Lucy Maud Montgomery (Plain-Language Summary)

Family Background

Montgomery’s ancestors came to St. John’s Island (now Prince Edward Island) from Scotland in the 1770s. (See Scottish Canadians.) Her maternal great-grandfather, William Simpson Macneill, was a member of the provincial legislature from 1814 to 1838. He was also Speaker of the House of Assembly. Her paternal grandfather, Donald Montgomery, served in the provincial legislature from 1832 to 1874. He was appointed to the Senate by Sir John A. Macdonald. He served there from 1873 to 1893.

Early Life

Montgomery’s mother, Clara Woolner Macneill, died from tuberculosis in 1876. She was only 23 years old. Montgomery was not yet two. Her earliest memory was of seeing her mother in her coffin. She once wrote of the experience:

I did not feel any sorrow, for I knew nothing of what it all meant. I was only vaguely troubled. Why was Mother so still? And why was Father crying? I reached down and laid my baby hand against Mother’s cheek. Even yet I can feel the coldness of that touch.

Montgomery’s childhood was spent with her maternal grandparents in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. Her father, Hugh John Montgomery (1841–1900), moved west to Prince Albert, North-West Territories (now Saskatchewan) in 1887. Maud was still a child. She joined her father and his new family in 1890. But she felt homesick. And she did not get along with her father’s new wife.

Montgomery moved back to the Macneill homestead in 1891. She also spent much of her childhood with her extended maternal family and her paternal grandfather. They all lived in nearby Park Corner, PEI. However, her grandparents showed her little affection. Her childhood was mainly one of loneliness and isolation. These feelings remained with her throughout her life. She coped by escaping into her imagination, and by reading and writing.

Early Career

Lucy Maud Montgomery once wrote in her journals, “I cannot remember a time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be an author. To write has always been my central purpose around which every effort and hope and ambition of my life has grouped itself.” She began writing poetry and journals when she was nine. She started writing short stories in her mid-teens. She published them first in local newspapers. She then sold them to magazines in both Canada and the US.

Her first publication, a poem titled “On Cape Le Force,” was printed in the Charlottetown Patriot on 26 November 1890. It was only a few days before her 16th birthday. At first, she used the pen names Maud Cavendish or Joyce Cavendish. She finally settled on L.M. Montgomery to hide her gender.

In 1894, she completed a teachers’ training course. She graduated from the two-year program with honours after only one year. She also studied English literature (1895–96) at the Halifax Ladies’ College at Dalhousie College (now Dalhousie University. It was during this time that she was first paid for her writing.

She taught in village schools in Belmont and Lower Bedeque, PEI, in the late-1890s. But she was soon earning a decent amount from her writing. After her grandfather died in 1898, she returned to Cavendish to live with her grandmother. In the winter of 1901–02, she worked as a proofreader for the Daily Echo in Halifax. She also wrote a weekly society column under the alias “Cynthia.” She spent 1898–1911 in Cavendish writing poems and stories for publication. She also worked in the local post office. It was run by the Macneills from their homestead.

Personal Life and Relationships

As a young woman, Lucy Maud Montgomery was slim, striking and highly intelligent. She drew the attention of many suitors. She had several romantic relationships. In her teens in Cavendish, she declined a marriage proposal from a boy named Nate Lockhart. During her post-secondary studies, she was courted by one of her teachers, John A. Mustard, and by Will Pritchard, the brother of her friend Laura Pritchard.

In 1897, Montgomery became secretly engaged to Edwin Simpson. He was a distant cousin who was studying to become a Baptist minister. But within a year, she was in a passionate romance with Hermann Leard, a farmer. She broke off her engagement with Simpson, much to her family’s dismay. In 1899, shortly after Montgomery returned to Cavendish to live with her grandmother, Leard died from influenza. Montgomery’s interest in romantic love seemingly died with him.

Marriage and Family Life

On 5 July 1911, Lucy Maud Montgomery married Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald. She had been secretly engaged to him since late-1906. Ewen was assigned a parish in Leaskdale, Ontario. They moved there later in 1911. Maud and Ewen’s first son, Chester, was born in 1912. A second son, Hugh, was stillborn in 1914. The third, Stuart, was born in 1915.

Maud and Ewen remained in Ontario with Chester and Stuart. In 1926, they moved to the small village of Norval. In 1935, they relocated to Toronto. They lived in a house near the Humber River that Maud called “Journey’s End.”

Montgomery’s roles as mother and minister’s wife made many demands on her time. The situation was made worse by Ewen’s unstable mental health. He was admitted to a sanatorium in 1934. He resigned from his parish in Norval in 1935. Montgomery herself suffered from mental illness, including depression.

Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Lucy Maud Montgomery completed her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, in 1905. It was inspired by such children’s books as Little Women and Alice in Wonderland. Montgomery had also seen a newspaper story about an English couple who had arranged to adopt a boy but were sent a girl. The manuscript was rejected by every publisher she sent it to. She gave up and kept it in a hat box. In 1907, she tried again. She secured a publishing deal with L.C. Page in Boston. 

