"The Story Girl" is one of the less well-known works of which children's author?

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) is most famous as the creator of the "Anne of Green Gables" series about the spirited red-haired orphan girl who comes to live with Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert on Prince Edward Island in Canada.

But she was the author of many other books as well, including the "Emily" series, and this novel, originally published in 1911, which tells the story of a group of cousins, and is also set on Prince Edward Island. Aficionados of the "Anne" novels will be familiar with an imaginative young heroine, but Sara Stanley, the eponymous heroine of "The Story Girl" takes things a stage further. Her tales are also rather more adult in nature than Anne's, drawing on the Celtic legends of her (and Montgomery's) inheritance, as well as Greek myths and pastiches of such writers as Edgar Allan Poe. In a rather surprising psychological twist, another Sara, Sara Ray is afflected with melancholy - as was Montgomery herself. There is no overt suggestion at all that they are meant, in some way, to be one and the same character, but one must wonder if them having the same name is wholly coincidental. However, it is not without humour, and the author, who was in a somewhat loveless betrothal to a Presbyterian minister at the time, includes some parodies of long-winded sermons!

There was a sequel to the book, entitled "The Golden Road", published in 1913, and it also forms the basis of some of the episodes of the TV series "Road to Avonlea".