The Most Popular Summer Girl
The critics and public are agreed that Anne is bound to be the most popular Summer girl—a delightful acquisition to any vacation party.
—Advertisement for Anne of Green Gables, July 19081
Advertisements would claim that everybody almost automatically loved Anne. And yet as Maud recounted the legend, Anne was battling a hostile world until she finally saw the light of day. Even her publisher was conflicted about Anne, Maud would say, drawing attention to the dangers surrounding her redheaded character. Yet Maud herself was conflicted in her feelings about Anne. To publish a book had been Maud’s life-long dream, and yet she would often contradict herself when commenting on her novel.
Once again, Anne would be pulled in different directions. She would be shaped through the vision of a publisher with a marketing genius, but there was a tension between Anne’s Canadian and American parents, as the two seemed to have different visions for the character’s future. The tension in Maud’s personality, and the fragmentary approach of her composition, were reflected in Anne’s personality. These fragments, in turn, now seemed to mirror the tension felt by an entire era caught in the whirl of modernity and simultaneously searching for nostalgic peace.
The New England Building at 200 Summer Street in Boston housed the publishing company of L.C. Page. Born in Switzerland, the son of an American consul, Louis Coues Page had grown up with all the privileges of wealth. Harvard-educated, he and his brother George worked in their stepfather’s publishing firm Estes & Lauriat. After Louis had achieved the position of president and general manager in 1897 he renamed the company L.C. Page and Company, which in 1914 became simply The Page Company. In a photo taken in 1937, L.C. Page looks like the baron of the company.2 With his head cocked up, mouth turned down, and shoulders squared, he could also pass for an army brigadier accustomed to giving orders. He had a penchant for philandering, gambling, and drinking. A conservative in politics and taste, he favored the romantic poetry of Bliss Carman and Charles G.D. Roberts, translations of the Italian poet Gabriele D’Annunzio, and classic novels by Charles Dickens, Sir Walter Scott, and Leo Tolstoy. Having also found a lucrative niche with juvenile fiction, he had a genius for marketing that set him apart.
At 200 Summer Street it was business as usual when Anne began making her rounds. After giving the novel the cursory read usually given to an unknown author, thirty-eight-year-old Louis said “No.” This time, however, Anne was not so easily brushed aside. She had formed an alliance with staff member “Miss Arbuckle,” one of the many expatriate Prince Edward Islanders in Boston, who was enchanted by the novel’s nostalgic Prince Edward Island locale. Miss Arbuckle quietly but persistently championed Anne to other staff readers until several supported the novel. The effective lobbying campaign forced the mighty Louis to yield to Anne. On April 8, an acceptance letter was drafted. This, at least, is how Maud relayed the story in her journal on July 16, 1916, after her relations with the Page brothers had soured.3 Unfortunately, Maud’s early correspondence with her publisher has disappeared; it is not part of the L. C. Page papers at the New York Public Library.
Meanwhile on Prince Edward Island the weather was so cold that the Minto was stuck in ice and the passengers and mails were delayed. Just a week earlier Frede had penned in her ten-year letter to Maud, “Time will bring around events.”4 On April 15, Mr. Crewe’s rumbling buggy finally
arrived at the red kitchen door. In the kitchen with its low, whitewashed ceiling, its old-fashioned braided mats on the floor, and Daffy the cat drinking milk near the warm stove, Grandma handed Maud the letter from Boston. Her hands must have been shaking as her anxious eyes scanned the single typewritten sheet.
