Author: Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and lost her mother to tuberculosis before she was two. Her father remarried and effectively handed her over to her maternal grandparents in Cavendish, the village that would later become the model for Avonlea. She was raised in a strict Presbyterian household with little open affection, and she escaped early into writing. She published her first poem at fifteen and her first paid story not long after. The success of Anne of Green Gables in 1908 changed her life and trapped her in equal measure. Her publishers wanted more Anne. She kept writing it, eight novels eventually, plus the Emily of New Moon trilogy, the Pat books, A Tangled Web, Jane of Lantern Hill, and several short story collections. Underneath all of it she kept detailed journals that were not published until after her death and that revealed a much darker private life than her readers would have guessed. Her marriage to the Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald was unhappy. Macdonald suffered from severe religious melancholy and was repeatedly hospitalized. Their elder son Chester turned out to be an unstable adult who caused her significant grief. She managed her depression with sleeping medication for years. She died in 1942, and her granddaughter announced publicly in 2008 that Montgomery had likely taken her own life. The note that survived suggested as much, though the family has been careful in how it discusses the question. Whatever the answer there, the public record of her writing remains remarkable. She wrote a series of books that have outlasted the cultural moment that produced them and continue to find new readers in roughly every generation since.