A popular and financially successful writer, Lucy Maud Montgomery MacDonald (1874-1942) is considered one of Canada's best known and most enduring authors.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30, 1874, in Clifton, Prince Edward Island. Her parents, Hugh Montgomery, a former sea captain turned merchant, and Clara Macneill Montgomery, came from large, long-established, and eminent Prince Edward Island families. Clara Montgomery died before her daughter, always known as Maud, was two years old, and her grief-stricken father sent her to live with her elderly, strictly Presbyterian maternal grandparents at their isolated farmhouse in Cavendish, 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. She also enjoyed the company...