Beyond ‘Green Gables’: A new look at Anne’s creator

The white-shingled home with a green-gabled roof is perched timelessly amid the rolling pastures of Prince Edward Island.

For a century, the farmhouse, which inspired the setting of “Anne of Green Gables,” has lured fans eager to retrace the bucolic footsteps of their favorite redheaded literary character. Visitors snap photos of patchwork quilts and rocking chairs. They wander the forest groves that Anne – with an e – who was so fiercely imaginative about the natural world around her, renamed the “Haunted Woods.”

But the Victorian farmstead is not just a capsule suspended in time. It welcomes a diverse fan base whose members see themselves in the foibles of the impetuous orphan who breaks all the rules but finds love and family.

“Anne of Green Gables” has sold more than 50 million copies and been translated into over 30 languages. The headstrong 11-year-old who was sent by mistake to live on a farm is one of the most beloved children’s characters of all time.

“[Author Lucy Maud Montgomery] is looking at the world and seeing people’s foibles and imperfections, yet holding them up affectionately and loving them anyway,” says Laura Robinson, a professor at Acadia University who chairs the L.M. Montgomery Institute management committee. “There are people who find any time they are in a tough place in their life, they really want to reread these because there’s something healing and redemptive about them.”

Ultimately, it’s a story about an outsider finding acceptance – a lesson that, if anything, resonates more today than ever. 

And with the 150th anniversary of Montgomery’s birth on Nov. 30, there are plenty of visitors to these red-sanded shores. Many people see the anniversary as an opportunity to more intentionally shift the conversation beyond just the “pastoral prettiness” of the story. They aim to examine the wider world the character would have inhabited and to consider Montgomery and her work with a 21st-century eye toward inclusion and diversity.

“Don’t get me wrong, we love Anne,” says Linda Lowther, a tourism and education consultant touted as the island’s “Montgomery at 150” expert. She is part of an effort to highlight new tours and tributes that educate visitors about the creator of Anne, not just the character.

Many of those events are exactly the kind one might expect on an island that can sometimes feel as if it jumped out of a storybook: floral scrapbooking, journaling workshops, musicals, concerts created with Montgomery poems, and the chance for children to be taught in a re-created classroom. 

But Montgomery, the writer of hundreds of short stories and 20 novels, was also a woman ahead of her time. She broke barriers and turned Anne into one of Canada’s most cherished, and lucrative, icons.

“She was a fierce environmentalist. I heard someone say she had the business acumen of Taylor Swift,” says Ms. Lowther.

She also had a complex life. Montgomery based the story of Anne in part on her own upbringing, after her mother died and her father left her with her stern grandparents in Cavendish on the north shore of the island. Throughout her life, she struggled with depression, and some of that trauma is found in her writing.

“[The story] is often represented as kind of fluffy and happy happy, but it can be scathing in moments,” says Dr. Robinson.

“More than one single narrative”

Anne has always appealed to a diverse set of readers. The Japanese are counted as some of her most devoted fans; Aretha Franklin famously considered Anne a “kindred spirit.”

But Montgomery today is being examined for blind spots. Her series, for example, ignores the Indigenous inhabitants of Prince Edward Island, who arrived thousands of years before European settlers. That storyline was explored in Netflix’s “Anne with an E,” when Ka’kwet, a Mi’kmaw character, befriends Anne.

Parks Canada, which runs Green Gables Heritage Place, this year released a 10-year management plan to “engage with Indigenous and marginalized communities to tell their stories.” Already, the site, which saw 165,000 visitors last year, includes panel information (some of it in Mi’kmaw language) about Indigenous history at the time “Anne of Green Gables” was published in 1908.

Parks Canada is also looking forward, considering the visitor experience in a more multicultural contemporary Canada. Prince Edward Island’s capital, Charlottetown, is among the fastest growing Canadian cities, thanks to immigration. 

Their management plan, still abstract, has nothing to do with changing the story, says Janette Gallant, with Parks Canada. “It has to do with reflecting the diversity of Canadian society and understanding there are more stories and more voices to be heard ... more than one single narrative.”

That’s the force that drove Judith Graves to create “The ANNEthology: A Collection of Kindred Spirits Inspired by the Canadian Icon.” In a collection of short stories, “Anne” is reimagined as a robot in one, a girl from Jamaica who’s been trafficked in another. “The idea was to take this universal character and see how she can shift in different cultures with different genders and in different time periods,” says Ms. Graves.

The local author has received some pushback from those defensive about “their island treasure,” she says. 

“Just leave her alone,” she heard.

“I feel like I’m Anne”

A visit to Green Gables Heritage Place should assuage anyone worried about an overmodernization of the storyline: The “kindred spirit” that many feel with Anne is enduring.

“I try to explain,” says Harriet Nicholson, an Australian on a 10-day trip of a lifetime. “I am Anne. I feel like I’m Anne.”

It’s more than just their shared red hair, or the “scrapes” that both got into as youngsters. When Ms. Nicholson would be late getting home as a child, her mother always knew to look “up” in the trees instead of “down.” At first, she didn’t see herself in the books. She was “sporty” growing up and thought the series was “too princessy.” Then her mom, whose own mother put it into her hands, tried a few years later, opening to the middle of the book when Anne shatters a chalk slate over the head of Gilbert, a classmate.

Ever since, she’s seen Anne as a trailblazer, reading the series every year. Now in her 20s, she finds 19th-century Anne the perfect “bosom buddy” for the 21st century.