The Orphan Girl and the Snow Queen
I was so scrawny and tiny and nothing but eyes, but … mother thought I was perfectly beautiful … . I’m glad she was satisfied with me anyhow; I would fell so sad if I thought I was a disappointment to her—because she didn’t live very long after that, you see. She died of fever when I was just three months old. I do wish she’d lived long enough for me to remember calling her mother.
—Anne Shirley to Marilla Cuthbert about the death of her mother1
The start into the New Year of 1905 was as rocky as a crossing of the Straits during high winds. But Maud had nobody but herself to blame. She, and only she, was responsible for brewing up the emotional storm that let loose just a few months before writing Anne of Green Gables. As the old year turned into the new, heralding the months that would give birth to Anne, the mental and emotional conditions that would give shape to our exuberant redhead were intensifying. The time has come for us to enter the homestead and get close to elusive Maud.
Set back from the wild north shore, the legendary ship graveyard of the North Atlantic, the Macneill homestead was nestled in the woodlands. Yielding to decades of fiercely gusting northern winds, the large apple tree in front of the kitchen window had become a wind-swept statue, creating a gate-like entrance to the house. In the kitchen, a low-ceilinged and white washed room, the curtains were drawn. A fire was flickering in the old cast-iron woodstove. Next to it stood Maud’s bathtub, neatly tucked
away, as everything had to be. The old homestead had no bathroom, and Maud was accustomed to creating her makeshift bath every fortnight. A proud, introspective woman with her mother’s thick mass of hair, Maud stood disrobed, her skin smooth and white. Her figure was petite, with delicate curves that would not be lost on her many suitors. She carefully stepped into the tub and eased herself into the water, letting the heat envelop her body. Some petals, harvested from the summer’s bounty, released their fragrance, blending with the smell of the wood and the fire. She closed her eyes and sighed with comfort. Consumed by the pleasurable warmth, Maud smiled and her thoughts began to drift.
Crackling and sputtering, the woodstove radiated its heat throughout the quiet kitchen. Grandmother Macneill’s bedroom, off the kitchen, was still. She had gone to sleep at nine o’clock. As usual, the ritual of going to sleep had been fraught with tension, as Grandmother’s fidgeting around the kitchen always started like clockwork and signaled it was time for both her and Maud to go to bed. At age eighty, Grandmother was set in her ways. She looked upon bathing with suspicion, as if it was some kind of weird, pagan ritual. She was truculent and resentful when Maud insisted on staying up to take a bath.
Born in April 1824, in Dunwich, England, Lucy Ann Woolner Macneill had arrived in Prince Edward Island at age twelve, had married at age twenty, and had had her first child at age twenty-one. A farmer’s wife, postmistress, and mother of six, Grandmother Macneill was practical and reserved. She found herself baffled and irritated by Maud’s dreamy, odd, and stubborn ways. One imagines the two women sitting at the dinner table with Maud occasionally staring into space, as Anne does in the novel. Grandmother Macneill was not easy to live with, but she was the only mother Maud had ever known.
Canadian writer Margaret Atwood sees the growing relationship between Anne and Marilla as the novel’s emotional core.2 Yet Maud’s journal account of her relationship with Grandmother Macneill would suggest that the imagined love bond between Marilla and Anne was written on the wall of silence that was part of the homestead’s architecture. The love that unites Marilla and Anne in fiction was sparked by Grandmother Macneill and Maud’s awkward rubbing against each other during the long and cold winter months when the winds were howling
outside and irritation was mounting inside. Grandmother’s reserve could be like the icy wind that blew across the Atlantic during that long winter of 1905. But Maud’s emotional storm was also connected with the memory of her mother.
