Anne of the Island

Early life and education

Lucy Maud Montgomery, who published as L. M. Montgomery, was born on November 30, 1874, in Clifton, now New London, on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill, died of tuberculosis when Maud was twenty-one months old. Her father, Hugh John Montgomery, later moved west, and Maud was raised by her maternal grandparents near Cavendish. An only child in an older household, she found companionship in books, nature, imagination, and writing. She also spent time with her mother’s relatives and cousins at Park Corner. The Island’s fields, shorelines, changing seasons, and small communities became enduring sources for her fiction.

Montgomery began writing poetry and keeping a journal at about nine. She attended school in Cavendish and, in 1893, studied at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown. She completed in one year a course normally requiring two and earned a teaching certificate. In 1895–96 she studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She subsequently worked as a teacher and in newspaper writing, experiences that helped shape her knowledge of community life and her disciplined working habits.

Writing career

Her major breakthrough came with Anne of Green Gables (1908), the story of imaginative orphan Anne Shirley and her life on Prince Edward Island. Its immediate success launched Montgomery’s best-known series. She followed it with Anne of Avonlea (1909), Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), The Story Girl (1911), and Chronicles of Avonlea (1912). The Golden Road (1913) continued the story begun in The Story Girl. The Anne books continued with Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), and Rilla of Ingleside (1921). Montgomery also created another memorable heroine in Emily of New Moon (1923), followed by Emily Climbs (1925) and Emily’s Quest (1927), and wrote the novel The Blue Castle (1926). Her output extended well beyond novels to short stories, poems, essays, and journals; she published a substantial body of work over several decades.

In 1911 she married Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and later lived in Leaskdale, Ontario, where she continued writing while meeting family and community responsibilities. Her career encompassed both rejection and extraordinary popularity. Her diaries and other writings document the persistence and daily labor behind her literary achievements, as well as the pressures that accompanied public success. Across her fiction, she returned to questions of imagination, belonging, education, friendship, family, and the possibilities open to women.

Later life and reputation

Montgomery died in Toronto, Ontario, on April 24, 1942, aged sixty-seven. She is remembered above all for creating Anne Shirley, one of the most recognizable characters in children’s literature. The Anne novels have reached readers across generations and countries, and have inspired many adaptations. Their Prince Edward Island settings have also shaped international ideas of Canadian rural life and landscape. Montgomery’s significance, however, is not confined to Anne: her other novels and shorter works demonstrate her range as a storyteller and her sustained interest in women’s inner lives, ambition, community, and the negotiations between dreams and reality. Her vivid characters, humor, and lyrical attention to place have secured her a lasting reputation as a major Canadian author and an influential writer for young readers.