Straw Hat with Red Plaits

Last summer, during a trip to Canada’s maritime provinces, my husband and I went on a literary pilgrimage. After attending a wedding in Nova Scotia we drove northwards across the Confederation Bridge to Canada’s smallest province, Prince Edward Island. From the bridge we drove further north still, up to the Gulf of St Lawrence. We were looking for a settlement called Cavendish, and for a small, green-gabled farmhouse that draws visitors from all over the world.

I am not a particularly gifted navigator, but there was little chance of us getting lost on Prince Edward Island. Cavendish takes its role as a place of pilgrimage seriously, and its most famous attraction, the farmhouse which inspired L. M. Montgomery to write Anne of Green Gables, is impossible to miss. However, as we turned in to the Green Gables site, I was more than a little disappointed by the disjunction between reality and the house of my imagination. Nowhere in my Green Gables were there billboards advertising the Avonlea Village Experience; nor were there signs marking the start of a Lovers Lane Trail. My husband’s response to the overcrowded carpark was brutally succinct. ‘It’s like Fleet service station,’ he sniffed. It wasn’t always thus. When Lucy Maud Montgomery was sent to Cavendish at the age of 7 to live with her strict grandparents, Green Gables was occupied, not by cheerful ticket-sellers sporting ‘Anne’ straw hats with red plaits attached, but by her cousins, David and Margaret Macneill. She was a lonely, imaginative child, who craved people to love and kindness in return. Both were missing from her unhappy childhood, so she lavished affection on the landscape around her instead, and it remained vivid in her mind long after she left Prince Edward Island. ‘Were it not for those Cavendish years’, she later wrote, ‘I do not think Anne of Green Gables would ever have been written.’ Generations of readers therefore have reason to be grateful for the existence of Cavendish. Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, and has remained continuously in print ever since. In the first hundred years of its existence it has inspired plays, musicals, films and a television series, as well as a bewildering range of merchandise – the straw hat/red plait combo is just the tip of the iceberg. Recently, L. M. Montgomery herself has become the subject of serious critical attention. Her diaries have been published, a university research centre devoted to her work has been established, and a critical edition of Anne of Green Gables has been issued by Oxford University Press. All this for the sentimental story of an orphan girl who is sent by mistake to live with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, the middle-aged siblings who, at the novel’s opening, have decided to take in an orphaned boy to help on the farm. Instead they get Anne, a red-headed, impetuous, imaginative child who turns their arid, well-ordered lives upside down and, in the process, wins their love and the friendship of the villagers in nearby Avonlea. There is, however, much more to Anne of Green Gables than this summary suggests. For a start, Anne is no cardboard cut-out heroine. While there is a fairy-tale element to her story (for an asylum-educated orphan she knows a remarkable amount of Scott, Tennyson and Browning), she is firmly rooted in the world Montgomery creates around her. Her triumphs and her failures are domestic, and centre on such momentous incidents as a successful recitation in a village concert, or an outburst of temper which leaves her slate broken and a schoolboy’s head bruised. And although she dreams of a future filled with ‘sunbursts and marble halls’, as she matures Anne remains deeply committed to Green Gables, to Avonlea and to the people there who first brought hope into her bleak existence. This is just as it should be, since it is Avonlea which gives Anne of Green Gables its heart and lifts it above the realm of most stories for girls. From bossy, good-hearted Mrs Rachel Lynde, through spiteful Josie Pye, to Marilla Cuthbert herself, Avonlea is peopled with living, breathing individuals whose stories reveal, in glorious detail, the joys and troubles of village life. Marilla is one of Montgomery’s most memorable creations who, thanks to Anne, discovers within herself a capacity for love which neither she, nor the reader, knew existed. Her developing ability to express that love, and her consequent anxiety about the sinfulness of setting ‘one’s heart so intensely on any human creature’, is one of the most moving things about Anne of Green Gables, although Montgomery never allows Marilla’s emotional conversion to become saccharine. Asked if she is sorry to have kept Anne, Marilla expresses more than the most eloquent declaration of affection in her answer. ‘“I can’t say I’m sorry,” said Marilla, who sometimes wondered how she could have lived before Anne came to Green Gables, “no, not exactly sorry.”’ Montgomery’s evocation of the scenery of her own island childhood is another aspect of Anne of Green Gables which sets it apart from other children’s books of the period. Anne’s world is a precious, beautiful place full of red roads, white cherry blossom and a sun which sets in a riot of purple over the Gulf of St Lawrence; where the dramas of life unfold in romantically christened ‘Lovers Lanes’ and ‘Haunted Woods’. Grounding Montgomery’s intensely coloured descriptions is the geography of Cavendish, which simultaneously locates the novel in a working, rural environment and transforms that environment into a landscape of dreams. The scenery of Prince Edward Island in fact plays a major role in all the ‘Anne’ books, although that role changes over the course of the series. So great was the demand for more novels about her red-headed heroine that Montgomery wrote a series of sequels, in which Anne grows up, teaches school, goes to college, and marries her childhood friend Gilbert Blythe. Anne’s marriage takes her away from Green Gables, to the imaginary settlement of Glen St Mary’s, a coastal village sixty miles from Avonlea. There, the sea enters the landscape of the books and Anne’s imagination with a new degree of intensity. In Anne’s House of Dreams, it is the sea which brings adventure, hope and tragedy into the lives of Montgomery’s characters, and which simultaneously sustains and endangers the sailors and fishermen of the nearby Four Winds Harbour. In the final book about Anne and her family, Rilla of Ingleside, it is the sea which epitomizes the fragility of Anne’s world, as it spirits the young men of Canada across the Atlantic to the trenches of the First World War. Although Rilla of Ingleside is the only ‘Anne’ book to engage directly with the First World War, four of the novels were written under the shadow of the conflict, and, as the war progressed, Montgomery became increasingly aware that she was writing about a world which no longer existed. She acknowledged this in the penultimate story, Rainbow Valley, which concludes with Anne’s son Walter – a poet who will die on Flanders Fields – telling of his vision of a mysterious Piper, piping the young men of Canada across the sea to their deaths. Rilla of Ingleside makes this vision real and is, in many respects, quite unlike the other books in the series. Based largely on Montgomery’s own wartime journals, it tells the story of the Canadian home front, and of the women who work and wait while their lovers, sons and brothers go abroad to die. The ‘Rilla’ of the title is Anne’s youngest daughter and it is through her eyes that we see the world of Anne of Green Gables come to an end. Rilla of Ingleside was published in 1921. When it first appeared some reviewers found its patriotism distasteful, and Montgomery was accused of naïve jingoism. She fiercely rejected the suggestion that her novel glorified the First World War, but she was unapologetic about its glorification of the Canadian men and women who fought that war. The heroines of Rilla of Ingleside are Rilla herself and Anne’s unglamorous housekeeper, Susan Baker, who together kilt up their skirts to get the harvest in, run the village store and, in Rilla’s case, save the life of an orphaned war-baby. Montgomery suggests that it is Rilla and Susan who represent the spirit of Canada, and that it is they who will rebuild their world so that it is fit to receive returning soldiers, men shattered by the horrors of war. As Anne’s surviving sons and daughters come home to be reunited with their childhood sweethearts, they embark on courtships which are infinitely more sombre than Anne’s own romance with Gilbert Blythe. By the end of Rilla of Ingleside, however, it is clear that Anne’s children will succeed in remaking their lives on Prince Edward Island, even if the pre-lapsarian world of their parents has all but disappeared. But not altogether. You can still find Anne’s world in the landscape of Prince Edward Island. After we had exhausted the delights of Green Gables, my husband and I meandered along the island’s red roads to the coast, guided by a deserted lighthouse. There, with the Gulf of St Lawrence stretched out before us, surrounded by the vivid colours of sea and shore, I found the landscape I had imagined as a child. And by the time we drove away from Cavendish, I had even warmed to Green Gables itself. Overcrowded and commercialized it may have been, but all its visitors – from the mothers dragging sullen families around, to the coach parties of Japanese schoolgirls – were there, like me, to rediscover a story read in childhood. We had travelled to an isolated Canadian village from all over the world, drawn by a lonely child’s intensely imaginative engagement with the landscape around her. The success of the Cavendish Green Gables is such a testament to the enduring influence of great writing for children that I almost bought a straw hat with red plaits to take home.

Extract from Slightly Foxed Issue 23 © Daisy Hay 2009