On Monday night, January 2, 1905, Maud had reread an old letter that a girlfriend had sent to her mother, Clara Macneill, long before her marriage. Maud would let her imagination travel through the girlish prose, following the little allusions and the jokes, ferreting out their intimate meaning and mysteries as she liked to ferret out the secrets of the brook in the woodlands behind the house. And by delving so deeply into the past, she brought herself into a state of upset. That night her brooding induced such stinging grief about her young mother as she had never experienced it before. Coming just months before writing Anne, a novel whose plot is prompted by the heroine’s loss of mother and father, this self-inflicted storm of mourning cannot be overestimated in the shaping of her book.
We know very little about Maud’s mother, for nobody ever spoke about Clara in the Macneill home. Grandmother Macneill had sealed her pain inside. Maud’s great-aunt, Mary Lawson, Grandfather Macneill’s sister, prepared biographies of the other family members but left a mysterious blank on Clara. It is as if her life and death were shrouded in silence. There was a formal portrait of Clara that overlooked the parlor from above the colonial mantelpiece. Her face was eternally young and pretty, but the over-accessorized pose betrayed a lack of stylistic maturity, one that Maud would never have been guilty of. The upswept hairstyle was unflattering and contrived. Clara may well have been the life of a party (a suitor was said to have killed himself over her beauty),3 yet neither of the two photos available suggests that she would have possessed that wit or the intelligence that Maud valued in spiritual kin such as her great-aunt Mary, who was a brilliant conversationalist and literary mind. Would Clara have understood her daughter’s odd dreams? Or would she have been like her sister Annie, jolly and lovable but no kin to Maud’s
poetic soul? Even worse, would she have been like Emily, who nagged and found fault and sneered at Maud’s literary efforts? Frozen in time, Clara’s portrait gave no answers. Had Clara left a letter to her daughter, Maud would have been able to bring her to life. But without words, she was a ghost. Still, there was a glimmer of hope: Just recently her aunt Eliza Macneill, a girlhood friend of her mother’s, had reassured her that Clara was a poetical girl, not a bit like her two sisters.4
These and other thoughts built up in Maud’s mind in early January 1905 and culminated in an anguished cry for her mother: “She would have understood—she would have sympathized.”5 Maud’s cry for sympathy echoes a popular mother’s column of the era. “Again it is sympathy; sympathy first, last and always sympathy,” Mrs. Birney had written in the April 1904 Delineator, urging mothers to show kindness and understanding toward their little ones, especially toward sensitive and temperamental children. Maud had evidently absorbed the message advocated by Mrs. Theodore W Birney, the Honorary President of the American National Congress of Mothers. A mother embodies”the sympathy which comprehends , which inspires and encourages to fresh effort.”6 That elusive “sympathy” was missing from Maud’s grandparents’ parenting, causing the lonely adult to despair of ever filling so cavernous a hole. In Mrs. Birney’s column, Maud found the ammunition to critique the childrearing skills of her grandparents.
In fact, Maud’s lengthy journal entry of January 2 reads like an evidentiary brief to a grand jury. Putting pen to paper that night, Maud spoke in the voice of prosecutor. The accused: her grandparents; the victim: herself as the orphaned child. Missing is the redeeming note of humor that is the hallmark of her fiction. Her tone was dead serious: “The older I grow the more I realize what a starved childhood mine was emotionally,” she lamented. In just one such example, Grandmother Macneill refused to console her as a nine-year-old when her kitten died. Instead, the farm-woman had turned the event into a teaching moment, just as Marilla would apply a practical and not always sensitive moral to each and every situation.7 “It is a great misfortune for a child to be brought up by old people,” Maud concluded to her grand jury that Monday night. The gap of youth and old age cannot be bridged, she noted, except by “exceptional natures that do not grow old in heart.”8 Here lay the core of her loneliness,
the shadow that had always followed her. Here in her own entrapment and rebellion against parental authorities lay also a powerful emotional spark for Anne of Green Gables. Only in fiction could she dream her way out of her prison; only in fiction could she bridge the insurmountable gulf between youth and old age that was at the root of her loneliness since early childhood.
