Lucy Maud Mntgomery

Lucy Maud Mntgomery

The author of the famous Canadian novel ‘ ANNE OF GREEN GABLES’, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, 30th November, 1874. When she was two, her mother died of tuberculosis. Her father, who was a merchant, remarried, and moved away. Montgomery was raised by her maternal grandparents in Cavendish. The place was isolated and her childhood was not particularly happy: she grew up in an atmosphere of strict discipline and punishment for the slightest reason. She joined her father briefly in Prince Albert, but they soon returned to Prince Edward Island.

At an early age Montgomery read widely. She started to write in school and had her first poem published in a local paper at the age of fifteen. In 1895 Montgomery qualified for a teacher’s license at Prince Wales College, Charlottetown. During the 1890’s she worked as a teacher in Bideford and at Lower Bedeque, both on Prince Edward Island.

From 1895 to 1896, Montgomery studied literature at Dalhousie University, Halifax. She returned to Cavendish to take care of her grandmother and worked at a local post office. On July 5th, 1911after her grandmother died, Montgomery married the Reverend Ewan MacDonald, to whom she had been secretly engaged since 1906. Prior to her engagement to Macdonald, she had two romantic involvements: an unhappy engagement to her third cousin Edwin Simpson, of Belmont, and a brief but passionate romantic attachment to Herman Leard, of Lower Bedeque. After their marriage, Montgomery and Macdonald moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, where Macdonald was Minister in the Presbyterian Church. She bore three sons, Chester (1912), Hugh (stillborn in 1914), and Stuart (1915). She assisted her husband in his pastoral duties, ran their home, and continued to write best-selling novels as well as short stories and poems. She faithfully recorded entries in her journals and kept up an enormous correspondence with friends, family and fans. Maud Montgomery Macdonald did not live on Prince Edward Island again, returning only for vacations.

While caring for her grandmother, she wrote the first book of the Anne series. It drew on her girlhood experiences. The idea was based on a notebook entry from 1904, “Elderly couple applies to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent to them.”

Anne of Green Gables was the story of a talkative, red-haired orphan, Anne Shirley. She had big green-grey eyes and a narrow, freckled face. Matthew Cuthbert and his sister Marilla, have adopted her from an orphanage in Nova Scotia. The book became hugely popular, although The New York Times critic (July 18, 1908) wrote: “…there is no real difference between the girl at the end of the story and the one at the beginning of it. All the other characters in the book are human enough.” The sequels followed Anne’s life from childhood to adulthood-she marries Gilbert Blythe, a doctor, loses her first child but her life is then fulfilled with the birth of Little Jem. The initial volume has been filmed several times, adapted for stage and translated into some 40 languages.

Montgomery’s