The Alpine Path

Lucy Maud Montgomery, (always called Maud by family and friends) and publicly known as L. M. Montgomery, (1874-1942) was a Canadian author, best known for a series of novels beginning with Anne of Green Gables (1908). In 1893, following the completion of her grade school education in Cavendish, she attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown. Completing a two year program in one year, she obtained her teaching certificate. In 1895 and 1896 she studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After working as a teacher in various island schools, in 1898 Montgomery moved back to Cavendish. For a short time in 1901 and 1902 she worked in Halifax for the newspapers Chronicle and Echo. She returned to live with and care for her grandmother in 1902. Montgomery was inspired to write her first books during this time on Prince Edward Island. Her works include: The Story Girl (1911), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), The Golden Road (1913), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne's House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920) and Rilla of Ingleside (1921).

When the Editor of Everywoman’s World asked me to write “The Story of My Career,” I smiled with a little touch of incredulous amusement. My career? Had I a career? Was not should not a “career” be something splendid, wonderful, spectacular at the very least, something varied and exciting? Could my long, uphill struggle, through many quiet, uneventful years, be termed a “career”? It had never occurred to me to call it so; and, on first thought, it did not seem to me that there was much to be said about that same long, monotonous struggle. But it appeared to be a whim of the aforesaid editor that I should say what little there was to be said; and in those same long years I acquired the habit of accommodating myself to the whims of editors to such an inveterate degree that I have not yet been able to shake it off. So I shall cheerfully tell my tame story. If it does nothing else, it may serve to encourage some other toiler who is struggling along in the weary pathway I once followed to success.