The realization that she was a charity child with no rights and no inheritance was equally painful. In March 1898, when Grandfather Macneill died in the middle of a Saturday afternoon, struck down by a heart attack, Maud had rushed home by sleigh and train from Lower Bedeque on the South shore where she had been boarding as a teacher and romancing Herman Leard. Cold and solitary, Alexander Macneill lay in the darkening parlor, just as her mother had lain there two decades earlier. He had willed the farm to his eldest son John. All property and monies went to Grandma Lucy. Annie and Emily were left one hundred dollars each. Maud was not mentioned in his will, which he had made a year earlier when Maud was teaching and boarding in Belmont.9 His last wishes spelled out Maud’s status: no amount of dreaming could remove the bald fact that she was a charity case. In the wake of his death she would be expected to care for her grandmother in order to earn her stay in the home. Her pride was hurt. She was angry. She did not really resolve this cold anger but used it to fuel her dream of Matthew, the kindred spirit who fulfills Anne’s desires. Eleven-year-old Anne finds in sixty-year-old Matthew a spontaneous and immediate kindred spirit. Shy, gentle Matthew is the opposite of cranky Grandfather Macneill, who had been a stern father until Maud left the homestead. That Marilla opens her heart to love Anne at the very same time that Maud’s own grandmother, with increasing age, was becoming more recalcitrant further underscores the novel’s role as a wish fulfillment dream. In a fairy tale the constraints of real life can smoothly be turned into their opposite. Just how much Maud was operating within fiction and fairy tales is seen in a singular event that would also have revived and amplified the entwining of birth and death that was such a key element of her own personal narrative.
In early February 1905, Maud’s cousin George Campbell’s baby boy Jack died of pneumonia. Maud traveled to Park Corner to stay with the family for two weeks. Relieved to be away from Cavendish, Maud’s mentioning of the boy’s death is almost perfunctory, as she describes this visit largely in terms of the distraction it provides to her; there is no mention of the family’s grieving, no mention of the baby’s name, and no mention of the funeral in her journal entry of March 3. In her March 7 letter to Ephraim she mentions it only as a social visit. She was fond of her cousins at Park Corner, so how could Maud be so callous? The situation provides a window into her psyche. Maud, who would soon write with great compassion about Anne, had a way of subtly closing off her feelings toward real-life suffering. With the center of her universe fueled by dreams and emotional storms, the rest of the world sometimes had a way of becoming peripheral, perhaps shielding the production of her art from the deep core of her imagination. This aloofness in real life, which she was able to mask in society, contrasts with the finely feathered sensitivity with which Maud explores her own feelings—past and present. As an artist, she had a way of distilling, filtering, and channeling emotions into her literature.
In fact, it seems that she worked the images she saw into her novel. Driving the twenty-one kilometers of hill and wood, river and shore from Cavendish to Park Corner and back that February, Maud would have twice passed her birth place located in the lovely little town of Clifton (today New London). The “small, yellowish-brown house” near the harbor held a fascination for her, as her journal entries from a few years earlier show. Clara and Monty and Maud had lived in Clifton only a year, where Monty ran the general store.10 It was a time when the family was complete and happy. It was the Eden of Maud’s life, and, sadly, she did not remember it. But she could imagine it. Today the restored Lucy Maud Montgomery Birthplace is a tourist destination during the summer, with displays of her scrapbooks and wedding dress. As a girl, Maud was saddened to see that each year left her birth house looking a little shabbier than before. In the early chapters of Anne of Green Gables, the house makes a cameo appearance. Maud lovingly restored the house to its brilliant yellow, scrubbing off the layers of brown dirt and sealing the magic of her
birthplace in “a weeny-teeny little yellow house … [with] honeysuckle over the parlor window.”11 It became the idealized house in which Anne was born, though Anne imagines it as such; Anne never sees it until the 1915 sequel Anne of the Island. Perhaps, in 1905, that was the contentedness Maud was dreaming of instead of dwelling on the baby that had just died.
