My book came to-day, ‘spleet-new’ from the publishers. I candidly confess that it was to me a proud and wonderful and thrilling moment. There, in my hand, lay the material realization of all the dreams and hopes and ambitions and struggles of my whole conscious existence—my first book. Not a great book, but mine, mine, mine.
– Lucy Maud Montgomery writing in her diary, summer, 1908
One of the earliest things she could remember was the sight of her young mother laying in a coffin, crowned by “smooth masses of golden-brown hair.” In September 1876 Lucy Maud Montgomery was 21 months old, angelic in white embroidered muslin, cradled by her ashen father, eyed by mourning relatives and pitying neighbours. She remembers looking down at her mother’s “sweet face, albeit worn and wasted by months of suffering…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.”
Four years later, her father, a failure in the godly endeavour of making money, left Lucy Maud in the care of her maternal grandparents and went west in search of a rainbow. In one sense “orphaned,” she grew up in a small village on the north side of paradise, Prince Edward Island, raised by stern elders who could not fathom or contain her passionate pixie spirit and whip-smart mind—rather a good plot for a children’s book.
Within the self-contained universe of Cavendish, eleven miles from the railway lines and twenty-four from the next village, Lucy Maud moved through an intricate Scottish tapestry of family myths going back centuries, iron-clad pecking orders, grievances never abandoned, religious frictions that split congregations, and the eternal battle to uphold morals and manners. Her childhood playgrounds encompassed the rugged red cliffs she would introduce to the world, glowing sand, an ocean of endless horizons, forest canopies where individual trees were treasured, and watchful companions blessed with a personality.
Everything was invested with a kind of fairy grace and charm…I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never draw it quite aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I caught a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond—only a glimpse— but those glimpses have always made life worth while.
She immersed herself in other worlds, in the precious few novels she was allowed to read, Charles Dickens of course, endless poets, and general interest magazines peddling “short stories and serials, which I devoured ravenously, crying my eyes out in delicious woe over the agonies of the heroines who were all superlatively beautiful and good. Every one in fiction was either black or white in those days. There were no grays.” She began making up her own characters. In the family sitting room, she would stare at her reflections in the two adjacent oval mirrors framed in the large bookcase. She fashioned the dual reflections into two friends, named them, and talked with them for hours. “I liked to do this at twilight…I cannot describe how real it was to me. I never passed through the room without a wave of my hand to [the friends] in the glass door at the other end.”
If there was magic and wonder all around her, there were no words of love uttered in public by her grandparents. In later middle-age she would write with palpable anguish and longing about a sleepover at her cousins when she was a child. Her aunt came to check on them, Lucy Maud pretending to be asleep as she heard her gentle aunt say with exquisite tenderness, “Dear little children”. Those simple words stuck for the rest of her life. “I loved such expression—I craved it. I have never forgotten it.”
Lucy Maud was nine years old when she decided she could write. At thirteen she submitted a poem to an American magazine. Their rejection devastated her. In 1890, aged fifteen, she tried again, this time with a P.E.I. newspaper which accepted it for publication. “It was the first sweet bubble on the cup of success and of course it intoxicated me.” That was all she needed. She never stopped after that. Neither did the rejections but she accepted those insults as inevitable collateral damage for the glorious adventure she had chosen.
Prince Charles and his wife Camilla share a laugh with actress Katie Kerr portraying Anne of Green Gables in Charlottetown, P.E.I. on Tuesday, May 20, 2014. Paul Chiasson/The Canadian Press.
In 1893, she excelled on the entrance exams for teacher’s college in Charlottetown. She needed an income. She didn’t want to stop writing. So while she taught in rural one-room schools, boarding with families, she would wake up before the sun had risen to sit in her cold bedroom and craft her stories for church and children’s periodicals, making sure to ration fun and delight, “I should like it better if I didn’t have to drag a ‘moral’ into most of them. They won’t sell without it, as a rule. So in the moral must go, broad or subtle, as suits the fibre of the particular editor.”
In 1901, she stopped teaching and returned to Cavendish to look after her widowed grandmother. She was making a modest but living wage with her stories. That fall she took on a short-term position in Halifax as a newspaper proofreader. She was also instructed to pilfer coverage from rival newspapers and generate her own reportage of weddings, engagements, and teas for her paper’s social pages; not funerals though. “Evidently,” she quipped, “funerals have no place in society.” Too tired to write before or after the daily slog, she trained herself to do so at her office desk whenever she caught a spare moment in the chaos.
She returned to Cavendish in 1902, back to her grandmother’s house, as disciplined as ever. “I was just a little magazine hack,” she would later say, (with unpersuasive self-deprecation), “and had to write what the publishers wanted.” By now, she had beheld some 160 short stories and 190 poems in delicious, tangible print but almost 30, she was drifting towards the precipice of spinsterhood. Fortunately, a handsome new Presbyterian minister appeared on the scene and perceived her shining qualities through the scrum of preening maidens. It helped that she, as her grandfather had done, ran the village post office from her grandmother’s kitchen. The minister had many occasions to call upon her to pick up his mail. He would propose and, dear reader, she would accept.
In the spring of 1904, the magazine hack was commissioned by a Sunday school paper to churn out another serial. Lucy Maud Montgomery rummaged through a notebook in search of ideas and uncovered an entry she had made years before. “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.” She may have originally seen this in a newspaper article. She sensed it had potential. Her heroine’s name—Anne—“flashed into my fancy already christened, even to the all important ‘e’…she soon seemed very real to me and took possession of me to an unusual extent. She appealed to me, and I thought it rather a shame to waste her on an ephemeral little serial. Then the thought came, ‘Write a book. You have the central idea. All you need do is to spread it out over enough chapters to amount to a book.’”
And so she did.
Antony Anderson is the author of "The Diplomat: Lester Pearson and the Suez Crisis" and is a senior fellow at the Bill Graham Centre for Contemporary International History. He writes documentaries for various national and international broadcasters. You can find him on X @CanadaHistory1.
