Writer of numerous novels, short stories, letters and journals.
Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of Canada's best-loved authors. Born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Montgomery was raised by maternal grandparents, Lucy and Alexander Macneill in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. Montgomery attended Cavendish public schools, later took a teacher training course in Charlottetown, and attended Dalhousie University.
She kept a journal from the time she was nine and as a child Montgomery created and wrote down stories about her cats and dolls. She published her first poem in the Charlottetown Patriot at age fifteen. At the age of twenty one, she became a teacher and continued writing by getting up at 6 am to write. She taught until her grandfather's death in 1898 and stayed in Cavendish, except for a brief 9 month stint with the Halifax Echo 1901-02. Here she worked as a proofreader and wrote, a weekly column about "fun, fashions, fads and fancies," called "Around the Tea Table" under the pseudonym of Cynthia. After her time in Halifax, Montgomery spent the next nine years looking after her grandmother. Often lonely and unhappy, Montgomery turned to writing as an escape. She sold stories to Canadian and American periodicals and kept up an open and frank correspondence with 2 penpals - a farmer in Alberta and a journalist in Scotland. In 1906, at age 32, Montgomery became secretly engaged to Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and they agreed they would not marry until after the death of her grandmother. Reportedly, Montgomery respected but did not love Ewan Macdonald.
She spent the fall and winter of 1906 writing her first novel, Anne of Green Gables. Published in Boston in 1908, Anne of Green Gables was an instant success and an immediate bestseller. It was published in June and reprinted six times in the next 5 months. Readers begged for more Anne books and she wrote eight books in her Anne series. In her journal she records that she received fan mail from "men and women who are grandparents, boys at school and college, old pioneers in the Australian bush, missionaries in China, monks in remote monasteries, and red-headed girls all over the world." She even received a letter of praise from Mark Twain.
When her grandmother Lucy Macneill died in 1911, Montgomery married Macdonald at the age of 37. They left Prince Edward Island and moved to Leaksdale, Ontario and then to Norval Ontario where Montgomery found herself in the difficult position of being a minister's wife. She felt that as a minister's wife, her behaviour was always under scrutiny.
Montgomery's married life was busy but not happy and she often found herself feeling lonely and friendless. When Ewen retired, they moved to Toronto where she spent the rest of her life writing. Despite the work of marriage and children, she managed to continue her writing and produced a book every other year until three years before her death. She published more than 20 novels and a large number of short stories. Her selected letters and journals have been recently reprinted. In 1923, Lucy Maud Montgomery was the first Canadian woman to become a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in England and in 1935, she was invested with the Order of the British Empire. She died in 1942, at age 68 and is buried in Cavendish.
Lucy Maud Montgomery's novels have been translated into 30 languages and are extremely popular in Japan and Poland as well as in her native Canada. Reportedly, Anne of Green Gable is issued to soldiers in Poland and is said to be a source of optimism for Japanese readers. In addition to selling millions of copies, her novels have been made into movies, musicals and a popular TV series. Montgomery's popularity has led to a rise in tourism in Prince Edward Island and the Canadian government has set up a national park around the areas she called Lover's Lane, Dryad's Bubble, and Lake of Shining Waters. Green Gables reportedly receives 350,000 visitors a year from around the world.
Read Lucy Maud Montgomery's novels on-line.
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Fiction by Lucy Maud Montgomery
Further reading