A moment for f-Annes and misfits everywhere
Revisiting that classic children’s novel, Anne of Green Gables, in the 150th year of the birth of its author, Lucy Maud Montgomery
I don’t remember how old I was when I first met Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables. Most likely I was a pre-teen (well before the term was invented), growing up in a then quiet neighbourhood of an Indian city about 12,338 km from the author’s beloved Prince Edward Island (PEI), Canada. I remember reading the Anne novels while lounging under a mango tree in our yard, imagining how it might be to hold (or behold) apple blossoms and to have a brook running through one’s garden. Reading of Marilla’s plum preserves that thrilled Davy’s palate (in Anne of Avonlea) I wondered if my Paati’s adai manga (salted and dried mango, pickled generously with chilli powder and gingelly oil) could be a savoury, cross-cultural counterpart. I wept with Rilla, Anne’s youngest, over her favourite brother Walter’s last letter from the war front (in Rilla at Ingleside). In my mind, I sat with Rilla in Rainbow Valley – once the happy site of much childhood frolic, though in reality I sat reading under an expansive tropical tree, soaking in a stream of music created by an infuriatingly invisible cuckoo. Many worlds coexisted in me as I relished, even devoured, the writings of a mysterious LM Montgomery who I took completely for granted as a child reader.
As an adult reader, however, I have learnt that stories cannot be separated from their back stories – and that writing can never be a given. Anne of Green Gables is a case in point. Not only did the first manuscript of the novel spend more than a year inside a hat box after facing rejection by five publishers, the published novel (despite selling over 19,000 copies within five months after publication in June 1908) was deemed “sentimental” and condescended to as “children’s writing” by male gatekeepers of literature with an ‘L’ for decades after.
Cut to now – the 150th year after the birth of Lucy Maud Montgomery on a remote island in 1874. A commemorative coin has been issued by the Royal Canadian Mint featuring Lucy Maud Montgomery (complete with her signature that often included a cat figurine) and her most famous character – little girl Anne, both gazing upon the “ruby, emerald and sapphire” landscape of PEI. This begs the question: How often does a book character get on the currency of a country? You can check the internet, gentle reader – possibly never. This is a moment for f-Annes (oh, that’s fans of Anne – wouldn’t Ruby Gillis and Diana just love that?!) and misfits everywhere.
Speaking of misfits, Slate called Anne “a patron saint of female outsiders” while Mark Twain personally fan-mailed Maud deeming Anne “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.” Translated during the Second World War into Japanese by Hanako Muraoka, Anne became a Japanese icon as war orphans related to her and female readers loved how she was anything but passive (refer incidents: breaking slate over Gilbert’s head because he teased her and flashing pure rage at Mrs Lynde for calling her homely). Red-haired misfit or not (the question pops up because adult Anne has auburn hair, is forever slim and symmetrical despite seven pregnancies and does not get to show us how she grew her beautiful weirdness, though it is hinted at from public perception of her and her family) it is clear that Maud’s Anne has found “kindred spirits” across the world.
The book series has remained in print for 116 years, been translated into 36 languages and created what Margaret Atwood called an “Annery” – literary, stage and screen adaptations galore besides a gamut of Anne of Green Gables tours and products.While it has been widely known that Anne-struck Japanese couples fly into PEI to marry at the Green Gables Heritage site, the fact that the novel was banned in Poland during Soviet occupation “for inspiring hope and resistance to authority,” is not so well known. The ban led to a thriving black market through which Polish soldiers accessed the book, memorised passages and passed around precious pages from a storybook about an orphan girl who “nobody ever did want” but accidentally got adopted by a brother and sister, actually looking to get a boy to help on the farm. I reconnected with reading Anne after watching CBC-Netflix’s ‘Anne with an E’ many times over.
Many cheers to Moira Walley-Beckett for not sanitising the problematic history of the land in the show, and for taking forward the original plot-points with many a contemporary twist. Reading Anne after watching this demanded a new rhythm of interacting with Maud’s writings and that is when the back stories began to draw me in. There is, literally, an endless supply of information available about this author thanks to the work of Montgomery scholars like Elizabeth Waterston, Mary Rubio, and Elizabeth Epperly. Maud kept vividly personal journals for over 50 years of her life, filling them also with photographs she took. These were complied and released about four decades after her death, allowing readers to see Maud beyond the hilarious, irrepressible characters (human, feline and canine) that she created.The abundance and variety of materials on Maud afford a reading between the lines drawn around women who answer the call to build an intimate relationship with words, while holding the reins of relationships taken on by choice, patriarchal conditioning or societal compulsion. Maud records – for instance, being ridiculed by family for her “scribbling.” She also notes that her husband Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian Minister whose parish she dutifully served, never acknowledged her standingas a writer and made “deprecating remarks” when anyone mentioned it. She would later hold secret his bouts of mental illness (he suffered severely from ‘religious melancholia’ – an unshakable belief that he and his family were predestined to go to hell) so he could keep his parish, while tending to him. This would place an inordinate strain on her psyche, already vulnerable from grief and losses since early in life.Losing her mother before she turned two; losing her father when he left her to the care of conservative grandparents; losing the love of her life to typhoid in her youth (though she’d decided she could never marry him); feeling the loss of a part of her “wild, untamed spirit” the day she married Ewan; losing Hugh, her second son, at birth; losing her dearest cousin and bosom friend Frederica Campbell to the Spanish Flu; losing many young men from families of the parish during the Great War (as the First World War that troubled her deeply was known) – the list of losses in Maud’s life cast more than a shadow on her spirit though her writing was anything but dark.
Maud learnt early to turn to Nature and used her imagination, even creating fantasy friends (like KatieMaurice and Lucy Gray) to overcome loneliness. Reading about her connection with trees, the sea, rocks, shells, shipwrecked captains, flowers and wooded pathways around her beloved island bring joy,as also her fishing expeditions with Well and Dave, her real childhood friends, or her earliest experiments with writing poetry. Yet, many parts of Maud’s life stories left me as sad as reading her novels had left me uplifted. Lucy Maud Montgomery published 20 novels, 530 short stories, 500 poems and 30 essays in her lifetime. When the average annual income for women was $300, Maud earned more than $7000 in royalties for Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, begun in the kitchen of her grandparents’ home, in June 1905. When her publisher went rogue on her by releasing rehashed drafts of her work and withholding payments, she engaged in an eight-year legal battle against him and won. She wrote through all this while playing her role as a minister’s wife, battling mental illness (that gripped her too), grief and humdrum daily emptiness. Though Maud records churning out Anne books under pressure from her publisher and readers, she loved the very “real Anne, with her eager, starry eyes and her long braids of red hair,” always at her elbow. Around 1919, when the Great War had ended and the seriousness of Ewan’s mental illness established, she notes in her journal that she is “done, done, done” with Anne. And yet, just before she crumbled under pressure and died in 1942, supposedly by suicide, she sent one last Anne manuscript to her publisher that was released in 2009 as The Blythes are Quoted. The world has received Anne – the chatterbox child with a wide open heart – with wide open arms. And is evidently not done: neither with Anne nor with Maud.
Charumathi Supraja is a writer, poet and journalist based in Bangalore.