The Troubled Life of L.M. Montgomery

Louisa Maud Montgomery was born in the small village of Clifton (known today as New London) on the north shore of Prince Edward Island, but, upon of the death of her mother, was sent to live with her maternal grandparents in nearby Cavendish. 

From a young age, Montgomery kept a journal in which she wrote freely about the significant people, places and events in her life, a habit which she continued well into later adulthood. Her entries portray a difficult childhood. The imaginative and free-spirited Maud found herself frequently at odds with her elderly grandparents, who favored an austere Presbyterian lifestyle and struggled to understand their granddaughter’s predilection for sudden flights of fancy. 

The young girl did attend the local one-room schoolhouse, but Cavendish was such an isolated farming community that she only ever had limited contact with other children of her own age. “This drove me in on myself and early forced me to construct a world of fancy and imagination very different indeed from the world in which I lived,” she later recalled. 

Montgomery’s flair for creative writing soon extended beyond her own journal. She was just 16 years of age when her first poem was published on the front page of the island’s leading newspaper, and a couple of stories followed soon afterwards. Professional opportunities for budding women writers were then still extremely limited, and so Montgomery turned to teaching as a profession. She taught at three schools on the island, interspersed with a period of study at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, before returning to Cavendish to care for her grandmother when her grandfather died in March 1898.

This enforced change in lifestyle at least gave her the opportunity to focus more on her writing. Montgomery’s biographer, Mary Rubio, estimates that by the early 1900s she was earning the then not inconsiderable sum of around $500 per annum from her writing. Yet, for the most part, these years marked a transition in outlook from the impulsive sunny optimism of youth, later so memorably embodied in her most famous fictional character, to a growing sense of disillusionment with the course her life was taking. 

“Only lonely people keep diaries,” Montgomery once wrote, revealing in that single succinct remark the reason why she committed her innermost thoughts and feelings to paper for much of her life. She became adept at adopting a cheerful public persona often far removed from how she actually felt. In 1903, she described herself as “tired of existence,” continuing “I am practically alone in the world. Soon youth will be gone and I shall have to face a drab, solitary, struggling middle age. It is not a pleasant prospect”.

Not long after this particularly despondent diary entry, Montgomery began work on the book which was to make her name. Like so many writers, she had long kept a notebook in which she jotted down random ideas that might come in useful for future projects. In search of inspiration for a story, she came across a long-forgotten entry from over a decade earlier: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.”

From such slight beginnings, Montgomery created one of the most enduringly popular characters of children’s literature, but Anne of Green Gables did not meet with immediate success. Having completed the book in late 1905, Montgomery sent the manuscript to five different publishers, only for it to be rejected by all of them. The author put “Anne” away in an old hat box and there it remained for two years until, upon rereading the manuscript, she decided to give one last publisher a try. L.C. Page & Company of Boston agreed to publish the book and Anne of Green Gables hit the shelves in June 1908.

The book became an instant bestseller. Praise from one reviewer that “the book radiates happiness and optimism” prompted Montgomery to comment in her journal: “When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom and care under which it was written I wonder at this.” Yet, like all the great children’s authors, Montgomery possessed an innate ability to escape into an alternative magical reality and take her readers with her.

A sequel, Anne of Avonlea, was published the following year, but it seems Montgomery was already tiring of Anne. The author expressed concerns to a regular correspondent, George Boyd MacMillan, that she would come to “bitterly repent” having created the character of Anne. This prediction proved right. Following a change of publisher, Montgomery was tasked with writing six more sequels over a period spanning more than two decades, taking Anne’s story through college to marriage and motherhood.

Montgomery’s grandmother died in March 1911 and, to the surprise of many, the author announced within a matter of weeks that she was to be married to a 40-year-old Presbyterian minister named Ewan MacDonald, whom she had known for around five years. The decision was clearly made for pragmatic, rather than sentimental, reasons. “This is a practical world and marriage must share in its practicalities,” Montgomery wrote. 

In early 1922, Montgomery finished a new book called Emily of New Moon. She described it as “the best book I have written—and I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others.” Like Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables, the book’s heroine, Emily Byrd Starr, is a spirited and imaginative young girl who struggles to fit into the alien new world to which she is reluctantly sent as an orphan. However, whereas the sunnily optimistic Anne is soon accepted and nurtured by those around her, Emily is a much more driven and complex character who faces an uphill battle to achieve success as a writer. 

As such, Emily’s story, which is continued in two sequels, Emily Climbs and Emily’s Quest, reflects Montgomery’s own experiences far more than the Anne of Green Gables series ever does.

Montgomery’s final novel, Jane of Lantern Hill, was published in 1937. Five years later, she died suddenly, aged 67, in Toronto, where she was then living. She was laid to rest in the cemetery at Cavendish on Prince Edward Island. Years later, her granddaughter, Kate MacDonald Butler, revealed shockingly that a note had been found near her bedside which led the family to believe she had almost certainly taken her own life. In her final years her writing output had dwindled almost to nothing, even in her personal journal. It seems that eventually even her beloved writing proved unable to offer her the escapism she craved from her troubled personal life.

The Canadian author’s books have continued to attract fans ever since her death, with a marked revival of interest in recent years sparked by several popular TV adaptations. Despite Montgomery’s personal demons, an underlying thread of optimism permeates her books, encapsulated in the idea that if you are blessed with a well-developed imagination and an appreciation for the beauty of the natural world, it is possible to navigate a path through life’s challenges. In an increasingly complex world this deceptively simple central message still resonates with many readers today.