The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L.M. Montgomery

From the d.j. flap: "L. M. Montgomery is known to millions of fans the world over as the creator of Canada's most famous redhead, Anne of Green Gables. Yet despite her literary fame, Maud Montgomery is little known as a person. She is so thoroughly identified with her famous heroine that the creator runs the risk of being overshadowed by her creation."

"...Maud Montgomery was born in the tiny P.E.I. village of Clifton in 1874, and grew up in Cavendish, on the north shore of the island. Nor did Maud Montgomery offer the world an alternate vision of herself; she always avoided talking publicly about herself in any depth or detail. Fortunately, during most of her lifetime she carried on a private correspondence with two men--true kindred souls--Ephraim Weber, a schoolteacher in Saskatchewan, and George Boyd MacMillan, a journalist in Alloa, Scotland. The Weber letters have long been lodged in the Public Archives of Canada. The MacMillan letters vanished. In a remarkable feat of literary detective work Mollie Gillen has tracked down and rescued this treasure trove of some eighty long letters from its dusty resting place--a trunk which had passed into the possession of MacMillan's nephew. The Maud Montgomery revealed by the MacMillan letters is a complex, contradictory figure."