An undeniable northern and Canadian element contributed to the shaping of Anne of Green Gables: the seemingly eternal winter of 1905, one of the fiercest in Island history. Large ice drifts and hummocks were hemming in the north shore of Prince Edward Island. Ice, sleet, snow drifts, and storms changed the pastoral isle into a frosty prison, keeping farmers and families cooped up. Mountainous ice shards transformed the white shore into a surreal landscape. The icebreakers, The Minto and The Stanley, provided winter passenger and mail-service runs, but found themselves routinely blocked by ice in the straits. Unable to move, they prevented the hay from being delivered for livestock and the mail from being delivered to the post office. The Island was cut off from the world. When the ice-breakers finally succeeded in making their way, the railway lines were blocked, and the mail could not be delivered.
The Macneill homestead was crowded on all sides by mountains of snow. On February 25, the Examiner reported that a Prince Edward Island farmer dug a twenty-meter tunnel through the snowdrifts to reach the livestock in the barns.12 By early March, the snow drifts in front of Maud’s homestead were six meters high. What was a single woman to do during the worst winter in Island history? She shoveled snow in the morning, wrote for a couple of hours, typewrote in the afternoon, and kept her hands otherwise busy with lace work and dishes and correspondence. On good days, Maud was prowling in the snow, sensitive to the beauty of winter and taking pictures of the historic snow drifts, pictures that she would insert into her journal years later. She appreciated the brooding stillness of the winter landscape, but the romance of her glittering ice palace was short lived.
“Another storm! No mail! Abominably dismal!” was Maud’s scream in an unpublished journal entry.13 She was suffering from an acute state of cabin fever that thrust her thinking and feeling inward, into her world of dreams. This intensified period of introspection was all the more excruciating as the lonely and restless months from the year before accumulated into a long period of turmoil and isolation. But perhaps this intense period of contemplative solitude was necessary for the seeds from her life to blossom into her novel. Flowers in all shapes and colors dominated the landscape of her dreams. To her beleaguered mind, the snow drifts were a mausoleum under which her flowers and her hope were buried.
At night she dreamed of daffodils and tulips. While sleet pellets drummed against the western kitchen window in February, Maud sat by the wood stove with the flower seed catalogue on her knees. She was day-dreaming, her mind arranging her spring garden: a bed of dahlias, a clump of lilies, and a patch of asters. The old-fashioned spring and summer gardens would run riot in Anne, long catalogues of flowers without end. “There were rosy bleeding-hearts and great splendid crimson peonies; white, fragrant narcissi and thorny, sweet Scotch roses; pink and blue and white columbines”; there were also “clumps of southernwood and ribbon grass and mint; purple Adam-and-Eve, daffodils, and masses of sweet clover.”14 This fictional flower garden grew from Maud’s pent-up wintertime dreams and frustrations. Maud’s vivid word paintings make us see, smell, feel, and hear the gardens and orchards of her dreams through a filter of aching pleasure and longing. The intensity of life and imagery seemed to be in proportion to her anguish and imprisonment. The flower garden was also one of the few passions that Maud shared with Grandmother Macneill, who, unlike Marilla, loved flowers and encouraged Maud to decorate the house with them.
The winter imprisonment lasted into April, when slush and mud forbade even a little walk at sundown. Bitter and sick at heart, Maud released her feelings in her journal. She took refuge in daydreams. “I’m always glad when the end of the day comes—these days at least—and I can get to bed,” she confided in an unpublished journal entry. “I like to curl up by myself and dream gorgeous waking dreams—brilliant affairs where I have everything I haven’t got in the real world. They help me a lot, those blessed dreams.”15 Maud does not tell us what her dreams are about, but
they were presumably the fuel that would soon drive Anne of Green Gables with a deeply personal charge that would finally crack the polished façade of the formula orphan story.
