Thread by @lainasparetime

Let's talk background, starting with L. M. Montgomery, who I did some research on last night.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born November 30th, 1874 in Clifton (aka New London), Prince Edward Island. Her mom died of tuberculosis when she was two. #LainaReadsAnne

#LainaReadsAnne Honestly her father seems like he was kind of a douche, and he took off to Saskatchewan and left Lucy with her elderly maternal grandparents. They were not particularly affectionate people, and though she had nearby family, she spent a lot of time alone as a child

#LainaReadsAnne She read a lot, and started writing very young. Her first published piece was a poem in a PEI newspaper when she was around 16 or 17.

#LainaReadsAnne She completed grade 10 and then got her teacher's licence. She finished a 2 year course in a year with honours, because she was cool like that. Not that she LIKED teaching, mind you. She did not.

#LainaReadsAnne Maud left teaching to study English literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was pretty rare in her time period for seeking higher education as a woman, though she had to leave school for financial reasons and didn't complete her degree.

#LainaReadsAnne She began supporting herself with writing. By 1899 she made $96.88 in writing, which I think would be around $4000 Canadian today, and by 1903, she made $500 a year, which would be a tidy sum of about $20,000 Canadian today.

Which tbh is nothing to sneeze at.

#LainaReadsAnne When her grandfather died, she moved home so her grandmother could stay in their home and lived with her I believe until she passed as well.

#LainaReadsAnne Maud had kind of an interesting romantic life as a young adult? I'm not going to go too much into it, but she had a few very hot affairs and more than one secret engagement, one lasting from 1906-1911.

#LainaReadsAnne (Abuse/child death CW) Unfortunately, after she married, her life got rather difficult. Her second son was stillborn. Both she and her husband suffered from depression, and he also became abusive at times, beating her.

#LainaReadsAnne She almost died of the Spanish flu, and considered him to care so little that she considered divorcing him, which in 1918 was really saying something. However, she thought it was her "Christian duty" to make the marriage work. (He was a minister, also.)

#LainaReadsAnne (Suicide CW) She passed away in 1942, and at the time it was ruled heart failure, but in 2008 her family came out stating that they believed she may have died by suicide. She was on very heavy medications to manager her depression.

#LainaReadsAnne Throughout her life, she totally struggled with Imposter Syndrome. She thought her work wasn't literary or modern enough to compare to her peers. Despite her success, she never felt she wrote her one "great" book and once said she was in writing "to make a living"

#LainaReadsAnne Which, frankly, respect.

#LainaReadsAnne Personally I think she put a whole lot of herself into her work and was very protective of her characters, but those things are not mutally exclusive.

#LainaReadsAnne In her lifetime, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote 500 short stories, 20 novels, two poetry collections, and numbers journal and essay anthologies.

I'm nervous this thread is about to break, so we'll talk about her most famous work (and the subject of my hashtag) next.