“We take pleasure in advising you that our readers report favorably with regard to your girls’s [sic] story ‘Anne of Green Gables’, and if mutually satisfactory arrangements can be made, we shall be glad to add the book to our next season’s list,” the typed letter simply signed L.C. Page & Company read. Maud was given the option of selling the book for a set amount to be determined, or to have it published on a “moderate” royalty basis. The short letter ended by suggesting that if she was not otherwise at work, “it might be a good idea to write a second story dealing with the same character.”5 It was not unusual for publishers at the time to suggest a sequel long before a book had been tested by the market, as literary scholar Carole Gerson writes in her study on the Anne sequels. “In other words, the second Anne book, Anne of Avonlea, was generated not by the clamour of enchanted readers, but by the current practices of market publishing; the charismatic quality of Anne of Green Gables was not substantive to the production of its initial sequels, but rather an incidental surprise.”6
Inebriated with joy, Maud may have kept her secret to relish by herself. Frede had just left to study at the Ontario Agricultural College in Guelph, but Ewan was scheduled to return to Prince Edward Island in April. She apparently made no record of this stunning news in her journal that night. But she must have responded to Page’s letter without delay, for just a week later, on April 22, the L. C. Page Company issued the contract for L. M. Montgomery of “Cavendish, P. E. I.” to sign over all the rights “including all serial rights, dramatic rights, translations, abridgements, selections” for the publication of “ANNE OF GREEN GABLES a juvenile story.” She would receive a 10% royalty on the wholesale price for each copy “sold over and above the first thousand.” In addition, the contract gave Page “the refusal of all her stories for book publication for a period of five years” on the same conditions that ruled this first contract.7 The entire book deal was negotiated, contracted, and signed within a remarkable three weeks. She signed the contract on Thursday, May 2, 1907.
“Well, I must simply tell you my great news right off!” she wrote to Ephraim Weber on the night of her signing, bursting with the exuberance of the moment. Yet despite her bubbly effusiveness, her tone was modest and self-deprecating. Ephraim should not think that she had written “the great Canadian novel.” It was “merely a juvenilish story, ostensibly for girls,” but her hope was that “grown-ups may like it a little.” She was pleased about having secured a reputable publisher, though not among the “top-notchers” like Harpers or MacMillan, as she admitted.8
There is shadow of nervousness. The novel was a labor of love, but would she be able to sustain the quality in a sequel? The lover of independence balked at the five-year binding clause in this publication marriage, although the insertion of such a clause, she told Ephraim, might be viewed by some as “rather complimentary.” Nothing indicates, however, that she tried to negotiate this clause in any way or that she took the trouble to seek professional consult. While she generously dispensed publishing advice to her pen friends, no one was advising her. And after years of toiling and multiple rejections, she was relieved to have a contract. Her ingrained lack of negotiation skills, her solitary publishing habits, and her desperate desire to be published, however, would prove costly in later years. On August 16, she finally announced the news in her journal, and penned her now well known, indeed legendary, mini-biography of how Anne came about:
I have always kept a notebook in which I jotted down, as they occurred to me, ideas for plots, incidents, characters and descriptions. Two years ago in the spring of 1905 I was looking over this notebook in search of some suitable idea for a short serial I wanted to write for a certain Sunday School paper and I found a faded entry, written ten years before:—‘Elderly couple apply to orphan asylum for a boy. By mistake a girl is sent them.’ I thought this would do. I began to block out chapters, devise incidents and ‘brood up’ my heroine. Somehow or other she seemed very real to me and took possession of me to an unusual extent. Her personality appealed to me and I thought it rather a shame to waste her on an ephemeral little serial. Then the thought came, “Write a book about her. You have the central idea and
character. All you have to do is to spread it out over enough chapters to amount to a book.”
The result of this was “Anne of Green Gables”.9 The notebook that contained the core spark for the novel has disappeared, but the story behind the notebook, and the complexity of Maud’s Anne, has finally been unraveled. In this belated entry, her tone was restrained and retrospective, yet with an effusive capstone. The dream she dreamed in that old brown school desk had finally come true, she noted. “And the realization is sweet—almost as sweet as the dream!”
She closed the entry with what appears to be a secondary thread, an afterthought: “Ewan came home in April. He seemed very well and quite recovered from his headaches and insomnia.”10
Maud promptly began work on a sequel. She worked all summer, never pausing to write in her journal, but then again, summer was always a dearth for her journal. She collected fresh material, blocking out new characters, and devising incidents. She was brooding up her first Anne sequel. By fall, she burst into the rapture of writing—a feeling always strangely bodily, like a physical sensation. She marked the occasion by going to the shore. The day before she had written the first six pages of her new book, what would become Anne of Avonlea.
