Lucy Maud Montgomery as a Writer and Author
Lucy Maud Montgomery | As a Child | As a Homemaker | As a Writer & Author | Lucy Maud & Mental Health
Lucy Maud Montgomery is one of Canada’s most well-known and enduring writers. She began writing and keeping a journal at a young age and continued the habit throughout her life. As noted by her biographer, Maria Rubio, these journals were a rich source of inspiration for her novels and were their own form of literary output. She often edited and reworked passages before copying them into her diaries and they functioned as both a mirror and a canvas.
Her early childhood was steeped in the Scottish oral storytelling tradition of her family, and its influence can be seen in all of her works, as can the thread of inspiration found in Romantic writers such as Robert Burns, Sir Walter Scott, Williams Wordsworth, Lord Byron, the Bronte sisters, and Lord Tennyson. Although best known for her fiction, she was first published as a poet at sixteen in Charlottetown’s Daily Patriot. Her output once she began writing professionally was prodigious, and her most famous works are often a reflection of the author herself – creative, intelligent, romantic, and occasionally brooding. She took publishing seriously from early in her career and wrote in her memoir of her frustrations.
“After leaving Prince of Wales College I taught school for a year in Bideford, Prince Edward Island. I wrote a good deal and learned a good deal, but still my stuff came back, except from two periodicals the editors of which evidently thought that literature was its own reward, and quite independent of monetary considerations. I often wonder that I did not give up in utter discouragement. At first I used to feel dreadfully hurt when a story or poem over which I had laboured and agonized came back, with one of those icy little rejection slips. Tears of disappointment would come in spite of myself, as I crept away to hide the poor, crimpled manuscript in the depths of my trunk. But after a while I got hardened to it and did not mind. I only set my teeth and said “I will succeed.” I believed in myself and I struggled on alone, in secrecy and silence. I never told my ambitions and efforts and failures to any one. Down, deep down, under all discouragement and rebuff, I knew I would “arrive” some day”.
~ L.M. Montgomery, The Alpine Path, 1917 ~
She was an active participant in the early days of the Canadian Authors Association (CAA) Toronto executive before she was nudged out by members with a modernist bent who lamented the number of women’s writers within the CAA. As noted by Jane Urquhart in her short book in the Extraordinary Canadians series, “Most damning of all was the notion that she wrote only for an audience of young girls. This was, and is, of course, not true.” This perception impacted the critical attention paid to her work until the 1960s, when renewed interest by select academics reignited serious consideration of her work within its cultural context.
“Today I finished Emily of New Moon, after six months writing. It is the best book I have ever written – and I have had more intense pleasure in writing it than any of the others – not even excepting Green Gables. I have lived it, and I hated to pen the last line and write finis. Of course I’ll have to write several sequels but they will be more or less hackwork I fear. They cannot be to me what this book has been.”
~ Lucy Maud Montgomery, February 15, 1922 ~
Over the course of her career, Lucy Maud Montgomery published more than 20 books and more than 500 poems and short stories in various periodicals and books. After death, her journals, a collection of short stories, and a collection of her poetry were published. Her work has remained influential for many other writers and is beloved by readers worldwide.