Set in Prince Edward Island, most of the Anne of Green Gables novels were conjured up in Ontario by Lucy Maud Montgomery. She wrote the classic children's books that follow the adventures of the exuberant Anne Shirley. Mark Twain himself called Anne "the sweetest creation of childhood ever written."

The backdrop of Anne of Green Gables is 19th century P.E.I. where Montgomery was born and raised. But the truth is that she wrote most of her 22 novels while living in Ontario.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was also Mrs. Maud Macdonald, wife of Reverend Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian Minister. While she had written Anne of Green Gables a few years before she was married and was already a famous author, she decided to follow her husband as he took up church positions in small Ontario towns.

She kept writing and with the help of a housekeeper, raised two boys, taught Sunday school and in fashion of the times, tried to make her husband's life successful and respectful. And that took some doing, because while by all accounts Reverend Macdonald was a decent man, he seems to have suffered from some serious psychological problems.

In small communities where the Reverend held church posts, Maud did everything she could to keep Ewan's ailments a secret. She worried what a congregation would think if they knew their minister was so unstable. She worried he would lose his job. By the early '30s, the illusion about her husband had unraveled and he was forced to retire. And Lucy had to support her eldest son, an underachiever, so it wasn't just hard on her nerves, it was also hard on her pocketbook.

She had done well as an author, so the minister's family lived better than most. However, during the Depression, few were spared. Her investments had fallen and now her husband was being forced to leave his manse. How were they going to live — and where? So they moved to Toronto.

In 1935, Toronto was suffering from something we can all relate to — a shortage of affordable housing. It was a landlord's market and the real estate agents Maud talked to were indifferent to her goal of renting a nice family house for about $50 a month.

One of them told her about a place on Inglewood Dr. that she could get for that price, but when she took the Saint Clair streetcar across to Deer Park and saw what her $50 would get her — her heart just sank. The little house was jammed between two other ugly houses. The kitchen was terrible, the hall was dark and the stairs were steep. And the two main rooms were covered in dreary wallpaper. Yet this seemed it was all her $50 could buy her in the big city.

So, with heavy heart, Maud made her way back downtown to stop in at just one last real estate office. With a population of 600,000, Toronto was a big city, but it was still small enough that when you went into the real estate office of A.E. LePage you could deal with Albert E. LePage himself.

Interested and understanding, Albert would be happy to show her some houses for rent if she would like to come back on Tuesday for an appointment. But sadly, he was quite sure that she wouldn't find anything she liked for less that $900 a year. $75 dollars a month. Maud's heart sank again.

But then, in the timeless patter of real estate, Mr. LePage informed her that if she could come up with $3000 dollars for a down payment, she could set up a mortgage that would carry for far less than rent. Now does that sound familiar to you? Well, Maud loved the idea. She loved the very idea of a house and a home. In Green Gables, she invented one of the best-loved houses in English literature and she had been well rewarded for her talents. Yet, at age 61, she had never owned a house of her own.

On Tuesday, when she and her husband came to meet Mr. LePage at his office, they were early. To kill time, they went down Riverside Dr. on the east side of the Humber River so they could look at the nice new houses going up. Maud knew the road well. They had often driven the route when they came to the city and Maud had always joked that she would like to live there when they retired. That morning she wasn't looking to buy a Riverside Dr. house but when she saw what she wanted, she wanted what she saw.

It was a two-and-a-half storey, Olde-English styled house. "A piece of England far from England," the Toronto developer Home Smith used to say, and little stone cottages and big half-timbered houses were his preferred landscape. The house she fixed her gaze on was brand new. So new, that the For Sale sign sat on the lawn and the builder/owner met her on the path and took her through the place.

There was a vestibule, a proper paneled hall, and a living room with a fireplace and big casement windows at either end. There was a breakfast nook, a bright, tiled kitchen, and a dining room with another big window. Upstairs there were two bathrooms — one of them in the big bedroom — and downstairs there was a recreation room. And everywhere there were lots of closets. It looked like a bit of old England from the outside, but inside it had everything. But for Maud, it was the trees and the valley behind the house that sealed the deal. She could garden, write, live.

Later that morning Mr. LePage thought it was a fine house too; he lived nearby on Riverside himself! They negotiated a price for something under $14,000 and after years of stress Maud, who so loved houses and trees, had found her own home. She named it Journey's End.

Albert E. LePage was the founder of Royal LePage.