarily for the purpose of creating a mission board to support the sending of Baptist missionaries. The North American Mission Board, or NAMB, (founded as the Domestic Mission Board, and later the Home Mission Board) in Alpharetta, Georgia serves missionaries involved in evangelism and church planting in the U.S. and Canada, while the International Mission Board, or IMB, (originally the Foreign Mission Board) in Richmond, Virginia, sponsors missionaries to the rest of the world.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Baptist Men is the mission organization for men in Southern Baptist Churches, and is under the North American Mission Board.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The Woman's Missionary Union, founded in 1888, is an auxiliary to the Southern Baptist Convention, which helps facilitate two large annual missions offerings: the Annie Armstrong Easter Offering (for North American missions) and the Lottie Moon Christmas Offering (for International missions).


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Among the more visible organizations within the North American Mission Board is Southern Baptist Disaster Relief. In 1967, a small group of Texas Southern Baptist volunteers helped victims of Hurricane Beulah by serving hot food cooked on small "buddy burners." In 2005, volunteers responded to 166 named disasters, prepared 17,124,738 meals, repaired 7,246 homes, and removed debris from 13,986 yards. Southern Baptist Disaster Relief provides many different types: food, water, child care, communication, showers, laundry, repairs, rebuilding, or other essential tangible items that contribute to the resumption of life following the crisis—and the message of the Gospel. All assistance is provided to individuals and communities free of charge. SBC DR volunteer kitchens prepare much of the food distributed by the Red Cross in major disasters.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The Convention has various affiliated primary and secondary schools, gathered in the Southern Baptist Association of Christian Schools. It also has several affiliated universities.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Since 1992, the Convention has carried out excommunications of various churches that support LGBTQ inclusion, a belief that contradicts the confession of faith. In 2018, the District of Columbia Baptist Convention was excommunicated for this reason.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On February 10, 2019, a joint investigation by the "Houston Chronicle" and the "San Antonio Express" found that there had been over 700 victims of sexual abuse by nearly 400 Southern Baptist church leaders, pastors and volunteers over the previous 20 years.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In 2018, the "Houston Chronicle" verified details in hundreds of accounts of abuse. It examined federal and state court databases, prison records and official documents from more than 20 states and researched sex offender registries nationwide. The "Chronicle" compiled a list of records and information (current as of June 2019), listing church pastors, leaders, employees and volunteers who have pleaded guilty to or were convicted of sex crimes.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On June 12, 2019, during their annual meeting, SBC messengers, who assembled that year in Birmingham, Alabama, approved a resolution condemning sex abuse and establishing a special committee to investigate sex abuse, which will make it easier for SBC churches to be excommunicated from the convention. The Reverend J.D. Greear, president of the Southern Baptist Convention and pastor of The Summit Church in Durham, North Carolina, called the move a "defining moment." Ronnie Floyd, president of the SBC's executive committee, echoed Greear's remarks, calling the vote "a very, very significant moment in the history of the Southern Baptist Convention."


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In June 2021, letters from former policy director Russell D. Moore to SBC leadership were leaked. In the letters, Moore described how the convention had mishandled claims of sexual abuse.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On May 22, 2022, Guidepost Solutions, an independent firm contracted by the SBC's executive committee, released a report detailing that SBC leaders had stonewalled and disparaged clergy sex abuse survivors for nearly two decades. This was the largest investigation undertaken in the SBC's history at the time, with $4 million reportedly spent by the organization to fund the inquiry. In addition to stonewalling and disparaging abuse survivors, the report also stated that known abusers were allowed to keep their positions without informing their church or congregation. The report alleged that while the SBC had elected a president, J.D. Greear, in 2018 who made addressing sexual abuse a central part of his agenda, nearly all efforts at reform had been met with criticism and dismissal from other organization leaders.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On June 14, 2022, the SBC voted "to create a way to track pastors and other church workers credibly accused of sex abuse and launch a new task force to oversee further reforms" after a consultant exposed that "Southern Baptist leaders mishandled abuse cases and stonewalled victims for years". The new task force will operate for one year, with the option to continue longer.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: On August 12, 2022, the SBC announced that it was facing a federal investigation into the sex abuse scandal.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: During its history, the Southern Baptist Convention has had several periods of major internal controversy.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In the 1850s–1860s, a group of young activists called for a return to certain early practices, or what they called Landmarkism. Other leaders disagreed with their assertions, and the Baptist congregations became split on the issues. Eventually, the disagreements led to the formation of Gospel Missions and the American Baptist Association (1924), as well as many unaffiliated independent churches. One historian called the related James Robinson Graves—Robert Boyte Crawford Howell controversy (1858–60) the greatest to affect the denomination before that of the late 20th century involving the fundamentalist-moderate break.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In the Whitsitt controversy of 1896–99, William H. Whitsitt, a professor at Southern Baptist Theological Seminary, suggested that, contrary to earlier thought, English Baptists did not begin to baptize by immersion until 1641, when some Anabaptists, as they were then called, began to practice immersion. This overturned the idea of immersion as the practice of the earliest Baptists as some of the Landmarkists contended.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: The Southern Baptist Convention conservative resurgence () was an intense struggle for control of the SBC's resources and ideological direction. The major internal disagreement captured national attention. Its initiators called it a "Conservative Resurgence", while its detractors have labeled it a "Fundamentalist Takeover". Russell H. Dilday, president of the Southwestern Baptist Theological Seminary from 1978 to 1994, described the resurgence as having fragmented Southern Baptist fellowship and as being "far more serious than [a controversy]". Dilday described it as being "a self-destructive, contentious, one-sided feud that at times took on combative characteristics". Since 1979, Southern Baptists had become polarized into two major groups: moderates and conservatives. Reflecting the conservative majority votes of messengers at the 1979 annual meeting of the SBC, the new national organization officers replaced all leaders of Southern Baptist agencies with presumably more conservative people (often dubbed "fundamentalist" by dissenters).


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: Among historical elements illustrating this trend, the organization's position on abortion rights within a decade had shifted radically from a position that supported them to a position that strongly opposes them, as in 1971, (two years before "Roe v. Wade"), the SBC passed a resolution supporting abortion, not only in cases of rape or incest—positions which even some Southern Baptist conservatives would support—but also as "clear evidence of severe fetal deformity, and carefully ascertained evidence of the likelihood of damage to the emotional, mental, and physical health of the mother"—positions not supported by the conservative wing. Also, in 1974, (the year after "Roe v. Wade") the SBC passed another resolution affirming its previous 1971 resolution, saying that it "dealt responsibly from a Christian perspective with complexities of abortion problems in contemporary society" while also in the same resolution claiming that the SBC "historically held a high view of the sanctity of human life". However, once the conservatives won their first election in 1980, they passed a resolution which completely reversed their prior positions on abortion, condemning it in all cases except to save the life of the mother. As such, all subsequent resolutions on the issue have followed the 1980 trend of being strongly against abortion and have gone further into opposing similar issues such as fetal tissue experimentation, RU-486, and taxpayer funding of abortions in general and Planned Parenthood in particular.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In 1987, a group of churches criticized the fundamentalists for controlling the leadership and founded the Alliance of Baptists. In 1990, a group of moderate churches criticized the denomination for its conservatism on certain subjects, such as women's ministry, and founded the Cooperative Baptist Fellowship in 1991.


