When Lucy Maud Montgomery created Anne Shirley, she contributed a memorable character to the rich literature of orphans: Jane Eyre, Tom Sawyer, and Huck Finn, along with Dickens’s Oliver Twist, David Copperfield, and Pip of Great Expectations. Each of these children is tested again and again by cruel adults and brutal circumstances, yet each manages to triumph over adversity, and see and shape a kinder world along the way. Anne Shirley’s situation follows a similar storyline—a young girl without family or friends, bounced from one bad situation to another, and then sent, unwanted, to a grim and crowded orphanage. By an odd stroke of luck, she finds herself en route to Avonlea, on Prince Edward Island, in response to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert’s request for a child to help with the work of their farm. Though not the boy the brother and sister had expected, once there, Anne proves wildly successful at winning over her detractors and does so in a way that sets her apart from the other literary orphans. While the English moors, the Mississippi River, and the London underbelly are integral to their respective novels, Anne’s relationship with the land of Prince Edward Island soon proves to be a critical source of inner strength.
As in the novels that preceded it, the strong draw of Anne’s story is due as much to the orphan’s charisma as to the setting where it takes place—in her case, the wooded paths, the orchards in bloom, the fields stretching out toward the sea. But the lasting gift of Anne of Green Gables is how the landscape also fuels Anne’s prodigious imagination; it’s where she goes when she needs sustenance; it’s the example she’ll hold onto for what is beautiful, what is possible. Anne’s creator, Maud Montgomery, makes this abundantly clear in the ways she writes about the natural world. In such passages, her writing soars, every sentence imbued with the kind of sensory detail that could only be rendered by someone who knew the scenes intimately and loved all she found there. In giving Anne such a connection to Avonlea, Montgomery reveals the way place can fire the imagination, and imagination, in turn, is what enables a skinny red-haired girl not only to survive but to thrive. It’s no wonder that so many people associate the landscape of Prince Edward Island with transformative, nurturing power.
In the journals she kept throughout her life, Maud Montgomery reveals so many similar experiences to those of Anne Shirley that much of the novel appears to be autobiographical. Even so, she insists that Anne was not based on anyone she knew. “I have never drawn any of the characters in my books ‘from life,’” she writes, “although I may have taken a quality here and an incident there. I have used real places and speeches freely but I have never put any person I knew into my books.” Yet her journals suggest that she is overlooking the most significant influence, for it’s clear that the life that most shaped the beloved Anne is the author’s own; she herself was the inspiration for the spirited girl whom readers came to love.
I put my arm around a lichened old spruce and laid my cheek against its rough side—it seemed like an old friend.
—THE SELECTED JOURNALS OF L. M. MONTGOMERY, VOL. 1
Prince Edward Island wheat fields, spruces, and fir trees. “There is no spot on earth more lovely,” Montgomery wrote of the island, on December 11, 1890.
Montgomery may have believed that Anne’s characteristics were different enough from her own to deflect a sense of personal story—Anne’s particularly awful childhood (the author was never in an orphanage), the curse of red hair (the author’s was brown), kindly elders to raise her (the author’s were not), and the letter “e” as part of her name (“I never liked Lucy as a name,” Montgomery writes in her journal. “I always liked Maud—spelled not ‘with an e’ if you please.”). And she may have believed that other, obvious similarities lacked significance—both had potted geraniums named “Bonny”; both had the same names for their favorite haunts (the Lake of Shining Waters, Lover’s Lane, the Haunted Wood, the Birch Path); both had the same imaginary friends reflected in clear glass—Katie Maurice, Violetta; and both lived with women who were known for their red currant wine.
Or perhaps Montgomery did see the common themes of their lives but chose never to admit that to anyone, including herself.
When I am asked if Anne herself is a “real person” I always answer “no” with an odd reluctance and an uncomfortable feeling of not telling the truth. 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 anywhere save in Dreamland . . . 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.
In ways that matter most to readers of the novel, that “somewhere” resides solidly within the author’s very being. Like Anne Shirley, Maud Montgomery valued the imagination almost as much as life itself. Like Anne, she deliberately chose to emphasize beauty—desiring, always, both to see it and to make it. And perhaps most important, like Anne, she found solace and sustenance in the natural world. The love they express for Prince Edward Island—its farms and forests, its flowers and fields, its past and its people—has imprinted the region on the novel’s readers, allowing us to believe that, in a place of extraordinary beauty, we, too, can learn to access the best parts of ourselves.