Even though the shore was close, Maud could go for months without taking a stroll along the beach because she was partial to the woods. But that Wednesday evening, October 9, with the air purified after a storm the day before, the clean-washed sand crunching underneath her step, and the salty smell of the water filling her lungs, her soul was filled with a nameless exhilaration. It was as if she was “borne on the wings of a raptured ecstasy into the seventh heaven,” she enthused in an unpublished part of this journal entry. “Oh, you dear earth! Tonight I loved you so much that I could have flung myself face downward on you, my arms outstretched as if to clasp you.”11 Having mastered the most difficult hurdle—the
opening, which was always excruciating for Maud—she was hoping that the rest would be fun. “Anne is as real to me as if I had given her birth—as real and as dear,” she concluded this exuberant journal entry.12 She was intoxicated with the joy of creation. Curiously, a full month later, on November 10, Maud described her ecstatic beach walk verbatim in her letter to Ephraim, but fibbed that it had happened three evenings earlier. It is a small but telling incident that indicates that dramatic immediacy was more important to our author than the literal truth. In the letter she referred to dryads and wood nymphs—presumably around the same time that she would have written chapter eight of the sequel, “A Golden Picnic,” in which Anne and her girlfriends dance around the woodland pool like wood nymphs performing a pagan rite.
Despite the progress on the new novel, however, Maud’s mood began to spiral downward. During the winter her writing world was out of joint because she had to work in the kitchen, where there were constant interruptions by post office visitors. Her misanthropy returned. “When I speak of loving Cavendish it is the place I love, not the people,” she noted in her November 3 journal record.13 In December, she dreaded the future, even a happy one, and with the night coming early, “dour gloom settles down on my soul.”14 In her dark mood, she was convinced that she was a creature whom no one could love. The only person she could share these feelings with was Frede, who had returned from Guelph after several months of studies. Maud missed her dear companion, and by February, 1908, she was tired of being cooped up at home and weary of asking others for rides. Her independence asserted itself and she simply walked the five miles on the frozen road. It took her one hour and fifty minutes to arrive at her destination in Stanley. “I was longing to see Frede.”15 The visit provided much-needed cheer. Always interested in psychic phenomena, Maud was trying to make her friends dream of her. She had commanded Frede to dream of her and it had worked.
On March 2, she offered to try the experiment on Ephraim: “I’ll try to make you dream of me.”16 She also announced that Anne of Green Gables would be out on March 15. Preoccupied Ephraim was distracted by problems of his own, however. His life was unraveling, he reported on March 20. He stood to lose the land he had purchased. He was threatened by lawsuits and a sheriff’s sale, and would eventually sell his land at a loss. On
April 5, Maud responded by saying that she was sorry to hear that his life was “on the rocks” but seeing that there was nothing she could do, she offered sympathy and hoped that he would find his way out of his difficulties. After this somewhat callous and cursory dismissal of a friend’s problems, she returned to her topic. “I did dream of you one night,” she wrote, insisting on sharing her own riveting dream narrative in which he starred as a man of adventure. Never once did she return to Ephraim’s real-life problems.17 Flattered to be the insistent object of fantasy for the romantic writer, the Alberta farmer “on the rocks” must have realized that there was a strange disconnect between reality and fantasy, for his Maritime writer friend was not interested in the prosaic reality of Ephraim’s life—which may have painfully reminded her of her own father’s failures.
On May 3, the eve of Anne’s publication, Maud composed a 2,500 word mini-autobiography in her journal that has never been published. In a remarkably balanced tone, she described the effects of her father’s departure and the Macneill grandparents’ and uncles’ nagging and fault finding of her as a child. “I received the impression of which to this day I have never been able quite to rid myself—that everybody disliked me and that I was a very hateful person.” Miss Gordon, her school teacher and good friend, who had taken the reins of the Cavendish School when Maud was fourteen, allowed her to reinvent herself. “For the first time it dawned on me that I was not so unlovable as I had been made to believe. I found myself one of Miss Gordon’s favorite pupils and this fact alone did more for me than all my previous years of ‘schooling’ put together.”18 It was a belated tribute to Hattie Gordon. With her golden hair and smart dresses, Hattie had been adored by her pupils, just like Miss Muriel Stacy in the first Anne book. These thoughts now shaped the writing of Anne of Avonlea, which explored Anne’s two years as a teacher in Avonlea. She dedicated this new novel to Hattie Gordon—the friend with whom she had lost touch.19
After a prolonged phase of depression, she feared an impending breakdown: “But if I break down what will I do?” she asked. “There is no one to take care of me and I could not afford to go away for treatment or stop work and rest.”20 Remarkably, she did not appear to count on Ewan Macdonald’s help. Her fiance had accepted a call to the presbytery of
Bloomfield and O’Leary in western Prince Edward Island, a potato-farming community ninety kilometers from Cavendish and today home of the Prince Edward Island Potato Museum.21 As a result, she saw Ewan seldom, but he had come for a visit in March. In her dark mood, on May 3, she also confessed to marriage jitters in her journal, wondering if she was fit to be anybody’s wife. Her one wish, she said on May 24, was for Uncle John’s family to disappear and for her to have “an independent home and existence here.”22 The thought of living by herself, independent in her own castle, again asserted itself as Maud’s default ideal.
