Lucy Maud Montgomery, known most famously for her Anne of Green Gables series of novels, is an undervalued Nasty Woman Writer who broke countless barriers and glass ceilings for women. In her later years, Montgomery was the victim of a deliberate smear campaign by Canadian literary critics who relegated her work to children’s books (until then, they had not been perceived that way) and called her writing “sentimental.” They attempted to erase Montgomery from the Canadian writing scene even though she was the most popular Canadian writer of all time. She became wealthy through her book sales and supported herself, her family, and friends. Unfortunately, she was forced to spend a lot of that money in a lawsuit with her original Boston publisher (who her books had made super wealthy), fighting for the rights to her own books.
Montgomery married late and was subsequently saddled with an unwell husband and a sociopathic son. Through it all, Montgomery continued to write, amassing 20 novels and 530 short stories, frequently touring and giving lectures and talks, helping other writers, and working hard to get Canadian writers accepted in the global literary scene.
She found satisfaction in steady communication from her fans, and how her books were beloved in so many countries. The writing process itself and her imagination were her salvation.
A Feminist writer
In the early 1900s, Lucy Maud Montgomery created female characters who were independent, had minds of their own, and broke the barriers of expectations for women of the time. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published in 1908. At a time when women had very few career options outside the home, Anne is top of her class and goes to college. She is ambitious and steadfast in the pursuit of her goals. She understands that her biggest limitation is that she was “not born a boy.” Even so, she never lets that stop her.
Montgomery encountered these limitations in her own life and expresses much of her own experience in her books. Biographer, Mary Henley Rubio writes:
“Although Maud was growing up in a society that had low expectations of women, she had already gained the same local education as the young men around her. Bright and ambitious, she fumed when her male cousins patronized her because she was a girl. And her frustrations over the inequity would grow: if any of them wanted a university education and showed aptitude, it would be granted to them—but not to her. And yet she could also see that she had far more ability than most of her male cousins”(44).
She attended the Halifax Ladies College. The school taught women secretarial and domestic arts. She was a teacher for a while and disliked it. Montgomery’s goal was to become a famous author. And that she did.
Montgomery’s protagonist, Anne, speaks her mind freely and displays qualities of empowerment and independence that would inspire women who read the books. As well as Anne, there are other strong, independent female characters who experience trials and growth throughout the novels. Marilla Cuthbert, Anne’s guardian, though she does not go to college and aspire to a career outside the home, is a woman who lives with her brother on a farm they own together, and runs her home economy with a high degree of efficiency and pride. This character is most probably modeled after the grandmother who raised Montgomery— a positive model.
Both Anne and Marilla have many female friendships independent of any man. Anne’s friends aspire to work and many go to college.The elder women of Marilla’s circle, though shut out from the world the younger women are slowly being allowed into, are in charge of their home economies, and help each other out both emotionally and with everyday issues of life and death. They form a small independent microeconomy in Avonlea on Prince Edward Island.
It can be said quite confidently that the female characters in Montgomery’s novels pass the Bechdel test with flying colors. The women have women friends who have conversations about things other than men. And go beyond that. They reveal the independent economies women have always participated in and the networks of care they have always provided.
Read Nasty Women Writers post: Alison Bechdel: The Secret to Superhuman Strength
Montgomery was influenced by George Eliot, the Brontë sisters, and Jane Austen and went on to influence many women writers of the future. She saw how Austen, the Brontës, and Eliot had used the local landscapes as the fictionalized backdrop for their books and continued in that vein. She was inspired to “immortalize Cavendish in Literature”(106), as others had the places they lived in.
Her ancestors founded the village of Cavendish on Prince Edward Island in 1790. They were Scottish Presbyterians, farmers and tradespeople. Cavendish became immortalized as Avonlea and is still a tourist destination because of Montgomery’s books, and hosts a National Historical site named after her.
“Her “story” extends into the impact of her books. In a twentieth-century society still dominated by patriarchy, she was one of the many forces convincing young women that they could have careers in many different professional fields (such as medicine and law), opening new vistas for them.
