The Wheel of Things: A Biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery is Canada's best-known writer of children's fiction. Anne of Green Gables -- in print, film, television, on stage--captures people's imaginations as easily now as it did when it burst upon the world in 1908. Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island and she set her best-loved stories there. She worked briefly as a journalist, but family responsiblities shaped her life as a young single woman. At 36 she married a dour, often depressive Presbyterian minister and moved to Ontario. There she lived a life of contradictions--in private, the romantic, successful imaginative writer; in public the strict, dutiful minister's wife. Using diaries and letters Lucy Maud never intended to be made public, The Wheel of Things is a pioneering biography of one of Canada's most successful and important writers. Since its publication, the release of Montgomery's diaries and other work by scholarly writers have confirmed the life story that Mollie Gillen tells so well in this important and path-breaking biography.