In a TVO biography series on Extraordinary Canadians, internationally-acclaimed author Jane Urquhart (The Underpainter, The Stone Carver, A Map of Glass) stated that she believes writers like herself would not write the way they do today had they not been preceded by Montgomery.  “Lucy Maud made it clear to me that you could become a writer, and believe it or not, when I was a child, that wasn’t necessarily so,” she explains. 

“I believe that one of the great things that Lucy Maud Montgomery did was give us permission to understand that the kind of thing that one might write about can take place in your own backyard.”  In a way, the setting of Anne of Green Gables is almost smaller than life, but through depicting a rural landscape for her story – a landscape that was the dominant way of life for most people living in Canada at the time – Montgomery was showing young people that their own homes could be “mythologized”.

Urquhart says it is important to remember that while Anne’s story is often categorized as a children’s book with a sunny-dispositioned protagonist, Maud’s story actually addresses a lot of important social issues in her time, particularly the plight of the orphan."

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