MAUD MONTGOMERY WAS BORN in the town of Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in November 1874; twenty-one months later, she lost her mother, Clara Woolner Macneill Montgomery, to tuberculosis. Shortly afterward, her father, Hugh John Montgomery, joined the migration of families from Prince Edward Island to western Canada (a journey also taken by Gilbert Blythe’s father), leaving two-year-old Maud in Cavendish with his wife’s parents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill. Though she and her father corresponded, Maud would not see him again until she was nine, when he returned to Prince Edward Island for several months. At age twelve, when she learned that he was to be married, she was thrilled—“a real mother to love and be loved by!” She wrote her stepmother, Mary Ann McRae, adoring letters, enclosing pressed flowers gathered from her favorite places. “It gave me exquisite joy,” she wrote in her journal years later, “to search the woodlands until I found something I deemed perfect enough to offer her.” But her hopes were crushed when the two met. Her father’s new wife proved to be shallow, mean-spirited, and jealous of the young Maud’s hold on her husband’s affections, which left Maud as motherless as Anne, soon to return to Prince Edward Island to be raised by grandparents who shared none of her spirit or fire.
A rear view of the house that Maud Montgomery immortalized as Green Gables, home of her Macneill cousins, siblings David and Margaret, and later of Ernest Webb and his family; now the historic site visited annually by tourists.
The old homestead where Maud Montgomery lived with her grandparents, 1900; colorized by Montgomery in the 1920s.
But unlike Anne Shirley, Maud Montgomery had a large extended family on the island and her grandparents frequently housed boarders—relatives, summer visitors, teachers from the nearby school, the captain of the shipwrecked Marco Polo—with most guests adding a welcome vitality to the household. Yet some of her relatives seemed so critical of her that she couldn’t seem to do anything to please them. (“My childish faults and short comings—of which I had plenty—were all detailed to the Macneill uncles and aunts whenever they came to the house,” she writes, and “I resented this more bitterly than anything else.”) Maud’s grandfather, in particular, though she described him as a “lover of nature” and possessing “a rich, poetic mind [and] a keen intelligence,” was also “a stern, domineering, irritable man,” and Maud claimed she always feared him. Throughout her early life, “He bruised my childish feelings in every possible way and inflicted on my girlish pride humiliations whose scars are branded into my very soul.” That Matthew Cuthbert emerges as the polar opposite—in his advocacy (puffed sleeves!), his indulgences (the new dress!), and overt fondness (“It’s terrible lonesome downstairs without you”)—comes as little surprise. In giving Anne this tender “kindred spirit,” as she describes him, to help champion her whims and opinions, Montgomery helps reveal another side of the impetuous girl who often proved so puzzling to Marilla.
LEFT: Maud Montgomery’s father, Hugh John Montgomery.
RIGHT: Maud Montgomery’s mother, Clara Macneill Montgomery.
Montgomery’s grandmother was just as different from Marilla as her grandfather was from Matthew. While Marilla is able to adapt to change and apologize when she errs, Maud’s grandmother was intolerant and set in her ways (at least in the young Maud’s eyes) and seemed incapable of showing any affection for the impulsive, sensitive child. Though she was, Montgomery admits, “kind . . . in a material way,” in that her granddaughter was “well-cared-for, well-fed, and well-dressed,” the two were often at loggerheads, “dissimilar in every respect essential to mutual comfort.” In addition to seeming cold and reserved, Maud’s grandmother insisted on a way of doing things that Maud described as torture. “I was constantly reproached with ingratitude and wickedness because in childhood, before I had learned any self-control or understanding of my position, I sometimes rebelled against ‘her’ ways.” Of her grandparents, she writes, “Emotionally they grew old before their time, getting into a rut of feeling and living which suited them but was utterly unfitted to anyone who was yet growing in soul or body. It is a great misfortune for a child to be brought up by old people.”
I was impulsive, warm-hearted, emotional; grandmother was cold and reserved, narrow in her affections and sensibilities.
