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Lucy Maud Montgomery, also known as simply L. M. Montgomery, (November 30, 1874–April 24, 1942) was a Canadian author, best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables.
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Montgomery was born at Clifton, Prince Edward Island. She attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown to get a teaching certificate. In 1895-96 she studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At the age of seventeen, she began working for the newspapers Chronicle and Echo. She moved back to Prince Edward Island, following a time when she lived in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan with her father.
After working as a teacher in various island schools, she moved back to Cavendish to live with her grandmother. For a short time in 1901 and 1902 she worked in Halifax, Nova Scotia for the newspapers Chronicle and Echo. She returned to live with and care for her grandmother in 1902. She was inspired to write her first books during this time on Prince Edward Island. In 1911, she married the Rev. Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian Minister, and moved to Ontario where he had taken the position of minister of St. Paul's Presbyterian Church, Leaskdale in present-day Uxbridge Township, that was also affiliated with the former (closed 1968) Presbyterian congregation in nearby Zephyr.
She wrote her next eleven books from the Manse at Leaskdale, Ontario. The Manse was sold by the congregation and is now the Lucy Maud Montgomery Leaskdale Manse Museum. The family, with two surviving children, Chester, and Stuart (Hugh Alexander died at birth in 1913), moved in 1926 to the Norval Presbyterian Charge, in present-day Halton Hills, Ontario, where a Lucy Maud Montgomery Memorial Garden can be seen from Highway 7. She died in Toronto in 1942, and was buried at Cavendish.
Her major collections are archived at the University of Guelph, while the Lucy Maud Montgomery Institute at the University of Prince Edward Island coordinates most of the research and conferences surrounding her work. Her complete journals, edited by Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, have recently been published by the Oxford University Press.
As the British writer Tony Barrell has pointed out (London Sunday Times, November 27, 2005), Montgomery was born on exactly the same day as Sir Winston Churchill, the celebrated British prime minister of the second world war.