In Boston, meanwhile, Anne of Green Gables was taking shape. Marketing wizard L. C. Page had put aside his reservations, if he had ever had any, to launch Anne like a fashionable debutante. There was some wrangling over the author’s name. L.C. Page preferred the femininity and romance of ‘Lucy Maud Montgomery’ Maud insisted on “L. M. Montgomery.” the literary identity for which she had worked so hard.23 The gender-bending name had a more serious, literary flavor than the more feminine pseudonyms such as Belinda Bluegrass or Maud Eglinton that she had cultivated in some short stories. Strike one would go to Maud. There was a delay in the book production because the illustrator L. C. Page had commissioned was overworked or sick. Page began marketing the novel in March 1908.
Everyone, young or old, who reads the story of ‘Anne of Green Gables’ will fall in love with her … . Miss Montgomery will receive praise for her fine sympathy with and delicate appreciation of sensitive and imaginative girlhood.24 This announcement in the American book trade magazine The Publishers’ Weekly set the stage for the birth of the little redhead. Anne, like most of Page’s books, was advertised at a sales price of one dollar and fifty cents. Although announced as “Ready in April,” the novel was in fact delayed until June, the month featured so prominently in the novel.25
“PUBLISHED TO-DAY: Anne of Green Gables,” The Publishers’ Weekly proclaimed the launch on its cover page on Saturday June 13, 1908.”In ANNE OF GREEN GABLES we believe that we have discovered another ‘Rebecca,’” the blurb read. “Anne is one of the most original heroines in recent fiction.” Indeed, Anne was proclaimed “the ‘leading lady’ of the book world of 1908.”26
The Island was exquisite that June. Just the right combination of rain and sunshine had graced the landscape. The grass was at its greenest. In Cavendish Mr. Crewe’s rumbling wheels stopped at Grandmother Macneill’s kitchen door to deliver the mailbag. It was Saturday, June 20, and there was a special packet for Maud. She unwrapped her parcel: “my first book!” she breathed to her journal. Excitement took her breath away. The thrill was intoxicating like a rich wine; “mine, mine, mine,” she repeated like a mantra in her journal. She had started writing the novel three years earlier, yet her book sounded depths that reached much further back. Her emotions and dreams lived in the novel. Opening the book to the dedication page, “To the Memory of my father and mother,” she felt a pang of pleasure.27
Anne, she thought, was beautifully appareled with a cloth cover and a handsome portrait in the center. Bathed in a hue of Titian red, the model’s hair was teased up into a Pompadour and gathered at the nape of the neck, clearly an adult style. Who was the Gibson Girl whose pointed chin and nude skin graced the cover of the first edition of Anne of Green Gables? Her identity is unknown but she was not Evelyn Nesbit, who by 1907 had become persona non grata. Evelyn’s sordid story had sold millions of tabloids and tinted postcards, but had forever banished her image of innocence from the cover of a juvenile story. Missing, too, was the name of the Anne cover artist, for the simple reason that the cover was not original but recycled from the attractive January 1905 Gibson Girl cover of The Delineator. Nothing could better illustrate Page’s marketing of the novel as a popular bestseller. Today a rare copy of The Delineator finally reveals the
long-lost identity of the cover artist: “The January design is a marvelously beautiful type of the American Girl executed in pastel by George Gibbs.”28 Educated at the Corcoran School of Art in Washington, D. C. and the Art Student League in New York, magazine and book illustrator George Gibbs placed his work in the era’s leading magazines such as Scribner’s, McClure’s, Harper’s, Cosmopolitan, and Colliers. He would become the cover illustrator for Maud’s subsequent books published by L.C. Page. By sending in ten cents in stamps for mailing, readers could acquire the Gibson Girl plate for home framing, so that by the time the novel came out, Anne was already a familiar face in the dens, parlors, or “Milady’s boudoirs” of regular Delineator subscribers. L.C. Page purchased the original pastel painting from Gibbs, and had it framed and hung in the personal library of his Brookline mansion.29 Unfortunately, like so much of the early history of Anne, it no longer exists.
