In 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery put pen to paper and created one of the most iconic and heartwarming protagonists of all time.
Red-headed, eleven-year-old Anne Shirley is a plucky, joyous orphan raised on the idyllic Prince Edward Island, Canada. She is adopted by two siblings, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had asked for a boy but were mistakenly sent a girl. While the death of her parents is tragic and the adults around her are initially distant and hardened, Anne’s unshakable spirit and wonder of the world soon wins them over. Throughout eight books, we watch Anne grow up, fall in love with the dreamy Gilbert Blythe, start a family of her own, and build a place for herself in the world.
Anne’s story is one of overcoming obstacles, winning hearts, and the undeniable beauty of being alive. It is a story many of us can attest to having needed at some point in our lives. What many don’t know, however, is that it is a story its author desperately needed too.
L.M. Montgomery was born in 1874 in Canada.
Like Anne, she lost her parents at a young age, however, in a slightly different way. Her mother died when she was two, and her father sent her away to Prince Edward Island to be raised by her grandparents. Her father’s abandonment was the first of many hardships Montgomery would struggle to overcome.
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Like Anne, she was a spirited and willful child, often clashing with her more traditional grandparents. “Grandfather Macneill, in all the years I knew him, was a stern, domineering, irritable man,” Montgomery wrote in her diary, which she instructed to be published after her death. “Grandmother was kind to me in her own way. Her ‘way’ was very often torture to me and I was constantly reproached with ingratitude and wickedness.”
From the time she was dreaming in her childhood bedroom, Montgomery knew that she wanted to be a writer, but such a future for a young girl was inconceivable to many.
For her family, the young girl’s hopes and aspirations were not only impossible but absurd and worthy of ridicule. No one embodied this more than her aunt Emily, who often watched her when she was young. “I can never forgive her for the sneers and slurs she used to call upon my childish ambitions and childish faults,” Montgomery wrote of her Aunt.
Aunt Emily’s almost insane level of hatred for her niece’s writing did not change even after she became a published author. Allegedly when reading aloud from Montgomery’s novel A Tangled Web, Emily threw the book down and declared “I’m ashamed to know her!”
Still, Montgomery was determined to live a writer’s life, no matter what others thought. Between 1897 and 1908, the year that Anne of Green Gables was released, she wrote and published an astounding 100 short stories. For inspiration, she drew from her own childhood, often taking passages from her diary and inserting them into Anne. While the similarities between Montgomery and Anne are undeniable, it is also clear the author softened the edges, perhaps creating for Anne the “kindred spirits” and “bosom friends” she herself was denied.
This can be seen too in the story of lovely Gilbert Blythe, who adores Anne from afar and eventually marries her. Montgomery’s supposed first love, a neighboring farm hand, died young of illness. She later married Rev. Ewan Macdonald but struggled with her husband’s mental illness and chafed within the strict confines of a wife’s role, particularly the wife of a Reverend.
She and Ewan would have three sons, and to this day, her family maintains the Park Circle home she grew up in on Prince Edward Island. It is now a museum dedicated to her legacy.
On April 24th, 1942, after sending off a final manuscript of Anne to her publisher, Montgomery died of a drug overdose at age 67. In 2008, it was revealed by her granddaughter Kate MacDonald Butler that she had struggled with debilitating depression for much of her life and that her death was a suicide. “I am proud of her courage, given how isolated and lonely she must have felt during certain periods of her life. I wish her family and community had some of the tools that are available today,” she writes.
L.M. Montgomery’s life was far from the idyllic, charming existence Anne led. However in creating Anne’s story, she gave herself, and by extension us, some solace from an often unkind world. Throughout her career, she wrote and published 500 poems, 350 short stories, 50 essays, and 20 novels.
Anne of Green Gables has sold 50 million copies since its publication, been translated into 36 languages, and adapted for stage, film, and television.
The scribbling little girl who was ridiculed for her dreams got the final word, and we were all better for it.
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