One or two also have favorable words for her"Emily" series (1923-1927) and
The Story Girl (1911). But critical strictures and reservations have had little effect on the reading public. All nineteen other novels and two volumes of short stories published during her lifetime remain popular, to varying degrees. Moreover, two more collections of her short stories were published in the 1970s.
The Road to Yesterday (1974) is an edited version of a manuscript discovered among her papers by her surviving son, Stuart Macdonald.
The Doctor's Sweetheart and Other Stories (1979) contains fourteen tales selected by Catherine McLay out of some five hundred magazines and periodicals ranging in date from 1899 to 1935, and Rea Wilmhurst has edited two more collections of stories:
Akin to Anne (1988) and
Along the Shore (1989). Montgomery's international appeal, especially to young girls, whom she rightly regarded as her natural audience, has never flagged.
Maud Montgomery (she loathed "Lucy" and insisted upon "L. M." on her publications and "Maud" from her friends) was born in the village of Clifton, now New London, Prince Edward Island, on 30 November 1874 to Hugh John Montgomery, merchant, and Clara Macneill Montgomery, both descendants of Scottish immigrants to Canada and members of a large clan of interrelated families whose diverse vagaries and collective fund of familial anecdotes were to provide a wealth of material for the newborn author.