She was “pegging” at her writing, she told Ephraim in March.16 Nothing in her correspondence or journal indicates anything but the regular run-of-the-mill toil of churning out formula stories. And yet, for those of us looking for Anne, the calm concealed the storm underneath. Amazingly, as we look for Anne in Maud’s short fiction during this period, we discover a number of prequels to Anne of Green Gables. Always disciplined and organized, Maud numbered her stories in the chronological order of her writing, allowing us to see that the world of Anne was already vibrant and alive.
Rippling with personal emotion, “The Understanding of Sister Sara” is Maud’s story of how Anne Shirley’s parents met. The story was published in the Michigan magazine The Pilgrim in August. In fact, Beatrice (a short leap to the more prosaic name of Anne’s mother, Bertha) is an orphan and dreamer, matched with a pragmatic sister, Sara. “Oh, I wish I had a mother! She could understand,” says Beatrice in the story, using Maud’s very own words from her journal that winter. Beatrice meets Walter Shirley, the name of Anne Shirley’s father in the novel. He is handsome and distinguished with dark and inscrutable eyes. Beatrice falls head-over-heels in love with him. They keep their engagement secret. “I want to dream my dreams first,” Beatrice says. Clinging to romance, the fanciful Beatrice wants nothing more than to shut out the real world for fear it might interfere with her dream. In the story, the Shirley couple is described as “a pair of romantic children,” a metaphoric arc that leads to Anne Shirley’s parents in Green Gables, who were “a pair of babies and as poor as church mice.”17 Here in this little-known short story is the prequel to Anne; all it took was a few minor changes. Other stories contained similar glimpses of Anne, such as Maud’s formula story “The Running Away of Chester” that she had published in Boys’ World in late 1903, in which several sentences, including freckle-faced orphan Chester’s desperate determination
for a home (“I’ll try to do everything you want me to do”) anticipates orphan Anne’s (“I’ll try to do and be anything you want me, if you’ll only keep me.”).18
Meanwhile the Sunday School Advocate in New York, to which Maud would contribute stories that year, was running a serial entitled The Major’s Sunshine. “An Adopted Daughter” was the title of the first chapter, featuring a little orphan girl with a glorious head of golden hair who charms the aging Major into adopting her.19 Sunshine girls and sunshine stories, with mottos such as “When things go wrong, smile and find a better way,” were popular in Sunday school magazines, offering the proverbial chicken soup for the soul during the cold months of winter.20 These were the formula stories that offered a blueprint for Anne. They reflected the self-help impulse embedded in American culture and presented a popularized transcendentalism with their belief in the innate goodness of humanity.
Add to these influences from New York a timely invitation from Toronto, and the stage was set for a sequence of events that would lead to the creation of Anne. In her March 7 letter to Ephraim Maud described receiving a letter with the return address of 20 Richmond Street East, Toronto, the headquarters for the Canadian Sunday School Publications and the Presbyterian Sabbath School Publications.21 They were asking her to submit some of her stories. Keen on featuring Canadian contributions, the editors were recruiting promising and established writers from across Canada. Publishing three papers for juveniles of varying ages, they were looking for good stories, as well as essays and sketches that would appeal to young people.22 Maud was selling her stories to the flourishing American Associated Sunday School Publications but was intrigued to hear that the Canadian rates were competitive. Flattered by the attention and never one to sit on her hands when it came to publishing, Maud had promptly mailed a girls’ story of 2,500 words to Toronto. Entitled “Lavender’s Room,” the story contained the character of Mrs. Lynde, and was published in East and West: A Paper for Young Canadians in early February. Already, Mrs. Lynde, anticipating the character in the novel, was “one of those people who pride themselves on saying just what they think, and who always seem to be thinking unpleasant things.”23 Maud received five dollars. This kind of speed and professionalism was refreshing to a writer who desired a decent income for her literary activities. In
fact, the new contact provided a new source of regular, if modest, income and she would publish numerous stories in East and West and in King’s Own (the Sabbath School Publication of the Presbyterian Church in Toronto). Exuberant Maud was pleased with her new “discovery.” Here was a “really truly Canadian affair that opens its eyes and says ‘papa’ and ‘mamma,’” she enthused in her March 7, 1905, letter to aspiring writer Ephraim Weber.24 She warmly recommended the Toronto syndicate to the writer in Didsbury, Alberta, reassuring him that the periodicals were of the same quality as their American counterparts.