—THE SELECTED JOURNALS OF L. M. MONTGOMERY, VOL. 1
In giving the Cuthberts their mix of traits—the silent, adoring Matthew and the pragmatic yet understanding Marilla—Montgomery provides Anne a path for taking on much of her own self-improvement in positive, endearing ways. The siblings help guide her through a series of humorous situations that readers know well (letting her best friend get drunk on red currant wine; dying her red hair green; breaking her ankle while walking the roof beam over the Barrys’ kitchen), with Anne determining after each mishap to be brave and try to act differently. Marilla had only to be fair, and Matthew steady and kind, for the emotional girl to learn to rein in some of her wilder impulses.
Wedding of Maud Montgomery’s father, Hugh John Montgomery, and stepmother, Mary Ann McRae Montgomery, 1887.
Maud Montgomery, her grandparents Lucy and Alexander Macneill, and her Uncle Leander, at their home in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, 1895.
Maud’s grandparents’ Cavendish home served as the local post office; here, the mailman—pictured in front of the barn—is delivering mail, c. 1890s.
A line of wind- and salt-battered trees next to a mown field reveals some of the challenges for farmers of the island.
IN THE SUMMER OF 1890, when Maud was fifteen, she took the train with her grandfather Montgomery to Prince Albert, in Saskatchewan, for an extended stay with her father. Maud’s hopes for a glorious reunion with her father were quickly dashed as he could show little overt affection for her, given the jealousies of his new wife. (In a sign of the distance between them, Maud called her “Mrs. Montgomery”—“I cannot call her anything except before others for father’s sake”; she also wrote in her journal that children avoided the house because her stepmother “is so cross,” though she risked having the words seen because Mrs. Montgomery “reads all my letters and everything else she can find in my room when I am out.”) Maud attended the local school for part of the year but in March was pulled out so she could help her stepmother with housework and the care of the new baby. The experience was painful and gave the young Maud ample material for the stories she would later provide of Anne’s years spent working in families with small children before being sent to the orphanage in Nova Scotia.
“The truth of the matter,” Maud wrote after a miserable illness, “is I’ve been working like a slave for the past eight months and I’ve just gone beyond my strength. I’ve had to do all the work of this house, except the washing, and help tend the baby, besides, while Mrs. Montgomery walks the streets or visits with relatives.” She tried not to complain overtly though, as her father had admitted “that he finds it hard to get along with his wife and asked me to put up with some things for his sake.”
“Father is a poor man today,” the young Maud wrote about his financial circumstances. “Yet he is one of those men who are loved by everyone. And I—I love him with all my heart—better than anyone else in the whole world—dear, darling father!” With her love for him as a guiding force, Maud endured the chores and her stepmother’s relentless criticisms and managed to form strong friendships with several classmates that lasted years after she withdrew from the school, suggesting she possessed the same kind of charisma that made Anne Shirley so popular with her peers.
During these difficult months, and whenever homesickness sets in, memories of Prince Edward Island helped buoy Maud’s spirits, transporting her to the landscape that restored her. Less than a week after her arrival, she admitted to her journal, “I have fought it off as long as I could but to-day I succumbed and had a fierce cry all to myself. I’d give anything to see dear old Cavendish for half an hour. Oh, for a glimpse of the old hills and woods and shore!”
Four months later, in December, the feelings surface again, made more acute by the unwanted attentions of the schoolmaster, Mr. Mustard. “Oh, for one glimpse of Cavendish!,” she wrote.
Of course I know it is winter down there now, just as here, but in thinking of it I always remember it just as I left it in the prime of summer with buttercups and asters blooming by the brooks, ferns blowing spicily in the woods, lazy sunshine sleeping on the hills, with the beautiful sea beyond blue and bright and far-reaching. There is no spot on earth more lovely.
In addition to their shared orphan status, Maud Montgomery recorded many additional elements in her journals, both before and after her return to Prince Edward Island, that she would later weave into Anne Shirley’s life. Both loved learning and attended similarly described schools; both adored books and memorized favorite passages and long poems; both attended “concerts”—public recitations and performances—whenever possible, and both mesmerized audiences when it came their time to contribute to the evening’s entertainment. In addition, both were ambitious and competitive in proving mastery of their lessons, and both ranked far above their peers in the entrance exams for the college in Charlottetown (while Montgomery ranked fifth in the province, she added tension to the novel’s plot by having Anne and Gilbert tie for first).
