An ever-'Green' site: Scholars, fans flock to Canadian author's home

July 18, 2000
Web posted at: 3:58 p.m. EDT (1958 GMT)

In this story: All Montgomery sites fair game 'She helped me become a Canadian' Orphan story has meaning for many RELATED STORIES, SITES

CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island, Canada (Reuters) - Prince Edward Island, Canada's tiny island province in the Gulf of St. Lawrence, has for nearly 90 years drawn devoted fans from around the world to scenic locales related to Lucy Maud Montgomery and her famous character: the verbose, red-haired orphan Anne of Green Gables.

Montgomery wrote 20 novels that have been translated into 20 languages, but it is the eight Anne of Green Gables books that elicit the type of devotion from scholars and fans reserved for only a handful of authors such as Jane Austen and James Joyce.

More than 1,250,000 tourists a year flock to the island of just 135,000 residents known for its red earth, potatoes and lobster fisheries. More than 43 percent of the visitors tour the Green Gables sites and revel in Anne memorabilia such as wigs with her signature red braids and porcelain dolls bearing her image.

Most cannot wait to see Montgomery's grave in Cavendish and the farm house on which Green Gables is based, complete with Lover's Lane -- a pathway outlined in the Anne novels.

And each year about 50 couples from Japan, where the Anne books are taught in school and are wildly popular, travel to the Anne of Green Gables Museum at Parks Corner to get married in the exact spot where Montgomery wed when she was 37.

The house in New London that she left when her mother died -- Montgomery was only 2 at the time -- also draws crowds of tourists eager to see the author's wedding dress and personal letters. And the site of the Macneill homestead where she grew up with her maternal grandparents draws tourists who want to walk the same route she took to her job at the post office -- even though the house has since been torn down.

In fact, any site mentioned in one of her journals, such as her paternal grandfather's home, which is still owned by the Montgomerys, is automatically turned into a museum littered with quotations from her work.

Montgomery's Anne is such a drawing card for tourists that even provincial license plates once bore her image.

All this Montgomery-mania raises a question: How did a turn-of-the-century author writing on a secluded island on the east coast of Canada generate so much worldwide interest?

Canada's Governor-General Adrienne Clarkson, a longtime fan, said Montgomery helped her, as a young immigrant from Hong Kong, to understand what it meant to be Canadian.

"She helped me to become a Canadian. I believe she was the writer that made me most understand what Canada was about, and I will always be grateful to those books for it," Clarkson told an audience at an L.M. Montgomery conference this month in Charlottetown, the provincial capital.

Anna Ippolita, a 27-year-old New York sociologist who grew up behind the Iron Curtain, said Anne's love of Green Gables reminded Polish readers like her of their feelings for their own country, and allowed them to reminisce about the way things were before the two world wars.

"We felt nostalgia for a time that really wasn't accessible to us anymore. We thought of these times as magical and peaceful. So even though we lived in such different conditions (compared with Anne), we related to her on a very personal level," she explained.

Ippolita read the Anne of Green Gables series even before it was required reading at school because her mother was a big fan. "Since then, it was my childhood dream to come to Prince Edward Island," she said.

Others surmise that it was Anne's origins as an orphan that have endeared her to many parentless readers. Mary McDonald Rissanen, a Prince Edward Island native who is now a language instructor at the University of Tampere in Finland, wonders if the popularity of the Anne novels in Finland is connected with the many children evacuated during the Second World War.

That sentiment is echoed by other scholars.

"A story of an orphan child -- and all children dream they are orphans at one time or another -- speaks to all children. It's a story of alienation and the need for acceptance and finding ways to get it," said Richard Sherwin, a professor of English Literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.

"I think what Montgomery captured, unlike any other writer that I know, is the interactivity between Anne, the family and the community. ... She is an orphan that wants to join, that desperately wants to be part of something," Sherwin added.

He visited Prince Edward Island to see the countryside for himself, including the reddish earth described so vividly in Montgomery's novels. He said he knows of many Anne fans in Israel and, as a university professor, he brushed off claims that Montgomery was not a serious literary figure.

"Sure she's not Shakespeare, but then most writers aren't Shakespeare either. And Shakespeare isn't always very good Shakespeare, so I don't buy that stuff," he said.

Others, such as 13-year-old Katharine Redfern from Toronto, find tales of "the way things were" appealing as well as informative. "I like old classic books myself and tales of Anne's adventures," said Redfern, who was first introduced to Anne at the age of 5 when her mother read her the stories.

She has steadily read her way through all the author's novels and is now embarking on Montgomery's journals. While she described visiting the Montgomery sites as "weird," she added that she would gladly return to the island to visit them again.

Returning Montgomery fans, such as Ippolita, concur. "It's great to be around people who love her work," she said.

Copyright 2000 Reuters. All rights reserved. This material may not be published, broadcast, rewritten, or redistributed.

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