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About L. M. Montgomery

About the Author

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island on November 30th, 1874. Following her mother’s death from tubercolosis, the infant Montgomery was committed to the care of her maternal grandparents in nearby Cavendish, P.E.I. The adolescent Montgomery found little sympathy in her stern, reticent grandparents, particularly with regard to her literary ambitions. At age 15, Montgomery joined her enterprising father and step-family in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. She returned to the Island only a year later. She completed her education at Prince of Wales College, Charlottetown, P.E.I. and later Dalhousie University, Halifax, Nova Scotia. Montgomery taught school in three rural communities on P. E. I. (Bideford, Belmont and Lower Bedeque) until her grandfather’s death in 1898, which recalled her to Cavendish to care for her grandmother. From 1898 - 1911, Montgomery wrote fiction and poetry for magazines, publishing her first novel Anne of Green Gables in 1908.

In 1911, Montgomery was freed by her grandmother’s death. She married Presbyterian minister Reverend Ewan Macdonald and moved to Ontario, where he served the parishes of Leaskdale from 1910 - 1926, and Norval/Union from 1926 - 1935. Montgomery had two sons, Chester (born 1912) and Stuart (born 1915), and juggled the responsibilities of a country minister’s wife alongside her international fame as an author. Montgomery was frequently strained by family financial problems, her husband’s mental illness, and the deaths of her close friends. She died on April 24th, 1942 in Toronto and was buried in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

Montgomery is best known for her imaginative, redhaired creation Anne of Green Gables, which has become a Canadian cultural icon. Montgomery is the author of 21 novels and many more published short stories and poetry, all featuring Canadian settings, namely her native Prince Edward Island. She contributed to various Toronto writer’s societies and held presidentship of the Women’s Press Club, where she made acquaintance with other prominent Canadian female figures like suffragette Nellie McClung. In honour of her literary accomplishments, she was made a Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts (1923), a Companion of the Order of the British Empire and a member of the Literary and Artistic Institute of France (1935), and was presented to Prince George, Prince of Wales and the British Prime Minister in 1927. The popularity of her works continue in print and screen productions worldwide.

Montgomery is traditionally viewed as a genteel Victorian writer who wrote “tales of sweetness and light” for young girls. The darker threads in her works have been drawn to attention with the publication of her private journals in 1987-2004. Current academic criticism examines the constraints she faced as a female writer for the popular market in post- WWI Canada, and most of all the complex layers in her life-writing. The diaries she left behind not only reveal her unhappy life, vastly different from those of her fictional heroines, but are also heavily expurgated documents. She was depressed towards the end of her life, and there is controversy of whether or not she committed suicide.