title: Southern Baptist Convention

text: In November 2020, the six SBC seminary presidents called critical race theory "unbiblical" and emphasized the need to turn to Christian teachings alone, not secular ideas, to confront racism. At least four African American churches left the denomination over the leadership's refusal to recognize critical race theory.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Lucy Maud Montgomery (November 30, 1874 – April 24, 1942), published as L. M. Montgomery, was a Canadian author best known for a collection of novels, essays, short stories, and poetry beginning in 1908 with "Anne of Green Gables". She published 20 novels as well as 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays. "Anne of Green Gables" was an immediate success; the title character, orphan Anne Shirley, made Montgomery famous in her lifetime and gave her an international following. Most of the novels were set in Prince Edward Island, and those locations within Canada's smallest province became a literary landmark and popular tourist site – namely Green Gables farm, the genesis of Prince Edward Island National Park. She was made an officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery's work, diaries, and letters have been read and studied by scholars and readers worldwide. The L. M. Montgomery Institute, University of Prince Edward Island, is responsible for the scholarly inquiry into the life, works, culture, and influence of L. M. Montgomery.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London) in Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. Her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery (1853-1876), died of tuberculosis (TB) when Maud was 21 months old. Stricken with grief, her father, Hugh John Montgomery (1841-1900), placed Maud in her maternal grandparents' custody, though he remained in the vicinity. When Maud was seven, her father moved to Prince Albert, North-West Territories (now Prince Albert, Saskatchewan). From then on Maud was raised by her grandparents, Alexander Marquis Macneill and Lucy Woolner Macneill, in the community of Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery's early life in Cavendish was very lonely. Despite having relatives nearby, much of her childhood was spent alone. She created imaginary friends and worlds to cope with her loneliness, and Montgomery credited this time of her life with developing her creativity. Her imaginary friends were named Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray and lived in the "fairy room" behind the bookcase in the drawing room. During a church service, Montgomery asked her aunt where her dead mother was, leading her to point upwards. Montgomery saw a trap door in the church's ceiling, which led her to wonder why the minister did not just get a ladder to retrieve her mother from the church's ceiling.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1887, at age 13, Montgomery wrote in her diary that she had "early dreams of future fame." She submitted a poem for publication, writing, "I saw myself the wonder of my schoolmates— a little local celebrity." Upon rejection, Montgomery wrote, "Tears of disappointment "would" come in spite of myself, as I crept away to hide the poor crumpled manuscript in the depths of my trunk." She later wrote, "down, deep down under all the discouragement and rebuff, I knew I would 'arrive' someday."


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: After completing her education in Cavendish, Montgomery spent one year (1890) in Prince Albert with her father and her stepmother, Mary Ann McRae (1863-1910), who had married in 1887. While she was in Prince Albert, Montgomery's first work, a poem titled "On Cape LeForce," was published in the Charlottetown paper "The Daily Patriot." She was as excited about this as she was about her return to Prince Edward Island in 1891. Before returning to Cavendish, Montgomery had another article published in the newspaper, describing her visit to a First Nations camp on the Great Plains. She often saw Blackfeet and Plains Cree in Prince Albert, writing that she saw many Indians on the Prairies who were much more handsome and attractive than those she had seen in the Maritimes.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery's return to Cavendish was a great relief to her. Her time in Prince Albert was unhappy, for she did not get along with her stepmother. According to Montgomery, her father's marriage was not a happy one.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1893, Montgomery attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown to obtain a teacher's license. She loved Prince Edward Island. During solitary walks through the peaceful island countryside, Montgomery started to experience what she called "the flash"—a moment of tranquility and clarity when she felt emotional ecstasy and was inspired by the awareness of a higher spiritual power running through nature. Montgomery's accounts of this "flash" were later given to the character Emily Byrd Starr in the "Emily of New Moon" trilogy, and also served as the basis for her descriptions of Anne Shirley's sense of emotional communion with nature. In 1905, Montgomery wrote in her journal, "amid the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never quite draw it aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it. I seemed to catch a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse—but those glimpses had always made life worthwhile." A deeply spiritual woman, Montgomery found the moments when she experienced "the flash" some of the most beautiful, moving and intense of her life.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery completed the two-year teaching program in Charlottetown in one year. In 1895 and 1896, she studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Upon leaving Dalhousie, Montgomery worked as a teacher in various Prince Edward Island schools. Though she did not enjoy teaching, it afforded her time to write. Beginning in 1897, her short stories were published in magazines and newspapers. A prolific writer, Montgomery published over 100 stories between 1897 and 1907.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: During her teaching years, Montgomery had numerous love interests. As a highly fashionable young woman, she had "slim, good looks" and won the attention of several young men. In 1889, at 14, Montgomery began a relationship with a Cavendish boy, Nate Lockhart. To her, the relationship was merely a humorous and witty friendship. It ended abruptly when Montgomery refused his marriage proposal.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: The early 1890s brought unwelcome advances from John A. Mustard and Will Pritchard. Mustard, her teacher, quickly became her suitor; he tried to impress her with his knowledge of religious matters. His best topics of conversation were his thoughts on predestination and "other dry points of theology," which held little appeal for Montgomery. During the period when Mustard's interest became more pronounced, Montgomery found a new interest in Pritchard, the brother of her friend Laura Pritchard. This friendship was more amiable, but he too felt more for Montgomery than she did for him. When Pritchard sought to take their friendship further, Montgomery resisted. She refused both marriage proposals; Mustard was too narrow-minded, and she considered Pritchard merely a good chum. She ended the period of flirtation when she moved to Prince Edward Island. She and Pritchard continued to correspond for over six years, until he died of influenza in 1897.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1897, Montgomery received a proposal from Edwin Simpson, a student in French River near Cavendish. She wrote that she accepted his proposal out of a desire for "love and protection" and because she felt her prospects were rather poor. Montgomery came to dislike Simpson, whom she regarded as intolerably self-centred and vain to the point of feeling nauseated in his presence. While teaching in Lower Bedeque, she had a brief but passionate affair with Herman Leard, a member of the family with which she boarded. (Leard himself was engaged to neighbour Ettie Schurman while involved with Montgomery.) Of the men she loved, it was Leard she loved the most, writing in her diary: "Hermann suddenly bent his head and his lips touched my face. I cannot tell what possessed me—I seemed swayed by a power utterly beyond my control—I turned my head—our lips met in one long passionate pressure—a kiss of fire and rapture such I had never experienced or imagined. Ed's kisses at the best left me cold as ice—"Hermann's" sent flame through every fibre of my being". On April 8, 1898, Montgomery wrote she had to stay faithful to Simpson: "for the sake of my self respect I "must not" stoop to any sort of an affair with another man". She then wrote: "If I had—or rather if I "could" have—kept this resolve I would have saved myself incalculable suffering. For it was but a few days later that I found myself face to face with the burning consciousness that I "loved" Herman Leard with a wild, passionate, unreasoning love that dominated my entire being and possessed me like a flame—a love I could neither quell nor control—a love that in its intensity seemed little short of absolute madness. Madness! Yes!" In Victorian Canada, premarital sex was rare for women (although it was common for unmarried men seeking sex to visit brothels), and Montgomery had been brought up in a strict Presbyterian household where she had been taught that all who "fornicated" were among the "damned" who burned in Hell forever, a message she had taken to heart. Despite this, she often invited Leard into her bedroom when everybody else was out, and though she refused to have sex with him as she wanted to be a virgin bride, she and Leard engaged in kissing and "preliminary lovemaking." Montgomery called Leard in her diary only "a very nice, attractive young animal!", albeit one with "magnetic blue eyes".


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Following objections from her family and friends that Leard was not "good enough" for her, Montgomery broke off her relationship with him. He died shortly afterwards of the flu. In 1898, after much unhappiness and disillusionment, Montgomery broke off her engagement to Simpson. She ceased to seek romantic love. Montgomery was greatly upset when she learned of Leard's death in June 1899, writing in her diary: "It is easier to think him as dead, mine, "all" mine in death, as he could never be in life, mine when no other women could ever lie on his heart or kiss his lips." (Leard's erstwhile fiancée, Ettie Schurman, died in 1909.)


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1898, Montgomery moved back to Cavendish to live with her widowed grandmother. For a nine-month period between 1901 and 1902, she worked in Halifax as a substitute proofreader for the newspapers "Morning Chronicle" and "The Daily Echo." Montgomery was inspired to write her first books during this time. Until her grandmother's death in March 1911, Montgomery stayed in Cavendish to take care of her. This coincided with a period of considerable income from her publications. Although she enjoyed this income, she was aware that "marriage was a necessary choice for women in Canada."


