maud

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874, in a small house in the town of Clifton on Prince Edward Island, Canada. She was the only child of Clara Macneill Woolner Montgomery and Hugh John Montgomery.Their house in Clifton is now a museum where visitors can see, among other things, the room in which Maud was born, many of her scrapbooks, and her wedding dress.

When Maud (as she liked to be called) was only twenty months old, her mother died of tuberculosis, and Maud was taken to live with her grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill, who lived about twelve miles away near the little town of Cavendish. Maud's father continued to run his store in Clifton while he pursued other business on the island, and eventually in western Canada. Maud adored her father, but since he lived in Clifton and travelled a great deal, his visits with him were occasional and brief.

When Maud was seven, her father left for Prince Albert, Saskatchewan ( about 2,500 miles from Cavendish), where he eventually settled and remarried. At the age of sixteen, Maud travelled to Prince Albert to live with her father and his new wife and baby. Although she was homesick for Cavendish, she was happy to be with her father at last; "It is lovely to be with father again..." she wrote in her journal. "He is such a darling. His eyes just shine with love when he looks at me."

After a year in Prince Albert, however, Maud reluctantly decided that she should return to her grandparents on Prince Edward Island. Her stepmother, apparently, was making her life miserable:

I shall be sorry to leave father...but...It will be so wonderful to escape from the atmosphere of suspicion and petty malice and persecution which Mrs. Montgomory seems to exhale wherever she is. Sometimes I feel as if I were literally smothering in it. I work my fingers to the bone for her and her children and I am not even civilly treated for it...

Maud returned to Cavendish in September, 1891. She wrote to her father often and continued to feel very close to him until he died in 1900, when Maud was twenty-five.

Living with her grandparents was not easy either, because they were quite elderly and very strict. They lived a quiet life, farming and keeping the Cavendish post office, and Maud often felt lonely. Her lively personality did not match their seriousness, so there was little joy in her life except that which she created for herself through her writing; from the time she was a young girl she kept a journal and wrote poems and stories.

Like Anne, Maud received her first-class teacher's licence after one year instead of the usual two, and she spent a year teaching on the island before going to university in Nova Scotia. When she had completed her studies, she returned to Prince Edward Island to teach. Her grandmother's death in 1898 brought an end to Maud's teaching carreer; she felt her place was back in Cavendish with her grandmother. Except for a brief period when she worked for the Halifax newspaper, she stayed on the Cavendish farm until her grandmother died.

During these years, Maud continued to write. A good number of her poems and stories were published in newspaper and magazines, and in the spring of 1905, she began to work on her first novel, Anne of Green Gables. When she finished the manuscript about a year and a half later, she sent it to several publishers, but no one of them wanted to publish it. Discouraged, she put the novel away in a hat box and forgot it. A year or so later she came upon the manuscripts while rummaging through the closet. This time she decided to send it to L.C. Page Company of Boston. They promptly accepted it, and when the book was published in June, 1908, Maud was elated:

My book came to-day, fresh from the publishers. I candidly confess that it was for me a proud, wonderful, thrilling moment! There in my hand lay the material realization of all the dreams and hopes and ambitions and struggles of my whole conscious existance - my first book! Not a great book at all - but mine, mine, mine, - something to which I had given birth - something which, but for me, would never have existed...

Maud always insisted that the Anne books were not autobiographical, but there are certainly many similarities in Anne's and Maud's stories. Anne and Maud were both orphans who were brought up by strict, no-nonsense guardians in farming communities on the north shore of Prince Edward island. Many of Maud's favourite places in Cavendish became Anne's in Avonlea - Green Gables itself, Lover's Lane, the Haunted Wood, the brook and the old log bridgr, the little schoolhouse with its spruce groove, and many others. Maud also gave Anne her intense love of beauty and nature, apassion for reading and learning and excelling, and a vivid imagination, from which sprang an infinite supply of imginary friends and stories (the Katie Maurice who lived behind one of the glass doors in a china cupboard was Maud's imaginary friend before she was Anne's).

During the time she was caring for her grandmothr and writing Anne of Green Gables and the sequel Anne of Avonles, Maud became engaged to Ewan MacDonald, the minister of the Cavendish Presbyterian Church. She finally agreed to marry Ewan only if he would agreed to wait until her grandmother no longer needed her. They were engaged for five years, marrying a few months after her grandmother died in 1911.

The MacDonalds moved to the small town of Leaskdale, Ontario, where Ewan was a minister for the next fifiteen years. They had two sons, Chester and Stuart. Writing continued to be an important part in Maud's life, and it provided a kind of escape from the demanding of life of being a mother and being a minister's wife. In addition to the Anne books, she published fifteen other books and a number of stories, poems and articles. She continued to keep her journal and wrote to her friends frequently. She also answered her own fan mail, which she received in large amounts.

In 1926 the MacDonalds moved to Norval, Ontario. Ewan retired in 1936, and he and Maud moved to Toronto to live out their remaining years.

Maud always thought Prince Edward Island as her true home, though she never lived there again after her marriage. She visited the island often and, when she died on April 24, 1942, her family took her to Cavendish to be buried in the cemetery close to her beloved Green Gables.