That year, Canada was pushing westward; Alberta and Saskatchewan would become provinces in the year Maud was to write Anne of Green Gables. There was obviously a market for stories with Canadian content—even in the United States. Other writers were also being tapped for content. “What we are in need of are good Canadian stories,” wrote Miss Elizabeth Ansley, the associate editor of Boys’ World, to the Mohawk-Canadian poet Pauline Johnson in November. “We have experienced considerable difficulty in procuring Canadian stories with the real patriotic ring—stories where the loyalty does not seem forced.”25 It was a magazine to which Maud had also been contributing since at least 1903. They paid six dollars per one thousand words. As even the famous Pauline Johnson discovered, stories were lucrative enough to make a living.
For Maud, the invitation was timely and tangible encouragement to set future Sunday school stories in Canada—a fact she delighted in. One wonders to what extent it was this Toronto invitation that prompted her to set her new Sunday school serial Anne of Green Gables in Prince Edward Island, Canada. It is very plausible that she first intended her Anne serial, with its distinct Prince Edward Island setting, for Toronto’s Sunday school magazine East and West. Unfortunately, she never named the “ephemeral” religious paper she had in mind for the Anne serial, but her description most certainly echoed her opinion of East and West.26
According to a brief journal entry of August 16, 1907, her first account of how Anne came about, it was during the spring of 1905 that she turned to her notebook in search of inspiration for the new serial she wanted to write for a Sunday school paper. She found an old, faded entry written years earlier: “Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.”27 Here in this stunningly simple entry was the
kernel for the novel. There was nothing here yet about a fiery redhead, a passionate bosom friendship, kindred spirits, or Avonlea—there was nothing yet about any of the classic topics and characters and settings that would make Anne so beloved and memorable.
The girl in the entry was Maud’s adopted cousin Ellen Macneill, but there was a story behind the entry. Born in 1889, the little orphan girl with soft hair and hazel eyes had come from Halifax accompanied by her five-year-old brother Ray. On September 22, 1892, two prosperous Cavendish farmers, Pierce Macneill and John C. Clark, had arrived in their buggies at the Hunter River train station only to discover that there had been a mistake: instead of two orphan boys, a little girl and her brother disembarked from the train. Despite the mistake, Pierce and his wife Rachael, who were childless, adopted the three-year old girl and named her Ellen. Ellen’s birth date and year had never been officially recorded, and, for the rest of her life, Ellen would celebrate her birthday on September 22, the day she arrived in Cavendish and found a home with the Macneills. Seventeen-year old Maud promptly recorded the event in her notebook.28
According to information provided by Ellen’s daughter Ruth Gallant in Hamilton, Ontario, and corroborated by a turn-of-the-century census report, Ellen was born in Nova Scotia and her ethnic background was English.29 A Canadian-born orphan, she was not a Barnardo child, as claimed in the biographical book dedicated to her and simply titled Ellen.30 During Maud’s era, under the farm immigration programme, Barnardo children were sent to Canada by the Barnardo organization, a British society named after Dr. Thomas Barnardo. In fact, Anne of Green Gables was one of the first novels to refer to the Barnardo boys, albeit in pejorative terms, when Matthew suggests that they adopt a Barnardo boy to help with the farm work and Marilla declares that she wants “a born Canadian” boy, not “London street Arabs.”31 She was referring to children of no fixed residence who wandered the streets of London. The Canadian agency for the Barnardo Organization placed advertisements in the Canadian
newspapers. Prospective parents filled out applications so that the children could be directly transferred to their new homes on the day they arrived in Canada. The idea was to ship them quickly to the designated farms, minimizing cost to the government.