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1908, Montgomery published her first book, "Anne of Green Gables." An immediate success, it established Montgomery's career, and she wrote and published material, including numerous sequels to "Anne", for the rest of her life. "Anne of Green Gables" was published in June 1908 and by November 1909 had gone through six printings. The Canadian press made much of Montgomery's roots in Prince Edward Island, which was portrayed as a charming part of Canada where the people retained old-fashioned values and everything moved at a much slower pace. The American press suggested that all of Canada was backward and slow, arguing that a book like "Anne of Green Gables" was only possible in a rustic country like Canada, where the people were nowhere near as advanced as in the U.S. Typical of the American coverage of Montgomery was a 1911 newspaper article in Boston, which asserted:"Recently a new and exceedingly brilliant star arose on the literacy horizon in the person of a previously unknown writer of 'heart interest' stories, Miss Lucy M. Montgomery, and presently the astronomers located her in the latitude of Prince Edward Island. No one would ever imagine that such a remote and unassertive speck on the map would ever produce such a writer whose first three books should one and all be included in the 'six best sellers.' But it was on this unemotional island that "Anne of Green Gables" was born... This story was the work of a modest young school teacher, who was doubtless as surprised as any of her neighbors when she found her sweetly simple tale of childish joys and sorrows of a diminutive red-haired girl who had made the literary hit of the season with the American public... Miss Montgomery, who is entirely unspoiled by her unexpected stroke of fame and fortune, made her first visit to Boston last winter and was lionized to quite an extent, her pleasing personality making a decidedly favorable impression on all who met her... It was all very nice and novel, but the young lady confided to her friends that she would be more than glad to get back to her quiet and uneventful country life and she would far prefer it as a regular thing even to a residence in Boston. One of the most delightful of her Boston experiences was a lunch that was given her by a local publishing house that issues her books, a thoroughly Bostonian idea as well as a most creditable one... Britain possesses as a cherished literacy shrine, the Isle of Man, but on this side of the ocean we have our Isle St. Jean, where, in the good old summer time, as Anne Shirley found it on the day of her arrival, the gulf-cooled air is 'sweet with the breath of many apple orchards and the meadows sloped away in the romantic distance to 'horizon mist of pearl and purple.'"