The book’s print and binding were also pretty, although the first edition, surprisingly, was published in cloth of three different colors—green, brown, and beige. “Most likely the multiple colors suggest that the publisher ran out of available cloth and simply used what was left over,” explains Donna Campbell, an Ontario collector of L. M. Montgomery’s first editions.
Opening the book, Maud would have seen the pretty frontispiece showing fifteen-year-old Diana fixing her friend’s hair and dress and the caption “‘There’s something so stylish about you, Anne,’ said Diana.”30 The packaging addressed the novel not to children, but to teenaged girls and young adults focused on fashion and dress.31 Seven additional plates illustrated Anne’s dramatic adventures: Arriving at Green Gables; Confronting Mrs. Lynde and stamping her foot on the floor; Going to Sunday school with wildflowers decorating her hat; Cracking the slate on Gilbert’s head; Walking the roof pole; and so on. Maud thought the illustration of Anne arriving at Green Gables was the best: Matthew and Anne looked exactly as they did in her imagination.
The quality of the illustrations, however, was not in the same league as the work of renowned children’s book illustrators Elizabeth Shippen Green or Jessie Willcox Smith (for whom Evelyn Nesbit had posed in Philadelphia). Illustrator William A. J. Claus, the Director of the Claus Art School in Boston, had honed his skills by copying religious paintings such
as Raphael’s Madonna for churches.32 It is likely that most if not all of the illustrations for Anne were done by Claus’s twenty-five-year-old wife May Austin Claus. Her initials M.A. came before his on the title page, and given his seniority, it is safe to assume that his name would have appeared first had he done the work. Maud quickly spotted some embarrassing errors. The book states that when Gilbert rescues Anne after the Lily Maid episode, her hair is short, having been just recently shingled after the hairdyeing episode. In the illustration, long hair flows down her back.33 When Anne confronts Mrs. Lynde, the lady is shown without a bonnet, suggesting a formal visit rather than a call. But these errors were less consequential than the final plate, which changed the ending. We see Gilbert and Anne walking down the lane as a romantic couple. Both are dressed for a courtship walk: Gilbert in a formal suit with tie, straw hat, and pleated trousers, Anne with an absurd open parasol when it is actually after sundown. Both look stiff and stilted as if they were drawn from “a 1908 fashion plate.”34 It is ironic that in the erroneous final plate, readers found conclusive evidence for Gilbert’s romance with Anne. It seemed that while Maud was intentionally leaving the novel’s ending ambiguous, as the decision was still open in her own life, the novel’s packaging identified the direction of the sequel. This may help explain why Maud did not like the illustrations and would have preferred her novel to stand on its own without such interventions. “What happens to Gilbert and Anne?” was the question that journalists and fans would soon pester her about.
Coincidentally, in July, Ed Simpson passed through Cavendish on his buggy—his bride beside him. Maud had the presence of mind to flash him a quick smile, but he displayed an “unflattering indifference,” she wrote on the night of July 16 in her journal.35 It would take time for the wounds to heal. Her tone stung with vindictive poison when she wrote in her journal the local gossip—that Ed’s bride was not beautiful but clever and in possession of a good fortune. One is struck at how the various plots concerning Maud’s lovers seem to fall into Jane Austen categories.