Unfortunately, mistakes were frequent, and since many adoptive parents preferred boys to help with the farm work, there was always a shortage of boys.32 Perhaps it was the error—the orphan girl sent in lieu of the boy—that made this ordinary adoption more memorable. As for Maud, she was attracted to the fateful mistake in this Cavendish adoption story. And the fact that it took place so close to home, within her own family, would also have encouraged her to use Cavendish as a setting.
Pierce Macneill’s farm was on the road to Stanley Bridge in what was known as Pierce’s Hollow, not far from the Macneill homestead and across from the place now known as Green Gables.33 When Anne of Green Gables was published, people immediately recognized Pierce’s Hollow as one of the novel’s landmarks, only with a different name—Lynde’s Hollow. The year the orphaned Ellen arrived in Cavendish, seventeen-year-old Maud would have encountered the little girl, for Maud was no stranger to Pierce Macneill’s home. In fact, it was here that Maud regularly picked up Selena Robinson, the Cavendish teacher who was boarding with Pierce and Rachael; it was also from Pierce that she occasionally borrowed a buggy. Moreover, Maud would have talked with Ellen at the Macneill post office, for Ellen picked up the family’s mail. Maud may even have taught Ellen in the Cavendish school, when she occasionally replaced the regular teacher in 1903. Yet Maud never mentioned any of these encounters and her later judgment of Ellen was rather insensitive and defensive: “There is no resemblance of any kind between Anne and Ellen Macneill who is one of the most hopelessly commonplace and uninteresting girls imaginable.”34 Ellen was a quiet and modest little girl, without the mettle to become the silver-tongued heroine of our story. Sadly, Maud felt the need to denigrate Ellen, to whom she owed, after all, an important spark for her book. It was a spark, however, that she was loathe to acknowledge: “Ellen Macneill never crossed my mind while I was writing the book.”35 Maud was furious that people did not sufficiently recognize the power of her imagination.
It would, in fact, take a unique blend of weather, memories, and influences for Maud’s inspired imagination to give birth to Anne that spring. We know that Maud always carefully mapped out her stories and serials before writing them. She would first “brood up” a character, as she called it, and then over weeks and months “block out” chapters and incidents and map the architecture of her writing in a meticulous process she called “spade work.” To Maud, writing was like planning and planting her beloved garden. In late March, the spring rains brought a thaw and Maud’s troubled mind soared. The thought of being in her garden and exploring the orchard infused her with life. After a long and exhausting winter, spring was a resurrection. In early April, she went into the garden amid slush and mud and took the spruce boughs off her tulip and daffodil beds. At the sight of the new spikes of life, she felt a flash of pleasure.
April finally brought the turning point. A spark was needed to bring together all of the different influences, images and memories; to galvanize the feelings and dreams; and channel them into the creation of a serial. Did the inspired book require a fairy-tale intervention of sorts? Perhaps it was a happy coincidence that the world-renowned author of fairy tales, Hans Christian Andersen, born in Odense in Denmark on April 2, 1805, celebrated his centenary in April 1905. Maud had most certainly read the April issue of the Delineator, which featured a biographical appreciation, “Hans Christian Andersen: The Friend of the Children” (along with a piece on Tennyson’s “Elaine,” which Anne enacts in chapter twenty-eight, “An Unfortunate Lily Maid”). The brilliant Danish author was quoted as saying, “I am the Ugly Duckling.” Not only was he poor and homely, with his huge feet and hands, but his feminine and bookish and dreamy nature always seemed to make him the odd person out. (Rumors about his alleged homosexuality had been surfacing even in the early twentieth century, although the Delineator made no mention of these.) His critics reviled his lack of education and, as the Delineator article pointed out, “Andersen’s sensitive soul suffered no little from this petty persecution.”36 Yet with his fancy he had conquered the world. He always remembered his father, a shoemaker with a poetical mind, who would often sit gazing before him as if in a dream. When his father died, the young Hans
Christian simply believed that it was the ice-maiden that had come to get him. This childhood experience later led him to write the fairy tale “The Snow Queen,” the story of the orphan boy Kay who is abducted by the Snow Queen and becomes cruel as a result of a splinter from an ice mirror stuck in his heart. Embedded in the story of “The Snow Queen” was the fear of the eternal winter, and the emotional chill that can freeze the human heart. This was the story that Maud would have read in the Delineator in April.
