WHEN L.M. MONTGOMERY STARTED to write Anne of Green Gables she had the idea that she wanted to make a book that had “a real human girl” in it and wanted “to write a book that will live.” She did that just that and much more in her first book and in all the books following it. Anne, Emily, Pat, Valancy, Kilmeny, Marigold, and her other heroines have touched the hearts and lives of children and adults of all ages across the globe. Behind these extraordinary books is an author with a very intriguing life. Join me as we take a look at the life of this beloved authoress.

Born on Prince Edward Island
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 on Prince Edward Island. Shortly after she was born her mother died and her father went abroad on business, leaving her to be raised by her grandparents, the Macneill’s. Maud (without an “e” as she always insisted) was much like her fictional character Anne in the sense that she loved to name inanimate objects. Three orchard trees became Little Syrup, Spotty and Spider, and White Lady Birch, and two other trees that grew intertwined were labeled The Lovers.

Maud learned to read at the early age of three, and by age ten she knew she wanted to be a writer. She had a very active imagination. One day she and her two playmates, David and Wellington, were in a place the children called the Haunted Wood. They were walking together when they spotted something white beneath a tree. Suddenly memories of all the stories they had told each other about what haunted those woods came to mind. As the white object advanced towards them they wasted no time in screaming and running for home as fast as they could. They convinced people back home that there really was something chasing them in the woods and several of the household workers grabbed pitchforks and went to investigate. A short while later it was discovered that the frightening white object was only one of Grandmother’s white tablecloths that had blown from where she had set it out to dry.

Maud’s childhood adventures in Cavendish (the town that was renamed Avonlea for her writings) gave much inspiration and material for her future books. She said, “Were it not for those Cavendish years I do not think Anne of Green Gables would ever have been written.”

A Budding Authoress
When Maud was nine years old she attempted to write her first poem. It was called “Autumn” and was written to imitate the style of many of the great British and American poet’s she had read: blank verse. Blank verse doesn’t have any rhyme but it does have a rhythm. Her father was visiting when she wrote that poem so she immediately showed it to him.

“What kind of poetry is this?” her father queried after he read it.
“Blank verse,” Maud replied.
“Very blank,” Mr. Montgomery responded.

From then on Maud always tried very hard to make her poems have both a definite rhyme and a rhythm. Years later she wrote a poem to express her contempt for poetry without rhymes, entitled “I Feel”:

I feel
Very much
Like taking
Its unholy perpetrators
By the hair
Of their heads
(If they have any hair)
And dragging them around
A few times,
And then cutting them
Into small, irregular pieces
And burying them
In the depths of the blue sea.
They are without form
And void,
Or at least
The stuff they produce
Is. They are too lazy
To hunt up rhymes;
And that
Is all
That is the matter with them.

As a child she shared her poems with her friends. They seemed to like them, but she wasn’t sure if a larger audience would. One time a school teacher came to board at Maud’s grandparents’ home. She was also a talented singer, so Maud saw her opportunity to get someone else’s opinion about her poetry. Maud asked Izzie Robinson if she had ever heard of the song “Evening Dreams.” Miss Robinson replied that the title did not sound familiar but perhaps she would recognize the words if she heard them. Maud recited the words to her. They were from one of Maud’s poems. Miss Robinson said she had never heard the song before but said the words were “very pretty.” Inwardly Maud beamed with delight and got the encouragement she was looking for.

By the time she was fifteen she had several awards in writing. The most important one to that date was a third place finish in the county for the Canada Prize for an essay about Canadian History. Her winning essay was on an experience she witnessed when she was eight: the shipwreck of the great ship Marco Polo on the Cavendish beach.

At the age of nine she started keeping a diary but wasn’t faithful about it for several years. On September 21st, 1889 she wrote on the first page of a new journal, “Life is beginning to get interesting to me.” From then on she continued to write in her journal consistently for the next fifty-three years.

One of the reasons why Maud’s life is much more easily traceable than other people of her time is because she kept such consistent diaries, wrote many letters (she wrote to one pen pal, Ephraim Weber, for forty years!), and loved to take photographs. Perhaps this can inspire us to keep such well-documented lives.

Prince Albert, Saskatchewan
Life had many changes in store for Maud. In April of 1887 her father remarried. After Maud’s first stepsister was born Mr. Montgomery and his second wife sent for Maud to come and live with them in the prairie province of Saskatchewan in a town called Prince Albert. It was 1890 and Maud was fifteen.

