Lucy Maud Montgomery Info

Lucy Maud Montgomery at age 10

Canadian author of the famous ANNE OF GREEN GABLES series, Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874 on Prince Edward Island in Clifton (now New London). Like many of her heroines, she was left motherless at the age of almost two, when her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery, died of tuberculosis. Her merchant father, Hugh John Montgomery, left her with her maternal grandparents, moving to the western provinces and he remarried.

Maud (as she was called) spent the next 14 years in Cavendish in an atmosphere of strict discipline. At the age of 15, her writing was first recognized when her first poem was published in a local paper.

At 16, she was sent to stay with her father and her stepmother in Prince Albert, Sasketchewan, but returned to her grandparents’ home a year later, where she continued her education in Cavendish.

In 1895, Montgomery got a teacher’s license at Prince Wales College in Charlottetown. She studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax until 1896 and taught school back on Prince Edward Island.

Lucy Maud Montgomery at age 29

During this time, her grandmother became ill and was widowed. Maud returned to Cavendish to take care of her grandmother, and worked at a local post office. She wrote the first book of the Anne of Green Gables series while caring for her grandmother. It was rejected by several publishers before finally being published in 1908

Her grandmother died passed away in 1911 and Montgomery married Ewan MacDonald, a Presbyterian minister. They moved away to to Leaskdale, Ontario, just north of Toronto. Here, she continued to write the Avonlea series and also published a book of poetry in 1916. She also had three children, losing one at birth.

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote other series with heroines with different personalities than Anne Shirley. In 1926, she published her first novel for adults, The Blue Castle.

Over a long career in writing, Montgomery was made Fellow of the British Royal Society of Arts in 1923, a Companion of the Order of the British Empire, and a member of the Literary and Artistic Institute of France, in 1935. Beginning in the 1980s, Montgomery’s complete journals, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, were published by the Oxford University Press. From 1988-95, editor Rea Wilmshurst collected and published numerous previously unknown short stories by Montgomery.

Lucy Maud Montgomery died April 24, 1942, and was buried in Cavendish cemetery. Her husband died a year later. They were survived by their two sons, Chester and Stuart.

You may also like...

Leave a Reply

Your email address will not be published. Required fields are marked *