But the most important similarities between Maud of the journals and Anne of Green Gables are those that evoke both passion and solace—an infectious delight in the natural world, a friendship with wild things, a sense of comfort and spiritual renewal in life outdoors, and a belief in the transformative power of the landscape’s splendor.
The girls in church, their hats adorned with ribbons and artificial flowers, laughed as the new girl, Anne, appeared wearing one she had decorated with “wind-stirred buttercups and a glory of wild roses.” Illustration by M. A. and W. A. J. Claus, from the 1908 edition.
Anne felt passionately about mayflowers (Epigaea repens). “I think it would be tragic,” she tells Marilla in Anne of Green Gables, “not to know what Mayflowers are like.”
NUMEROUS PASSAGES IN Anne of Green Gables and in the additional Anne novels appeared first as entries in Maud Montgomery’s journals. She took pains in crafting scenes, whether transcribing conversations or waxing “poetical” about her surroundings, and she vented such raw feelings—joy and rage, indignation and awe—that when Anne was in the throes of a similar emotion, the material was already there on the page to give to the garrulous girl. One such example is the mayflower picnic beloved by both Maud and Anne, when the students would head out from school on a clear day in May and gather armfuls of the fragrant blossoms—“pink and white stars of sweetness under their brown leaves”—to wreath around their hats and carry in bouquets as they sang their way back home.
“I long for the sight of them,” Montgomery wrote in her journal, “little pale pilgrims from summerland . . . when we went rambling through ‘the barrens’ . . . coming upon plots of them, sweet and fragrant and shy, hidden away in the spruce nooks and hollows.” Anne described them to Marilla in equally glowing terms, claiming that mayflowers “must be the souls of the flowers that died last summer and this is their heaven.”
From the very first sentence of Anne of Green Gables, readers are introduced to the idea that natural things—brooks, flowers, trees—are, to both Maud Montgomery and Anne Shirley, animate. The brook that runs past Rachel Lynde’s house flows from its source with a headlong rush, though it knows to slow down and be “a quiet, well-conducted little stream” when passing Mrs. Lynde’s, as though it were conscious of the older woman’s penchant for ferreting out mischief-makers.
Queen Anne’s lace (Daucus carota) in front of the pond in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island, the inspiration for Montgomery’s Lake of Shining Waters.
A few pages later, when Anne is finally in the buggy with Matthew, en route at last to Green Gables, she lavishes attention on things she sees as having spirits of their own; she bids goodnight to the newly named Lake of Shining Waters (“I always say good night to the things I love, just as I would to people. I think they like it”); and, just before arriving at Green Gables, she hears the voices of the trees “talking in their sleep” and imagines the “dreams they must have!”
Within a day of her arrival, she gives names to Marilla’s geranium (Bonny) and to the flowering cherry tree outside her window (Snow Queen). Within a few more days, she has come to know all the shrubs and trees around the house and “made friends with the spring down in the hollow.” And upon returning from her first church service in Avonlea, she waves in greeting to Bonny and to a nearby fuchsia, knowing they might have “been lonesome” when she was gone.
Here, too, Montgomery was drawing on her own experience. “I just love the woods,” she wrote in her journal at age fourteen. Seventeen years later, she elaborated a bit more: “In the woods I like to be alone for every tree is a true old friend and every tiptoeing wind a merry comrade. If I believed seriously in the doctrine of transmigration I should think I had been a tree in some previous stage of existence.”
“Anne’s habit of naming things,” wrote Montgomery, “was an old one of my own giving romantic names to cherished places.” The names that Anne and Montgomery used for many of these places are identical, making it easy for readers to move from the world of fiction to the actual, physical world of Prince Edward Island. Anne’s Lover’s Lane, she wrote, “was of course my Lover’s Lane,” while the Lake of Shining Waters was based on the pond near her relatives’ home at Park Corner (though in “the effects of light and shadow,” she admitted, the nearby Cavendish Pond probably influenced her as well). The idea for the Birch Path came from a photograph that had appeared in Outing magazine, though she had ample groves of birches to draw on for their comforting shape and pale aspect. Other names—Willowmere, Violet Vale, the Dryad’s Bubble—were invented for the novel, but the Haunted Wood was a place she knew well, along with “the old log bridge” near Green Gables, which she crossed often.