She was overjoyed at seeing her father again because she had missed him dearly. However, things did not work out. Because her stepmother, Mary Ann, was only twelve years older than Maud it was difficult for both of them to think of each other as mother and daughter so Maud would call her stepmother Mrs. Montgomery rather than something more familiar. Maud was ruled with a strict hand and was worked very hard, especially when her stepmother become pregnant with her second child—Maud’s step-brother. Maud was very unhappy and unfortunately her father was too busy to realize that his little “Maudie” was being treated as a servant. She longed to go home to Prince Edward Island.

In the summer of 1891 her wish for home came true. She was sixteen years old when she crossed the continent and returned to the island that she held so dearly in her heart. Though she did have fond memories of enjoyable times with her friends in Prince Albert, she was very glad to be back home.

College Aspirations
Maud knew that to become a better writer she would need a good education, but most girls her age did not go to college or even finish high school. Her grandparents did not feel that it was important for their granddaughter to get a higher education either, so they decided against sending her to college.

For a while Maud gave music lessons to some local children while continuing to write as much as she could. Even when her hand couldn’t be writing, her mind was never dormant. She would keep ideas for stories or poems in her head all day and would write them down whenever she could find a chance.

After teaching music lessons for a year (which she hated doing), Maud knew she wanted more in her life. She decided she must go back to school. She wanted to become a teacher.

Reluctantly her grandparents agreed to pay for her schooling at Prince of Wales College. Maud was overjoyed and passed her entrance examinations as fifth highest out of sixty-four students.

She had a good time at college, though she was often extremely busy, trying to cram two years of study into one year to save money. She managed, however, and came out with excellent scores and a teacher’s license.

The first school she taught at was in the town of Bideford. It was a one room schoolhouse that had forty-eight students crowded into it. While boarding with Reverend and Mrs. Estey, Maud got inspiration for a part of Anne of Green Gables in an incident that happened there. While the Estey’s were entertaining some guests one day, Mrs. Estey fixed a cake. She was in a hurry and accidentally grabbed a bottle of anodyne liniment instead of flavoring. Her guests took one bite of the cake and refused to each any more, but a visiting minister was gracious enough to eat his whole piece without as much as saying a single word about the odd taste.

Using the money that Maud had saved from her earnings from teaching, she decided to attend Dalhousie College to take a literature course. She felt that becoming more familiar with literature would help her in her own writing.

While attending college Maud got paid for a piece of her writing for the first time! Though the check was only $5, it was still a very monumental event for her. After that first $5, checks of other small amounts started to come in. Maud was beginning to become a real paid writer. Still, only a small percentage of what she wrote was ever published. Many of her poems or stories got rejected time after time. Maud always felt a little frustrated at other people’s attitude towards her. All they saw was her successes and they were envious. “They do not realize,” Maud said, “how many disappointments come to one success. They see only the successes and think all must be smooth traveling.” It surely was not for Maud, nor for most other writers.

After the end of her semester at Dalhouise College, Maud returned home to her grandparents on Prince Edward Island. She could not afford to go another term and her grandparents refused to help her out financially any longer. Even though her education was not to the level she wanted it to be, Maud was not discouraged about her writing. She knew the road of a writer is one of hard work and diligence and she was convinced that she could do it.

She started teaching school again, this time in the town of Belmont. Maud found that the students at Belmont were hard to teach and unintelligent. She longed for her school back in Bideford. Maud struggled to find time to write and ended up having to get up at 6:00 AM before school to do it. The place where she stayed was cold, and sometimes it was minus twenty degrees inside when Maud would try to write.

After Belmont she took a school at Lower Bedeque. While she was there she got news that her Grandfather Macneill died. It was at the end of her term so she was able to rush back home. She could not bear the thought of her grandmother being left alone at such a trying time as that.

Maud and Grandmother took over the post office that Grandfather used to run. Maud continued to write and send out her submissions. Now she could keep her rejection slips a secret, as she was the only one who saw them as they arrived at the post office. It was 1899 at this time and she was twenty-five years old. That age was nearly considered an old maid in her time. Maud did dearly long to have her own family someday, but had not found someone she wanted to spend the rest of her life with yet. She became somewhat lonely, living under her grandmother’s strict house and being unable to do things in the world that she desired to do. Also around this time a close friend died of the influenza.