A month later, Anne was leaping off Page’s list of “Summer’s Successes.” The early critics tended to agree with Marilla: “No house will be ever dull that she’s in.”36 The conservative New York Times Saturday Review of Books called her “one of the most extraordinary girls that ever came out of an ink pot” but also quibbled that Anne was altogether too
queer: despite the fact that she has spent her life with illiterate folk and has had little schooling, she speaks with a vocabulary worthy of Bernard Shaw and has a reasoning power worthy of the Justice of the Supreme Court.37 Nevertheless, the reactions were largely positive. “‘Anne of Green Gables’ is worth a thousand of the problem stories with which the bookshelves are crowded today,” enthused the reviewer in the Toronto Globe on August 15.38
That same August, an incident at the homestead set new turbulences in motion. On a windy day, a spark from the cooking stove, which they kept outside during the summer, must have landed on the roof. The old kitchen roof caught fire. Maud dragged the ladder from the barn, and mounted it with pails of water, eventually putting out the fire. Her efforts were successful, and during better times the little adventure would have yielded a good story, but somehow it put her nerves on edge. What if the house, filled with two decades of pictures, journal pages, notebooks, letters, and recorded memories, had burnt down? What sort of fiction would Maud have written? We can only speculate about the effects on her style and content. The event left her feeling a sense of shock for weeks after, as she told George MacMillan on August 31. “I am glad you liked my book,” she noted. She said she agreed with the critics who said that the ending was conventional, lacking the freshness of the earlier parts. If she had known there would be a sequel, she would simply have stopped, she added. In fact, when she made this statement (which she also repeated elsewhere and that has since been repeated by numerous scholars as evidence that the ending was no good) she was in a grim mood. She was feeling “soaked” with Anne, as she put it. “I’m sick of the sound of her name.”39 It was the beginning of an ambivalent love-hate relationship with her heroine.
In Cavendish, people immediately recognized some of the portraits, arousing Maud’s defensiveness. “Yet there isn’t a portrait in the book,” she told Ephraim on September 10, adding, “They are all ‘composites.’”40 And yet she provided no information on how her vivid imagination had blended the characters, on how they were really a brilliant distillation of many different portraits that allowed many people to identify with the heroine. A clipping service provided her with reviews of her novel, and by September 10 she had collected an impressive list of about sixty, a number she proudly italicized.41 Three were truly negative, two mixed, and the
remaining highly flattering, she wrote to Ephraim. In fact, she laid it on thick, providing several pages of quotations. This was perhaps because Ephraim, besides recommending horseback riding to cure her headache and nerves, had commented on Anne in terms not as effusively laudatory as she may have hoped from her most ardent fan and admirer. Yet we can also sense her irritation. If she were “dragged at Anne’s chariot wheels” the rest of her life, she would “bitterly repent having ‘created’ her,” she explained three months after the novel’s publication. “Every freak who has written to me about it, claims to be a ‘kindred spirit.’”42 A month later, by October, Maud recorded in her journal that her book was a “best seller,” already in its fifth edition.43
Meanwhile in Toronto, the Canadian Magazine championed the novel’s Canadian flavor in November. “Her environment, a picturesque section of Prince Edward Island, is thoroughly Canadian, and Miss Montgomery presents it in a piquant literary style, full of grace and whole-heartedness.” The periodical was unstinting in its praise, calling Anne “a novel that easily places the author, Miss L.M. Montgomery, in the first rank of our native writers.”44 Ironically, it was not until 1942, the year of Maud’s death, that the first Canadian edition of the novel was published by Toronto’s Ryerson Press. “In Anne of Green Gables’ you will find the dearest and most moving and delightful child since the immortal Alice,” said Mark Twain in a letter to actor Francis Wilson, which Page promptly quoted in The Publishers’ Weekly on December 5.45 According to the December 26 advertisements in the same book trade magazine, her “most devoted admirers” now included “Bliss Carman, Mark Twain, Francis Wilson, Sir Louis H. Davies, of the Supreme Court of Canada, and Annie Fellows Johnston.”46 The kindred spirits clan was growing quickly.
Some of her relatives, such as cranky Uncle Leander, took her seriously for the first time. For the Reverend, who had studied theology at Princeton, she was no longer the poor insignificant country cousin but a published author worthy of a real conversation. Grandmother and Uncle John seemed more respectful after she had proven that her Waverly pen carried a heftier and more financially lucrative weight in the world than even the golden Island potato. Despite this new respect, however, Grandmother was still the same crabby person.
Cavendish was proud of Maud’s achievements and yet, it appears, not unstintingly so. Curiously, the Literary Society never paid her the compliment she so yearned to hear. No notice of congratulation is found in the minute book, which soberly recorded that she resigned from the book committee in December 1908—the year of her success. Over the years she would hoard the compliments and attention, savoring her sweet success. But she also created a mental blacklist of all those who neglected to congratulate her. A sign of narcissistic self-involvement, it was also a mark of deep-seated insecurity and a lifelong desire for praise and acceptance. Nate Lockhart, with whom she had first shared her desire to write a book, never congratulated her on her novel, she complained. One wonders whether she congratulated him on the birth of two sons, both in the same year as Anne.47 Her old resentment flared up when Aunt Emily said that she herself was not educated enough to appreciate the novel. One wonders if Grandmother Macneill or Uncle John read the novel and enjoyed it.