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In contrast to this publisher's ideal image of her, Montgomery wrote in a letter to a friend: "I am frankly in literature to make a living out of it." The British scholar Faye Hammill noted that in the books Anne is a tall girl and Montgomery was 37 at the time, which hardly made for a "young school teacher." Hammill also noted that the author of the piece chose to present Montgomery as the idealized female author, who was happiest in a domestic/rural environment and disliked fame and celebrity, which was seen at the time as conflicting with femininity. In emphasizing Montgomery's modesty and desire to remain anonymous, the author was portraying her as the ideal woman writer, who wanted to preserve her femininity by not embarking on a professional career, writing only a part-time job at best. At the same time, Hammill noted that the author was using the anachronistic French name for Prince Edward Island, to add to his picture of a romantic, mist-shrouded fantasy island where the old ways of life continued "unspoiled", just as Montgomery was portrayed as an "unspoiled" woman.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Shortly after her grandmother's death in 1911, Montgomery married Ewen (spelled in her notes and letters as "Ewan") Macdonald (1870–1943), a Presbyterian minister, and they moved to Ontario, where he had taken the position of minister of St. Paul's Presbyterian Church, Leaskdale in present-day Uxbridge Township, also affiliated with the congregation in nearby Zephyr. Montgomery wrote her next 11 books from the Leaskdale manse that she complained had neither a bathroom nor a toilet. The congregation later sold the structure, which is now the Leaskdale Manse National Historic Site. Macdonald was not especially intelligent, nor was he interested in literature. Montgomery wrote in her diary: "I would not want him for a lover but I hope at first that I might find a friend in him." After their marriage, she took her honeymoon in England and Scotland, the latter a particular point of interest to her, as it was for her the "Old Country"—the romantic land of castles, rugged mountains, shining glens, lakes and waterfalls that was her ancestral homeland. By contrast, Macdonald's parents had come to Canada after being evicted in the Highland Clearances, and he had no desire to visit the "Old Country". His wife had to drag him to the Isle of Skye, the home of the Clan MacDonald, where the Macdonalds had once reigned as the Lords of the Isles. The MacDonalds had been Gaelic-speaking Highlanders, while the Montgomerys and Macneil had been English-speaking Lowlanders, which might explain the differing attitudes the couple held toward Scotland, as Montgomery was more proud of her Scottish heritage than her husband. Furthermore, Montgomery had read the works of Scottish writers like Robbie Burns and Sir Walter Scott, whereas her husband did not read literature at all, forcing his wife to explain to him who Burns and Scott were. In England, Montgomery visited places associated with her favorite writers, going to the Lake District made famous by William Wordsworth, to William Shakespeare's house in Stratford-upon-Avon, and to the Haworth house in the Yorkshire moors where the Brontës (Anne, Charlotte, Emily and Branwell) had lived.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: The Macdonalds had three sons; the second was stillborn. Montgomery believed it was her duty as a woman to make her marriage work, though, during a visit to Scotland, she quipped to a reporter, "Those women whom God wanted to destroy He would make into the wives of ministers." The great increase of Montgomery's writings in Leaskdale is the result of her need to escape the hardships of real life. In 1909–10, Montgomery drew upon her Scottish-Canadian heritage and her memories of her teenage years to write her 1911 novel "The Story Girl." Her youth had been spent among a Scottish-Canadian family where Scottish tales, myths, and legends had often been recounted, and Montgomery used this background to create the character of 14-year-old Sara Stanley, a skilled storyteller who was an "idealized" version of her adolescent self. The character of Peter Craig in "The Story Girl" very much resembles Herman Leard, the great love of Montgomery's life, the man she wished she had married, but did not, right down to having blond curly hair. As with her relationship with Leard, the other characters object to the lower-class Craig as not "good enough", but Felicity King chooses him anyway.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: During the First World War, Montgomery, horrified by reports of the "Rape of Belgium" in 1914, was an intense supporter of the war effort, seeing the war as a crusade to save civilization, regularly writing articles urging men to volunteer for the Canadian Expeditionary Force and for people on the home front to buy victory bonds. Montgomery wrote in her diary on September 12, 1914, about the reports of the "Rape of Belgium":"But oh, there have been such hideous stories in the papers lately of their cutting off the hands of little children in Belgium. Can they be true? They have committed terrible outrages and crimes, that is too surely true, but I hope desperately that these stories of the mutilation of children are false. They harrow my soul. I walk the floor in my agony over them. I cry myself to sleep about them and wake again in the darkness to cringe with the horror of it. If it were Chester!" In Leaskdale, like everywhere else in Canada, recruiting meetings were held where ministers, such as the Reverend MacDonald, would speak of Kaiser Wilhelm II as the personification of evil, described the "Rape of Belgium" in graphic detail, and asked for young men to step up to volunteer to fight for Canada, the British Empire, and for justice, in what was described at the time as a crusade against evil. In a 1915 essay appealing for volunteers, Montgomery wrote: "I am not one of those who believe that this war will put an end to war. War is horrible, but there are things that are more horrible still, just as there are fates worse than death." Montgomery argued prior to the war that Canada had been slipping into atheism, materialism and "moral decay," and the war had brought about a welcome revival of Christianity, patriotism and moral strength as the Canadian people faced the challenge of the greatest war yet fought in history. Montgomery ended her essay by stating that women on the home front were playing a crucial role in the war effort, which led her to ask for women's suffrage. On October 7, 1915, Montgomery gave birth to her third child and was thrown into depression when she discovered she could not produce breast milk to feed her son, who was given cow's milk instead, which was a health risk in the days before pasteurization.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery identified very strongly with the Allied cause, leading her on March 10, 1916, to write in her diary: "All my misery seemed to centre around Verdun where the snow was no longer white. I seemed in my own soul to embrace all the anguish and strain of France." In the same diary entry, Montgomery wrote of a strange experience, "a great calm seemed to descend upon me and envelop me. I was at peace. The conviction seized upon me that Verdun was safe-that the Germans would not pass the grim barrier of desperate France. I was as a woman from whom some evil spirit had been driven-or can it be as a priestess of old, who out of depths of agony wins some strange foresight of the future?" Montgomery celebrated every Allied victory at her house, for instance running up the Russian flag when she heard that the Russians had captured the supposedly impregnable Ottoman city-fortress of Trebizond in April 1916. Every Allied defeat depressed her. When she heard of the fall of Kut-al-Amara, she wrote in her diary on May 1, 1916: "Kut-el-Amara has been compelled to surrender at last. We have expected it for some time, but that did not prevent us from feeling very blue over it all. It is an encouragement to the Germans and a blow to Britain's prestige. I feel too depressed tonight to do anything." Much to Montgomery's disgust, Ewen refused to preach about the war. As it went on, Maud wrote in her diary "it unsettles him and he cannot do his work properly," The Reverend Macdonald had developed doubts about the justice of the war as it went along, and had come to believe that by encouraging young men to enlist, he had sinned grievously.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery, a deeply religious woman, wrote in her diary: "I believe in a God who is good, but not omnipotent. I also believe in a principle of Evil, equal to God in power... darkness to His light. I believe an infinite ceaseless struggle goes on between them." In a letter, Montgomery dismissed Kaiser Wilhelm II's claim that God was on the side of Germany, stating that the power responsible for the death of "little Hugh" (her stillborn son) was the same power responsible for the "Rape of Belgium," and for this reason she believed the Allies were destined to win the war. Montgomery had worked as a Sunday School teacher at her husband's church, and many of the men from Uxbridge county who were killed or wounded in the war had once been her students, causing her much emotional distress. Uxbridge county lost 21 men in the Great War from 1915, when Canadian troops first saw action at the Second Battle of Ypres, until the war's end in 1918. Montgomery's biographer Mary Henley Rubio observed: "Increasingly, the war was all that she thought of and wanted to talk about. Her journals show she was absolutely consumed by it, wracked by it, tortured by it, obsessed by it -- even addicted to it." Montgomery was sometimes annoyed if her husband did not buy a daily newspaper from the corner store because she always wanted to read the latest war news.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery underwent several periods of depression while trying to cope with the duties of motherhood and church life and with her husband's attacks of religious melancholia (endogenous major depressive disorder) and deteriorating health: "For a woman who had given the world so much joy, life was mostly an unhappy one." In 1918, Montgomery was stricken with and was almost killed by the "Spanish Flu" pandemic that killed between 50-100 million people all over the world in 1918–1919, spending ten days bed-ridden with the Spanish flu. In her diary on December 1, 1918, Montgomery wrote after a visit to Toronto in November: "Toronto was then beginning to be panic stricken over the outbreak of the terrible "Spanish flu." The drug counters were besieged with frantic people seeking remedies and safeguards". Montgomery wrote in her diary about being infected with Spanish flu: "I was in bed for ten days. I never felt so sick or weak in my life," going on to express thanks to God and her friends for helping her survive the ordeal. Montgomery's best friend Frederica Campbell MacFarlane was not so lucky and died after contracting the Spanish flu on January 20, 1919. Montgomery was so upset at her husband's indifference to her suffering, she considered divorce (something very difficult to obtain in Canada until 1967; between 1873 and 1901, there were only 263 divorces out of a population of six million). Ultimately, Montgomery decided it was her Christian duty to make her marriage work.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: After the First World War, a recurring character in Montgomery's journal that was to obsess her for the rest of her life was "the Piper," who at first appeared as a heroic Highlander piper from Scotland, leading men into battle while playing traditional Highland tunes, but who turned out to be the Pied Piper of Hamelin, a trickster taking children away from their parents forever. The figure of "the Piper" reflected Montgomery's own disillusionment with World War I and her guilt at her ardent support for the war. To inspire men to volunteer for the war, a piper had marched through the centre of Leaskdale daily for all four years of World War I, playing Highland war tunes, which had given Montgomery the inspiration of the figure of "the Piper." "The Piper" first appears in the Anne books in "Rainbow Valley" (1919), inspiring the future grown children of Glen St. Mary with his courage. In "Rilla of Ingleside" (1921), "the Piper" returns as a more sinister figure, inspiring Anne's son Walter to enlist in the Canadian expeditionary force, while taking on the appearance and personality of the Pied Piper of Hamelin.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: The Reverend Ewen MacDonald, a good Calvinist 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. The Reverend MacDonald 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. Montgomery herself was driven to depression by her husband's conduct, often writing that she wished she had married somebody else. 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" as he stared blankly into space for hours.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In February 1920, Montgomery wrote in her diary about having to deal with:"A letter from some pathetic ten-year old in New York who implores me to send her my photo because she lies awake in her bed wondering what I look like. Well, if she had a picture of me in my old dress, wresting with the furniture this morning, "cussing" the ashes and clinkers, she would die of disillusionment. However, I shall send her a reprint of my last photo in which I sat in rapt inspiration – apparently – at my desk, with pen in my hand, in gown of lace and silk with hair so – Amen. A quite passable woman, of no kin whatever to the dusty, ash-covered Cinderella of the furnace-cellar." For much of her life, writing was her one great solace. In 1920, Montgomery wrote in her diary a quotation from the South African writer Olive Schreiner's book "The Story of an African Farm" which defined different types of love, including a "love without wisdom, sweet as life, bitter as death, lasting only a hour," leading her to write: ""But it is worth having lived a whole life for that hour."" (emphasis in the original). Montgomery concluded:"My love for Hermann Leard, though so incomplete, is...a memory which I would not barter for anything save the lives of my children and the return of Frede" [Frederica Campbell MacFarlane, her best friend]. Montgomery believed her spells of depression and migraine headaches she suffered from were both expressions of her suppressed romantic passions and Leard's ghost haunting her.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Starting in 1917, Montgomery was engaged in five bitter, costly, and burdensome lawsuits with Louis Coues Page, owner of the publishing house L.C. Page & Company, that continued until she finally won in 1928. Page had a well-deserved reputation as one of the most tyrannical figures in American publishing, a bully with a ferocious temper who signed his authors to exploitative contracts and liked to humiliate his subordinates, including his mild-mannered younger brother George, in public. Montgomery received 7 cents on the dollar on the sale of every one of the "Anne" books, instead of the 19 cents on the dollar that she was entitled to, which led her to switch publishers in 1917 when she finally discovered that Page was cheating her. When Montgomery left the firm of L.C. Page & Company, Page demanded she sign over the American rights to "Anne's House of Dreams", and when she refused he cut off the royalties from the earlier "Anne" books. Even though he did not own the U.S. rights to "Anne's House of Dreams", Page sold those rights to the disreputable publishing house of Grosset & Dunlap, as a way of creating more pressure on Montgomery to capitulate. Instead, Montgomery sued Grosset & Dunlap. Page was counting on the fact that he was a millionaire and Montgomery was not, and that the prospect of having to spend thousands in legal fees would force her to give in. Much to his surprise, she did not. Montgomery hired a lawyer in Boston and sued Page in the Massachusetts Court of Equity for illegally withholding royalties due her and for selling the U.S. rights to "Anne's House of Dreams", which he did not possess.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1920, the house where Montgomery grew up in Cavendish was torn down by her uncle, who complained that too many tourists were coming on to the property to see the house that inspired the house in which Anne was depicted as growing up. Montgomery was very sentimental about that house, and the news of its destruction caused her great pain. Between May and July 1920, Montgomery was in Boston to attend court sessions with Page, who taunted her by telling her the "Anne" books were still selling well, making him millions.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1920, Montgomery was infuriated with the 1919 film version of "Anne of Green Gables" for changing Anne from a Canadian to an American, writing in her diary: "It was a pretty little play well photographed, but I think if I hadn't already known it was from my book, that I would never have recognized it. The landscape and folks were 'New England', never P.E. Island... A skunk and an American flag were introduced – both equally unknown in PE Island. I could have shrieked with rage over the latter. Such crass, blatant Yankeeism!" Reporting on the film's premiere in Los Angeles, one American journalist described "Anne of Green Gables" as written by a "Mr. Montgomery," who is only mentioned in passing two-thirds into the article with the major focus being on the film's star Mary Miles Minter, who was presented as the true embodiment of Anne. Montgomery disapproved of Minter's performance, writing she portrayed "a sweet, sugary heroine utterly unlike my gingerly Anne" and complained about a scene in the film where Anne used a shotgun to threaten people with, writing that her Anne would never do such a thing. Montgomery had no say in either the 1919 or 1934 versions of "Anne of Green Gables" as the publisher, L.C. Page had acquired the film rights to the story in 1908, and as such, all of the royalties paid by Hollywood for both versions of "Anne of Green Gables" went to him, not Montgomery. Montgomery stopped writing about Anne in about 1920, writing in her journal that she had tired of the character. By February 1921, Montgomery estimated that she had made about $100,000 from the sales of the Anne books while declaring in her diary: "It's a pity it doesn't buy happiness." She preferred instead to create books about other young, female characters, feeling that her strength was writing about characters who were either very young or very old. Other series written by Montgomery include the "Emily" and "Pat" books, which, while successful, did not reach the same level of public acceptance as the "Anne" volumes. She also wrote a number of stand-alone novels, which were also generally successful, if not as successful as her Anne books.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: On August 20, 1921, Montgomery started writing what became the novel "Emily of New Moon", as she planned to replace Anne with Emily as the star of a new series of novels. The character Emily was partly autobiographical, as Emily's dream was to be a writer when she grew up. Unlike Anne, who does not have clear goals about what she wants to be when she grows up, Emily Starr knows she wants to be a writer, a characteristic she shared with Montgomery. One aspect that Emily, Anne and Montgomery all shared was "the flash"—the mystical power that Montgomery called in "Emily of New Moon" "the wonderful moment when the soul seemed to cast aside the bonds of the flesh and spring upward towards the stars," allowing the soul to see "behind the veil" to a transcendent beauty.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1925, a Massachusetts court ruled in favour of Montgomery against her publisher, Louis Coues Page, as the judge found that he had systemically cheated her out of the profits from the "Anne" books since 1908. Page used every conceivable excuse to avoid paying Montgomery what he owed her and, after his brother George died of a heart attack in 1927, accused Montgomery of causing his brother's death by suing him for her rightful shares of the royalties. In fact, Louis Page was not close to George, who had just left the firm of L.C. Page & Company to get away from his abrasive and arrogant brother before he died of a heart attack, aged 52. In October 1928, Montgomery finally won while Page, continued to insist in public that she had caused the death of his brother, which he used as a reason why he should not have to pay Montgomery anything. Page waged a campaign of harassment against Montgomery, sending her telegrams accusing her of causing his brother's death and the subsequent mental breakdown of his widow by defeating him in court, asking her if she was pleased with what she had allegedly done. Page's behavior badly damaged his business, as no author chose to publish with a publisher who had revealed himself to be both dishonest and vindictive, and after the 1920s Page's publishing house largely depended upon reissuing older books rather than issuing new books as authors took their business elsewhere. On November 7, 1928, Montgomery received a cheque for the $15,000 US dollars out of which auditors had established Page had cheated her.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In terms of sales, both in her lifetime and since, Montgomery was the most successful Canadian author of all time, but because her books were seen as children's books and as women's books, she was often dismissed by the critics, who saw Montgomery as merely a writer for schoolgirls, and not as a serious writer. In 1924, the "Maple Leaf" magazine asked its readers to nominate the 14 greatest living Canadians, and all of the winners were men. Montgomery only made the runners-up list to the 14 greatest Canadians, coming in at 16. However, Montgomery did make it onto another list of the 12 greatest living Canadian women. Hammill argued that Montgomery was successful at managing her fame, but the media's fixation on presenting her as the idealised woman writer, together with her desire to hide her unhappy home life with her husband, meant that her creation Anne, whose "life" was more "knowable" and easier to relate to, overshadowed her both in her lifetime and after.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1925, Ewen MacDonald became estranged from his flock when he opposed his church joining the United Church of Canada, and was involved in an incident when he nearly ran over a Methodist minister who was promoting the union. Montgomery as the minister's wife had been a prominent member of the Leaskdale community and had been a much-loved figure who organized community events. Rubio wrote the people of Leaskdale "liked" the Reverend MacDonald, but "loved" Montgomery. At the same time, she complained in her diary her husband had a "medieval mind" when it came to women as to him: "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."


