L.M. Montgomery

Canadian · 1874 to 1942

Born Lucy Maud Montgomery on November 30, 1874, in New London, Prince Edward Island, she lost her mother to tuberculosis at twenty-one months and was given over to her stern maternal grandparents in the village of Cavendish, her father moving west to Saskatchewan, where she briefly joined him in 1890 and disliked her stepmother profoundly. The Cavendish childhood was lonely; she invented imaginary friends called Katie Maurice and Lucy Gray who lived behind a bookcase, and walked the island roads listening for what she called "the flash," a sudden moment when the veil between her and a more luminous world seemed to thin. She trained as a teacher at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and studied a year of literature at Dalhousie. From 1897 she sold short stories to magazines steadily, more than a hundred between 1897 and 1907. Anne of Green Gables was published in June 1908 and went through six printings by November of the following year. She continued the series through Anne of the Island (1915), Rilla of Ingleside (1921), and the Emily of New Moon trilogy, twenty novels in all. In 1911 she married the Presbyterian minister Ewen Macdonald and moved to a Leaskdale manse in Ontario without a bathroom; she nursed his religious melancholia for decades while writing eleven of her books from that house. She had three sons; the second was stillborn. Spanish flu nearly killed her in 1918. She was found dead in her Toronto bed on April 24, 1942, aged sixty-seven; the death certificate recorded coronary thrombosis, but a note at her bedside, made public by her granddaughter in 2008, suggested an overdose taken after years of depression.