Writing a life1995

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born with the storyteller's gift. Throughout her life she would use this talent to tangle and reinforce the intersecting threads of her experience: her Scots heritage, her early years in nineteenth-century Prince Edward Island, her teacher training at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, her unhappy marriage to a Presbyterian minister, and her powerful, tormenting ambition.

With the creation of Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery quickly became Canada's most enduring and celebrated author. Yet this biography presents the Montgomery legend with a darker cast. Rubio and Waterston reveal Montgomery to be a subversive writer, who interjected messages of resistance into her superficially pleasant stories. The authors pay attention to Montgomery's private journals,...