Anne Shirley: my continuing obsession

Since I first read Anne of Green Gables I have wanted to visit Prince Edward Island, home of both L M Montgomery and her much-loved characters. Last summer, I wrote here about achieving that ambition. I said then that I wanted to re-read all the books in the series - and now I have! There are 8 books directly about Anne and her family, plus two Chronicles which are essentially short stories about other people in which Anne occasionally appears. In order, they are:

Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of Windy Willows (sometimes called Windy Poplars)
Anne's House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside 

Some I borrowed from the library, most were available as free ebooks and a few I had to pay a small amount to download. So what did I think? I was a little disappointed. I love Anne of Green Gables. It's a strong story, the three main characters are believable and lovable and the relationships between them beautifully drawn. If you're reading this, you probably know the story already, so I won't go over it here, but I will say the other books can't match it. Anne grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe, her sort-of-childhood-sweetheart, and has a large family. It's all a bit ordinary. After Anne's House of Dreams, the books are really about her children anyway, and Anne retreats into the background as an idealised mother figure.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy the books - I did, but there was an element of perseverance to reading them, each one striking me as dull to start with so that I had to struggle to get into them. I could always have told you the plot of Green Gables, but the sequels had left very little impression. Some examples: I had totally forgotten how pious the language was - perhaps, as a daughter of the manse myself, this hadn't struck me quite so forcibly as a child as it does now. However, as the manse I grew up in was Methodist, I'm amazed I didn't remember the strong anti-Methodist prejudice of Miss Cornelia who appears in the later books. I was fairly sure during Anne's first pregnancy that it ended badly, and the sadness of little Joyce's death confirmed this. In the same book, House of Dreams, there was a sub-plot which I vaguely remembered about a young woman whose husband had come home from sea brain-damaged, but I wasn't at all prepared for the dramatic denouement. The things I did remember vividly were often small ones such as the phrase "crossing the bar" for the death of an old sea-captain and Anne's preference for the word "dusk" rather than "twilight"', which I didn't agree with at the time but do now.

I though the best sequel was the last one. In Rilla of Ingleside, which concentrates on Anne's youngest daughter, we again have a single protagonist with real personality. Rilla is also more dramatic because it's set against the background of World War 1 with unbearable tension as all the young men volunteer to fight for the mother-country. I just knew they couldn't all come back, but didn't know which one/s would be lost. Another strong point of the book is that Susan - housekeeper for most of Anne's marriage - comes into her own. Always a faintly comic figure, she adds to this both fierce patriotism and an unsuspected talent as a military tactician. If only the generals could have listened to her!

I'm glad I undertook this project, but feel I've exhausted the obsession for the meantime and Anne can go back on her shelf until I need her again. However, it has started me thinking about other places I have visited because of a character in a book. My first trip to the US included a visit to Provincetown, original home of Dicey Tillerman, another spirited heroine from a series by Cynthia Voigt. I have the first book (Homecoming) on my shelves and might just start there!

Visiting Green Gables: Anne and Maud

Green Gables, Cavendish, PEI, Canada

I've just come back from three weeks in Canada, and one of the highlights was a visit to Prince Edward Island, home of L M Montgomery (Lucy Maud, known as Maud) and the place in which she set her books, including Anne of Green Gables.

I've always loved Anne, and if you want to read about what I learned from visiting Green Gables and see more pictures, please check out the entry in my travel blog. Read the comments too - two things emerge. One is that one of my friends reblogged it, and she later emailed to say that the link had appeared in the "LMM / Anne News from the World" section of the L M Montgomery Institute (it's not there now, but this is a site worth looking at for Anne fans). We were both thrilled!

The other comments relate to Maud's own life and how hard it was. I learned at Green Gables that her husband had suffered from depression (or religious melancholia as it was described at the time), but not that she did too, and so badly that there is some evidence that she killed herself - see this Guardian article. I suppose this is not the sort of thing that a museum aimed at families would want to dwell on, and I dare say the main impression left on me, that she was someone who loved the land of her birth and was driven to write about it, is still true. It made me think about the dangers of confusing author and character, of which I was guilty - when I wrote my travel post, I had to go through it carefully and remove all the places where I had referred to Maud as "Anne". Anne was happy and optimistic, but Maud's life was much harder. With how many other books have I assumed, wrongly, something about the authors because of what they wrote about?

It has certainly inspired me to re-read the Anne books, but also to read more about Maud. I bought a slim volume of memoirs while we were away, and I will be raiding both my local library and the University of Strathclyde's collections very soon.