Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874, in Clifton (now New London), a small farming community on the north shore of Prince Edward Island ^[1]. Her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill, died of tuberculosis before Maud, as she preferred to be called, turned two. Her father, Hugh John Montgomery, eventually moved west to Prince Albert in the Saskatchewan territory, leaving his daughter in the care of her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill, in the village of Cavendish ^[1][2].

The Macneill household was strict and Presbyterian, and Montgomery later described a childhood that mixed real loneliness with intense imaginative freedom. The family ran the local post office out of their farmhouse, which gave the young writer an unusual advantage: she could mail out manuscripts and receive rejection slips without the neighbors knowing ^[2]. The fields, shore, and wooded lanes around Cavendish supplied the scenery she would return to in book after book.

She began writing early and kept at it with unusual discipline. In November 1890, while living for a year with her father and stepmother in Prince Albert, she published her first work, a poem titled On Cape Le Force, in the Charlottetown Daily Patriot ^[1][3]. The western stay was unhappy, and she returned to the Island within a year, but the appearance of her name in print confirmed an ambition she never abandoned.

Montgomery trained for one of the few professions open to women of her generation. She earned a teacher's license from Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown in 1894, completing a two-year program in a single year, and taught in rural Island schools at Bideford, Belmont, and Lower Bedeque ^[2][3]. In 1895 and 1896 she spent a year studying English literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, a rare step for a woman of modest means at the time ^[1].

Throughout the 1890s and early 1900s she wrote constantly, selling poems and short stories to Sunday school papers, agricultural weeklies, and American magazines. In 1901 and 1902 she worked briefly in Halifax as a proofreader and columnist for the Daily Echo, then returned to Cavendish in 1902 to care for her widowed grandmother ^[2]. By the middle of the decade her freelance income exceeded what most Island schoolteachers earned, and she was placing work in prominent periodicals across North America ^[3].

Her breakthrough came from a rejected idea. Working from an old notebook entry about a couple who applied to adopt a boy and received a girl instead, she drafted a novel in 1905. Several publishers turned the manuscript down, and she put it away in a hatbox before revising it and trying again. The Boston firm L.C. Page and Company accepted it, and Anne of Green Gables appeared in June 1908 ^[1][4]. The book sold roughly 19,000 copies in its first five months and went through multiple printings within a year, drawing praise from readers as prominent as Mark Twain ^[4].

Any account of Lucy Maud Montgomery achievements begins with Anne Shirley, but it does not end there. Under pressure from her publisher she produced sequels quickly: Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), and eventually a series that followed the heroine into marriage, motherhood, and the First World War with Rilla of Ingleside (1921), one of the few contemporary Canadian novels to depict the war from the home front ^[3][5]. Over her career she published more than twenty novels, roughly 500 short stories, and about 500 poems ^[2].

Her other major heroine, Emily Byrd Starr of Emily of New Moon (1923) and its two sequels, is often read as her most autobiographical creation, a Prince Edward Island orphan determined to become a writer ^[3]. The Blue Castle (1926), an adult novel set in Ontario's Muskoka region, has attracted a devoted readership of its own. Montgomery also fought a long and costly series of lawsuits against L.C. Page over royalties and reprint rights, litigation that stretched across nearly a decade before she finally prevailed ^[2][5].

Formal honors followed the sales. In 1923 she became the first Canadian woman elected a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England ^[1][3]. She was invested as an Officer of the Order of the British Empire in 1935, and in 1943 the Canadian government designated her a person of national historic significance ^[1][6]. Anne of Green Gables has never gone out of print, has been translated into dozens of languages, and found an especially passionate audience in Japan, where the novel entered school reading lists after 1952 ^[4][6].

Montgomery's private life ran on a different track from her sunny fiction. She was secretly engaged to Ewan Macdonald, the Presbyterian minister at Cavendish, from 1906, but she refused to marry while her grandmother lived. After Lucy Macneill died in March 1911, the couple wed that July and moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, where Macdonald had taken a parish ^[1][2]. Montgomery never again lived on Prince Edward Island, though she returned often and set nearly all her fiction there.

The marriage brought heavy burdens. Ewan Macdonald suffered from recurring bouts of what was then called religious melancholia, a depressive conviction that he was damned, and Montgomery managed his illness while concealing it from his congregations ^[2][5]. She bore three sons: Chester in 1912, Hugh, who was stillborn in 1914, and Stuart in 1915. Alongside the duties of a minister's wife she maintained a punishing writing schedule, often producing a book a year.

From 1889 until her death she kept extensive private journals, recopying and editing them with an eye to eventual publication. Released in scholarly editions beginning in 1985 under the editorship of Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, the journals revealed the anxiety, grief, and professional frustration behind the public persona, and they transformed academic study of her work ^[5][7].

In 1926 the family moved to Norval, Ontario, and in 1935, after Ewan retired from the ministry, they settled in Toronto in a house Montgomery named Journey's End ^[1][2]. She continued to publish through the 1930s, returning to her most famous character with Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) and Anne of Ingleside (1939), books written partly to satisfy market demand during the Depression.

Her final years were shadowed by worry. Her elder son Chester's failed marriage and erratic conduct distressed her deeply, her husband's mental health declined further, and the outbreak of the Second World War in 1939 revived the dread she had felt during the first ^[2][5]. She became dependent on prescribed sedatives, and her own depression worsened.

Montgomery died in Toronto on April 24, 1942, at the age of 67. The cause was recorded at the time as coronary thrombosis. In 2008 her granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler wrote publicly that the family believed she may have taken her own life, a claim scholars continue to debate, with some arguing that a note found at her bedside was a journal fragment rather than a suicide note ^[5][8]. She was buried in the Cavendish cemetery on Prince Edward Island, within sight of the fields she had written about all her life ^[1].

Few Canadian writers have left a comparable mark. Anne of Green Gables is estimated to have sold tens of millions of copies worldwide, and adaptations have appeared steadily since a silent film in 1919: stage plays, radio serials, the celebrated 1985 CBC television miniseries, Japanese animation, and the Netflix series Anne with an E (2017 to 2019) ^[4][6]. Charlottetown's musical version of Anne of Green Gables, first staged in 1965, ran every summer for decades and is billed as Canada's longest-running annual musical ^[6].

The books reshaped the economy of her home province. Green Gables Heritage Place in Cavendish, the farmhouse of her cousins that inspired the novel's setting, is part of Prince Edward Island National Park and draws large numbers of international visitors each year, many of them from Japan ^[6]. Her Leaskdale manse in Ontario and her Cavendish home site are also preserved as historic sites ^[1].

Scholarship has kept pace with tourism. The L.M. Montgomery Institute, founded at the University of Prince Edward Island in 1993, hosts an ongoing program of conferences and research, and the publication of her complete journals and letters has established her as a significant chronicler of Canadian women's experience, not simply a children's author ^[7]. For readers asking who was Lucy Maud Montgomery, the answer now takes in both the creator of one of literature's most loved orphans and a complex professional writer whose private record is studied as closely as her fiction. Any full Lucy Maud Montgomery biography must hold those two figures together.