Lucy Maud L.M. Montgomery Books In Order

Publication Order of Anne Shirley Books

Chronological Order of Anne Shirley Books

Publication Order of King Family Books

Publication Order of Emily Books

Publication Order of Silver Bush Books

Publication Order of Standalone Novels

Publication Order of Chronicles of Avonlea Books

Publication Order of Non-Fiction Books

Publication Order of Selected Journals Of L.M. Montgomery Books

Publication Order of Collections

Publication Order of All Aboard Reading Books

Publication Order of Anthologies

L. M. (Maud) Montgomery was a Canadian fiction writer who was most well known for her novels that started with Anne of Green Gables. That book was an immediate success and was followed by a number of sequels with Anne as a central character. Altogether, Montgomery published 20 novels, along with 530 short stories, 500 poems, and 30 essays.

Lucy Maud was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, on a cold and snowy day on the 30th of November, 1874. Her mother was Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery. Her mother died of tuberculosis when Maud was only 21 months old, leaving her father, Hugh John Montgomery, grief-stricken and distraught over her death.

Feeling guilty over the death of his wife, her father gave custody of Maud to her maternal grandparents. He remained in the area, but when she was seven, her father moved to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan (then known as North-West Territories), leaving her with her mother’s parents, Alexander Marquis Macneill and Lucy Woolner Macneill. They lived in the nearby community of Cavendish and raised her in quite a strict and unforgiving manner.

Lucy Maud’s early life there was quite lonely and even though she had a fair number of relatives nearby, she spent much of her childhood alone. At age five, she suffered a nearly fatal bout of typhoid fever, but other than that, she was a healthy child.

To cope with her loneliness, she created various imaginary friends and worlds. Montgomery later attributes this part of her childhood as the phase in which she developed her creativity. From 1890-1891, she missed out on one year of her early education in Cavendish by staying in Prince Albert with her father and his new wife, Mary Ann McRae. While she stayed in Prince Albert, her first work, a poem called On Cape LeForce, was published in the Charlottetown paper, The Daily Patriot, in November 1890. The time spent with her father and stepmother was an unhappy one because she didn’t see eye to eye with her stepmother and thought that her father’s marriage was an unhappy one.

After she completed her grade school education in Cavendish in 1893, she enrolled in Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and obtained a teaching certificate by completing a program intended for two years in only one. In 1895/1896, she studied literature in Halifax, Nova Scotia, at Dalhousie University. Afterwards, she taught in Prince Edward Island schools. She was not a person who enjoyed teaching, but she did it because it afforded her time to spend on writing. In a timespan of 10 years starting from 1897, she published over 100 stories in various magazines and newspapers.

Montgomery had numerous love interests during her years of teaching. She won the affection of many, but was not one to jump into marriage easily. Her first relationship was with a boy from Cavendish named Nate Lockhart. To her, the relationship was more like a fun and witty friendship, but it ended the moment she refused his marriage proposal. In the 1890s, she refused other marriage proposals because she never really felt for the men who proposed to her.

In 1897, she secretly accepted the marriage proposal of Edwin Simpson, who was a student in French River, near Cavendish, and was her second cousin. She accepted his proposal out of a longstanding desire for “love and protection.” A few months later, however, her feelings for him changed and she broke off the engagement. Then while boarding with the Leard family when she was a teacher in Lower Bedeque, she had a short-lived but extremely passionate affair with Herman Leard, the eldest son.

Even though she was a teacher all this time, she never quite gave up on her dream of being a successful writer. Her first paycheck in 1985 was a sum total of 5 dollars, with which she purchased five volumes of poetry instead of investing it in boots or gloves or other necessities.

In 1898, her grandfather suddenly passed away and she had to leave her teaching job to help out her grandmother. The following 10+ years proved to be a prolific and successful period, and Maud firmly established herself as a successful and talented author. She published hundreds of poems, stories, and her first and most famous novel, the perennial best-seller Anne of Green Gables (1908).

For a period of nine months, from 1901 to 1902, she also worked as a substitute proofreader and journalist for the local newspaper, The Daily Echo. She stayed in Cavendish until her grandmother passed in March, 1911.

The book, Anne of Green Gables, was published on June 20, 1908, and was an instant success, cementing her career as a fiction writer. The book depicts the experiences of Anne Shirley, an 11-year-old orphan who is sent to live with an older couple, a brother and sister who wanted to adopt a boy to help them on their farm in Prince Edward Island. It has sold more than 50 million copies worldwide since its publication and has been adapted to numerous films, television movies, series and musicals. She continued writing sequels for the book up until the very end of her life.

After her grandmother’s death in 1911, she accepted the marriage proposal of a Presbyterian minister named Ewen McDonald. With her substantial book royalties, they were able to fund an extended honeymoon in England and Scotland. They visited many places
.depicted by some of her favorite authors such as William Shakespeare, James M. Barrie, William Makepeace Thackeray, Oliver Goldsmith, and William Wordsworth.

Returning to Canada in September 1911, Maud and Ewan made their home in The Leaskdale Manse, located in Uxbridge, Ontario, where Ewan worked as a parish minister. They had three children, all sons. Their first child was born in July 1912 and was named Chester Cameron. Their second-born, Hugh Alexander, died just after being born in August 1914. Their third son, Ewan Stuart, was born in October 1915. While she had the job of raising her sons, Montgomery continued writing Anne of Green Gables sequels, fiction, non-fiction, and poetry.

During the period around WWI, she began to realize that her publisher was dishonest. Consequently, over a decade of lawsuits and countersuits ensued. During this period, she sold the rights to her first seven books, which eventually proved to disastrous because those books continued to sell well.

In 1923, Montgomery became the first Canadian woman to join the Royal Society of Arts in Britain, an honor shared by famous people such as Adam Smith, Samuel Johnson, William Hogarth, and Karl Marx. In 1935, she was made a member of the Literary and Artistic institute of France and was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. Despite all these accolades and honors, she apparently led a depressed and unhappy life, with nervous fatigue that plagued her on a daily basis due to having to take care of her mentally damaged husband. Writing was her solace.

In the years preceding her death, Maud gradually became addicted to barbiturates that doctors had prescribed for depression, possibly a result of caring for her mentally ill husband for years. On April 24, 1942, she was found dead in bed, in her Toronto home. The principal cause of death on her death certificate was listed as coronary thrombosis; however, in September 2008, her granddaughter revealed that Montgomery may have ended her life through a drug overdose. Her final resting place was in her hometown’s Cavendish Community Cemetery.

The Government of Canada declared Montgomery a Person of National Historic Significance in 1943, a year after her death. Her birthplace in New London is a museum.