In the same way, her influence extended to young women who aspired to become authors. They saw that it was possible for a woman writer to work with the community she knew, rather than tackling the sweep of great world events. After all, what goes on in the human heart rules both the domestic and the larger political world. . . . It might also be said that Maud was an early pioneer in the technique of “branding” a named but imaginary fictional community. From Maud’s “Avonlea” in Prince Edward Island, Margaret Laurence could move to “Manawaka” on the Canadian prairies, Alice Munro to “Jubilee” in south western Ontario and Margaret Atwood could depict new fictional neighborhoods within Toronto. . . . Around the world, many other women writers would claim Maud as their favorite childhood writer—and sometimes as their model, as in the case of Astrid Lindgren, Swedish author of the “Pippi Longstocking” tales”(Rubio 9).
To change the world, one must first imagine it so
Anne with an E, the main character of the Anne of Green Gables and the seven novels to follow in that series, is all about the power of imagination. Anne uses her imagination as a coping mechanism to help her survive trauma. Her parents have died and she is an orphan. She is hired out to work in harsh conditions at a young age. When she arrives at Green Gables she is full of stories and imaginings that are unbounded and bleed into the everyday world. She talks too much and spins tales out of everything, unable to stay focused on a task or regulate her emotions. She slowly learns to trust and stay present to the settled, “safe,” experience of life with siblings Marilla and Matthew. Once she is able to integrate her imagination into this new, grounded reality, she can use it for art and creativity in a way that is healthy and serves her and her community.
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s own life was traumatic in the beginning. She too must have developed her imagination to survive it. Her mother died when she was two and her father moved away and started another life without her.
Maud “lived partly on the surface of life and partly in another world, out of sight, where she walked in the alternate byways of literature, creativity, and imaginative adventures. . . . She had grown up with Scottish and Irish mythologies, which held that there was an alternate world of fairy folk beneath the earth’s solid surface. To her imagination, this pagan Celtic legacy of subterranean folk was no more fantastical than the Christian belief in a God and singing angels above the earth’s solid surface”(Rubio 321).
Montgomery was raised by her grandparents. Her grandfather was harsh and difficult but her grandmother was a steady, loving and guiding force. As she matured and her life again became traumatic, she retreated to her writing. But for Montgomery, her imagination was limited by the times she lived in and what she allowed herself to express. She became a minister’s wife and was further constrained by that role. One wonders what her life would have been like if she allowed herself to imagine a different future for herself, as she did for her female characters. What if she had allowed herself to be as outspoken as Anne from the Avonlea series and as daring as Valancy from The Blue Castle?
Though her own everyday life was stunted, she created characters that encouraged and gave permission to girls and women to dream bigger, and so widen their imaginations and possibilities.
Worlds within worlds
In Montgomery’s novels there are worlds within worlds. These “interior” or “secret” worlds allow the characters to create or imagine alternatives to the patriarchal paradigm. These worlds, whether hidden, secret places or alive only inside their own minds, once integrated with the everyday world, offer the women a larger realm of possibility.
In Anne of Green Gables there is Anne’s own rich imagination and interior world. With Marilla’s help, Anne learns to apply her carefully cultivated imagination to her everyday experience. Though she often scolds her for her dreaminess, Marilla’s steadfast support of who Anne is at her core helps Anne develop fencing around that dreaminess, allowing her to comfortably bring more of herself into the everyday world and share her largess with the people around her.
“Those who knew Anne best felt, without realizing that they felt it, that her greatest attraction was the aura of possibility surrounding her . . .the power of future development that was in her. She seemed to walk in an atmosphere of things about to happen”(Anne of Avonlea, loc 3214).
In Anne of Avonlea, the second book in the series, Miss Lavendar Lewis, who lives in the small, secluded hovel, has developed a secret world within the world. After a tragic event in her youth, she retreated to the forest and lives isolated in a cabin suited for fairies and angels, named Echo Lodge. Anne and her bosom friend, Diana, get lost one day and stumble upon this moss-covered cottage hidden in what feels to them like an enchanted forest, complete with a table set for tea.
Upon realizing where they are, Diana tells Anne that the woman who lives there is a forty-five-year-old, old maid. When the girls see her, she does not seem to match their idea of what an old maid should look like:
“She was a little lady with snow-white hair beautifully wavy and thick, and carefully arranged in becoming puffs and coils. Beneath it was an almost girlish face, pink cheeked and sweet lipped, with big soft brown eyes and dimples. . . actually dimples. She wore a very dainty gown of cream muslin with pale-hued roses on it. . . a gown which would have seemed ridiculously juvenile on most women of her age, but which suited Miss Lavendar so perfectly that you never thought about it at all.”