Maud, the Newspaperwoman
In 1901 Maud accepted a job offer to work as a newspaperwoman at Halifax, Nova Scotia for the Daily Echo. Even though Maud was not a feminist, she was proud of her position among the males at the newspaper office. She was the only woman there and not only did menial proofreading, but also writing. She had her own column called “Around the Tea Table” that was printed once a week.

Sometimes she had to do unusual work. One time the editor of the newspaper lost the conclusion to a long serial story the newspaper was running. He asked Maud to write her own ending to it. She did and later used the incident in one of her Emily Starr books.

Even though Maud loved her job at the newspaper, she did not like the idea of her grandmother living alone in the big house in Cavendish, plus she could barely make a living off of her small salary (which was a meager $5 a week). She once again returned home in June of 1902. There she stayed with her grandmother for nine more years.

Anne Shirley is Born
It was 1905 when Maud was looking around for an idea for a serial story to write for a Sunday School paper. She came across a scrap of paper that she had scribbled a story idea on ten years prior. It said, “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.” Maud sat down in her grandmother’s kitchen and began to write, using that idea. The beloved Anne Shirley of Green Gables was born. Maud only meant to make her story seven chapters long but soon found herself captivated with the freckled, homely girl with carrot-red hair and an expansive imagination and she proceeded to write an entire novel about her. Maud put many of the incidences of her own childhood into the book.

Maud tried four times to get Anne of Green Gables published but without success. Discouraged, she put the manuscript into a hatbox and stored it in a closet.

A year later Maud came across the Anne story and tried sending it out to a publisher one more time. It was accepted! Two years later it appeared in print. Maud was thrilled to have her first book published, though she wasn’t completely pleased with the illustrations that were drawn for it. When Maud first thought of Anne for her main character she had in mind exactly what she looked like. The image for Anne was one she had clipped from an American magazine and kept with her while she wrote.

Fan mail poured in. Her readers loved her first Anne book! They pleaded for a second, and Maud started Anne of Avonlea.

Mrs. Macdonald
Meanwhile Ewen Macdonald began to notice Maud and spent a lot of time around the Cavendish post office where she worked. He was the new minister at the Presbyterian church in her town. Maud was getting rather desperate to have a family and perhaps unwisely chose to settle for Ewen—a man she felt she could not love, but liked well enough. They began courting and got engaged in 1906, though they did not get married until five years later. After they got engaged Ewen (or Ewan, as Maud liked to spell it) left for Scotland while Maud stayed with her grandmother. Ewen and she hardly saw each other during their long engagement.

Lucy Maud Montgomery became Lucy Maud Macdonald (though she kept the Montgomery for her writing) on July 5th of 1911, shortly after her grandmother died. She wrote in her journal, “I sat at the gay bridal feast, in my white veil and orange blossoms, beside the man I had married—and I was as unhappy as I had ever been in my life.” Later on she found she had trouble conforming to the image of a minister’s wife and giving up dancing, enjoying modern music, and other things that minister wives were not supposed to like.

Ewen and Maud had two boys, Chester and Stuart, whom they loved very much. Maud went on to write the rest of the Anne books, in between writing the Emily Starr books and others. She grew more in favor in the eyes of her welcoming readers as time past and she made many public appearances. Even though she did not live on Prince Edward Island during her married life, she went back to visit often.

Unfortunately, during her time as a minister’s wife she became involved in the occult. These beliefs make their way briefly into her Emily books. Outwardly she tried to live the good Christian life most of the time, but it is a good possibility that she was not truly saved. Though her life wasn’t always exemplary, we can still learn and benefit much from her life and writings. As with reading any material, you should be cautious about LMM’s views on certain things.

On April 24th of 1942 Maud passed away at the age of sixty-seven from mental and emotional breakdown. She was completely exhausted from the strain of holding her failing family together as her husband, suffering from depression all his life, got worse with age and also experienced memory loss. Ewen died and was buried beside Maud two years later.

It is unfortunate that such a great author as L. M. Montgomery did not live a completely rich and full life, but her writing did seem to come together in ways that her personal life could not. Anne of Green Gables went on to inspire several movies, a musical, a television miniseries, and even a ballet. Emily of New Moon was also made into a miniseries. Jane of Lantern Hill had a movie that was loosely based on it, and there is possibly a movie adaptation of The Blue Castle also.

Whether you are a “kindred spirit” to Maud or not, I think you will find an irresistible charm in her writings, and even perhaps a bosom friend among her characters.