“To-day I was again annoyed and amused—with the annoyance distinctly uppermost—to be asked, as I so constantly am, ‘Was So—and—So the original of This—or—That in your books’?
This annoys me because I have never drawn any of the characters in my books ‘from life’, although I may have taken a quality here and an incident there.  I have used real places and speeches freely but I have never put any person I knew into my books.  I may do so some day but hitherto I have depended wholly on the creative power of my own imagination for my book folk.”

Montgomery insists that Matthew and Marilla are not based on relatives of hers – David and Margaret Macneill.  “The Matthew and Marilla I have in mind were entirely different people from David and Margaret.  I suppose the fact that David is a notoriously shy and silent man makes people think I drew Matthew from him.  But I made Matthew shy and silent simply because I wished to have all the people around Anne as pointedly in contrast with her as possible.” 

Some people think Marilla shared common characteristics with Montgomery’s grandmother.  Montgomery agrees that there are similar qualities, but they only made their way into Marilla because she wanted to make the character as different from Anne as possible.

Montgomery does reveal that Anne’s window friend Katie Maurice was actually drawn from her own imaginary friend who appeared in the bookcase door in her sitting room.

And there is one character that Montgomery strongly felt to be real – and always at her side.

“When I am asked if Anne herself is a ‘real person’ I always answer ‘no’ with an odd reluctance and an uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth.  For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real to me that I feel I am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence anywhere save in Dreamland.”

To read more about Montgomery’s vision of Anne, read The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery – Volume II: 1910-1921.