Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was born in what is now New London, Prince Edward Island, and raised by her grandparents after the death of her mother when she was just two. She worked for a time as a teacher and a journalist, then wrote her first novel, Anne of Green Gables, in the evenings while caring for her grandmother. She went on to publish twenty novels and hundreds of short stories, and she created, in Anne Shirley and Emily Starr, two of the most beloved characters in Canadian literature.