The Mystery of Anne Revealed
“ … There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn’t be half so interesting.”
—Anne to Diana in Anne of Green Gables1
While Maud waits to hear about the fate of her package, the novel that would make her famous, the time has come to revisit the unsolved mystery of Anne. Ultimately, the key to this mystery allows us to understand how Maud was able to distill the formula genre and create an enduring classic. So far, we have explored the sources that went into the shaping of Green Gables, Avonlea, and the bosom friends and enemies that populate the novel. In Maud’s palace of art, we have unlocked many doors, revealing how different influences blended together to give birth to the novel. Yet a crucial door remains to be opened. Maud had disclosed where Anne’s face came from, but where did Anne come from? The secret that Maud never revealed to her readers concerns the discovery that Maud presumably did not want her readers to know.
I found the answer to the mystery of Anne serendipitously while searching for the elusive photograph of Evelyn Nesbit. In the old magazines that Maud read and published in, I stumbled over the fragments and influences that would have fueled the fire of her imagination and that may well have inhabited her notebook (the same in which she found the
spark for her Anne story, “Elderly couple apply to an orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.”)
Maud’s belated January 10, 1914, journal entry confirms that for several years, Grandmother Macneill had a subscription to Godey’s Lady’s Book during Maud’s childhood and adolescence. For the voracious reader in a household of few books, “its monthly advents were ‘epochs in my life.’”2 In those days of bangs, bustles, and puffed sleeves, she opened the page of the Philadelphia periodical to gorgeous hand-tinted fashion plates with sewing instructions. The fashion pages were followed by the literary treats—short stories and serials, which Maud devoured. Useful too were the music sheets, as she was learning to play the organ. Although Maud made disparaging comments about its literary quality, the fashion and family magazine did boast original American writing by authors including Edgar Allen Poe, Longfellow, and Emerson, and actively encouraged its female readers’ creative writing. Perhaps most fascinating in Maud’s belated journal entry is her revealing sideways note about the reading influences of Godey’s Lady’s Book: “Do we ever really forget anything in our lives? I do not think we do. The record is always there in our subconscious minds, to be suddenly remembered when something brings it to our recollection—perhaps never to be remembered, but always there.”3 While she makes no mention of how Godey’s Lady’s Book might be related to the birth of Anne, the cluster of Godey’s references from 1892 to 1894 suggests that they inspired incidents in Anne.
Consider a little poem, which Maud would have seen on Godey’s jester’s page in October 1893. The poem featured a silly mock rhyme poking fun at a woman’s head of red hair and presciently titled “To Anne”:
They said
Her hair was red.
To me it was pure gold,
A-blush, because it did enfold
A face and neck so fair …
And yet they* said
Her hair was red.
* The Women.4 Although Maud’s notebook no longer exists, there is evidence to suggest that Maud had clipped this ironic ode “To Anne” into her notebook, presumably in proximity to “The Boy with the Auburn Hair,” also written in 1893. Eighteen-year-old Maud had written the little ditty about a boy, Austin Laird, she had nicknamed “Cavendish Carrots” for his flaming red hair, creating a feud in the school. Was it the poem’s division between the flowery perspective of the male speaker and the ironic refrain, “Her hair was red” that caused Maud to conceive Anne, a romantic with a mundane head of hair? It seems too great a coincidence that there appeared, on the same jester’s page, a joke concerning a wife who refuses to reconcile with her husband after a quarrel, insisting, “No; my feelings have been injured beyond repair.” The remark, and the situation, recall Anne’s melodramatic refusal to heal the breach after Gilbert pokes fun at her carroty hair, and her delight in indulging clichéd feeling: “Gilbert Blythe has hurt my feelings excruciatingly, Diana.”5 It was not a matter of copying the incident into her novel, but she was inspired by it, presumably chuckling as she was imagining the episode.
The secret Maud took to her grave, however, concerns my discovery in the New York Public Library of two Anns whose fictional lives Maud would presumably have recorded in her notebook, but never acknowledged. For in January 1892, the year a little orphan girl arrived in Cavendish in lieu of a boy, “Charity Ann” appeared in Godey’s Lady’s Book. And in July 1903, just two months before Evelyn Nesbit entered Maud’s imagination, red-haired orphan “Lucy Ann” appeared in Zion’s Herald, a Boston Methodist newspaper.
