Logan Steiner on 'After Anne', the Fictional Biography of Author L.M. Montgomery

Litigator and author, Logan Steiner, joins us to share her fascinating debut novel, After Anne: A Novel of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Life. Her story is a fictionalized account of the life of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the famed Canadian author of the beloved Anne of Green Gables series, and tells of Maud’s marriage to a Presbyterian minister, the personal struggles she faced as a mother, writer, and public figure, and the tragic way her life ended. As for what drew Steiner to writing about Maud, she said, “I’m just always really drawn to learn about my favorite authors so I not only appreciate their books but I really want to know the story behind the story and everything that they’ve faced along the way that they went through and persevered through to create the books that I love the most, and so I learned about the story of Maud sitting in bed late one night and it immediately drew me in and I felt really compelled to learn more… and her life ended in this really tragic way that hadn’t been revealed for a number of generations… and then learning that she had these journals… I was really drawn to learn more and to write, to have my first book be the story of somebody with a real creative spirit whose work had inspired me.”

One of the motivations for writing this book came from Steiner’s curiosity of what someone’s life is like after a big event unfolds. “I’ve always been really interested in that idea of the after. That idea of after a lifelong dream is realized, what happens next? And so I knew I really wanted to tell, to look at, what was life like after the huge success of Anne of Green Gables and to explore what happens in Maud’s life that lead to this tragic end for this writer of such life-affirming characters to take her own life… I was so moved to really dive in and understand that question.” Regarding the structure of the novel, Steiner centered the events around the papers that Maud burned towards the end of her life. Steiner was intrigued with what would have been in those papers that Maud felt so compelled to burn and destroy. She wondered, “What would a famous writer have chosen to excise from her life record and really I’ve always wanted to know, what will really matter to me at the end of my life? What matters in the end? So I landed, after many edits and many iterations, on a structure that really centers around Maud burning papers of her life and having scenes that are most significant to her replay that are related to those papers that she’s burning.”

Although Maud wrote many other books, Anne of Green Gables is by far her best known work. Set in Prince Edward Island, Canada, the series chronicles Anne Shirley’s life beginning as an 11- year-old orphan and follows her journey into middle age. What does Steiner attribute Anne’s popularity and staying power to? She reflected, “Anne just has this vibrant openness about her and really saying what she means and also being so open with her emotions… she just has this enduring precociousness and verbosity, and is so much herself in the world, and I think there’s something in each of us that wants to be more that way… I also think that Maud had such a gift for relationships and so much of what endured readers to her to the Anne character were her relationships… the way she related to different people in a small town…that’s so much the appeal of Anne as well, which is about that sense of place.”