Lucy Maud Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables

The date for this stamp is on the case that Anne is sitting on.

Lucy Maud Montgomery's childhood began in 1874. She was raised by her grandparents who had definite notions about how a little girl should dress and behave. Lucy Maud was a solitary but bright child, living in a world of books and imagination. She soon started to write. "Although in real life [she] would not have hurt a fly... she continued for a time to write stories in which battle, murder and sudden death were commonplace..." When she was eleven, she submitted her first manuscript to a publisher. Montgomery's dedicated ambition was "to have a recognized place among good workers in [her] chosen profession" as a writer. While freelancing and doing a newspaper gossip column, she learned to produce for specific audiences. For example, she enjoyed writing for Sunday School publications but, in her own words "I should like it better if I didn't have to drag a moral into most of [these short stories]." "They won't sell without it, as a rule. So, in the moral must go. The kind of juvenile story I like best ... is a good jolly one ... with no insidious moral hidden away in it like a pill in a spoonful-of jam". "But oh, I love my work", she admitted. "I love to sit by the window of my room and shape some hairy fairy fancy into verse." She kept her ideas for stories in a notebook. In 1904 she found an old entry which said "Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By a mistake a girl is sent them". It sounded like a good prospect for the Sunday School trade but the character demanded a book. Anne of Green Gables thus charmed the author as much as she would the public. Montgomery married in 1911 and moved to Ontario where she combined her careers as a "conscientious house-keeper" and as a productive artist. Further novels continued to stress "the recurring myths of girlhood". The author died in 1942. The Post Office commissioned Peter Swan to paint Anne of Green Gables for the Lucy Maud Montgomery stamp.