Maud graduated from Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown in 1894 and received a first-class teacher's licence. She taught school altogether for some three years and attended Dalhousie University in Halifax for one year. When her grandfather died in 1898 she returned to Cavendish to take care of her grandmother and to work in the post office with her. Apart from a ten-month stint as a newspaper reporter in Halifax (1901-1902), she stayed with her grandmother until Lucy Woolner Macneill died in 1911. In July of 1911 Maud Montgomery married Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald (see photographs above), to whom she had been secretly engaged for five years, and moved to Ontario. Her first novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), was an immediate international success.

The Macdonalds lived in Leaskdale, Ontario (1911-26) and then in Norval (1926-35), where they raised two sons. Montgomery continued to write. When Ewan Macdonald retired from the ministry in 1935, they moved to Toronto. L.M. Montgomery Macdonald died in 1942. She was buried in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, on the hill overlooking the land and sea she loved.

In 1923 Montgomery was the first Canadian woman to be made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Arts in Great Britain. In 1935 she was elected to the Literary and Artistic Institute of France and was also made an Officer of the Order of the British Empire. In 1936, largely because her books had already made the area a destination for travelers, the Government of Canada purchased land in Cavendish and designated it for a national park. In 1943 Lucy Maud Montgomery Macdonald was declared in Canada a person of national historic significance.

In her lifetime she published twenty novels, five hundred short stories and five hundred poems in periodicals, two collections of short stories, one volume of poetry, and contributed three short biographies to the volume Courageous Women. For years she gave public readings and talks and wrote articles for newspapers and magazines. She left behind personal scrapbooks of photographs, memorabilia, and clippings and a million-word journal illustrated with her own photographs. Her novels have been translated into more than a dozen languages and she has inspired productions in radio, television, theatre, cinema, music, and art.