A lonely girl on a tiny island wrote stories to keep herself company — and one of them changed children's literature forever.
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on this day in 1874, in a small village on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother died before she turned two. Her father, stricken with grief, sent her to live with her elderly grandparents and eventually moved away to western Canada. She rarely saw him again.
By all accounts, young Maud was deeply lonely. An only child raised by strict grandparents on an isolated farm, she had few friends and no siblings to play with. So she did what would one day make her immortal — she invented worlds. She created imaginary friends, gave names to the trees around her, and by age nine, she was writing poetry and filling journals with her observations of life on the island.
The adults around her dismissed her dreams. In the late 1800s, the idea of a young woman becoming a published author was considered absurd by many. Montgomery didn't care. She earned a teaching license, took a position in a schoolhouse, and wrote furiously in every spare moment she had. By the time she was in her early thirties, she had quietly published over 100 short stories in newspapers and magazines across Canada and the United States.
Then, in 1904, she found an old note she had scribbled in a notebook years earlier: "Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent to them."
That single sentence became the seed of everything.
Montgomery spent eighteen months crafting the story of Anne Shirley — a red-haired, wildly imaginative orphan girl sent by mistake to a farm on Prince Edward Island. After four publishers rejected the manuscript, Montgomery shoved it into a closet and tried to forget about it. But she couldn't. She pulled it out, tried one more time — and in 1908, a Boston publisher said yes.
"Anne of Green Gables" became an instant bestseller. It went through four editions in just three months. Mark Twain himself called Anne "the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice." The book has never gone out of print. It has been translated into at least 36 languages, sold over 50 million copies worldwide, and has been adapted for stage, film, and television more times than anyone can count.
Montgomery went on to write seven more books in the Anne series and over a dozen additional novels. By the end of her life, she had produced 20 novels, more than 530 short stories, 500 poems, 30 essays, and an autobiography — along with personal journals spanning more than 5,000 pages that scholars still study today.
She was named an Officer of the Order of the British Empire, became the first Canadian woman elected to the Royal Society of Arts, and was declared a Person of National Historic Significance by the Canadian government.
And Prince Edward Island — that tiny, quiet place where a lonely little girl once talked to imaginary friends among the trees — became one of Canada's most beloved tourist destinations, visited by hundreds of thousands of people each year, all because of the worlds she dreamed up there.
Montgomery once wrote in her journal: "I cannot remember a time when I was not writing, or when I did not mean to be an author."
She meant it. And millions of readers around the world are grateful that she did.