The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L.M. Montgomery, author of Anne of Green Gables by Mollie Gillen was first published by Fitzhenry & Whiteside in 1975. The book was reprinted in paperback in 1983 by Goodread Biographies, an imprint of the Formac Publishing Company. Gillen's groundbreaking biography was based on her "skillful literary detective work" in locating important primary sources, including the lost correspondence of L.M. Montgomery and George Boyd MacMillan. Gillen's work provided new insight into L.M. Montgomery's life.
Here is the book's description from
Formac Publishing Company:
The remarkable life and struggles of the woman who created Canada's best-loved heroine, Anne of Green Gables.
Lucy Maud Montgomery is Canada's best-known writer of children's fiction. Anne of Green Gables-- in print, film, television, on stage--captures people's imaginations as easily now as it did when it burst upon the world in 1908.
Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up in Prince Edward Island and she set her best-loved stories there. She worked briefly as a journalist, but family responsibilities shaped her life as a young single woman. At 36 she married a dour, often depressive Presbyterian minister and moved to Ontario. There she lived a life of contradictions--in private, the romantic, successful imaginative writer; in public the strict, dutiful minister's wife.
Using diaries and letters Lucy Maud never intended to be made public, The Wheel of Things is a pioneering biography of one of Canada's most successful and important writers. Since its publication, the release of Montgomery's diaries and other work by scholarly writers have confirmed the life story that Mollie Gillen tells so well in this important and path-breaking biography.
Reviews
"Mollie Gillen has made Lucy Maud Montgomery a vividly real human being, in a biography as readable as its subject's own novels."
—Joan McGrath, Quill & Quire
"Millions have shared her dreams ... a perceptive and sympathetic portrait of a complex personality."
—Ottawa Journal
Image credit:
Scan of my book cover of
The Wheel of Things.
References:
Review of
The Wheel of Things. A Biography of L.M. Montgomery. Author of Anne of Green Gables.
Children's Literature Association Quarterly, vol. 2 no. 3, 1977, p. 16-16.
Project MUSE https://dx.doi.org/10.1353/chq.0.1425.
Cowan, Ann S. Review of
The Wheel of Things: A Biography of L.M. Montgomery, Author of Anne of Green Gables, by Mollie Gillen.
The Canadian Historical Review, vol. 58 no. 4, 1977, p. 512-513.
Project MUSE,
https://muse.jhu.edu/article/570657.
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Created June 20, 2000. Last
updated September 27, 2024.
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