The Mystery of Anne of Green Gables
“Avonlea is a lovely name. It just like music. How far is it to White Sands?”
“It’s five miles; and as you’re evidently bent on talking you might (it well talk to some purpose by telling me what you know about yourself.”
“Oh, what I know about myself isn’t really worth telling,” said Anne eagerly. “If you’ll only let me tell you what I imagine about myself you’ll think it ever an much more interesting.”
“No, I don’t want any of your imaginings. Just you stick to bald facts. Begin at the beginning. Where were you born and how old are you?”
—Anne and Marilla, from an early chapter entitled
“Anne’s History” of Anne of Green Gables1
Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L. M. Montgomery and Her Literary Classic was sparked by a paradox and a mystery. With over fifty million copies of the novel sold, a multi-million-dollar tourist industry and countless adaptations of the novel and its sequels in musicals, movies, cartoons, dolls, and figurines, millions of fans know Anne Shirley intimately, but they know surprisingly little about how she came about. How can a work be so famous and yet its history so little known? We know more about other literary texts whose creation is shrouded in mystery such as Cervantes’ Don Quixote, Mary Shelley’s Frankenstein, or Charlotte Brontë’s Jane Eyre, than we know about Anne of
Green Gables. In her journal, Maud’s quick pen would froth up the tiniest details of her life into dramatic events, but that same nimble pen never revealed a single word about Anne while Maud was writing the novel. As a result, the mystery of Anne has remained unsolved for over a century. Maud did leave her readers with a few sparse clues in her private writing, some planted years and decades after Anne was published. Why was Maud so secretive, never mentioning the novel while she was writing it, later forgetting and confusing crucial details including the year and month in which she began writing the novel? How do truth and fiction blend together in the legend she told about how Anne came about? And what does the story of Anne’s creation tell us about Anne of Green Gables as a piece of literature with an enduring power to move readers?
Maud was thirty years old when she wrote Anne of Green Gables in 1905, and thirty-three when it was published. Already there was some gray in her hair, and the conflict between youth and age was raging inside. She had been working like a Trojan to combat her feeling that she had failed in life. We know that Maud was an addictive diarist who nostalgically dwelled on the past, letting it shape the present. But she was also ruthless in burning and discarding old letters, documents, diaries, and notebooks. The documents we have available today—journals, scrapbooks, photographs, and letters—do not contain the original notebooks that Maud used for her fiction writing. Only the distilled version that she wanted us to see was allowed to survive.2 And yet she also left a few clues behind, as if she wanted to be found out, teasing us with little snippets of revelations.
Her journal was the stage on which Maud performed her artful version of the truth. She had a life-long habit of keeping secrets and masking her feelings and, moreover, after the publication of Anne of Green Gables, Maud, now a celebrity author, was preoccupied with her reputation and legacy. We know that she carefully edited, illustrated, and recopied her journals with the intention of having them published, and so these are calculated literary journals rather than spontaneous impressions of day-to-day events. Isabel Anderson, an Ontario schoolteacher who had a crush on Maud when Maud was in her fifties, wrote the author a romantic, yet illuminating letter: “You are a will-o’-the-wisp, elusive, exclusive, impulsively flitting here and there, leaving a trail of exotic sweetness that
haunts one with a mad desire.” Isabel pointed out that Maud had a way of creating intimacy in her writing, of seducing her reader, and of giving each fan the feeling that answers awaited those who had been disappointed in life. “It is because of something for which you stand, which they long for and have not,” Isabel wrote of Maud’s powerful hold over her fans.3 Isabel was a passionate fan, and for all her frustrated and frustrating love for Maud, she was on to something. Isabel recognized that the strong emotional pull of Maud’s fiction was not unlike the pull of Maud’s personality.
One of the reasons Maud was so persuasive in convincing us of her version of events was that she was, indeed, self-deceived. An emotional and forceful advocate of her own legend, she rarely stopped to question her motives. Like the unreliable narrator in a modernist novel, Maud was able to draw readers into the maze of her splendid isolation, taking us into ‘the palace of art,’ to cite the title of one of her favorite poems by Alfred Lord Tennyson. To unravel the original pictures and sources behind Anne of Green Gables we will travel through the maze of her palace and unlock the rooms she kept closed. For the first time, readers will be able to see into the secretive world she constructed. Maud had an ingenious way of making her readers loyal kindred spirits and of creating a fiercely protective bond. But her fans will be intrigued and surprised by some of the things Maud did not tell them about the making of Anne.
Looking for Anne of Green Gables is the story of a literary mystery about the life of a beloved fictional character who mirrored, according to L. M. Montgomery’s account, her own dreams and fantasies, her memories and emotions. Thus the book is also a biography of the enigmatic Maud at the time of writing and publishing Anne. We shall investigate the years in which Anne was taking shape, focusing on the crucial period from 1903 to 1908.
Telling the life of Anne is like peeling an onion. This book takes readers inside Maud’s guarded life not only by reading between the lines of her unpublished journal entries for the period, but also by looking beyond the conventional sources that Maud wanted us to see. Looking for Anne of Green Gables highlights the sources that are not found among L. M. Montgomery’s papers but that were crucially relevant to the creation of her story: the sources and pieces of writing she discarded or simply forgot. This investigation uncovers the surprising inspiration related to the creation of Anne;
material that Maud carefully omitted, which forms a remarkable story ripe for the telling. This book takes readers inside Maud’s intensely private life to reveal Maud’s sideways manner of telling the truth and the depth of her evasions. For the first time, we will be able to appreciate the stunning complexity of Anne of Green Gables.
What does the journal refuse to tell? What did Maud not want to say? How can we determine how Anne was “brung up”? These were some of the questions that guided my search. By delving into the story of Anne, we are uncovering the story of Maud. By digging behind the silences, the gaps, and the personae of the journals, photographs, scrapbooks, and letters, my goal was to recapture the original pictures and texts—including the ones that Maud had discarded or otherwise eliminated—to piece together the fragments that inspired the making of Anne of Green Gables. In the legend Maud told about the birth of Anne she noted that Anne simply “flashed into my fancy already christened, even to the all important ‘e.’”4 This book reveals a very different story.
The story of Anne has its origins, not merely in the turbulent nature of Prince Edward Island’s north shore and the timeless romance of apple blossoms, but also in the popular cosmopolitan magazines of New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. This book is the untold story of a literary classic and its writer, who quietly quarried her material from the popular images of the era—beauty icons, fashion plates, and advertisements—and from American mass market periodicals. For the first time, Anne fans will hear the story of how the American model Evelyn Nesbit became the model for Anne’s face. While her name has been identified, the story of how she came to figure in Anne of Green Gables has never been told. We know that Maud imitated the formula fiction of juvenile periodicals, religious newspapers, and glamorous women’s magazines, but we are now also able to track how, in a perfect storm of inspiration in the spring of 1905, Maud ultimately transcended these influences to create a twentieth-century literary classic that would conquer the world.