What accounts for the novel’s success in the wide world? What made it so easy to connect with Anne? It is as if Maud had impregnated the story and characters with her own hunger for love. Or, as Maud’s “fan” Isabel Anderson explained the attraction, “It is because of something for which you stand, which they long for and have not.”48 The novel has an uncanny way of entering into an intimate relationship with the reader. But the novel also resonated with the culture of the era including its fashions, fads, and fears. In the year Anne was launched, red hair seemed omnipresent. The Metropolitan, for instance, featured a series of redheaded cover girls including, in March, a Titian redhead in Gypsy-chic in the center of a Zodiac wheel; in August, a flower-wreathed redhead in an empire dress in a rural Garden of Eden with ripe red apples; and in September, an auburn beauty holding a crystal ball in a dark underworld forest. That same September, The Delineator published a beautifully illustrated poem, “The Redheaded Baby,” by Reginald Wright Kauffman:
“Redheaded Baby, with laughing eyes,/ Dimple-cheeked, firm-limbed, brave little boy.”49
A new culture of speed and leisure was emerging in advertisements for automobiles, motor boats, gramophones, phonographs, zonophones, and other “Talking Machines.” The Metropolitan ran ads for Maja, the sister of Mercedes, the car “in reach of all lovers of good automobiles,” and the Rambler, “The Car of Steady Service” by Thos. B. Jeffrey & Company. “Buy a Real Car,” urged the American Motor Car Sales Company, advertising Roadsters and multi-passenger “Tourist” cars at up to 50—60 horsepower and ranging in price from $3,200 to $4,000.50 The motorboat was no longer for the wealthy man alone, the ad proclaimed: “Probably one of the greatest joys of the clan is the cruise which corresponds to the touring trips of the automobilists.”51 There were also a multitude of advertisements for modern bathrooms, with plumbing fixtures that would provide absolute and perfect sanitation. How could this modern and urban world possibly be interested in the rural, backward world of Anne?
One might assume that such symbols of modernity would automatically render obsolete the old-fashioned buggy and the rural landscape of Green Gables, pushing both into the old and bygone Victorian era. However, the opposite appears to have been true. In June 1908, the very same time Anne was leaping off the presses, The Metropolitan featured “A Detail of Spring Motoring,” a drawing by George Gibbs, the same—though at the time unacknowledged—artist who painted the Anne cover.52 The drawing illustrates that the new automobile culture was in perfect harmony with nostalgia for rural nature: A car has come to a standstill in the midst of a pastoral scene; the man at the wheel looks on as the woman steps on the car seat to pluck white blossoms from the canopy of cherry trees. In the March issue, a Gibbs drawing entitled “Motor-Boating” depicts modern machinery against a backdrop of pastoral nature: a woman in a red sweater sits at the wheel of a speed boat, while a man with a green tie holds on to the railing. The boat cuts through the water at high speed, whirling up a huge splash of white foam. But visible in the background is a sailing boat and a placid, treelined shore.53 Modern consumer items appeared at their most exciting and desirable when packaged within the familiar, romantic nature ideal that was celebrated in Anne. The novel’s old-fashioned world was perhaps
the tonic that helped alleviate the anxieties whirled up by the speed of the new and unknown era.
