L. M. Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and her life shaped almost everything she wrote. Her mother died of tuberculosis before Maud turned two, and her father, unable or unwilling to raise her, handed her over to his wife’s parents — Alexander and Lucy Macneill — in the small farming village of Cavendish. She grew up in their strict Presbyterian household, an imaginative and lonely child among elderly relatives, wandering the red-dirt roads and shore paths that would later become Avonlea.

She trained as a teacher at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, taught briefly in rural PEI schools, and spent a year at Dalhousie in Halifax studying literature. When her grandfather died in 1898 she returned to Cavendish to keep house for her widowed grandmother — a duty that kept her tied to the island for thirteen years. During that stretch she wrote constantly: poems, stories, and sketches for magazines, building a modest income and a growing reputation. In 1905 she drafted a novel about an orphan girl sent by mistake to an elderly brother and sister who had wanted a boy. Publishers rejected it repeatedly. She put the manuscript in a hatbox. When she pulled it out and tried again in 1907, the L.C. Page Company of Boston accepted it, and Anne of Green Gables appeared in June 1908.

The book was an immediate international bestseller. After her grandmother’s death in 1911 she married Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister she had been quietly engaged to for five years, and moved to Ontario, where he took a parish in Leaskdale. She spent the rest of her life in Ontario manses, raising two sons (a third was stillborn), performing the endless duties of a minister’s wife, and writing — over twenty novels, hundreds of stories and poems, and the extensive private journals that later transformed how she is understood.

The Life Behind the Books

Because those journals, published beginning in the 1980s, revealed a much darker life than her sunny fiction suggested. Her husband suffered from what he called “religious melancholia” — recurrent depressive episodes with delusions of damnation — and she kept his condition hidden for decades to protect his ministry. She fought a long, exhausting lawsuit against her original publisher over royalties and rights. Her elder son Chester was a chronic disappointment: expelled from school, disbarred from law, unfaithful to his wife, financially ruinous. She herself struggled with depression and heavy reliance on barbiturates and bromides prescribed for her nerves.

She died in Toronto in April 1942. The family long described it as heart failure. In 2008 her granddaughter revealed publicly what the family had known: Montgomery left a note, and her death was almost certainly a suicide by drug overdose. She was sixty-seven, exhausted by her son’s disasters, her husband’s illness, and the darkening news from wartime Europe.

Legacy

Her literary reputation has only grown. She is now recognized as one of the major Canadian writers of the twentieth century, and Anne of Green Gables has been continuously in print for over a hundred years, translated into more than thirty languages, and adapted endlessly for stage, film, and television. The Cavendish farmhouse that inspired Green Gables is a Canadian national historic site and one of the most visited literary shrines in the world.

— The Editors