She tells the young women that she was only pretending to have a tea party with lots of people and she is so happy they have shown up for it. To which Anne responds:
“Oh, do you imagine things too?”
“Yes, I do,” she confessed, boldly. “Of course it’s silly in anybody as old as I am. But what is the use of being an independent old maid if you can’t be silly when you want to, and when it doesn’t hurt anybody? A person must have some compensations. I don’t believe I could live at times if I didn’t pretend things”(chapter XXI).
After becoming good friends, Anne discovers that though Miss Lavendar has created this secret place to live independently and magically, she is terribly lonely. It and she are not integrated into the larger community. At the end of the novel, with Anne’s help and careful guidance, Miss Lavendar is able to integrate her secret, magical world back into the everyday world and develops a more satisfying life.
Both Anne and Miss Lavendar eventually develop lives that are larger and more satisfying because of the rich interior spaces and secret worlds they have created.
In The Blue Castle, Valancy has crafted the imaginative “Blue Castle” where she spends hours alone fantasizing.
Her mother:
“Mrs. Stirling has instilled in Valancy the terrible fear of “what people will say” about her. Valancy’s mother, as well as her aunts and uncles and cousins, all say cruel things to her. If Valancy ever speaks back to anyone, her mother chides her that it is “unladylike to have feelings.” Her mother polices her every moment; she is not allowed solitude and privacy even in her own bedroom, lest she do unmentionable things there”(328).
Here, a sexual component is inferred with Valancy’s world within her world. It does seem she may be doing “unmentionable things” while fantasizing about her Blue Castle. In fact, the book The Blue Castle was one of the first books to be banned. Montgomery wrote the book when she was fifty-two.
“This novel was certainly not written for children. It was even banned from some church libraries. First, it has an unwed mother in it, but, worse when Roaring Abel skewers religious hypocrisy, he is so funny that readers cannot help laughing. Apparently, no one saw that this novel was close to being Maud’s own spiritual autobiography, a spillover mid-life crisis. It is ironic that at the same time Maud was choosing older heroines and mature themes for her novels, she was being demoted to the children’s shelves of bookstores and libraries by changing literary styles and other forces. This novel was the first to be banned in some libraries”(Rubio 331).
The Blue Castle has many complex and layered themes. Valancy’s world within her world and the sexual awakenings she experiences is one; the portrayal of what happens to women who get pregnant out of wedlock is another.
Valancy’s world within her world is brought to life on the paradisal island she flees to with outcast Barney Snaith. There she experiences her own “Blue Castle” but she is isolated from her former life and family. Eventually, at the end of the novel, all the worlds are integrated, offering Valancy a life that is more satisfying for her than what was planned by her family.
Valancy is an extraordinary character, taking on issues women still deal with today: exploring the boundaries of what it means to be free, allowing oneself her voice, discovering one’s authentic being, learning about true beauty, and coming to love oneself.
Again, like Anne, Valancy is cursed because she is “not a boy.” She is also not beautiful.
After a doctor tells her she is dying, things change:
“I’ve been trying to please other people all my life and failed,” she said. “After this I shall please myself. I shall never pretend anything again. I’ve breathed an atmosphere of fibs and pretenses and evasions all my life. What a luxury it will be to tell the truth! I may not be able to do much of the things I want to do but I won’t do another thing that I don’t want to do”(Loc 750).
Would Valancy have been able to make this decision and walk out of her old life without having cultivated her interior life in the Blue Castle? I doubt it. The point being made is that preserving a rich interior world unaffected by the patriarchy helps one survive the patriarchy and make one’s own way.
Here Montgomery offers a roadmap for creatives, women, and all marginalized peoples. We first have to be able to dream it. Then we need to be able to bring those dreams into our everyday lives and apply them in ways meaningful to both worlds.
If the system that confines us and keeps us down owns our imaginations, we are truly lost.
Stay tuned for Lucy Maud Montgomery Part 2: An Ecofeminist Writer.
Lucy Maud Montgomery is a Nasty Woman Writer.
©Theresa C. Dintino 2025
Works cited:
Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Avonlea. Cascais Classic Editions. First published in 1909
Montgomery, L.M. Anne of Green Gables. Amazon Classics. First published in 1908.
Montgomery, L.M. The Blue Castle. Grapevine India, 2022. First published in 1926.
Rubio, Mary Henley. Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings. Anchor Canada, 2008
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