Children’s/Young Adult Literature:
Anne of Green Gables, 1908
Anne of Avonlea, 1909
Kilmeny of the Orchard, 1910
The Story Girl, 1911
Chronicles of Avonlea, 1912
The Golden Road, 1913
Anne of the Island, 1915
Anne’s House of Dreams, 1917
Rainbow Valley, 1919
Further Chronicles of Avonlea, 1920
Rilla of Ingleside, 1921
Emily of New Moon, 1923
Emily Climbs, 1925
Emily’s Quest, 1927
Magic for Marigold, 1927
Pat of Silverbush, 1933
Mistress Pat, 1935
Anne of Windy Poplars, 1936
Jane of Lantern Hill, 1937
Anne of Ingleside, 1939
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 (Rea Wilmhurst, editor)
Among the Shadows: Tales from the Darker Side, 1990 (Wilmhurst, editor)
After Many Days: Tales of Time Passed, 1991 (Wilmhurst, editor)
Against the Odds: Tales of Achievement, 1993 (Wilmhurst, editor)
At the Altar: Matrimonial Tales, 1994 (Wilmhurst, editor)
Across the Miles: Tales of Correspondence, 1995 (Wilmhurst, editor)
Christmas with Anne, and Other Holiday Stories, 1995 (Wilmhurst, editor)
Long Fiction:
The Blue Castle, 1926
A Tangled Web, 1931
Poetry:
The Watchman, and Other Poems, 1916
The Poetry of Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1987 (John Ferns and Kevin McCabe, editors)
Nonfiction:
The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, 1917 (serial), 1974 (book)
The Green Gables Letters from L. M. Montgomery to Ephraim Weber, 1905-1909, 1960 (Wilfred Eggleston, editor)
My Dear Mr. M.: Letters to G. B. MacMillan, 1980 (Francis W. P. Bolger and Elizabeth Epperly, editors)
Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Vol. I: 1889-1910, 1985 (Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, editors)
Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Vol. II: 1910-1921, 1987 (Rubio and Waterston, editors)
Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Vol. III: 1921-1929, 1992 (Rubio and Waterston, editors)
Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, Vol. IV: 1929-1942, 1997 (Rubio and Waterston, editors)
Lucy Maude Montgomery–or Maud (without the e), as she affectionately liked to be called–is best known for her eight “Anne” books, beginning with Anne of Green Gables and ending with Anne of Ingleside. The series stars the orphan Anne, who finds a home by getting adopted by a brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who farm on Prince Edward Island. Montgomery wrote similar stories with female protagonists, such as Emily in Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, and Emily’s Quest; Pat in Pat of Silverbush and Mistress Pat; and Jane in Jane of Lantern Hill, but the Anne series became the most famous and Prince Edward Island the setting for all but one of her twenty-one novels.
It can be argued that Montgomery’s characters were autobiographical. Montgomery was a writer at heart, keeping a journal as a child, and imagining all sorts of characters. She wrote her first poem at nine, sent many off for publication at twelve, and published her first poem in the local paper at fifteen. The story of Anne began as a note in one of her daybooks. Maud sometimes thought of herself as an orphan, and she read books such as Frances Hodgson Burnett’s A Little Princess (1905) and Charles Dickens’s David Copperfield (1849-1850).
Maud was the only child of Hugh John Montgomery and Clara Woolner Macneill, of upper English and Scottish society. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Maud was only twenty-one months old. Her father left her living with her elderly and stern maternal grandparents, visiting only occasionally until she was ten, when he moved to Canada’s frontiers. Although he was absent for most of her childhood, she adored him. When her father married a twenty-four-year-old woman, Maud was fifteen, and she traveled by train to live with them in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan. After only a year, Montgomery returned home to Prince Edward Island.
At sixteen, Montgomery was expected to marry or start a career. Always desiring to be a writer, however, she wanted a college degree. She saved her money, and with some help from her father and grandparents, was able to attend Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, where she excelled and won awards for her writing. She worked as a teacher and journalist and studied further at Dahlhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. When her maternal grandmother became ill, Maud moved back to Prince Edward Island to care for her. Maud’s father died suddenly from a flu virus in 1900.
In 1907 Anne of Green Gables was accepted for publication by L. C. Page of Boston, and her career was launched. After her grandmother died, Montgomery married a minister, Ewan MacDonald, in 1911. They pastored several churches in Canada, and in 1912, at age thirty-seven, she gave birth to a son, Chester. In 1914 she suffered the death of her second son, Hugh, who was stillborn with a knot in his umbilical cord. In 1915 a healthy third son, Evan Stuart, was born. When she received royalties from her writings, she hired a maid so she could continue to write. Throughout their marriage her husband suffered from an undiagnosed mental illness, and often Maud took over church duties and cared for him. Still, she made time to write in the margins of her busy life–daily journals, many letters, poems, and more than twenty books. Returning to the popular Anne series just before her death, Maud finished the last Anne book, coming back full circle to her familiar friend.
Accused of writing too much sentimentality, Montgomery might well have answered that life is sentimental. She died at age sixty-seven and was buried, at her request, in the Cavendish graveyard, looking down on the sea from her beloved Prince Edward Island.