Outspoken to Unspoken: Searching for Anne’s Voice after She Marries

Like many Canadian girls, I grew up on Anne of Green Gables. My sister and I watched the movies so often we’d recite scenes in our bedroom at night. The “fishing for lake trout” episode was our go-to favorite. When an elementary school friend visited Green Gables on Prince Edward Island, she brought me a porcelain figurine of Anne I still have on my shelf. A few years ago, I made my own pilgrimage to the Island that inspired L.M. Montgomery’s beloved series.

Photo from my visit to Green Gables

Despite this history, I’d never actually read the books, much to my husband’s bewilderment. “How in the world can you call yourself a fan?” he wanted to know. “Isn’t reading the books the whole point?” The question bothered me enough that I read all six this summer.

Read the rest of my article over at The Curator.

Fixing the Anne Gap

Like many Canadian girls, Anne Shirley was a freckled-face redhead embedded in my imagination whose fanciful expressions would often find their way out of my mouth as I can be a kindred spirit in the melodrama department: “I’m in the depths of despair!” “It’s been a Jonah day!” My sister and I, who shared a bedroom for the first eighteen years of our lives, would often rehearse the famous “fishing for lake trout” scene before bedtime where Gilbert Blythe rescues Anne from a leaking boat in which she plays the dead Lady of Shalott in Tennyson’s poem.

Actor playing Anne at Green Gables

Given this background, you’d probably think that I’ve read all eight books in the series, but the truth is—I’ve read none! I’ve seen all the movies, but I have never picked up the books, which is a hard confession to make considering I’m Canadian and an English major who calls herself an Anne fan.

Two friends with whom I recently travelled to the Maritimes thought this was unacceptable (as I was beginning to feel too), and so a few days ago, I fixed this worrisome gap in my literary life. I read the first book of the series, Anne of Green Gables, and what better place to do it than in PEI, the birthplace of L.M. Montgomery’s classic?

Visiting the Green Gables homestead was the fulfillment of a childhood dream for me and my friends. For those of you like me who had only known the house by the movie, you may be a little surprised to learn that the house used in the movie was filmed in Ontario. Disappointing, right? However, the house in Cavendish is the home that inspired L.M. Montgomery. Her grandfather’s cousins lived there. Despite not being like the movies, the house itself is beautiful and old and creaky and everything a farmhouse should be. For a city girl like me, I even felt a twinge of longing to have one season of life in such a setting. The two-storey house is decorated with period pieces to replicate what would be in Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert’s early twentieth-century home: chamber pots, spinning wheels, cast iron stoves.

Anne’s bedroom complete with carpet bag and broken slate

The grounds are equally lovely. You can take a walk in the surrounding woodlands dubbed Lover’s Lane and the Haunted Wood by Anne. The golf courses encircling Lover’s Lane interfered with the charm of the place, but Cavendish itself is kind of like that. You can visit beautiful Cavendish Beach with its white sand and rugged red cliffs (for $7.50 since it’s part of PEI National Park), but in town are monstrous theme parks and water parks that scream kitschy and would probably have L.M. Montgomery rolling over in her grave.

Lover’s Lane

Golf course

Speaking of graves, here is the Cavendish cemetery where she is buried with her husband, the Reverend Ewin MacDonald. The Haunted Wood trail from Green Gables leads to the cemetery as well as to Lucy’s Cavendish home, where she lived most of her life with her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Macneill as her mother died when Lucy was just 21 months old.

Cavendish Cemetery where L.M. Montgomery is buried

This Cavendish home is where Lucy wrote Anne of Green Gables, and although the farmhouse and buildings are no longer standing, just being in the spot that inspired her was enough to inspire me in my writing. It felt like hallowed ground walking around the homestead, reading quotes from the author’s journals and taking in the overwhelmingly green and unadulterated view of wide open fields.

the importance of place…

wide open spaces

A teenage girl who’s a descendant of the Macneill’s gave a five-minute history of the site and Lucy’s relation to it at the Bookstore, which was really interesting. All of Lucy’s novels are set in PEI except The Blue Castle, which is one of my favourites (set in Ontario). Also, Lucy was about to give up on having Anne of Green Gables published when it was rejected for the 5th time because she thought another rejection would “finish her”, but she decided to open up the manuscript one last time and rework it, and it was on her 6th attempt that it was finally accepted. I love stories of perseverance like that.If you buy a book at the Bookstore, you can even get it stamped with a seal that says “Site of Lucy Maud Montgomer’s Cavendish Home.” After devouring the novel in a few days (which I was pleased to discover parallels the movie very closely), I am now wanting to read the other seven. I am not wanting to read Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson though, the novel that’s meant to be a prequel to Anne of Green Gables, because 1) I’m personally not interested in how Anne got to Green Gables—Lucy didn’t want to begin the story there, so I don’t want to either; 2) I’m a bit leery when people mess with classics that are absolutely fine on their own; and 3) from the excerpt I read of it at the back of my Penguin edition, it was painfully mundane and lacked the creativity and wit that characterizes the original. And I think therein lies the problem of appropriating an author’s story, character, and style while also trying to come up with your own version. Pretty near impossible. I must say reading the books makes me want to revisit the movies though, now that I’ve walked in Anne’s shoes for a small sliver of time.

Reading Anne on Cavendish Beach

Have you visited Anne of Green Gables? Read the books or opted for the movies? What’s your favourite line or scene to rehearse?

The Yellow Room

Last week I wrote about spaces that famous authors have lived and wrote in. I said I would invite you into a former writing space of mine, so here it is:

I knew happiness whenever I entered my Anne of Green Gables loft with yellow paint that complemented the Jack Vettriano hanging above my bed. The angled skylight amplified the sound of West Coast rain drumming me to sleep many a night; the south-facing window offered a cropped view of paragliders sailing effortlessly through the skies above Victoria’s Dallas Road. They say different spaces make you feel different ways, and I felt home when I turned the knob of that bedroom door I was almost too tall to walk through. I remember the morning sun streaming through the blinds, making patterned rainbows on my wall that could be the subject of an Impressionist painting; the smell of the ocean when I opened the window and let the salty Pacific air waft through my fairytale space in all its glory. I even had a little writer’s desk that looked towards the ocean that I couldn’t see as much as I could sense. I couldn’t have asked for a better space. I think I could almost endure windowless, dreary basement suites for the rest of my life because I had one year in that yellow room—a room of my own, thank you Virginia Woolf. It made me want to write in it and about it, although I wish I had written less fact and more fiction. I got through grad school pouring copious cups of tea for myself while poring over books, articles, and notes that ate up all my energy for creative leftovers, every last drop, and what little I saved I brought to the ocean to contemplate, rejuvenate, and forget.

Okay, so I tend to be a bit melodramatic when I write for myself (this was an excerpt from my journal), but from looking at the room, does it not live up to the image I painted of it? I think so. Oh how I miss that yellow room, that space that apparently I grew so exhausted in writing academically that I gave up on writing creatively, although what was I thinking? When will I have such an inspiring place again, or so much mental stimulation?

What’s your writing space? Do you have “a yellow room?”