L. M. Montgomery

Montgomery's mother died when she was twenty-one months old, and her father left her with his in-laws in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island — a strict, undemonstrative household in which she was fed, clothed and not much loved. The orphan looking for a home, which she wrote so well, was not an invention.

Anne of Green Gables was rejected by five publishers. She put the manuscript in a hatbox, left it there, took it out again years later, and sent it once more. It appeared in 1908 and never went out of print.

She married a Presbyterian minister in 1911 and spent much of the marriage managing his severe recurring depression while producing more than twenty books, running a manse and keeping the private journals that are now her second body of work. They record insomnia, dread, and the growing distance between the sunlit country she wrote and the life she was living.

She died in Toronto in 1942. In 2008 her family made public their belief, based on a note found beside her, that she took her own life; some scholars have questioned that reading. What is not in question is how much of the cheerfulness was work.