The World of Anne of Green Gables and Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud or L.M. Montgomery was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island in 1874. (The name of the town is now New London.) Her mother died shortly after her birth and her Grandparents in Cavendish raised her.

Even as a child, she had a vivid imagination and used books and writing to fill her time. She published her first poem, 'On Cape LeForce', while attending the one-room school near her Grandparents' home.

She received her teaching license from the Prince of Wales College and taught at three P.E.I. schools, eventually leaving to study English literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She began her career as an author when she received payment for her writing during the time she spent at Dalhousie.

She returned to Cavendish when her Grandfather died to look after her Grandmother and lived there for most of the next 13 years. While in Cavendish, she wrote and attempted to have published many poems and stories. Eventually, she managed to earn a comfortable living from the earnings of her writing, which was quite an accomplishment for a woman of those times.

In 1905, she wrote and tried to have Anne of Green Gables published but it rejected. Luckily for us, in 1907 the Page Company of Boston, Massachusetts, agreed to publish it in 1908. The book was an instant hit and launched Montgomery on a successful writing career.

Montgomery eventually wrote 500 short stories and 20 novels. Since her death in 1942, her stories have been produced for television audiences. Every year new books are published. In 2008, the 100th Anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, two new books, Before Green Gables and A New Beginning, were published filling in the timeframe in Anne Shirley's life before she arrived on the Island.

Montgomery's books were instant hits and remained so popular that some of them were reissued over and over again. There even continue to be new books published -- either editions reissued or new writings by current authors on the themes of L.M. Montgomery or Anne of Green Gables. Even some of these newer books are extremely popular, out-of-print and somewhat hard-to-find. For a younger reader, eager to enjoy Anne of Green Gables, there are even junior versions available.

All of them ~~ antique, vintage and newer editions ~~ are cherished by their owners making some of her books hard to find. It is my belief that the people who own them never part with them because even the ones printed in the 1990s can be hard to come by. Every Lucy Maud Montgomery book that I have sold has been received with genuine appreciation. If you are interested in expanding your collection or even starting one, make sure to check out the selection of wonderful books that are listed in my eBay store at Treasures By Brenda.

Whichever ones you do have, I am sure you will share them with the children in your life and pass them along to someone else who will love them.

Prince Edward Island is indeed a magical place, as it is portrayed in the books and the movies. If you are able to visit and you love Anne of Green Gables, it will definitely be well worth your time. Seeing the live performance of Anne was a highlight of my family's visit to to the island and my children are both boys!

When we visited P.E.I. for our summer vacation a few years ago, I thought that that visit would be enough. I never would have dreamed that I would be ready for another visit so quickly. However, all of this reading about Montgomery and her books (I even recently re-watched one of the Anne of Green Gables movies) has made me, once again, long for the east coast of Canada!

Click here to order the
Anne of Green Gables 2010 calendar
(shown in the picture here)
from Amazon.

The founder of the L.M. Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island said that Montgomery had, "genius for making other people able to see images. Even in translation, she's able to make you picture the places and the people so distinctly so that they become part of your own story."

Fans from different parts of the world are attached to the story for different reasons.

The Poles who are very attached to their country, focus on the idea of 'home' which appears in Montgomery's writings. Anne of Green Gables is about a lonely orphan finding a place to call her own.

The Japanese are fond of these books for three important reasons. The first is because of Anne's love of nature and Montgomery's lyrical verse about the Island tie which tie in with Shinto -- the native religion of Japan and the belief in spirits associated with a particular place.

The second is tied to the second world war and the number of Japanese children who identified with the story when it was translated after the Second World War. The teacher translated the book she was given by a Canadian missionary even though it was politically inappropriate at that time and she managed to keep both herself and the translated pages safe throughout the war. Seven years after the war was over, her translation was introduced to the Japanese and later became a part of the school curriculum.

The final reason the Japanese are so attached to Anne of Green Gables is because Japanese women also value the femininity of Anne. "Anne is tempestuous, she has outbursts. Yet at the same time she is a good girl." -- Irene Gammel.

The fourth installment in the Anne of Green Gables series featuring a brand-new screenplay which was written by Kevin Sullivan. It is a three-hour television movie based on the characters that Lucy Maud Montgomery created, a prequel to the 1985 Anne of Green Gables mini-series which was released on television in Canada in October 2008.

"Everything was invested with a kind of fairy grace and charm, emanating from my own fancy, the trees that whispered nightly around the old house where I slept, the woodsy nooks I explored, the homestead fields, each individualized by some oddity or fence or shape, the sea whose murmur was never out of my ears - all were radiant with 'the glory and the dream'...amid all the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty." -- L.M. Montgomery from Stan Sauerwein's Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Incredible Life of the Creator of Anne of Green Gables

Click here to order your
2010 Anne of Green Gables
mini calendar from Amazon.

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