This premium quality large print edition includes the complete, unabridged text of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s beloved tale in a freshly edited and newly typeset edition. With a large 7.44″ x 9.69″ page size, this edition is printed on heavyweight 55# bright white paper with a fully laminated cover featuring an original full color design.

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was a Canadian author best known for Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its sequels. Her work was, for the most part, based on her own life and surroundings. Somewhat sentimental but charming nonetheless, her tales of Anne, a high-spirited orphan girl taken in by an older brother and sister who think they are getting a boy who can help on their farm, have delighted readers for generations and inspired several movie and television adaptations.

Montgomery’s mother died before she was two, and she was sent to live with her maternal grandparents on their farm on Prince Edward Island, with her paternal grandparents also living nearby. “Maud” spent an idyllic childhood in the fields and woods surrounding the farming communities of the island. Educated at the island’s Cavendish School, she stayed with her father and his second wife in Prince Albert, Saskatchewan while attending high school and eventually earned a teacher’s license from Prince of Wales College in 1893. She gave up teaching and moved back to her grandparents’ farm after the death of her grandfather, taking a position as a proofreader with an area newspaper briefly while pursuing a career as a writer. A few poems and short stories were published before she finished Anne of Green Gables in 1904, but it would be four years and numerous rejections later, in 1908, before her first novel found a publisher.

An immediate success, the book launched her long and successful writing career. She married in 1911 and following a honeymoon in England and Scotland the couple settled in Leaskdale, north of Uxbridge, Ontario where her husband served as parish minister. They had three sons, one of whom died in infancy, and while raising her children Montgomery continued to write further Anne works, poetry, fiction, and non-fiction. In 1923 Montgomery became the first Canadian woman to join the Royal Society of Arts in Britain. In 1935 she became a member of the Literary and Artistic Institute of France and was awarded the Order of the British Empire.

As the popularity of her “good and jolly stories” with happy endings declined, by the late 1930’s so too did the health of both Montgomery and her husband. He retired from the ministry and they moved to Swasea, west of Toronto, where both apparently suffered from severe depression along with physical decline. In 1938 she suffered a nervous breakdown while he underwent elctroshock treatments for mental health issues.

Lucy Maud Montgomery Macdonald died of congestive heart failure in Toronto on April 24, 1942. Her body lay in state at Green Gables, following which she was buried in nearby Cavendish Cemetery.When Marilla Cuthbert’s brother, Matthew, returns home to Green Gables with a chatty redheaded orphan girl, Marilla exclaims, “But we asked for a boy. We have no use for a girl.” It’s not long, though, before the Cuthberts can’t imagine how they could ever do without young Anne of Green Gables–but not for the original reasons they sought an orphan. Somewhere between the time Anne “confesses” to losing Marilla’s amethyst pin (which she never took) in hopes of being allowed to go to a picnic, and when Anne accidentally dyes her hated carrot-red hair green, Marilla says to Matthew, “One thing’s for certain, no house that Anne’s in will ever be dull.” And no book that she’s in will be, either. This adapted version of the classic, Anne of Green Gables, introduces younger readers to the irrepressible heroine of L.M. Montgomery’s many stories. Adapter M.C. Helldorfer includes only a few of Anne’s mirthful and poignant adventures, yet manages to capture the freshness of one of children’s literature’s spunkiest, most beloved characters. There’s just enough to make beginning readers want more–luckily, there’s a lot more in the originals! Illustrator Ellen Beier creates vibrant pictures to portray the beauty of the land around Green Gables and the spirited nature of Anne herself. (Ages 5 to 8) –Emilie Coulter