“I read everything, I possibly could about her,” Fishbane said. Seeing the name of the author, and discovering it was actually a real person with a real family and a real life, was life-changing. When she was about 7, Fishbane’s parents bought her the book series.

“My mother was kind of in love with Michael Landon,” she said. Her love for stories, history and reading started with Little House on the Prairie. She started when she was 12, to deal with the emotions of growing up and going through puberty as a (self-described) overweight girls with “that hair” and “those horrible braces.” It was an obsession from an early age.įishbane, like Montgomery, kept a detailed journal.

She actually kept all those journals, and they have since been published.įishbane read each of these journals, as well as dozens of poems, hundreds of short stories and all of Montgomery’s 21 novels. She was a meticulous note-taker, writing in journals from the time she was nine. Montgomery also described the landscape with rolling hills, open spaces and winding rivers as “a western Eden.”Īll of this is described in Montgomery’s journals, letters, poems and essays. She describes how she falls in love with the city, which Montgomery described as having a “medieval” flare. Fishbane describes them as her formative years. While fans of Montgomery are well versed in her history in P.A., not everyone is aware of how important it was in her life. I truly think Prince Albert was the fodder for future writing.” “This is the place she grows up, this is where she does her first writing, true writing. “Montgomery came here a very young girl, and she becomes a woman here,” said Melanie Fishbane, author of Maud, a fictionalized account of Montgomery’s teen years. That 15-year-old lgirl left a year later, but in the time in between she went to high school, fell in love with the city and a boy in town, became a published writer in the local newspaper and became a young woman. The Montgomery home, where Lucy Maud Montgomery spent part of her teen years, was once located on this Prince Albert corner. Her hope was she would finally be part of a family – with her father, his new wife, and their family in their home at what is now Central Avenue and 11 th Street East. She had lived with her grandparents, and was young, bookish and ambitious. She had been away from her father since she was 11, when he headed west to fight in the Riel Resistance. Her mother had died when she was just 21 months old. In 1890 a 15-year-old girl moved to Prince Albert from Cavendish, PEI. A new book explores the life of the teen, and her adventures in Prince Albert. (Peter Lozinski/Daily Herald) Lucy Maud Montgomery spent a year in P.A., a year that would prove important to her later in life. Fishbane reads from her book 'Maud' during a stop in at the Prince Albert Historical Museum.

Maud melanie fishbane