Anne also captured something of the burgeoning social mood. By the time it was published, a national adoption campaign was in full swing. “The Delineator Child-Rescue Campaign” had been initiated by The Delineator’s editor-in-chief, American author Theodore Dreiser, in September 1907. The goal of this widely publicized campaign was to find foster families or adoptive families for orphans. The ultimate goal was to dismantle the old-fashioned and deficient asylum system. Its motto, “For the Child that Needs a Home and the Home that Needs a Child,”54 seemed to encapsulate the motto of Anne of Green Gables. Each month, The Delineator published portraits and profiles of orphan children in a concerted effort to recruit adoptive parents. Nine-year-old Bud and five-year-old Blossom, for instance, came from the Florida woods: “But as they belong to one family stem and are pretty as any flowers that grow, we have given them the nicknames.” The October 1908 journalistic portrait of the pair echoes the language of orphan literature like Anne of Green Gables. “These are well-born children, free from any hereditary taint, and are affectionate and responsive,” the column noted, just as Marilla reflects that Anne likely comes from a good family. “Their first ride on a train and street car was with the superintendent of the society. Their eyes fairly danced with the sight of the panoramic picture from country to town.” And just like Anne, Bud and Blossom enjoy ice cream for the first time.55
Reaching all the way to the White House, with Theodore Dreiser meeting with President Theodore Roosevelt, this campaign helped contribute to the creation of the US Children’s Bureau in 1912. It also echoed and reinforced the ideas of Anne of Green Gables—the new spirit of providing a loving home for children rather than viewing orphans for their use value. “[T]he orphans in tales aimed at female readers likewise ‘stir up hearts,’ bringing romance or reconciliation or other expressions of feelings in their wake.”56 Thus Anne brings to Green Gables the gift of the heart, triggering moments of emotional awakening for Matthew, for Marilla, for Aunt Josephine Barry, and numerous others in the sequels. By drawing on the language of orphan literature, The Delineator’s child-rescue campaign also had the effect of promoting and popularizing “emotional” orphan literature. In particular, given its timing, the campaign
helped to promote Anne of Green Gables. And vice versa: Anne helped promote the idea of adoption as we understand it today.
But the novel spoke to readers on a deep emotional and spiritual level as well. The book contained an implied promise of a fairy tale—the promise that things would come out all right, even if they looked dark. The heroine’s irrepressible optimism made her a charismatic carrier of hope and perseverance. Readers were able to believe in the fairy tale because Maud had distilled a lifetime of dreams and hopes and passions and struggles into the novel. The simple but heartfelt message now inspired thousands of readers across boundaries of gender and class. They would reread the novel numerous times and pass it on as a gift to their best friends, children, and grandchildren. Maud marveled at the effect her book was having in the wider world. With Maud’s genius for writing friendship, the novel spawned romantic communities of kindred spirits. With its irrepressible heroine, the forerunner for Pollyanna, the book became a classic in bibliotherapy. Jacqueline Stanley, the author of Reading to Heal, for instance, cites Anne of Green Gables as one of her favorite books growing up.57 “I shall recommend it to all as a book to drive away the blues,” the Page ad quoted Marguerite Linton Glentworth, Chairman of the New York Woman’s Press Club, in November.58 “Thousands of readers have been made happy by an acquaintance with the delightful ANNE OF GREEN GABLES,” The Publishers’ Weekly cover page claimed on December 26.59 In a way, Anne turned Emersonian and Thoreauvian transcendentalism from the head to the heart. Maud wanted be “a messenger of optimism and sunshine.”60
At the same time that Anne and Maud were being fêted, Evelyn Nesbit, the woman whose picture had been an inspiration for Anne’s face, sat alone in her hotel room in New York on her twenty-fourth birthday. She was afraid to go out because of the notoriety that had followed her after her mentally unstable husband shot and killed her former lover, Stanford White. Although Evelyn had valiantly supported her husband with her testimony in court, her husband’s relatives, the Thaw family, had cut off contact with her. At his second trial in 1908 the jury delivered a verdict of insanity and he was incarcerated in the Matteawan State Hospital for the Criminally Insane, where he occupied private quarters. A movie about the Thaw-Nesbit-White triangle had been scheduled to open in
New York, but the President of the New York Society for the Suppression of Vice, Anthony Comstock, rose up and protested the movie, as did the mayor of New York, George McClellan, who ordered the theaters in the city closed. According to one historian, “In the furor, the National Board of Review—the country’s first movie watchdog group—was created.”61 Evelyn recalled in her memoir that on “Christmas Day, 1908, my birthday, dawned, desolate and cheerless.” But there was one bright spot. She was thrilled to receive a most unusual pet as a gift, delivered to her in a basket: a six-foot Florida snake that she named Tara. “It really knew me and would curl up beside me while I read and sewed.”62 The avid reader and student of Theosophy (a belief in the unity of nature, body, and soul) would have been fascinated by the story of Anne and could have used the boost of knowing that she was the inspiration for Anne’s face. Unfortunately, however, like two ships passing in the dark, the paths of Maud and Evelyn never crossed.