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1926, the family moved into the Norval Presbyterian Charge, in present-day Halton Hills, Ontario, where today the Lucy Maud Montgomery Memorial Garden can be seen from Highway 7. In 1934, Montgomery's extremely depressed husband signed himself into a sanatorium in Guelph. After his release, the drug store gave Montgomery a "blue pill" intended to treat her husband's depression that was accidentally laced with insecticide (a mistake on the part of the drug store clerk) that almost killed him. The Reverend Macdonald became notably paranoid after this incident, as his mental health continued to deteriorate.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1933, Montgomery published "Pat of the Silver Bush", which reflected a move towards more "adult" stories for young people. Unlike Anne with her sense of optimism and vibrancy, Pat is a "queer" moody girl who is noted for being a "loner". Pat's best friend, Elizabeth "Bets" Wilcox, dies of the Spanish flu, giving the book a darker tone than Montgomery's previous books. In a letter to a fan in 1934 who complained about the dark mood of "Pat of the Silver Bush", Montgomery replied: "I gave Anne my imagination and Emily Starr my knack for scribbling; but the girl who is more myself than any other is 'Pat of the Silver Bush'...Not "externally", but spiritually she is I". Pat's deep attachment to the countryside of Prince Edward Island, especially her family farm, Silver Bush, mirrored Montgomery's own attachment to the countryside of her home province, and the farm that she grew up on.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In 1935, upon her husband's retirement, Montgomery moved to Swansea, Ontario, a suburb of Toronto, buying a house which she named Journey's End, situated on Riverside Drive along the east bank of the Humber River. Montgomery continued to write, and (in addition to writing other material) returned to writing about Anne after a 15-year hiatus, filling in previously unexplored gaps in the chronology she had developed for the character. She published "Anne of Windy Poplars" in 1936 and "Anne of Ingleside" in 1939. "Jane of Lantern Hill", a non-Anne novel, was also composed around this time and published in 1937. On June 3, 1935, King George V named Montgomery to the Order of the British Empire (OBE), and on September 8, 1935 at Rideau Hall in Ottawa, the ceremony of investiture giving her an OBE was held with the Governor-General, Lord Bessborough, conducting the ceremony. As a member of the Order of the British Empire, Montgomery was given a special medal, which could only be worn in public in the presence of the King or one of his representatives like the Governor-General. Her husband did not attend the ceremony, but Montgomery was by all accounts greatly honoured to be appointed an OBE.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Writing kept up Montgomery's spirits as she battled depression while taking various pills to improve her mood, but in public she presented a happy, smiling face, giving speeches to various professional groups all over Canada. At the Toronto Book Fair, held on November 9, 1936 to promote Canadian literature, Montgomery met the pseudo-Ojibwe author and environmentalist Grey Owl. During her speech to the assembled authors, Montgomery spoke of hearing an "owl's laughter" in Leaskdale, causing Grey Owl to jump up and interrupt her, saying: "You are the first white person I have ever met who has heard an owl's laughter. I thought nobody but Indians ever heard it. We hear it often because we are a silent race. My full name is Laughing Grey Owl." Grey Owl's remark made the front page of "The Toronto Mail and Empire" newspaper the next day. Montgomery described Grey Owl in her diary: "Grey Owl was looking quite the Indian of romance, with his long black braids of hair, his feather headdress and a genuine scalping knife -- at least he told us it was genuine." Montgomery liked Grey Owl's speech the same evening stating Canada's "greatest asset is her forest lands" saying that most Canadians were too proud of "skyscrapers on Yonge Street" rather than the "natural resources we are destroying as fast as we can". After Grey Owl's death in 1938, and the revelation that the supposed Ojibwe was actually the Englishman Archie Belaney, Montgomery stated that though Belaney lied about being an Ojibwe his concern for the environment, nature, and animals were real; and for this reason Grey Owl's message was worth cherishing.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: On November 10, 1937, Montgomery gave a speech in Toronto at another annual gathering of the Toronto Book Fair calling for Canadian writers to write more stories about Canada, arguing Canadians had great stories worth writing. Despite her efforts to raise the profile of Canadian literature through the Canadian Authors Association, the male "avant garde" of Canadian literature led by Frederick Philip Grove, F. R. Scott, Morley Callaghan and Raymond Knister complained about the mostly female membership of the CAA, whom they felt had overly glorified someone like Montgomery who was not a "serious" writer. Over time, Montgomery became addicted to bromides and barbiturates that the doctors had given her to help treat her depression.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery was greatly upset by World War II, calling the war in a 1940 letter "this nightmare that has been loosed on the world... unfair that we should have to go through it again." In her only diary entry for 1941, Montgomery wrote on July 8, 1941: "Oh God, such an end to life. Such suffering and wretchedness." On December 28, 1941, Montgomery wrote to a friend: "This past year has been one of constant blows to me. My oldest son has made a mess of his life and his wife has left him. My husband's nerves are even worse than mine. I have kept the nature of his attacks from you for over 20 years but they have broken me at last... I could not go out to select a book for you this year. Pardon me. I could not even write this if I had not been a hypodermic. The war situation kills me along with many other things. I expect conscription will come in and they will take my second son and then I will give up all effort to recover because I shall have nothing to live for." In 1940, the Canadian Prime Minister William Lyon Mackenzie King introduced conscription under the National Resources Mobilization Act, but with the caveat that conscripts could only be used in the defence of North America, and only volunteers would be sent overseas. Mackenzie King scheduled a referendum for April 27, 1942, to ask the voters to release him from his promise to only send volunteers overseas, which Montgomery alluded to in her letter mentioning "conscription will come in." In her last entry in her diary on March 23, 1942, Montgomery wrote: "Since then my life has been hell, hell, hell. My mind is gone – everything in the world I lived for has gone – the world has gone mad. I shall be driven to end my life. Oh God, forgive me. Nobody dreams of what my awful position is."


