Oddly enough, having just visited the land[1] of Anne of Green Gables, in all its lovely and quiet summertime glory, I’ve been unable to write. It’s as if I don’t want to sully the author’s life and love with my own words, when hers were more than sufficiently brilliant.

 

Rather than try to recapture the experience in my own drab casing, I’ll tell you some fun and interesting stuff I Iearned about how the infamous Anne of Green Gables was inspired, and how cool the author, L.M. Montgomery, truly was. And to be fair, I’m not sure I’ll get all the facts right because I was so caught up in the magic of it all that I could barely focus to read the exhibits in the museum portion, but I’ll try.

 

The main character of the novel is Anne Shirley. Where to begin? My god, I just started to bust out “How do you solve a problem like Maria?” from the Sound of Music. That’s not even one of my faves because (said with a cringe) I really don’t like TV musicals at all (you can judge me, it’s OK). But I guess the sentiment is the same. The nuns didn’t have a clue how to handle Maria, just as most everyone was baffled by Anne. Why? You just can pin Anne down. She’s a free spirit. And, she’s a free spirit in the late 1800s/early 1900s, during a time when girls weren’t encouraged to be free anything. After all, our protagonist Anne was not only a child, but a girl and an orphan to boot.

 

The parallels between Anne and and the author begin right away. Lucy Maud Montgomery, born 1874, lost her mom, Clara Woolner Macneil, to tuberculosis when Lucy was just 21-months-old. She likely didn’t have a single memory of her—heartbreaking for a little girl. So it’s no wonder her fictional creation, Anne Shirley, lost her parents to typhoid fever days apart when Anne was just 3-months-old. As you probably know, this sets the trajectory of the whole novel.

 

Anne’s eventual caretakers, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, are brother and sister in their mid-to-later years who decide they need some help running their farm. They reach out to an orphanage on the mainland requesting a boy come live with them on Price Edward Island. Who shows up on the train but eleven-year-old, red-haired Anne Shirley. Not a boy. When the realization of the mix-up hits for Marilla, we get our first true glimpse of the passionate, imaginative, fire-cracker who is Anne (and L.M. Montgomery).

 

Matthew brings Anne inside to meet Marilla, who is thoroughly confused as to what the mare and buggy brought home with him. The two adults discuss the situation in front of Anne and the following “tragical” scene ensues. Anne unleashes with the following:

“You don't want me!” she cried. “You don't want me because I'm not a boy! I might have expected it. Nobody ever did want me. I might have known it was all too beautiful to last. I might have known nobody really did want me. Oh, what shall I do? I'm going to burst into tears!”[2]

 

Marilla tries to stop the tear train before it takes off from the station, but Anne miserably retorts:

“You would cry, too, if you were an orphan and had come to a place you thought was going to be home and found that they didn't want you because you weren't a boy. Oh, this is the most tragical thing that ever happened to me!”[3]

 

If we pop back over to the author’s life for a minute, we can see that there’s good reason Lucy Maud Montgomery felt (and wrote) Anne’s rejection so acutely.  Her own father, Hugh John Montgomery, was supposedly so stricken with grief over his wife’s death (and likely so overwhelmed by suddenly having a girl child under the age of 2 all by himself), that he placed Lucy in the custody of her maternal grandparents, the Macneils. I imagine Lucy must have wondered if she had been a boy, whether she would have been more “valuable” to her father, or if he would have stayed. Or at least, he could have taken her with him, when he left Cavendish and moved up to the north west of Canada to what we now know as Saskatchewan when Lucy was just 7-years-old. Ironically, Lucy later had three children of her own—all male—although one was stillborn.

 

And so, from a young age, Lucy grew up in Cavendish on the Macneill homestead, an old-fashioned Cavendish farmhouse, surrounded by apple orchards situated less than a mile from the Atlantic coast.[4] Without her mother or father, she lived with her grandparents, a very lonely little girl. It’s said that this is where her creativity as a budding artist and author bloomed. One article tells us that her writing habits developed early in life, and her imagination became “a passport to fairyland”: “I had no companionship except that of books and solitary rambles in wood and fields. This drove me in on myself and early forced me to construct for myself a world of fancy and imagination very different indeed from the world in which I lived.”[5]

 

As it turns out in real life, Lucy Maud Montgomery really did not like her first name, and so, I’m going to call her what she preferred—Maud—without an “e”. While that’s not a particularly popular name today, I can see why she was a bit starstruck by it. Back in England in 1843, Queen Victoria’s second daughter was named Princess Alice Maud Mary, and that’s supposedly why Lucy’s mom picked that as her middle name. So Maud knew right off the bat that her Anne, who desperately tried to rename herself Cordelia much to Marilla’s chagrin, at the very least needed to celebrate the “e” at the end of her name to differentiate herself from the ordinary and “unromantic” Ann. When Marilla questions her about all this name and spelling nonsense, Anne replies,

“Oh, it makes such a difference. It looks so much nicer. When you hear a name pronounced can't you always see it in your mind, just as if it was printed out? I can; and A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished. If you'll only call me Anne spelled with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia.”[6]

 

You gotta love this kid. And it doesn’t take too long for Marilla to catch up to her brother Matthew in falling in love with her, in her own rusty way. Maud’s grandparents were said to be strict Presbyterians who showed her little in the way of affection. So perhaps eventually “winning over” Marilla and Matthew was a way of re-writing her own story as she wished it could have been, given the loss of her mom.

