Here is Maud’s very first recollection of being in love:

“I was twelve or thirteen years old, I am not quite sure which, when I first fell in love.  There was a musical concert in Cavendish Hall one night, given by three graduates of the Blind School in Halifax.  One of these was a Mr. Chisholm—a tall, slendor young man with little golden dabs of side-whiskers, a most angelic face, and a more than angelic voice.  He sang several songs and I, small miss, gazing up at him from the audience lost my heart completely.

It is the truth that I felt, for the first time a very strange sensation—a romantic yearning of hitherto unknown and of almost terrifying sweetness.  It mattered not at all that my hero was blind.  He was perfection, that was all.  When I went home it seemed to me quite intolerable that I should never see him again and the world was suddenly big and lonely.  I thought about him for a week—and then forgot him.

Fifteen years afterwards in Halifax I met his widow.  Her husband had recently died and she was heart-broken—for it seems that he had really been all my young fancy had painted.  I told her with a smile that her husband had been the first man I had ever been in love with and she laughed sadly and said that everyone who knew him loved him.  So I did not bestow my virgin passion unworthily.

It seems absurd to speak of that experience as love; but, save in intensity and duration, what I felt that evening, as I gazed at the young singer’s pale, spiritual face—it really was spiritual in spite of the side-whiskers—and listened to his thrilling voice differed in nothing from the similar emotions of after years.  There was no passion in it, save of the soul, but that night I crossed the threshold of life’s temple, though I did not penetrate to the inner shrine.”

Source: The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery, Volume II: 1910-1921

Photo: Maud at age 12. - taken from The Lucy Maud Montgomery Album