The Lake of Shining Waters with its wood-plank bridge, Park Corner, c. 1895; colorized by Maud Montgomery in the 1920s.
As far back as I can remember it lay there and must have served as a bridge for a generation before that for it was hollowed out like a shell from the tread of hundreds of passing feet. Earth had blown into its crevices and ferns and grasses had found root in it and fringed it luxuriantly. Velvet moss covered its sides. Below was a clear, sun-flecked stream.
In addition to being a source of beauty and wonder, the natural world also provides Maud and Anne a spiritual home. “If I really wanted to pray,” Anne tells Marilla, “I’d go out into a great big field all alone or into the deep, deep woods, and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.” Montgomery echoed this sentiment in her journal (a scene that she develops further when imagining the perfect place for a wedding—the kind that Anne and Gilbert will ultimately have in Anne’s House of Dreams):
I have an ideal Sunday in my mind. Only, I am such a coward that I cannot translate it into the real but must drift on with the current of conventionality . . . But I would like to go away on Sunday morning to the heart of some great solemn wood and sit down among the ferns with only the companionship of the trees and the wood-winds echoing through the dim, moss-hung aisles like the strains of some vast cathedral anthem. And I would stay there for hours alone with nature and my own soul.
It’s to the natural world, then, that each girl turns when her soul is beginning to despair. The inspiration found there not only shifts her mood, it changes the very caliber of the writing, the sentences seemingly possessed of a new vitality, bringing readers into a brighter, better place. An early example from Montgomery’s journal, written during the drudgery of the annual potato harvest, has young Maud and her friend ending the day in “tattered, beclayed old dresses,” their “faces plastered with dirt and mud.” But rather than dwell in her writing on the grime or physical weariness, she turns instead to the stunning view just beyond.
Signatures and drawings left by visitors on a birch tree near Green Gables. Montgomery also used birch bark to write on, a few samples of which appear in her scrapbooks.
We were picking potatoes all day up in our hill field . . . I hate it! But since pick I had to I was glad it was up in the hill field because I love that field. There is such a glorious view from it—the deep blue sea, the pond as blue as a sapphire, the groves of maple and birch just turning to scarlet and gold, the yellow stubble-lands and the sere pastures.
Later, in an angry entry written while in Saskatchewan, she vented about the rough way her stepmother had treated and dismissed a hired girl named Edie. “It has been a dismal day,” Maud wrote. “I feel so lonely.” She recounted her stepmother’s “vile temper,” her jealousy of Edie and Maud’s friendship, and the awkward position Mrs. Montgomery put Edie in. “It has made me feel absolute contempt for her,” Maud wrote. But then, rather than elaborate on her fractious relationship with Mrs. Montgomery, she shifted instead to a subject that soothed her—a letter she had received from home containing dried poppies and pansies. “It just seemed as if they spoke to me and whispered a loving message of a far-off land where blue skies are bending over maple-crimsoned hills and spruce glens are still green and dim in their balsamic recesses.” Both the memory of Cavendish and the language she used to honor it exerted a calming effect, and the anger at Mrs. Montgomery slowly abated.
In the early days of Anne’s time at Green Gables, a similar transformation can be seen taking hold of Anne—much to Marilla’s surprise. After being told to hold her tongue, as she talked “entirely too much for a little girl,” Anne settles into silence, becoming “more and more abstracted, eating mechanically, with her big eyes fixed . . . on the sky outside the window.” Marilla hardly knows what to make of the change, for “while this odd child’s body might be there at the table her spirit was far away in some remote airy cloudland, borne aloft on the wings of imagination.”
It’s an exquisite moment for all that it reveals about the power of an active inner life to lift an individual out of her immediate circumstances. Throughout the novel, Anne’s imagination flourishes in the beauty of the natural world in a way that invites us all to pay it closer attention, and to take advantage, whenever possible, of its potential to help us transform the moments that regularly challenge our own lives.
The “White Lady,” a favorite tree of Maud Montgomery, c. 1890; colorized by Montgomery in the 1920s.
For lands have personalities just as well as human beings; and to know that personality you must live in the land and companion it, and draw sustenance of body and spirit from it; so only can you really know a land and be known of it.
—THE ALPINE PATH
