'L.M. Montgomery' by Jane Urquhart. With an introduction by John Ralston Saul. Penguin 167pp.


     Think of Lucy Maud Montgomery and like a flash images of small town girls come to mind. There's the world famous 'Anne of Green Gables', 'The Golden Road',  'Emily of New Moon' and many other novels written by one of Prince Edward Island's most famous daughters.
      In these novels, young girls and later as teenagers overcome stern parents, small town rules and other obstacles to win a new life.
     But Lucy Maud Montgomery's life wasn't like that at all. "O God, such an end to life," the sixty something Montgomery wrote nine months before she died. "Such suffering and wretchedness."
     In this short biography, the talented novelist Jane Urquhart spells out the main high and low points of Montgomery's life. There were many low points and it's good that Urquhart has told us about them, though she could have written a little more about the novels Montgomery wrote.
      In any case Montgomery's mother died whan Lucy was two. Her father went off to Saskatchewan and Lucy rarely saw him. She was raised by two stern maternal grandparents. Her closest friend and cousin Frede was killed by the great flu epidemic of 1919.
    Montgomery married a troubled Presbyterian minister Ewan MacDonald. But MacDonald freaked out and dragged his wife down with him.
      "His beliefs," writes Urquhart, "resulted in a paranoid conviction that he had been born damned and that God hated him." This was the Presbyterian creed raised to an impossible to bear level.
   Also Montgomery ended up in lawsuits with her publisher who tried to pay her as little as possible. Many writers have had this problem.
     The last seven years of Montgomery's life were spent mostly in Toronto where her husband's problems caused her to feel terribly depressed. By now which is the 1930's, her rigid judgemental character had turned off her two sons, Chester and Stuart. Another son, Hugh dies after his birth. Chester ended up in prison for a while.
     Montgomery's life was at times tough going and Urquhart hasn't spared us the details. Still, she's written a beautiful last chapter which shows us the great appeal of Montgomery's fiction.
    "Trust the art, not the artist," D.H. Lawrence once wrote. Urquhart hasn't really done this but she's filled us in on the sad background to Montgomery's mostly escapist fiction. I enjoyed reading this book. My only regret is that Urquhart didn't tell us more about the novels Montgomery wrote.