Lucy Maud Montgomery Biography Quotes 10 Report mistakes

Early Life and Family
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874, in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her parents were Hugh John Montgomery, a merchant, and Clara Woolner Macneill. When Montgomery was not yet two years old, her mother died of tuberculosis, a loss that shadowed her sense of belonging and informed her writing about orphaned or displaced children. After Clara's death, Montgomery was raised in Cavendish by her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill, in a strict but affectionate household deeply rooted in the rhythms of rural Island life. Her father later remarried and settled in Prince Albert, in what is now Saskatchewan; Montgomery spent a year with him as a teenager but returned to Cavendish, feeling more at home among the landscapes and communities that would nourish her imagination.

Education and Apprenticeship as an Educator
Montgomery attended local schools and proved an exceptional student. She earned a teacher's license at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, completing the two-year program in one year. She later pursued literature courses at Dalhousie University in Halifax, an unusual step for a woman at the time and a testament to her ambition as a writer. She taught in rural schools across Prince Edward Island, including Bideford and Lower Bedeque, experiences that honed her observational skills and introduced her to the daily dramas of small communities. Teaching supported her financially while she steadily built a freelance career in newspapers and magazines, publishing poems and short stories in outlets such as The Youth's Companion and other North American periodicals.

Early Writing and Halifax Interlude
In addition to teaching, Montgomery worked in Halifax for a time, including on the staff of a daily paper, which exposed her to the pace of city journalism and sharpened her editorial sense. By the late 1890s she had returned to Cavendish to care for her aging grandmother. That period of relative seclusion was also one of intense productivity. She wrote steadily, sold numerous stories and poems, and developed the discipline that would sustain her later success. Her early romantic life included an engagement to Edwin Simpson, a Presbyterian minister, which she ended, and a passionate attachment to Herman Leard, a farmer, which she also relinquished. These complex relationships appear in transmuted form throughout her fiction, where duty, yearning, and restraint are recurrent themes.

Breakthrough with Anne of Green Gables
Montgomery began drafting Anne of Green Gables in 1905, drawing on her memories of Cavendish and the farmhouse and fields of her youth. After several rejections, she found a publisher in L. C. Page and Company in Boston. The novel appeared in 1908 and was an immediate success, acclaimed for its lively heroine Anne Shirley, its evocation of Prince Edward Island, and its humor and sentiment balanced by emotional depth. Sequels followed, including Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne's House of Dreams (1917), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), and Anne of Ingleside (1939). She also wrote Kilmeny of the Orchard (1910), The Story Girl (1911), and later, the Emily trilogy (Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily's Quest), which offered a more closely autobiographical portrait of a young writer's apprenticeship.

Marriage, Ministry, and Motherhood
On July 5, 1911, Montgomery married the Reverend Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister. The couple settled first in Leaskdale, Ontario, where she balanced parish life with a demanding writing schedule. They had two sons who survived to adulthood, Chester and Stuart, and another son, Hugh, who was stillborn. Her journals from the Leaskdale years, later published as The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, record the pressures of parish expectations, her husband's struggles with depression, and her own cycles of anxiety and melancholy, alongside the satisfactions of literary accomplishment and domestic life. In 1926 the family moved to Norval, Ontario, and later, in 1935, to the Toronto neighborhood of Swansea, maintaining Montgomery's connection to both rural memory and urban publishing networks.

War, Loss, and the Maturing Voice
World War I altered Montgomery's outlook and fiction. Her novel Rilla of Ingleside (1921) remains notable as a rare home-front chronicle told from the perspective of a Canadian community and a young woman coming of age during the war. The influenza pandemic that followed brought personal sorrow; among the losses she mourned was that of her cousin and confidante Frederica (Frede) Campbell MacFarlane in 1919. Such griefs deepened the complexities of her later novels, in which she increasingly explored adult compromises, disillusionment, and resilience.

Professional Battles and Public Recognition
Despite her popularity, Montgomery was not insulated from the legal and financial hazards of authorship. Disputes with her first American publisher, L. C. Page, over royalties and rights led to protracted litigation. She persevered, changing publishers and managing a formidable output: more than twenty novels, hundreds of short stories, and several volumes of poetry and essays. Her books were translated widely, and early film adaptations, including a 1919 silent version and a 1934 talkie starring the actress who adopted the screen name Anne Shirley, extended her fame. She also wrote the lyrics to The Island Hymn, a tribute to Prince Edward Island that would later be adopted as the province's official anthem.

Private Journals and the Record of a Life
Montgomery kept a detailed journal from 1889 until near her death, documenting her creative process, family life, professional worries, and the landscapes and people that fed her imagination. After her passing, these journals were edited by scholars Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, and selected letters were also published, offering an unparalleled portrait of a major author negotiating gendered expectations, marketplace pressures, and inner weather. The journals illuminate her abiding love for Prince Edward Island, her gratitude to mentors and friends, and her persistent sense that art could redeem the losses of childhood.

Decline and Death
The late 1930s and early 1940s were marked by ill health, concerns over world events, and continuing family stresses. Montgomery died on April 24, 1942, in Toronto. The official cause of death was recorded as coronary thrombosis. Decades later, her granddaughter Kate Macdonald Butler publicly raised the possibility that Montgomery, after years of depression and the strains of caregiving and work, may have taken her own life, a view that has informed nuanced discussions of her final years. She was buried in Cavendish, returning in death to the place that had shaped her imagination and given joy to millions of readers.

Themes, Influence, and Legacy
Montgomery's fiction, often celebrated for its charm, is equally remarkable for its attention to the power of imagination, the ethics of community, the dignity of rural life, and the interiority of girls and women seeking a vocation and a voice. The landscapes of Cavendish, the discipline she cultivated as an educator and journalist, the steady support and occasional turbulence of life with Ewan Macdonald, and the presence of children like Chester and Stuart in her household all informed the texture of her stories. Her conflicts with publishers sharpened her sense of professional identity, while confidants such as Frederica Campbell MacFarlane sustained her spirit. Through Anne Shirley, Emily Starr, and many other characters, she expanded the possibilities of young adult and domestic fiction and helped place Prince Edward Island on the literary map.

Her books have never been out of print, their appeal renewed across generations and media. Tourist pilgrimage to Cavendish and Leaskdale, scholarly editions of her journals and letters by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, and ongoing adaptations testify to a life in which imagination transformed local memory into literature of lasting, international resonance.

Our collection contains 10 quotes who is written by Lucy, under the main topics: Witty One-Liners - Motivational - Faith - Poetry - New Beginnings.