The eight-year-old orphan runaway in Canadian writer Mary Ann Maitland’s story “Charity Ann. Founded on Facts” arrives just before midnight, on a New Year’s Eve in the early 1870s, at the home of an old
Scottish couple, Donald and Christy McKay. The McKays are simple farming folk, sitting by the kitchen fire when they hear a knock on the door. The late-night visitor introduces herself as Ann, a little girl desperate to escape the local poorhouse. Determined to find a home and earn her keep as a servant with the McKays, she offers her services. “I can wash dishes, and scrape pots, and peel tawties, and mind the babies, and everything,”6 she pleads. Scrawny Charity Ann “was not a pretty child. Her eyes were gray, and in some other face might have been called beautiful, but they were too large and lustrous to mate with that forlorn and hungry look. Her tawny hair was dull and straggling … . No, Ann was not a pretty child.”7 Anne readers recall a similar description of Anne Shirley: “Mrs. Thomas said I was the homeliest baby she ever saw, I was so scrawny and tiny and nothing but eyes.” The scrawny, big-eyed orphan was a formula convention that also appeared in other literature. (“She ain’t no beauty—her face is all eyes,” we read, for instance, in Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, the 1903 novel that is often compared with Anne of Green Gables and was based on the same formula literature.8)
Like Anne Shirley, Charity Ann hates her name. Like Anne Shirley, she has raised several sets of twins—“The babies? How many had she? Twins, I suppose,” Donald asks. Charity Ann retorts, “Yes, lots o’ twins; nine o’ them.” (Compare with Anne Shirley’s predicament with Mrs. Hammond’s large family: “I like babies in moderation, but twins three times in succession is too much.”9) Despite the humor of Maitland’s dialect story, the McKays are horrified to learn that Charity Ann has been physically abused. She has purple marks on her arms and wrists. The graphic realism of these facts will be softened in Anne of Green Gables. Donald is furious about the asylum matron, “that Peters woman.” (She may well have lent her name to Mrs. Peter Blewett in Anne of Green Gables, the exploitative foster mother who is so keen on taking Anne Shirley home to put her to work on her brood.) For Anne readers who have been wondering about Anne’s reluctance to disclose what Marilla calls the “bald facts” of her past, Anne’s history lies embedded in these stories.
Soon Charity Ann is a treasured member of the family. She is a diligent household helper for Christy McKay, who is plagued by rheumatism and is grateful for the help. Meanwhile Donald McKay showers Charity Ann with affection and gifts such as sweets and a little ribbon, just as
Matthew spoils Anne with chocolates and puffed sleeves. Eventually Charity Ann blossoms into a rosy, plump girl. In a seemingly contrived and happy ending, a long-lost McKay relative discovers that Charity Ann is—yes!—his daughter. The story’s saccharine last line, “‘Charity Ann’ no more, but Love Ann, ‘and the greatest of all is Love!’”10, belies the social realism of the story’s beginning. And although Maud would write similar endings for several of her orphan stories, it was not so for Green Gables.
Difficult to locate today, the ephemera of Godey’s Lady’s Book and other magazines are distilled and transformed into inspired and timeless scenes in Anne of Green Gables. As with other influences, such as the Cavendish orphan girl Ellen Macneill, Maud mentioned Godey’s Lady’s Book disparagingly in later years. While she makes no mention of Charity Ann, or the cluster of other Godey’s references from 1892 to 1894, there can be no doubt that they inspired incidents in Anne.