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: In the last year of her life, Montgomery completed what she intended to be a ninth book featuring Anne, titled "The Blythes Are Quoted". It included fifteen short stories (many of which were previously published) that she revised to include Anne and her family as mainly peripheral characters; forty-one poems (most of which were previously published) that she attributed to Anne and to her son Walter, who died as a soldier in the Great War; and vignettes featuring the Blythe family members discussing the poems. The book was delivered to Montgomery's publisher on the day of her death, but for reasons unexplained, the publisher declined to issue the book at the time. Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre speculates that the book's dark tone and anti-war message (Anne speaks very bitterly of WWI in one passage) may have made the volume unsuitable to publish in the midst of the Second World War.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: An abridged version of this book, which shortened and reorganized the stories and omitted all the vignettes and all but one of the poems, was published as a collection of short stories called "The Road to Yesterday" in 1974, more than 30 years after the original work had been submitted. A complete edition of "The Blythes Are Quoted", edited by Benjamin Lefebvre, was finally published in its entirety by Viking Canada in October 2009, more than 67 years after it was composed.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: 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, in September 2008, her granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, revealed that Montgomery suffered from depression—possibly as a result of caring for her mentally ill husband for decades—and may have ended her life through a drug overdose.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: ... I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: An alternative explanation of this document is provided in Mary Henley Rubio's 2008 biography "Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings", which suggests that Montgomery may have intended it as an entry in part of a journal now lost, rather than a suicide note.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery was buried at the Cavendish Community Cemetery in Cavendish following her wake in the Green Gables farmhouse and funeral in the Cavendish United Church (formerly Cavendish Presbyterian Church).


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: During her lifetime, Montgomery had published twenty novels, over 500 short stories, an autobiography, and a book of poetry. Aware of her fame, by 1920 Montgomery began editing and recopying her journals, presenting her life as she wanted it remembered. In doing so, certain episodes were changed or omitted.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: The L. M. Montgomery Institute, founded in 1993, at the University of Prince Edward Island, promotes scholarly inquiry into the life, works, culture, and influence of L. M. Montgomery and coordinates most of the research and conferences surrounding her work. The Montgomery Institute collection consists of novels, manuscripts, texts, letters, photographs, sound recordings and artifacts and other Montgomery ephemera.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Her major collections (including personal journals, photographs, needlework, two book manuscripts, and her personal library) are archived in the McLaughlin Library's Archival and Special Collections at the University of Guelph.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: The first biography of Montgomery was "The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L. M. Montgomery" (1975), written by Mollie Gillen. Dr. Gillen also discovered over 40 of Montgomery's letters to her pen-friend George Boyd MacMillan in Scotland and used them as the basis for her work. Beginning in the 1980s, her complete journals, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, were published by the Oxford University Press. From 1988–95, editor Rea Wilmshurst collected and published numerous short stories by Montgomery. Most of her essays, along with interviews with Montgomery, commentary on her work, and coverage of her death and funeral, appear in Benjamin Lefebvre's "The L. M. Montgomery Reader", Volume 1: "A Life in Print" (2013).


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Despite the fact that Montgomery published over twenty books, "she never felt she achieved her one 'great' book." Her readership, however, has always found her characters and stories to be among the best in fiction. Mark Twain said Montgomery's Anne was "the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice." Montgomery was honoured by being the first female in Canada to be named a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts and was invested Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: However, her fame was not limited to Canadian audiences. "Anne of Green Gables" became a success worldwide. For example, every year, thousands of Japanese tourists "make a pilgrimage to a green-gabled Victorian farmhouse in the town of Cavendish on Prince Edward Island." In 2012, the original novel "Anne of Green Gables" was ranked number nine among all-time best children's novels in a survey published by "School Library Journal", a monthly with primarily U.S. audience. The British public ranked it number 41 among all novels in The Big Read, a 2003 BBC survey to determine the "nation's best-loved novel." The British scholar Faye Hammill observed that Montgomery is an author overshadowed by her creation as licence plates in Prince Edward Island bear the slogan "P.E.I. Home of Anne of Green Gables" rather than "P.E.I. Birthplace of L.M Montgomery. Much to Montgomery's own annoyance, the media in both the United States and Canada tried to project the personality of Anne Shirley onto her.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery's home, the Leaskdale Manse in Ontario, and the area surrounding Green Gables and her Cavendish home in Prince Edward Island, have both been designated National Historic Sites. Montgomery herself was designated a Person of National Historic Significance by the Government of Canada in 1943.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Bala's Museum in Bala, Ontario, is a house museum established in 1992. Officially it is "Bala's Museum with Memories of Lucy Maud Montgomery," for Montgomery and her family ate their meals in the boarding house while staying at another nearby boarding house during a July 1922 holiday that inspired her novel "The Blue Castle" (1926). The museum hosts some events pertaining to Montgomery or her fiction, including re-enactment of the holiday visit.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery was honoured by King George V as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire (OBE); there were no Canadian orders, decorations or medals for civilians until the 1970s.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: Montgomery was named a National Historic Person in 1943 by the Canadian federal government. Her Ontario residence was designated a National Historic Site in 1997 (Leaskdale Manse), while the place that inspired her famous novels, Green Gables, was formally recognized as "L. M. Montgomery's Cavendish National Historic Site" in 2004.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: On May 15, 1975, the Post Office Department issued a stamp to "Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables" designed by Peter Swan and typographed by Bernard N. J. Reilander. The 8¢ stamps are perforated 13 and were printed by Ashton-Potter Limited.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: A pair of stamps was issued in 2008 by Canada Post, marking the centennial of the publication of Montgomery's classic first novel.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: The City of Toronto named a park for her (Lucy Maud Montgomery Park) and in 1983 placed a historical marker there near the house where she lived from 1935 until her death in 1942.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: On November 30, 2015 (her 141st birthday), Google honoured Lucy Maud Montgomery with a Google Doodle published in twelve countries.


title: Lucy Maud Montgomery

text: There have been multiple adaptations of Montgomery's work. Television producer Kevin Sullivan negotiated permission with Montgomery's heirs prior to producing the popular 1985 miniseries "Anne of Green Gables", and several sequels, only to have multiple legal disputes with them. In 1999 Sullivan and his partners announced plans to make Sullivan Entertainment a publicly traded company. In their prospectus they described the works based on Montgomery's novels as profitable. Montgomery's heirs sued him, claiming he had not paid them their contracted share of royalties, claiming the films had failed to turn a profit.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Shiva Baby is a 2020 comedy film written and directed by Emma Seligman. The film stars Rachel Sennott as Danielle, a directionless young bisexual Jewish woman who attends a with her parents, Joel (Fred Melamed) and Debbie (Polly Draper). Other attendees include her successful ex-girlfriend Maya (Molly Gordon), and her sugar daddy Max (Danny Deferrari) with his wife Kim (Dianna Agron) and their screaming baby. It also features Jackie Hoffman, Deborah Offner, Rita Gardner and Sondra James in supporting roles.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Adapted from Seligman's own 2018 short of the same name, "Shiva Baby" premiered online at the 2020 South by Southwest film festival, while its first public screenings were at the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF), due to the COVID-19 pandemic. It was released in theaters and streaming on April 2, 2021. The events of the film take place almost entirely in real time and at one location as Danielle explores her romantic and career prospects under the intense watch of her family, friends, and judgmental neighbors.


title: Shiva Baby

text: "Shiva Baby" received positive reviews from critics. It was praised for its representation of bisexual and Jewish people, while also described as accessible for people outside those groups, and for effectively conveying anxiety-inducing claustrophobia. Seligman was praised for successfully drawing up tension within the film, especially in her feature directorial debut, and won several awards for her screenplay. The cast and the musical score by Ariel Marx, likened to that of a horror film, were also praised.


