L. M. Montgomery

Life

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother died before she was two, and her father moved west, leaving her to be raised by her maternal grandparents in the farming village of Cavendish. It was a strict and lonely upbringing, and she later said that books and the island landscape were her companions. She attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and Dalhousie University in Halifax, taught school briefly, and began selling stories and poems to magazines in the 1890s.

She returned to Cavendish in 1898 to care for her widowed grandmother and ran the village post office, writing in the evenings. Anne of Green Gables, finished in 1905, was rejected by several publishers before L. C. Page of Boston accepted it, and its success in 1908 was immediate. After her grandmother’s death in 1911 she married Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and moved to Ontario, where she spent the rest of her life as a minister’s wife in Leaskdale and Norval and later in Toronto.

She published steadily, including seven more Anne books, the Emily trilogy and a number of other novels, while managing a husband with severe depression and a long legal battle with her first publisher. Her own health and spirits declined in her last years. She died in Toronto in April 1942.

Literary significance

Montgomery is Canada’s most widely read author and Anne Shirley one of the most recognizable characters in children’s literature. Her books are set almost entirely on Prince Edward Island, which she described with a particularity that has made the real places tourist destinations. Her strength is in comedy of character and in the speech of talkative, imaginative girls who do not fit their surroundings.

Later critical interest has turned to her journals, published after her death, which show a far darker and more ironic writer than the novels suggest, and to the Emily books, which deal more directly with a girl’s determination to write.

Where to start

Anne of Green Gables is the natural beginning and is in this library, along with its sequels Anne of Avonlea and Anne’s House of Dreams.