The second Ann magazine story that helped shape Anne of Green Gables is the story of Lucy Ann. It arrived at the red kitchen door of the Macneill homestead in July 1903, in Zion’s Herald, the Boston Methodist magazine to which Maud was a regular contributor of short stories. This particular issue of Zion’s Herald contained Maud’s own story “The Little Three-Cornered Lot”—and immediately following it was J. L. Harbour’s “Lucy Ann.”11 Even if she were not in the habit of devouring her complimentary copies, which she was, the story would have caught her eye. Its title was also the name of her grandmother. Compared to “Charity Ann,” Harbour’s “Lucy Ann” was a more psychological story. The developing emotional bond between Lucy Ann and her adoptive mother, a middle-aged spinster, provided the seed for the mother-daughter bond that develops between Anne Shirley and Marilla Cuthbert.
Red-haired and freckled, Lucy Ann looks like Anne Shirley’s twin sister. Twelve years old, “a-goin’ on to thirteen,” Lucy Ann lives in the workhouse in the city and arrives at the country railway station, sent to spend her holidays with Miss Calista May, who has reluctantly agreed to
take her in. Like Anne of Green Gables, this orphan’s story begins with a memorable buggy ride. Miss Calista May, prim and severe like Marilla, picks her up at the train station. On the way home, the city girl who has never been to the country cleverly sidesteps questions about her “folks” by rejoicing at the rural sights. “Oh, just see them lovely flowers in that fence corner! Ain’t they sweet?” She delights at the sight of the birds, the corn, the flowers, and even ordinary apples. Her spirit is true to her last name—Joyce (the name Maud will also give Anne Shirley’s first-born baby girl who dies in Anne’s House of Dreams).
Lucy Ann is poor. Her straw hat is cheap, its blue ribbon faded, as is her dress, but she holds a Japanese fan as a proud talisman. “She’s a humly little thing, with that red hair and all them freckles,” Miss Calista muses to a neighbor, and yet she admits that there is “something kind o’ likeable about her.” Though she is a city girl, Lucy Ann has an innate love of nature and rejoices in life on the farm. She gathers wildflowers and enjoys wading in the brook at the foot of the orchard. She is messy in the house, but Miss Calista remarks that she cannot expect a child “to keep things just so, speshly a half-heather [sic] child like she is.” Meanwhile, Miss Calista’s “not very tender heart” is warming toward the forlorn little orphan. Her “unwonted gentleness” signals her growth as a person. When Lucy Ann saves the life of her benefactress, in a manner similar to the way in which Anne saves the life of Minnie May, the story ends with Miss Calista’s happy decision to let her stay on the farm. “I think that we——we—we need each other,” she says. In the final scene, Lucy Ann runs up to Miss Calista and they kiss. Here in this formula story was the birth of Marilla’s warming toward Anne Shirley. Here was the seed of what would become one of the novel’s central character developments.
In Maitland’s “Charity Ann,” the formula consisted in reconstituting a home for the orphan through a sudden and implausible reemergence of a long-lost relative. The lonely orphan recovers a place in the biological family, a popular fantasy that Maud used in several short stories prior to Green Gables.12 In “Lucy Ann,” however, the orphan finds an adoptive parent who is unrelated but benefits from the match, a resolution Maud also used in short stories as well as in Green Gables.13 Post-Victorian orphan stories underwent a dramatic shift in emphasis. In stories of the Victorian period, the adopting family usually draws an economic or practical benefit
from the adoption. For example, the orphan works as a hired hand or performs household tasks in exchange for food and board. While the social mood and social measures had begun to change at the turn of the century, with adoptive parents beginning to seek an emotional benefit from adopting a child, the backlash was powerful, and it was only during the 1910s and 1920s that adoption was cast more consistently in terms of emotional rather than pragmatic benefit.14 The shift is perhaps most obvious in Harold Gray’s comic strip Little Orphan Annie, which began in 1924. No longer marginal to the family, orphan Annie’s new role is that of a cherished status symbol in the center of Daddy Warbucks’ millionaire family. In both Maitland’s and Harbour’s stories the orphan girl has to earn the adoption by providing a service. Anne of Green Gables announces the dramatic shift in the genre. Clumsy at household tasks, Anne will actually talk her way into staying at Green Gables, bewitching Matthew (and Marilla) and awakening their emotions. “What good would she be to us?” asks Marilla. “We might be some good to her,” is Matthew’s sudden and unexpected retort.15 By shifting the paradigm of the orphan narrative, Anne of Green Gables helped pave the way for the understanding of adoption that we share today.
