H u n t e r P O S t C A r D S

I thought Anne of Green Gables was for girls. Not that I knew much about her, or the writer who created her. But now I'm a fan of the talkative redheaded optimist, and have

even made a pilgrimage to the green-gabled house where Anne's story began.

Story and photos by Graham Wilson

Additional photos by Margaret Faolua & Ross Todd

My sister Margaret had long been a fan, and when she realised her dream to visit the world Anne inhabited on Canada's Prince Edward Island, I was

more than happy to tag along. I must say I was a little curious about what would be there – after all, wasn't Anne of Green Gables a work of fiction that Lucy Maud Montgomery had published 100 years earlier?

Prince Edward Island (PEI) is the smallest of the Canadian Provinces and is part of Atlantic Canada that also takes in Nova Scotia, New Brunswick and Newfoundland. Drivers can reach the island by ferry or by the 12.9 km Confederation Bridge, the world’s longest bridge crossing ice-covered salt water.

There is no charge to arrive by bridge or ferry, but a toll is charged as you leave the island. We had intended to use the bridge when we reached New Brunswick, but the weather was closing in, and we were nearer a ferry terminal, so saved the bridge crossing for the homeward journey. Besides, Anne travelled by ferry – there was no bridge to the island in her day!

PEI's original inhabitants, the Míkmaq people, had a descriptive name for the island meaning “land cradled on the waves”, and waves were in abundance on the Northumberland

Strait the day we drove onto the ferry at Caribou, Nova Scotia.During the 70-minute voyage, I quizzed Margaret about

Anne of Green Gables, and by the time the ferry docked at Wood Islands, I had a better idea of who this Anne character was, and I could even sprout a couple of Anne's better-known lines. "My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes." That one springs to mind, and "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.”

In less than an hour we'd driven to Charlottetown, PEI's capital city. There was a chill in the air as some of winter's first snow started to fall, but the trail began to warm as we found our first evidences of Anne at the Anne of Green Gables Store. There we found everything from handsomely bound souvenir editions of the books, to a combination hat and wig – complete with ribbons and red plaits!

It is another 32 kilometres to Cavendish and the house where Lucy Maud Montgomery placed her main character, Anne Shirley, the little orphan girl mistakenly sent to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert who had asked for a boy to help

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Matthew on the farm.The beauty of the place with its surrounding orchards and

woods may have been lost on the practical Cuthberts, but Anne had never dreamed of anything lovelier, and when told she'd have to be sent back to the orphanage because there had been some mistake, Anne laments, "This is the most tragical thing that has ever happened to me!"

There's no doubt that Anne's enduring popularity owes its greatest debt to her verbosity. She's sometimes comical, at other times heart wrenching, and readers just love being around this young lady who speaks her mind.

A fictional character she may be, but there's no doubt that the hopes and dreams of a real person are expressed through Anne's story.

Anyone who enjoys Anne's colourful turn of phrase will find the same expressive qualities in the quotations from Lucy Maud Montgomery - in English and French - displayed on plaques throughout the park.

Reading the plaques, looking into each room of the house, exploring the barn, and walking through the haunted wood, you come to realise just how much of herself the author has put into her protagonist.

Maud Montgomery had come to live in Cavendish with her maternal grandparents at the age of 21 months after her mother died of an illness.

Growing up she was an avid reader and began writing as a teenager, having a poem published when she was 15. Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908 when Maud was 33.

Green Gables is now a national historic site and a museum, but when Montgomery was growing up, the house was the home of her grandfather's cousins, David Jr. and Margaret MacNeill.

The name Green Gables refers to the deep green triangular structures enclosing the ends of the pitched roof and some gable-shaped canopies over the doors and windows of the farmhouse.

To get to the green-gabled house from her grandparents place, Maud would have to walk through a wood, which became the haunted wood of her first novel. It took on its haunted quality many years before Maud wrote about it; she and two boys about her age who came to board at her grandfather's place to attend school would play in the wood imagining it to be haunted.