title: Shiva Baby

text: College senior Danielle and her sugar daddy Max have sex before she hurries to a observance with her parents, Joel and Debbie. Before the , at her aunt Sheila's house, Danielle is schooled by her mother on how to respond to questions about her disorganized life. Within the house, members of the local extended Jewish community compare her to her ex-girlfriend Maya, who is adored by the neighbors and heading to law school. Max, who is a former colleague of Joel's, arrives, and Debbie insists on introducing him to Danielle in the hopes that one of Max's relatives will hire her. They have an awkward exchange and Debbie reveals to Danielle that Max is married, shocking her.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Overwhelmed by prying neighbors, Danielle is further affected by the arrival of Max's seemingly perfect but non-Jewish wife, Kim, and their baby, Rose. After accidentally ripping her tights and hurting her leg, Danielle retreats to the bathroom where she takes a topless photo and sends it to Max. She is interrupted and accidentally leaves her phone in the bathroom. Unable to look away from Max and his family, she offers to clean vomit from an adjacent room in order to escape. Maya comes to help, catching Danielle repeatedly looking at Max. She mistakes the gaze as one directed at Kim and attempts to gauge Danielle's interest, while Danielle tries to dismiss Kim's attractiveness and success.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Danielle is reluctantly introduced to Kim, who is interested in making conversation with and hiring her, though Danielle is jealous and rebuffs her offer. It is also revealed that Kim is the breadwinner of the family and therefore unknowingly funds Max's arrangement with Danielle. Kim grows suspicious when she notices Danielle wearing the same expensive bracelet that Max had given to her. Max spills coffee on Danielle, leading her to have a brief heart-to-heart with her mother. Maya also tries to talk to her, but Max interrupts the two; annoyed, Maya loudly reveals details of her and Danielle's past relationship, while Max tries to determine if Danielle is still romantically interested in him. She then follows him to the upstairs bathroom and tries to give him a blowjob but he leaves. Upset, Danielle goes outside, finding Maya smoking by the side of the house. The two admit that they miss each other and passionately kiss. Maya is excited, but later finds Danielle's phone in the bathroom and reads notifications from the sugar baby app; angry, she taunts Danielle about the phone without revealing where it is. Danielle's anxiety grows when she encounters Kim with her parents again, having a measured conversation in which she behaves erratically and hints that Max uses the couple's vacant SoHo apartment as a bachelor pad. When Kim asks if Danielle is dating, Joel starts talking about her failed love life and implores the nearby guests to sing a song they used to sing to her as a baby; Danielle feels infantilized and stressfully imagines Kim singing along, and flaunting her relationship with Max.


title: Shiva Baby

text: The guests then gather to say Kaddish, with Rose screaming until Kim takes her away. Max follows Danielle into the kitchen afterwards, and they discuss ending their arrangement. Kim appears and tells Max they should go home, and Danielle leaves to ask her parents if they can go home, too. Moments later, Kim finds Danielle to return her phone, and tries to force her to hold Rose, saying she needs help feeding her. Danielle tries to refuse as Max arrives and argues with Kim about the baby, which pushes Danielle into accidentally knocking over a vase. Danielle attempts to clean up the mess but has a breakdown on the floor in front of the guests, and is comforted by her mother and Maya. Debbie suggests they use helping an elderly attendee to her car as an excuse to leave, and Maya and Danielle reconnect as they carry food outside. Everyone is persuaded to ride home in Joel's overpacked van, with Kim and Max's baby shrieking as Joel struggles to find his keys. Maya and Danielle affectionately hold hands in the back and smile at each other.


title: Shiva Baby

text: "Shiva Baby" is an expansion of writer-director Emma Seligman's 2018 short film of the same title, which she had made as her thesis project while studying film at New York University Tisch School of the Arts (NYU). The title refers both to Danielle and to the baby brought to the , Rose. Seligman said that she felt there was room to expand on the short from early on, but needed motivation from lead actress Rachel Sennott to start working on a feature; the feature film entered production just before the short premiered at the 2018 South by Southwest (SXSW) film festival. Despite the short being accepted to SXSW, giving Seligman confidence, nobody there was interested in making a low-budget feature. She then approached Katie Schiller, who she said was "the best producer in [their graduating class]", at Sennott's encouragement. While developing the feature, Seligman re-watched Gia Coppola's film "Palo Alto", saying that she has "never seen a film so accurately portray the suffocating and debilitating nature of young female insecurities" like it. She was also inspired by Trey Edward Shults's "Krisha" and how its location was used for storytelling, which led to her viewing "Shiva Baby" through a similar psychological thriller lens. Other inspiration came from the Coen brothers, Joey Soloway's "Transparent", John Cassavetes, and Mike Nichols. The costume design of the film was based on outfits worn at Seligman's family had attended.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Seligman said that financing "Shiva Baby" was "probably the hardest thing" she and the producers would do; they sought funding for the feature for a year and received some offers from organizations that requested more creative control over the film in return, which they were unwilling to give. The production also faced setback when Seligman had to return to Canada after finishing the short when her visa expired. Filmmaker Amanda Kramer, a friend of Seligman, put them in contact with Rhianon Jones of Neon Heart Productions, who became an executive producer; more investors became interested with Jones attached. Most of the financing came from outside funding and independent funding from people the production team knew. Seligman told "Women and Hollywood" that using primarily one location was also a financial decision. "Shiva Baby"s budget was around $200,000. Producer Kieran Altmann managed to secure some funding from his parents, Fiona and Martin Altmann, who are credited as executive producers. He said that the competitive filmmaking market in New York helped them work with a small budget, as they could negotiate large discounts on gear rental. The crew were also friends of the producers, and most took a cut in their usual rate, while editor Hanna Park was Seligman's roommate.


title: Shiva Baby

text: The short film had been based on a fictional scenario combining Seligman's "uncomfortable and funny" experience of , and the community of women she knew who were sugar babies at NYU. When it came to expanding the story to a feature, she chose to also draw on her own bisexuality; the desire to showcase more of the character of Danielle and her sexuality is a reason Seligman chose to make the feature. She said that "if no one [watched] this movie except for some young bisexual women who feel seen, then [she would] feel like [she had] done [her] job". The character of Danielle is described as relatable; she is the film's "way in" and the other characters are all seen through her eyes. Seligman was also interested in exploring Max and Kim's relationship, and Debbie and Danielle's mother–daughter relationship, further, and in expanding on the central theme of Danielle finding her self-worth through sexual autonomy but "realizing that's not as powerful as she thinks it is". "Variety" noted that themes of empowered young women were present in several screenplays in the same season; features editor Malina Saval wrote that "Shiva Baby" shows through Danielle how a "pressure to be perfect manifests itself in women long before marriage and kids come into focus" and explores how the power of sex is only limited.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Karina Solórzano for the Los Cabos International Film Festival wrote that "Shiva Baby" has "the same elements as some of Woody Allen's most popular films – including the Jewish family and multiple lovers – but Seligman has her own vision and offers something different", and that it "follows the contrarian path promoted by [...] "Disobedience", [but] this is not the central point of the plot; Seligman does not treat the [queer] protagonists as exceptional or disobedient". Solórzano also compared the themes of youth to those of "Booksmart", and the tension to that of "Uncut Gems", and discussed the relevance of other themes in "Shiva Baby", including Danielle's insecurities; the cultural and religious conflicts surrounding Danielle's sexuality; complex female relationships; and the honesty that comes with family gatherings.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Writer-director Seligman became aware of lead actress Sennott at NYU when Sennott was acting in other students' thesis films and making comedy sketches. Thinking that she looked "like someone [Seligman] would run into at a family event", Seligman cast Sennott in her own thesis film, the "Shiva Baby" short. Sennott was kept on as Danielle when Seligman began expanding "Shiva Baby" into a feature-length film; they had formed a collaborative bond and Seligman "never even thought about casting someone else", though, unlike her character, Sennott is neither queer nor Jewish. When media began criticizing Jewface, Sennott as Danielle was frequently mentioned. She worked with Seligman to develop the character over the two years of production from the beginning of the short film to the feature, and read all of Seligman's screenplay drafts. Some of the film's potential financeers asked the producers to consider replacing Sennott with a bigger name star. Besides Sennott, the first actor to be cast was Molly Gordon, who was cast as Danielle's love interest, Maya, without a chemistry read with Sennott; they only met the day before filming began. Seligman says she experienced impostor syndrome working with the cast, especially after holding a rehearsal for a scene between Danielle and Maya but not being able to make it work. After Gordon, Dianna Agron was cast as Kim. Agron was in Israel when she was sent the script, and met with Seligman in New York shortly after returning. Seligman said that, as a Jewish actress, Agron was excited to "finally" be in a Jewish film, despite playing the only character who is not Jewish. Through conversation with Agron, lines were added alluding to her character having Jewish heritage. Producer Lizzie Shapiro told Ynet that Agron "brought to the role a different dynamic of what it means to be a Jew who looks like [she does]". Commenters have said that Agron's casting is an example of intertextuality and "a bit of an inside joke". Danny Deferrari was the last actor to be cast, accepting the role of Max a few days before shooting began.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Casting had been challenging; the film focuses on both queer and Jewish culture, so Seligman and the producers wanted to find actors who would "feel authentic to the material". Seligman felt it was important to cast Jewish actors but was open to other people if they seemed perfect for the role. She also discussed authentic queer representation with "The Hindu", calling it a "trickier issue"; having spoken with actors who are not out, Seligman said that "for everyone on screen playing a queer character to be out and proud and talking about their sexuality [...] is a lot to ask of someone." Casting director Kate Geller went to the Jewish theatre community in New York for most of the cast. Due to the low budget, they looked to only cast actors based in New York City, with the exception of Fred Melamed, whom the production flew out from Los Angeles. Melamed had accepted the role of Joel based on reading the script alone. Unbeknownst to Seligman, several cast members already knew each other, such as Melamed and Polly Draper (who plays his wife Debbie), who were friends from the Yale School of Drama; she used this as an advantage on set, though Draper had originally been sought to play a different role in the film. The production had been looking for a Jewish actress to play Debbie, but Seligman said that Draper "put a spell on [her] and [she] had to say yes." Seligman's own mother also wanted Draper to play the mother character in the movie. Draper improvised on-set for her character a lot, as well as adding a mother's perspective, though the production did not have time for full improvisation.