Orphan stories were popular in the period for the sad reason that many mothers died during or following childbirth. The mortality rate in the early twentieth century was high, with six to nine women out of one thousand dying during or following childbirth due to poor obstetric or delivery practices (as compared to thirteen American women of one hundred thousand dying in 2004, according to the National Center for Health Statistics).16 Orphan stories were as plentiful in the mass media magazines as whitewashed shells on the Cavendish beach. But, is there a text of origin, an urtext, for these Ann stories? One likely candidate is James Whitcomb Riley’s Little Orphant Annie (1885), a popular nursery rhyme poem:
Little Orphant Annie’s come to our house to stay,
An’ wash the cups an’ saucers up, an’ brush the crumbs away, … An’ make the fire, an’ bake the bread, an’ earn her board-an’- keep; … 17 The Hoosier dialect poem was based on the life of Mary Alice (Allie) Smith, a girl orphaned at the age of ten during the American Civil War.18 Smith found a home as a servant in the Riley household in Greenfield, Indiana, in the winter of 1862. She told the children tales of elves, witches, and goblins, using her oratory skills to keep the children in line and to build respect, for as an orphan she had no rights or powers. Somehow her name, Allie (from Alice) morphed to Annie during typesetting. Allie Smith had no idea she was the model for the famous poem. She was seventy years old before finding out that she was little orphan Annie. The popular poem spawned numerous spin-offs. It sparked the “Ann” orphan stories, “Charity Ann” and “Lucy Ann.” (No doubt the poet Maitland would have been familiar with Riley’s poem.) Of course, the name Ann, with or without an “e,” was (and remains) popular: Maud’s own grandmother and stepmother had “Ann” for a middle name.
The proliferation of these “Ann” stories, and the omnipresence of late Victorian adoption stories, undermines the arguments of those readers who see Anne of Green Gables as being too narrowly influenced by one novel, the bestselling Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm (another work about which Maud was mum). Published in September 1903 by Philadelphiaborn author Kate Douglas Wiggin, also known as Mrs. Riggs, this children’s classic was made into a silent movie starring Mary Pickford in 1917. With her pink parasol in hand, her black hair and glowing eyes, Rebecca Rowena Randall is poised to win over her Aunt Miranda, a thin spare New England spinster living in Riverboro, Maine. Although the similarities are striking, a good many can, in fact, be traced to earlier sources and formula genres that both authors drew on. The book is not found in Maud’s personal library, yet it is safe to assume that she was aware of the novel, which was discussed in the periodicals she read. “Rebecca with her quaint ways and vivid imagination, should find life almost unbearable when transplanted into a household of commonplace people,” The Delineator book page noted in February 1904. “The story is told in Mrs. Riggs’s happiest vein.”19 In reading Rebecca, one may be struck by her resemblance not so much to Anne but to Emily Byrd Starr, Maud’s most autobiographical heroine who develops into a writer just like budding poet Rebecca. Yet Rebecca is also a model housekeeper
whose story is laden with morals. Ironically, Anne of Green Gables, though written by a Sunday school teacher and future minister’s wife, is a much more secular and subversive novel. “Montgomery has done more than imitate Wiggin’s successful formula,” as one scholar aptly puts it. “She has improved on her model.”20 Indeed, Maud transcended the formula character, for, like Maud herself, Anne Shirley’s character pulls in many different directions.
Of course, Maud had also feasted on the orphan literature of the nineteenth century. The innocent, romantic children in Charles Dickens’ fiction, David Copperfield and Oliver Twist, survive in a corrupt world while maintaining their moral integrity. Mark Twain used the characters of Huckleberry Finn and Tom Sawyer to develop his powerful satire of America’s Gilded Age; Tom and Huck came to symbolize the unfettered freedom of the orphan. The early literature of orphan girls was steeped in moral correctness: Goody Two-Shoes (1765) is a lover of books and becomes a school teacher. By the mid-nineteenth century, many bestselling novels featured orphaned heroines who were notable for their strong religious sentiments. The orphan girl is unlikely to be conventionally pretty, but invariably, she has strength of character. Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre is plain but passionate, and she defies abusive relatives and institutional authorities. No matter that Maud may not have read all of these texts; she had imbibed the literary and popular orphan literature of the era and was able both to mimic and transform it.21 With Anne Shirley, Maud was poised to make literary history, even though ironically her intent had been to write just a little formula story.