One of the early chapters, “Morning at Green Gables,” pays tribute to Hans Christian Andersen, whose work Maud had first read with Well Nelson, the little orphan who had boarded with the Macneills along with his brother, releasing her from her excruciating loneliness. Outside Anne Shirley’s window in the east gable room is a cherry tree, its blossoms so heavy you can’t see the leaves. She names the tree “Snow Queen.” We delight in Anne’s creativity and imaginative flights of fancy, but the name is also a tribute to the Danish fairy-tale author whom Maud loved. Not only she delighted in “The Ugly Duckling” and “The Snow Queen;” these tales were popular with millions of readers then and now. Anne of Green Gables is in essence the story of the ugly duckling.37 Anne is the odd outsider, seemingly ugly and unloved, who turns out to be the beautiful swan in the end. It is the story of the Snow Queen, in which old, emotionally frozen characters are awakened by the exuberance of youth and spring.
Not only were flowers stirring that spring, but also the ghosts of the past were rustling their chains. On May 21, Maud once again reread her journal of the Prince Albert period, traveling in spirit through the old friendships and revivifying the kindred spirits of Will Pritchard and Laura Pritchard. She cried and mourned, her father’s memory was so vivid: “Oh, my dear father. How far away your grave is! You should be lying by my young mother’s side near yonder in the churchyard.”38 With her lost mother’s unquiet spirit stirring in the parlor, it was time to summon up the familiar waking dream of reassembling her family. In real life she had been failed, but in fiction, in her own fairy tale, she could realize the dream. Anne was a wish fulfillment dream, one of “those blessed dreams” that never failed her.
In the theatre of Maud’s mind, the stage was set, the curtain rising. Anne was suddenly flashing in Maud’s fancy, adorned with fiery red braids
and fully christened down to the e, as Maud would later describe in her memoir. Just as the garden burst into life, so all of the different influences, fuelled by the release of pent-up creative energy after a long hibernation, were finally coming together. Anne was a girl with infectious optimism, with enough charm to soften even the most hardened inhabitants of the village of Avonlea. Romantic Anne was a pagan wood nymph gazing up at the stars and dreaming, like Evelyn Nesbit. She was the orphan girl who was supposed to have been a boy, like Ellen Macneill. There were also some traces of Trilby in the freckled high-spirited witch who conquered the world with her magnetic personality. Intelligent and verbally dexterous, Anne was a dreamer and appealed to the author with her vivid imagination. “Somehow or other she seemed very real to me and took possession of me to an unusual extent. Her personality appealed to me,” Maud later recalled in her journal.39
Like her readers, Maud was enthralled by her character. Presumably what Maud would have noticed first about Anne was that she was more alive than other girls. Her exuberance glowed from inside. She seemed to embody life. Her eyes were luminous and bright. Spunky, red-haired Anne was already running away from Maud and breaking the formulaic orphan mold. By injecting her own feelings and dreams into this lively and gangly figure, Maud was giving birth to a “real-life” character, throwing Sunday school morals to the wind, as she would later remember it. She had meant to write a serial but the heroine took such possession of her that she would soon decide to turn the serial into a novel. Not only was Maud flying high, but also millions of readers would fly with her soon.
As Anne skipped through Maud’s imagination, fleet of foot and fleet of mind, somehow she was liberated. Here was a new character who surprised Maud and excited her. A character who shared her own dreams and passions, and some of her complex contradictions. She was now ready to begin writing—as yet unconscious that she was embarking on a story that would change her life and make literary history.