Selected Works of Lucy Maud Montgomery: Volume 1 - Anne of Green Gables & Anne of Avonlea

A popular and financially successful writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery is considered one of Canada's best known and most enduring authors. She was born on November 30, 1874, in Clifton, Prince Edward Island. Young Maud was a solitary child, sensitive, imaginative, and rather out of place in her grandparents' household. She found respite in books, notably Dickens, Scott, Byron, and Longfellow, and in writing stories and poems of her own, a talent which she developed at a very early age. By the mid-1890s she had achieved moderate success as a writer, having had many stories and poems published for money.
Intelligent, energetic, ambitious, and strong-willed, Maud was also very feminine. She loved fashionable clothes, was grateful for her slim good looks, and enjoyed the company and admiration of men. Like most young women of her era, Maud believed that marriage was the highest occupation for women, and she looked forward to her own marriage and children. However, she had high standards—her husband would have to meet certain social and educational criteria—and she had a romantic nature. In 1897 she became engaged to a suitable young man, but she quickly became disillusioned with him. While engaged she met and became involved with another wholly unsuitable young man, whom she thought she loved but knew she could never marry. Within a few months she had broken with both men and henceforth ceased to look for or expect romantic love.
In 1907 Maud's previously rejected first novel was accepted by a publisher. Anne of Green Gables, the appealing story of an imaginative, irrepressible, red-headed orphan girl who was adopted by two elderly Prince Edward Islanders was published by the L.C. Page Company of Boston in 1908. It was an immediate and tremendous success with readers of all ages and both sexes. With some surprise Maud wrote a friend, "Anne seems to have hit the public taste." Among the thousands of fan letters Maud received was one from Mark Twain, who described her heroine as "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." A sequel, Anne of Avonlea, followed in 1909 (there eventually were eight Anne books) and, despite not having received very favorable royalty terms from her publisher, Maud's professional and financial success was assured.