In 1905, the silhouette of what would become Anne Shirley was emerging, when Maud was “giving birth” to a redhead who looked surprisingly similar to Anne. Her long-forgotten story “By the Grace of Sarah Maud” was published in June in the Boston magazine Modern Women.22 The story’s spirited and melodramatic heroine Sarah Maud Molloy is a freckled little witch with a ragged sailor hat topping her “carrotty” curls. Her clothing
is faded, and the eight-year-old chatterbox luxuriates in grief when we first see her. The story provides a clue to Anne’s temper.
“By the Grace of Sarah Maud” is about a young man coincidentally named Nesbitt, who is mad at himself because he has missed his train. Pretty Betty Stewart had given him an invitation to join her for a picnic at Maiden Lake, a golden opportunity to declare his love (Maiden Lake is also the name of the lake where Maud and Will picnicked and printed their names on the poplar). Nesbitt’s sulking is interrupted by crying. Stretching his neck, he discovers a little redhead curled up on a bench. He tries to elicit the reason for her heartbreak. “I—can’t—get to the pickernic,” 23 the redhead sobs. She could not go with the mission children on a woodland picnic because she did not have the proper clothing. Here is also the kernel for Anne’s dream of picnics and anguish about missing her own church picnic. Nesbitt spontaneously proposes a picnic to Sarah Maud: “You are what I really needed, Sarah Maud—a diversion.” “‘Ain’t!’ said Sarah Maud indignantly, ‘I’m Irish.’”24
Anticipating Anne Shirley, the city urchin reveals an intuitive and poetic understanding of nature’s beauty. Already she is a more sophisticated character than Harbour’s Lucy Ann, whose appreciation of nature is much less spiritual and less sensuous. Nesbitt and Sarah Maud roam in the woodlands and pick flowers, wild roses, and daisies. With great green arches above her, Sarah Maud feels solemn and happy, as if she was “at Mass.” Maud was working her own nature thrills into the story. With a rapacious appetite for information that anticipates Anne Shirley’s, the little girl fires off a thousand questions at Nesbitt, who ends up revealing his love for Becky. At sunset, they leave the woods and take the train back home. In the train is Becky Stewart, returning from the picnic, cool because she thinks Nesbitt has neglected her. “Are you his girl?” asks Sarah Maud, and while Nesbitt gasps, Becky softens and admits that—yes, she is Nesbitt’s “girl.”25
Maud must have felt that this sparkling little redhead was a kindred spirit. She baptized the character with her own name: Sarah Maud, whose initials SMM are close to her own LMM. “But maybe it’s the Irish,” she would note about herself in her journal many years later, trying to identify the scintillating quality of her own face, a quality that transcended the puritanical Scottish Macneills and the dash of English Woolners and
Penmans.26 In her Irish temper, Sarah Maud was a comic stock character, though more complex and intelligent than another of Maud’s redheads. The handmaid Charlotta in her 1903 story “The Bride Roses” speaks in a thick brogue, makes silly errors such as weeding the flowers instead of the weeds. Looking like a messenger from pixieland, she insists on being called Charlotta with an “a” instead of the more common “Charlotte.”27
Was our Anne Irish? Here in the little Irish redhead Sarah Maud was the tempestuous part of Anne Shirley’s personality. The Irish stereotype is flaming red hair and temper to match, a love of fairies and leprechauns—which abound in Anne of Green Gables—and the green of the shamrock and St. Patrick. But Maud sidestepped the stereotype by shrewdly blending cultural references. Instead of Sarah Maud’s Irish working-class parents, Maud endowed Anne Shirley’s parents with a more noble poverty. Walter and Bertha Shirley teach at Bolingbroke High School and thus represent an educated class. Maud removed Sarah Maud’s dialect, and instead gave Anne the language of books. Anne’s melodramatic language is scripted and comic, and yet, she also speaks the language of visionaries and dreamers that crosses the boundaries of culture, class, and age. (Was Maud also thinking of Ephraim Weber, the German-Mennonite who had spoken his first English sentence at age twelve and yet was a brilliant reader of literature?) Anne’s bookish language was foreign and yet familiar. There was nothing “rude or slangy” about her, as Marilla remarks when she begins to change her mind about Anne’s staying at Green Gables: “She’s ladylike. It’s likely her people were nice folks.”28 The Irish redheaded little “mite of the slums” Sarah Maud had morphed into a personality that middle-class readers could identity with. In fact, both mainstream readers and new immigrants alike could identify with this character from away who cuts across social, cultural, and generational boundaries. Blending the cultural references was a brilliant stroke. It was like blending Tom Sawyer and Huckleberry Finn into one. The middle-class good-bad boy meets the true social rebel and outcast. In Anne’s case, the tempestuous ugly duckling met the poetic dreamer. It was a happy marriage of opposites, a blending of seemingly contradictory qualities.