Released in June 1908, the book sold more than 19,000 copies in its first five months. It was reprinted 10 times in its first year. It garnered widespread acclaim. American author Mark Twain called lead character Anne Shirley “the dearest, most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice.” By the end of the First World War, Lucy Maud Montgomery was a household name in the English-speaking world.

Publishing Contracts and Rights

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s contract with her first publisher, L.C. Page, required her to produce two sequels to Anne of Green Gables. These were Anne of Avonlea (1909) and Anne of the Island (1915). She then wrote four more books under contract to Page: Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), The Story Girl (1911), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912) and The Golden Road (1913).

In 1920, Page published a collection of Montgomery’s stories, Further Chronicles of Avonlea, that were still in his possession. But Montgomery had not renewed her contract with him. She sued and ended her relationship with Page. By this time, Page held the rights to her first six books. Montgomery shifted to Canadian publishers McClelland and Stewart and American publishers Frederick Stokes in 1917. For the next decade, she engaged in a series of bitter lawsuits with Page over royalties and rights.  

Other Notable Publications

With McClelland and Stewart and Stokes, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote five more Anne books: Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Rilla of Ingleside (1920), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) and  Anne of Ingleside (1939). They also published her best-selling Emily trilogy — Emily of New Moon (1923), Emily Climbs (1925) and Emily’s Quest (1927) — as well as six other novels: The Blue Castle (1926), Magic for Marigold (1929), A Tangled Web (1931), Pat of Silver Bush (1933), Mistress Pat (1935) and Jane of Lantern Hill (1937).

By the time she died, Montgomery had published 20 novels, two books of short stories and one book of poetry. She had also written a brief autobiography (The Alpine Path: the Story of My Career in 1917) as well as the many poems, stories and articles she wrote for magazines. Most of these were republished in anthologies after her death.

Thematic Concerns

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s fiction always returns to representations and stories related to motherhood and maternity. Much of her writing sees motherhood as crucial work for women and focuses mainly on the education of girls.

Business Affairs and Legal Issues

Lucy Maud Montgomery eventually became an astute businesswoman. She ensured a stable and solid income, which enabled her to maintain a nice life for her family. This was a great achievement for a female writer in the early 20th century. However, she did not profit much from the sale of her first books, even Anne of Green Gables. The royalties she was given in her first contract with Page were small. Page also kept the profits from licensing, reprints and adaptations.

In the decades since Montgomery’s death, a thriving industry of TV series, stage productions and Anne-related products has flourished. The licensing, broadcasting and merchandising rights to Anne of Green Gables have become very valuable. They have been the subject of many legal disputes. All licensing rights are now held jointly by Montgomery’s heirs and the province of Prince Edward Island (through the Anne of Green Gables Licensing Authority).

Death and Mental Health

The circumstances of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s death have been the subject of great controversy. She died in Toronto in 1942. Her body was taken by train to Prince Edward Island. A funeral was held at the Macneill homestead in Cavendish. It had by then become Prince Edward Island National Park.

The cause of Montgomery’s death was listed as heart failure. But in 2008, Montgomery’s granddaughter, Kate Macdonald Butler, revealed that her family had long believed Montgomery’s death to have been a suicide by drug overdose. She explained that her father, Stuart Macdonald, had found a note by his mother’s bedside asking for “forgiveness.” This note had been kept secret by the family ever since. Macdonald Butler stated that the family’s motive for coming forward with the news was to help lift some of the stigma around mental illness.

However, University of Guelph professor Mary Rubio, a leading authority on Montgomery and her work, offered a different take on her death. She argued that the note cannot conclusively be seen as a suicide note. She believes it may in fact be the last page of a journal entry. Rubio co-edited Montgomery’s multi-volume journals published between 1985 and 2004. She believes that the number “176” at the top of the note indicates that it was page 176 in a handwritten journal. The missing 175 pages have never been found. Rubio has argued that they may have been taken by Montgomery’s eldest son, Chester Macdonald.

But Rubio has also conceded that Montgomery was “suffering unbearable psychological pain” and was addicted to barbiturates. She had also told a friend a month before her death that “she had doubts that she would still be there in a week.”

Heritage Sites and Landmarks

Thousands of tourists visit Prince Edward Island each year to see the “sacred sites” related to Anne of Green Gables.

In 1983, the City of Toronto named a park near Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Toronto home in her honour. Montgomery’s home in Leaksdale, Ontario, and the Green Gables area around her Cavendish home in PEI, were named National Historic Sites in 1997 and 2004, respectively. The latter has been open to the public since 1985.

In 2017, the manse in Norval, Ontario, where Montgomery lived with her family until 1935, was bought by the L.M. Montgomery Heritage Society of Halton Hills. It plans to turn the home into a museum.