 

In the story, Anne regularly had to hide or tone down her enthusiasm for life and love of fantasy and drama. My guess is that the author had to do much of the same. She couldn’t let on that she had imaginary friends growing up, but she could certainly write them into Anne’s story later in life, and out came Lucy Gray and Katie Maurice.

 

In fact, Maud kept her writing secret from her family because they considered it to be a waste of time—especially for a woman. So she worked in secret, even going so far as to smuggle candles to her room so she could write at night. She even held a job at the post office partly to give her cover and allow her to send manuscripts and receive correspondence from publishers. In her 1917 autobiography, The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career, Maud said, “I struggled on alone, in secrecy and silence. I never told my ambitions and efforts and failures to any one. Down, deep down, under all discouragement and rebuff, I knew I would 'arrive' some day.” And arrive she did!

 

Like the character she so craftily wrote, Maud had plenty of encouragement from nature. Good ‘ole Wikipedia tells us the following:

During solitary walks through the peaceful island countryside, Montgomery started to experience what she called “the flash” – a moment of tranquility and clarity when she felt an emotional ecstasy, and was inspired by the awareness of a higher spiritual power running through nature. Montgomery's accounts of this “flash” later served as the basis for her descriptions of Anne Shirley's sense of emotional communion with nature. In 1905, Montgomery wrote in her journal that “amid the commonplaces of life, I was very near to a kingdom of ideal beauty. Between it and me hung only a thin veil. I could never quite draw it aside, but sometimes a wind fluttered it and I seemed to catch a glimpse of the enchanting realm beyond-only a glimpse-but those glimpses have always made life worthwhile.”[7]

 

Maud began writing Anne of Green Gables in the spring of 1904 and sent it off for the first time in 1905. She used her initials, L. M., lest she be rejected even more quickly for being a woman. I have to imagine she said something to the effect of “Let them read my work and then decide.” All she heard from publishers were five different rejections. Finally fed up, it’s said she stuffed the whole manuscript in a hat box until one day in 1908 she decided to give it another shot and got a “yes” from a publishing company in Boston. It went viral—as viral as things could without internet. Even Mark Twain fawned over it here in America.

 

By the time she passed in 1942, Montgomery published 20 novels, over 500 short stories, 30 essays, an autobiography, and a book of poetry. Anne of Green Gables has been translated into 25 languages, more than 50 million copies of the book have been sold worldwide, and it is probably still the most widely read Canadian novel in the world. It has been made into movies, plays, musicals, cartoons, miniseries, and radio shows. The book put Prince Edward Island on the map, and the historic site of her birth is a park that sees over 125,000 visitors each year—I’m proud to count myself as one in 2019. Montgomery did all this at a time when women couldn’t even vote. Anne would be proud of her.[8]

 

And so on a sunny Friday morning, I stood on the lush green land just outside of the Macneil homestead. I marveled at the strange reality of physically being at what has become “Green Gables.” And borrowing “Anne's beauty-loving eyes,” I “lingered on it all, taking everything greedily in.” The novels tell us:

A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thick-set with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen. On both sides of the house was a big orchard, one of apple-trees and one of cherry-trees, also showered over with blossoms; and their grass was all sprinkled with dandelions. In the garden below were lilac-trees purple with flowers, and their dizzily sweet fragrance drifted up to the window on the morning wind.”[9]

 

I breathed that sweet air and then toured the house. I couldn’t help but fawn over the dress with the puffy sleeves that hung in Anne’s bedroom. I chuckled at the cupboard where she found and downed the raspberry cordial while entertaining Diana. I floated through what was probably Lover’s Lane to the post office where Maud once worked. I imagined I found the Lake of Shining Waters closer to the coast. I marveled at the fact that Lucy Maud Montgomery had actually lived here and dreamed here. It was all so romantical, in the purest sense of childhood.

P.S. If you’re now itching to reread the books or even listen to them, they’re still brilliant. And, if you want to re-watch, don’t settle for anything other than the 1986 version with Megan Follows. Seriously.

P.P.S. The parallels between their lives go on and on, but alas, I had to stop. And we may both be relieved.

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Notes/Sources:

[1] Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, tucked neatly between Nova Scotia and New Brunswick, Canada

[2] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/anne-III.html

[3] Idem

[4] https://www.encyclopedia.com/women/encyclopedias-almanacs-transcripts-and-maps/montgomery-lucy-maud-1874-1942?utm_medium=google

[5] Idem

[6] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/anne-III.html

[7] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Lucy_Maud_Montgomery

[8] http://mentalfloss.com/article/60282/14-facts-about-anne-green-gables-author-lm-montgomery

[9] https://www.cs.cmu.edu/~rgs/anne-IV.html