For the first time, we are able to understand Anne’s complex and slowly evolving personality. For the first time, we are able to understand the depth of her character and her multifaceted personality, summarized
in her own sentence, “There’s such a lot of different Annes in me.” Anne is made up of many Annes, and different readers can identify with different facets of her personality. Romantic Anne was a pagan wood nymph gazing up at the stars and dreaming (Evelyn Nesbit). Orphan Anne had a troubled history and was desperately hungry for a home (Charity Ann). She was a girl radiating sunshine and recruiting a mother (Lucy Ann Joyce). She was a girl who was supposed to have been a boy (Ellen Macneill), a rebellious and tempestuous little redhead, who appealed to Maud with her bold and fearless way of speaking to adults (Sarah Maud). Charismatic Anne was able to bind Maud to the chariot of her imagination. Maud adopted her and made her the heroine of her novel.29
For the first time these sources allow us to identify the two time periods that were particularly relevant for the birth of Anne: the period from 1892 to 1894, when Maud was a rebelling teenager aged seventeen to nineteen, living with her grandparents but planning to leave the homestead to teach; and the period from 1903 to 1905, when she was a mature but solitary writer caring for her grandmother and feeling ambivalent about her future. During these periods she squirreled away many pieces that would allow her imagination to build up Anne. The blending of these disparate time levels would result in a sense of timelessness, which also explains why fans and scholars who have tried to establish an historical chronology for Anne’s life, tracing her birth year by using historical references, have found themselves in a maze of confusion and contradiction. Anne was the product of a long evolution. In fact, just as Maud would distill her winter potpourri from the blossoms of an entire summer, so she distilled Anne’s character from a variety of “Anns” while also blending that distillation with her own nostalgic memories. That distillation is at the core of the novel’s success.
For the first time, we recognize why “Charity Ann” and “Lucy Ann,” the two formula Anns without the e, were merely ephemeral little stories, and why Maud’s Anne with an e became the international success it is. As Anne herself notes in the novel in what must surely have been the author’s tongue-in-cheek comment: “A-n-n looks dreadful, but A-n-n-e looks so much more distinguished.”30 Maud even mocked her own habit—Anne is a chatterbox who is constantly quoting, paraphrasing, and dramatizing clichés of the popular romantic literature she has read. That
Maud had effectively subsumed the magazine and newspaper Anns into her own Anne has been her secret for over a century. We must assume that she quietly discarded the evidence, for she destroyed her notebooks, as we know, and none of these stories are found in her personal papers, but are reborn after more than a century in this book. Maud was poking fun at herself for consuming the formula stories. She had, in effect, put them to excellent use, and had found her own literary voice by birthing a truly original character who paradoxically also represented a distilled version of a long tradition of orphan stories. Anne was the result of ten years of disquiet and turbulence, years of restlessness and loneliness. And Anne was now in Boston, where L. C. Page was contemplating whether or not to adopt this fiery orphan desperate to find a home.