An ode to Anne and L.M. Montgomery

Today is writer Lucy Maud Montgomery’s 144th birthday. Montgomery is famous for her Anne of Green Gables novels.

I never read the books as a child and was only drawn to the heroine a few years ago when I watched the 1980s Megan Follows dramatisation – and then read the books.

Anne is a timeless heroine and this is why she remains so popular today (she even has a massive following in Japan). She is resilient and has survived deep early traumas such as losing both her parents, living in orphanages and generally having to grow up too quickly.

She is smart and she does not apologise for it; she is ambitious and talented and writes her way out of a mediocre small-town life; she stands up for herself with no hesitation; she does not downgrade herself to keep up with a man even when that man proposes to her and all of her friends are pairing up; she speaks the truth with passion and emotion, even to adults; she is true to herself and committed to finding out who she is and where she belongs in the world.

She is also kind-hearted and generous and never seems to give up on anybody – often winning hearts everywhere she goes. Maybe Montgomery paints Anne as extremely positive because it was a way to provide an antidote to her own melancholia. (L.M. was even committed to a specialist mental hospital at one point in her life and her husband also used to suffer from crippling depression.)

Earlier this year, I had the chance to take a trip to Prince Edward Island (PEI) – the birthplace of Montgomery and where the Anne of Green Gables books are set. I learned how deeply the island affected the writer’s creation of Anne. Montgomery lived with her maternal grandparents because her mother died when she was very young and her father spent years establishing a career, many times moving between PEI and the western provinces.

Site of the home where L.M. wrote her Anne books

I met two generations of the Montgomery family (on the Macneil side) on the site of Green Gables. The view in the background is what L.M. would have woken up to when writing the books.

It was at her grandparents’ home in Cavendish that she wrote Anne of Green Gables and many other books and short stories. The buildings do not remain today but the land around it evokes Anne’s Green Gables. Montgomery has written how “it is and ever must be hallowed ground to me” and how “the peace and quiet of this dear old place is very sweet to me. There is no place on earth I love, or ever will love as I do it”.

She certainly had a lot of time to be silent, think and imagine the books. So much time alone, the trees became her friends, recognising that they “whispered nightly around the old house where I slept” and remarking how “when I have lived with a tree for many years it seems to me like a beloved human companion”.

A replica of Anne’s room in another building belonging to Montgomery’s relatives but now a historic heritage site

The Lake of Shining Waters

Yes, you can get raspberry cordial on PEI!

While we all know Anne is a fictional creation, to Montgomery she was very real. At the Anne of Green Gables museum which I visited on PEI, there is evidence of this in the writer’s own words. The museum displays are accompanied by information from her biographies and journals. One plaque states that when Montgomery was 10, she told the neighbours across from her relatives’ home that if she ever had a daughter she would name her Anne. Montgomery herself also states that when asked if Anne is fictional she always used to reply ‘no’ with “an odd reluctance and an uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth”.

Montgomery said: “For she is and always has been, from the moment I first thought of her, so real to me that i feel I am doing violence to something when I deny her an existence….she is so real that although I’ve never met her, I feel quite sure I shall do so some day – perhaps in a stroll through Lover’s Lane in the twilight – or in the moonlit Birch Path – I shall lift my eyes and find her, child or maiden, by my side. And I shall not be in the least surprised because I have always known she was somewhere.”

A kindred spirit indeed.

Here lies L.M. alongside her husband, Ewen Macdonald