Lucy Maud Montgomery is known to millions of readers the world over as the creator of Canada’s most famous redhead, Anne of Green Gables. Born in the tiny Prince Edward Island village of Clifton in 1874, Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in the seaside community of Cavendish on the north shore of the island.

Opportunities for women were limited in the rural Victorian society of the time, but Lucy Maud showed an unusually independent turn of character by trying her hand first as a teacher and then as a journalist in Halifax before returning to the isolation of Cavendish to care for her widowed grandmother. It was during these thirteen long years that she wrote Anne of Green Gables and established herself as Canada’s most popular and widely-read author.

In 1911 she married Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald and moved to Ontario. Her spiritual home remained Prince Edward Island, however, and she continued to write of it with nostalgic fondness until her death in 1942.