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In 1917 Montgomery was asked by the editor of Everywoman's World to write about her career. She wrote that the incidents and environment of her childhood had a marked influence on the development of her literary gift and she doubted that Anne of Green Gables would ever have been written were it not for her years at Cavendish.

No place seemed ordinary to Montgomery: she would bring all of her experience to her imaginative process. As a 9 year old, she had been reading Thompson's Seasons when making her first attempt at poetry:

Montgomery recalled that peaches and pears were not abundant in Prince Edward Island at any season, and that though there was some partridge shooting, she was sure nobody ever heard a "sportsman's horn" in that Province. She wrote: "But in those glorious days my imagination refused to be hampered by facts. Thomson had sportsman's horns and

so forth; therefore I must have them too."The rooms of the house have been painstakingly decorated

to reflect the way they are described in Montgomery's novels.In these rooms, you don't have to stretch your imagination

very far to imagine Anne saying, "Marilla, isn't it nice to think that tomorrow is a new day with no mistakes in it yet?" or "What a splendid day . . . I pity people who aren't born yet for missing it. They may have good days, of course, but they can never have this one. or "Some people go through life trying to find out what the world holds for them only to find out too late that it's what they bring to the world that really counts."

Montgomery loved Prince Edward Island for its proximity to the sea and has Anne visit Cavendish beach to write. At one time Anne drives along the seashore with her friends after a performance at the White Sands Hotel where many bejewelled ladies had been in attendance. Unlike her envious friends, Anne seems well contented: "Look at that sea, girls - all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds."

Montgomery's ability to imagine the best of every situation, however dark, is what gives Anne the optimism readers find so compelling. Readers down the years have caught that same optimism and have often been able to

"Now autumn comes, laden with peach and pear;The sportsman's horn is heard throughout the land,

And the poor partridge, fluttering, falls dead."

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apply it to their own situations.Lucy Maud Montgomery herself said she never dreamed

that Anne of Green Gables would appeal to such a broad audience. "I thought girls in their teens might like to read it, that was the only audience I hoped to reach. But men and women who are grandparents have written to tell me how they loved Anne, and boys at college have done the same. The very day on which these words are written has come a letter to me from an English lad of nineteen, totally unknown to me, who writes that he is leaving for 'the front' and wants to tell me 'before he goes' how much my books and especially Anne have meant to him. It is in such letters that a writer finds sweet reward for all sacrifice and labor."

Montgomery died in Toronto in 1942, but she is buried in Cavendish Cemetery near those places she loved so much in her earlier life.

As we drove off the Island, I couldn't help admiring the people who have kept this link with the past alive. In addition to Parks Canada and the curators of the Green Gables historic site, there is a lively academic community contributing to our understanding of a bygone era from which important lessons can be learned.

An unexpected lesson can be drawn from Montgomery's personal life. It is ironic that she made Anne so forthright

at a time when those same qualities could have helped Montgomery deal with her own demons, particularly her own depression.

But in a more judgemental era, some things were kept to oneself.

100 years after Anne of Green Gables was published, The Boston Globe and Mail quotes Montgomery's granddaughter:

"Although she was a very successful author, her life was overshadowed by her depression, coping with her husband's mental illness and the restrictions of her life as a clergyman's wife and mother in an era when women's roles were highly defined . . . My heart aches for them, as well, because I know they were part of a generation that simply did not acknowledge personal dysfunction, let alone seek help." (Kate

Macdonald Butler, The Boston Globe and Mail, 19 September 2008.)

Kate Macdonald Butler also speaks of the great admiration she has for her grandmother: "...For her contribution to Canadian literature and culture, her strength of character, and the love, pride and sense of responsibility she gave to my family."

That love, pride and sense of responsibility is Lucy Maud Montgomery's legacy; an enriching experience for anyone who immerses themselves in the world of Anne of Green Gables.

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