title: Shiva Baby

text: "Shiva Baby" was filmed over 16 days in August 2019 at an Airbnb in Flatbush, Brooklyn. Seligman chose the house on because of its dark wood interior and stained-glass windows providing a "Yentl"-like glow. The shoot was initially planned for summer 2018, which was postponed to 2019; Seligman then wanted to push it again, to 2020, to have more time to raise money, but Sennott "set a timebomb". The film mostly takes place in one location during one day. After scouting the house, Seligman built a model of the first floor out of Lego and used this to plan shots. She said that some of the main struggles related to continuity, particularly working with actors who were not always available at the same time. The production had only "two days when [they] had the entire [principal] six-person cast together at the same time". Another struggle was the baby playing Rose, who would not stop crying; Seligman said this was a "learning experience" that caused her to rework some scenes to fit in a crying baby. The opening scene, set before the at Max's apartment, was filmed on the last day. Seligman, with a largely female cast and crew, felt prepared for this and other scenes involving intimacy, but discovered during filming that the scenes were more vulnerable and required more sensitivity.


title: Shiva Baby

text: Director of photography Maria Rusche used an Arri Alexa XT camera to shoot in fullscreen 2K resolution and Apple ProRes 4444 format, with Kowa anamorphic lenses as well as a 10:1 Cooke Cinetal zoom lens. About half of the film was shot handheld. Seligman and Rusche initially considered shooting "Shiva Baby" like a romantic comedy, but "the anxiety hook was what [they] found to set the tone for most of the process". Rusche discussed her equipment choices with "IndieWire"s Chris O'Falt, explaining that to capture the claustrophobia and anxiety in the film in the way they wanted, they needed to have Danielle surrounded by people but still allow the principal cast to play off each other. To achieve this, Rusche decided to use an anamorphic lens so that multiple characters can remain in shot together, through the wider field of view, while still being distinguished from background characters thanks to the lens's depth. They also wanted to utilize natural image distortion to emphasize Danielle's anxiety; Rusche said the effect of the Kowa lenses "helped make it feel like the walls could literally cave in on her" and had "a good balance of edge distortion without falling apart or losing too much sharpness at the edges".


title: Shiva Baby

text: Seligman was uncertain if she wanted to use a score for the film when going into production, as she was aiming for realism, but chose to do so to divert focus from background chatter and represent Danielle's emotions. Seligman wanted it to have strings to reflect Klezmer music, without being overpowering, a "sweet spot" that she said composer Ariel Marx achieved. Marx also suggested adding the score to some scenes it had not originally been intended, making them more stressful. As well as composing, Marx performed strings, while Sam Mazur contributed percussion.


title: Shiva Baby

text: The score received positive reviews. Stephen Saito for "Moveable Fest" described the score as Marx's version of the "Jaws" theme. "IndieWire"s Jude Dry wrote that the "tense string score ratchets up the tension, though this technique loses its bite after a few too many uses", while Katie Rife of "The A.V. Club" praised it, likening it to the work of Harry Manfredini. Andrew Parker for "The GATE" also touched on the score's horror-like qualities, saying it worked well for its contribution to the claustrophobic storytelling. "The Film Stage" listed it as one of the best scores or soundtracks of 2021.


title: Shiva Baby

text: "Shiva Baby" was slated to premiere at the 2020 South by Southwest (SXSW); following the festival's cancellation in light of the COVID-19 pandemic, it was instead screened digitally in April 2020. The producers submitted the film to the Sundance Film Festival, and though they were given an extension on submission to work on post-production, it was not accepted. Altmann said that while it was disappointing to be rejected from a festival like Sundance, the team had been aiming for SXSW, as it was where the short premiered. It was also screened digitally at a variety of festivals in August and September 2020, and had its first physical screening at the TIFF Bell Lightbox for the 2020 Toronto International Film Festival (TIFF). In place of live events, it received cast and director Q&A sessions via video links.


title: Shiva Baby

text: In September 2020, just before its TIFF run, Utopia acquired distribution rights to "Shiva Baby". It was released in limited theaters and video on demand on March 26, 2021 in Canada, by distributors Pacific Northwest Pictures, and on April 2, 2021, when movie theaters re-opened, in the United States. The soundtrack was released on the same day. Utopia shopped the film to various streaming platforms: it was made available in Spain on Filmin, and in several countries on Mubi from June 11, 2021 for Pride Month. "Shiva Baby" also had a limited release in UK theaters in June 2021, and a wide release in Australian theaters beginning July 2021. It has been picked up for theatrical distribution in Israel by TLVFest. It began streaming on HBO Max in July 2021, with HBO and Seligman developing a television pilot based on the premise of the film.


title: Shiva Baby

text: The first theatrical poster and trailer were released on February 18, 2021. was designed by High Council, with "Nylon" noting that it captures the film's style; "Sennott dressed to the nines in Jewish deli couture is nothing short of pure camp." A second, red band, trailer was released on March 29, 2021, and a UK trailer followed on May 27. According to Seligman, Utopia targeted their marketing at the young queer female audience by producing content like the red band trailer. Additionally, pandemic lockdowns gave Seligman the time to engage with audiences at many film festivals, creating "if not a grassroots campaign, than a ground-up campaign", in her words. She added: "This is how we were able to find the right audience for the film, we responded to their excitement and included them in our outreach."


title: Shiva Baby

text: "Shiva Baby" was the most-watched film on Mubi in 2021 by the start of August, and ended the year still in the top spot. It had a record-breaking sixteen-week continuous run (April 2–July 22, 2021) at the Quad Cinema in New York.


title: Shiva Baby

text: The website's critics consensus reads: "A ruefully funny calling card for debuting director Emma Seligman, "Shiva Baby" transcends its sitcom setup with strong performances and satisfying insights." Metacritic assigned the film a weighted average score of 79 out of 100, based on 24 critics, indicating "generally favorable reviews".


title: Shiva Baby

text: Brian Bromberger of "The Bay Area Reporter" said it "may be one of the best bisexual films ever made", and Alex de Vore of the "Santa Fe Reporter" said that the ending is "one of the most meaningful moments of hope ever captured on film". Madeline Ducharme of "Slate" "Outward" called "Shiva Baby" and character Danielle "a step forward for bi representation on screen", and diversity-focused "Incluvie" Aspen Nelson said that it "will be remembered as a crucial film of youthful Jewish representation in cinema." Sennott's performance was noted as one of the best breakouts of 2020.