Legacy

Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novels remain in print. They continue to be the focus of critical and scholarly attention. A 2014 reader poll conducted by CBC Books declared Anne Shirley Canada’s most iconic fictional character. Mary Rubio has called Anne of Green Gables “Canada’s most enduring literary export.”

In the 1970s, second-wave feminists such as Margaret Atwood began to champion Montgomery’s work. Montgomery and the character of Anne Shirley came to be seen as feminist heroes who were ahead of their time. As the Guardian’s Jean Hannah Edelstein wrote in 2009, “It’s never stated explicitly, but Anne is definitely a feminist, and being a feminist in early 20th-century Canada is a difficult path to follow.” In a 2016 interview, Anne with an E executive producer Moira Walley-Beckett, declared Anne “a patron saint of female outsiders.”

The publication of the first of Montgomery’s journals in 1985 further revealed her mature, complicated and sometimes troubled mind. In 1993, the University of Prince Edward Island founded the L.M. Montgomery Institute. It hosted the first International L.M. Montgomery Conference in 1994. The biannual event attracts hundreds of academics and fans from around the world.

Montgomery’s materials are held at the University of Guelph’s L.M. Montgomery Research Centre.

Tributes

Lucy Maud Montgomery and her characters achieved a level of fame that was unheard of in Canadian fiction. In 1927, Montgomery received a fan letter from British Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin and met with the Prince of Wales (later King Edward VIII) in Toronto. That fame only continued to grow after her death. Numerous institutions and organizations around the world are named after Anne Shirley or Green Gables. These include The School of Green Gables, a nursing school in Okayama, Japan.

Anne of Green Gables enjoys its highest degree of popularity in Poland and Japan. The book was published in seven editions in Poland between the First and Second World Wars. It was voted the country’s fourth most popular book in a 1932 poll. Anne of the Island, the third book in the Anne series, was published by the Polish Army in Palestine during the Second World War In Japan, the novel resonated with an orphaned population following the War. It has been a mandatory part of the public school curriculum in Japan since 1952.

In 1996, the CBC TV series Life & Times aired an episode on Montgomery titled “Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Long Road to Fame.” Melanie Fishbane’s young adult novel Maud was published by Penguin Random House in 2017.

Honours

In 1923, Lucy Maud Montgomery became the first Canadian woman to be made a member of the British Royal Society of Arts. In 1924, she was named one of the “Twelve Greatest Women in Canada” by the Toronto Star. In 1935, she was named to both the Order of the British Empire and the Literary and Artistic Institute of France. In 1943, she was named a Person of National Historic Significance by the Government of Canada.

Canada Post issued stamps in honour of Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables in 1975 and again in 2008, to mark the novel’s centennial. In 2016, the Bank of Canada included Montgomery in a list of 12 candidates to become the first Canadian woman to be featured alone on Canadian currency. (See Women on Canadian Banknotes.)

Writings

Novels

• Anne of Green Gables Series
• Anne of Green Gables (1908)
• Anne of Avonlea(1909)
• Anne of the Island(1915)
• Anne's House of Dreams(1917)
• Rainbow Valley(1919)
• Rilla of Ingleside(1921)
• Anne of Windy Poplars(1936)
• Anne of Ingleside(1939)
• The Blythes Are Quoted(2009)

Emily Trilogy

• Emily of New Moon(1923)
• Emily Climbs(1925)
• Emily's Quest(1927)

Pat of Silver Bush Series

• Pat of Silver Bush(1933)
• Mistress Pat(1935)

The Story Girl Series

• The Story Girl(1911)
• The Golden Road(1913)

Others

• Kilmeny of the Orchard(1910)
• The Blue Castle(1926)
• Magic for Marigold(1929)
• A Tangled Web(1931)
• Jane of Lantern Hill(1937)

Short Story Collections

• Chronicles of Avonlea (1912)
• Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920)
• The Road to Yesterday(1974)
• The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories (1979)
• Akin to Anne: Tales of Other Orphans (1988)
• Along the Shore: Tales by the Sea (1989)
• Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side (1990)
• After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed (1991)
• Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement (1993)
• At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales (1994)
• Across the Miles: Tales of Correspondence (1995)
• Christmas with Anne and Other Holiday Stories (1995)

Poetry

• The Watchman and Other Poems(1916)
• The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery (1987)

Journals, Letters, and Essays

• The Green Gables Letters from L.M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905–1909(1960)
• The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career(1917; 1974)
• My Dear Mr. M: Letters to G.B. MacMillan from L.M. Montgomery(1980)
• The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery(5 vols., 1985–2004)
• The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1889–1900(2012)
• The Complete Journals of L.M. Montgomery: The PEI Years, 1901–1911(2013)
• The L.M. Montgomery Reader, Volume 1: A Life in Print(2013)
• M. Montgomery's Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1911–1917(2016)
• M. Montgomery's Complete Journals: The Ontario Years, 1918–1921(2017)

Non-fiction

• Courageous Women(1934)