Anne of Green Gables
by L. M. Montgomery
This coming Saturday marks the 150th birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the author of Anne of Green Gables.
Montgomery was born on 30 November 1874 on Prince Edward Island, the smallest province of Canada, north of Nova Scotia. Her mother died before her second birthday so she was raised by her maternal grandparents. She had a lonely childhood and used to take long solitary walks, during which she experienced ‘the flash’, tranquil moments of ecstatic clarity. She became a prolific writer and is best remembered today for her children’s novel Anne of Green Gables (1908) and its many sequels, which include Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Anne of Windy Willows (1936) and Anne of Ingleside (1939).
In the book, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert are a middle-aged brother and sister who run Green Gables Farm on Prince Edward Island. They apply for an orphan boy to help with their work, but Anne Shirley arrives instead, an eleven-year-old girl with bright red hair and a big imagination. The book follows Anne’s adventures on the farm with the Cuthberts and at school in the nearby town of Avonlea.
Anne of Green Gables is much loved around the world, especially in Japan, where it has been on the national curriculum since 1952. Japanese couples regularly travel to Prince Edward Island to get married and there is a replica of Green Gables Farm at the ‘Canadian World’ theme park in Ashibetsu, on the island of Hokkaido.
Incidentally, on the very same day that Montgomery was born in New London, a baby boy was born at Blenheim Palace in Oxfordshire. His name was Winston Churchill.
If you want to know what little Winston got up to 150 years ago, at the same age as Anne of Green Gables, you can find out in the best of the many books he wrote: My Early Life (1930).
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Montgomery was a fascinating woman. Her fiction writing was often crafted to suit the demands of her publishers, eager to satisfy the reading public that loved Anne. She married later in life (in her thirties, unusual for the time) to a minister and had two sons. His vocation took her away from her beloved Prince Edward Island. Some of her other notable works include The Story Girl series, the Emily series that is a particular inspiration to young writers, and Rilla of Ingleside, considered one of the few good works of fiction depicting life in Canada during World War One. In spite if all the time demands made on her with writing and church duties, she was a prolific journal writer and if you are interested in the woman behind the novels, they are an interesting read. These journals reveal the pull she felt between doing her duty to others( her publisher, her husband, her children, the church, her family in PEI) and struggling to fulfill her writing ambitions. Often rewritten, they document a marriage that went sour as her husband experienced mental illness, children who grew up to be disappointing aand her struggles to be more than a writer of children’s books. By the end of her life she was a very unhappy person, and there is some doubt as to whether her death was due to ill health or an overdose of drugs. But she journaled almost to the very end.
Oh my gosh, I love, love, love "Anne of Green Gables." It was one of the first classic lit novels that I read. Anne (and Jo March of "Little Women") made me feel it was okay to be a weird teen. That it was fine to not be like everyone else. If you ever get a chance, try Montgomery's "The Blue Castle." So good.