Catherine Reid - The Landscapes of Anne of Green Gables: The Enchanting Island that Inspired L. M. Montgomery

Wheat ready for harvest.

CATHERINE REID

Timber Press Portland, Oregon

The good stars met in your horoscope,
Made you of spirit and fire and dew.

ROBERT BROWNING, 1855

Old Prince Edward Island is a good place in which to be borna good place in which to spend a childhood. I can think of none better.

THE ALPINE PATH

During the course of her life, Lucy Maud Montgomery published twenty novels, more than five hundred short stories, hundreds of poems, and numerous essays. But it was her first and remarkable novel, Anne of Green Gables (1908), that garnered her a worldwide audience. The enthusiastic response to the book spurred an immediate request for more stories about the spunky, irrepressible Anne (an additional seven novels and three story collections fill out the rest of Annes life), while Anne of Green Gables went through initial print runs at speeds that surprised author and publisher alike. In the subsequent century, the novel has sold over fifty million copies, been translated into twenty different languages, and spun off numerous films, plays, musicals, and television series.

Such popularity derives from the books equally compelling features: the appeal of its storylineelderly siblings want a boy from an orphanage to help them with farm work and are sent an odd scrawny girl insteadand the sheer force of Annes personality, so garrulous, smart, and endearing that she quickly wins over Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert along with a wide array of island characters. Annes imagination carries the book, as she manages to find the beauty in the bleak and the lesson in every disaster, beginning with the grim possibility of being returned to the orphanage.

Due to the phenomenal success of Anne of Green Gables, tourism is Prince Edward Islands second most important industry, with agriculture (number one) and fishing (number three) still as important as they were when Montgomery lived there. For the fan seeking the landscapes of Annes old haunts, however, the level of new development can be startling; this is not the Prince Edward Island of the late 1890s, when Anne was gathering mayflowers by the armfuls and wandering fern-lined paths through the woods. One has to look beyond the modern conveyances to see the evidence of undisturbed woodlands, acres of farmland, and expanse of ocean just beyond, or squint in a way that blurs the adjacent golf course and amusement park, the buses and B&Bs, the tour groups and Anne look-alikes in their aprons and wigs with red braids. It is then that it becomes possible to see and sense all that a childor the child in all of usmight have been able to learn and pursue in the Prince Edward Island of Annes era. This book returns readers to the original landscape that so inspired one of literatures most memorable characters.

Matthew Cuthbert, says the astonished Marilla, whos that? Illustration by M. A. and W. A. J. Claus, from the 1908 edition.

A road through the woods, looking much as it would have in Montgomerys day. In Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery referred to a similar lane as the Birch Path.

A street in Avonlea Village, which features original buildings from Montgomerys time as well as replicas of other period buildings; Montgomery modeled the fictitious Avonlea on the town of Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY shares numerous similarities with the unforgettable Anne Shirley. Annes parents died when she was an infant; Mauds mother also died when she was not-quite two, and her father decamped to the other side of the continent a few months later. Both are subsequently raised by elderly peopleMaud by her mothers grim and stiff parents, and Anne by a pair of unmarried siblings. Both are gregarious, intelligent, high achievers, excelling at their schoolwork and ranking top in their classes. Both attend one-room schools and later teach in them. Both delight in being in the midst of social whirlswhether berrying, recital-planning, or sharing pranks with their classmates; both also pursue justice ferociously and are adept at maintaining an iciness against those they feel have wronged them.

Most notably, though, its when landscape and the imagination merge that their shared sensibility becomes most evident. They use many of the same names for their favorite places (Lovers Lane, the Lake of Shining Waters, the Haunted Wood) and spend as much time as possible wandering favorite spots (when she and her friends were young, Montgomery writes in an 1892 journal entry, we fairly lived in the woods). The great expanses of sea and field act like canvases for their imaginations, the quiet island beauty nourishing their souls.

In the first eight years of Lucy Maud Montgomerys surviving journals, the period she subsequently describes in Anne of Green Gables, nothing is rendered as poetically as are the scenes of naturenot clothing or playmates or the interiors of houses, not pets or schoolrooms or suitors. Its when she turns her attention to the surrounding land that the reader can feel her changing gears to one that evokes far more passion. In that shift of her gaze to the outdoors, the ordinary falls away, and the following sentences soar with aesthetic power. The subtle hues in a sunset, the changing colors of autumn, the winter scenes from a horse-drawn sleighall reverberate with new meaning when seen through Maud Montgomerys or Anne Shirleys eyes.

Queen Annes lace (Daucus carota)

A field of clover, a cover crop that farmers might rotate with wheat, hay, corn, or potatoes.

This shift in voice when turning to the landscape is especially noticeable when either girl is feeling uncertain, badly treated, or homesick, as in Annes first hours with the Cuthberts, not knowing whether they would let her stay at Green Gables, or when Montgomery spends an awkward teenage year in Saskatchewan with her father and his new wife and realizes she has little place in their life there. To rally herself, each girl turns toward the natural worldlooking out a window, walking down a wooded lane, or recovering a memory of some happy time spent outsideand almost immediately, as though a switch had been flipped, the prose vibrates with a new energy and the sorrow fades away.