Archiv der Kategorie: Montgomery, Lucy Maud

Montgomery, Lucy Maud. I was born on November 30, 1874, in Prince Edward Island, a colorful little land of ruby and emerald and sapphire. I came of Scotch ancestry with a dash of English, Irish, and French from various grands” and “greats.”
My mother died when I was a baby and I was brought up by my grandparents in the old Macneill homestead at Cavendish. . . eleven miles from a railroad and twenty-four from a town, but only half a mile from one of the finest sea-beaches in the world. I went to the “district school” from six to seventeen. I devoured every book I could lay my hands on. Ever since I can remember I was writing stories and verses. My early stories were very tragic creations. Almost everybody in them died. In those tales battle, murder, and sudden death were the order of the day.
When I was fifteen I had a “poem” published in a local paper. That gave me the greatest moment of my life. Then I qualified for a teacher’s license at Prince of Wales College, Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island, and taught three years. During those and the following years I wrote all kinds of stuff. Most of it was rejected but enough was accepted to encourage me. Eventually I won a place as a writer of stories for young people.
I had always hoped to write a book . . . but I never seemed able to make a beginning. I have always hated beginning a story. When I get the first paragraph written I feel as if it were half done. To begin a book seemed quite a stupendous task. Besides, I did not see how I could get time for it. I could not afford to take time from my regular writing hours. In the end I never set out deliberately to write a book. It just “happened.” One spring I was looking over my notebook of plots for a short serial I had been asked to write for a certain Sunday School paper. I found a faded entry, written many years before. “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.” I thought this would do. I began to block out the chapters, devise incidents, and “brood up” my heroine. “Anne” began to expand in such a fashion that she seemed very real to me. I thought it rather a shame to waste her on an ephemeral seven-chapter serial. Then the thought came: “Write a book. You have the central idea and the heroine. All you need to do is to spread it over enough chapters to amount to a book.” The result was Anne of Green Gables.
I wrote it in the evenings after my regular day’s work was done. I typewrote it myself on my old second-hand typewriter that never made the capitals plain and wouldn’t print “m’s” at all. Green Gables was published in 1908. I did not dream that it would be the success it was. I thought girls in their ‘teens might like it but that was the only audience I hoped to reach. But men and women who are grandparents, boys at school and college, old pioneers in the Australian bush, Mohammedan girls in India, missionaries in China, monks in remote monasteries, premiers of Great Britain, and red-headed people all over the world have written to me telling me how they loved Anne and her successors. Since then I have published sixteen books. Twenty-three years ago I married a Presbyterian minister, the Reverend Ewan Macdonald, and came to Ontario to live. I like Ontario verymuch, but anyone who has once loved “the only island there is” never really loves any other place. And so the scene of all my books save one has been laid there. And in my dreams I go back to it.
List of my books: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne’s House of Dreams, Rain- bow Valley, Rilla of Ingleside, Chronicles of Avonlea, Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily’s Quest, Kilmeny of the Orchard, The Story Girl, The Golden Road, Magic for Marigold, A Tangled Web, The Blue Castle, Pat of Silver Bush.