| Last updated at 12:31 AM on 14/06/08 |
Between the lines 
A new book uncovers the surprising truths behind the creation of the classic character Anne of Green Gables
MARY MACKAY
The Guardian
When it comes to looking for the origins of Anne of Green Gables, Ontario author Irene Gammel has been searching in all the right places.
Despite Lucy Maud Montgomery’s declaration that her feisty young female character was born in a flash, Gammel has discovered that Anne Shirley was actually the summation of a whole lot of parts, including some of Montgomery’s own life experiences and a surprising number of influences, both locally and beyond the borders of Prince Edward Island.
These fascinating findings have come to light in “Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic.” This book, published by Key Porter, is the first to explore the real story behind the imaginary Anne.
“I was fascinated by the story simply because ‘Anne of Green Gables’ is such an important book and is a Canadian icon. The novel has become not just a Canadian but an international classic,” says Gammel, who is the Canada research chair in modern literature and culture at Ryerson University in Toronto.
“At the same time that it has received this international fame, we haven’t really given it that history that it deserves.”
It was no easy task tracking the historical footprints that led to Anne, due to Montgomery’s infamously secretive nature, especially when it came to facts about her first novel.
“I was intrigued that Lucy Maud Montgomery herself didn’t tell us much about how this text came about and the scholars have not really given us very much either,” says Gammel, who has written and edited eight books and several scholarly books of essays, including “Making Avonlea” and “The Intimate Life of L.M. Montgomery.”
“So for me, this was a kind of challenge to take on this project. I love being a kind of a literary detective and finding out what is behind a text and especially, in this case, what is behind the silence of the text.
In her sleuthing work to determine the substance behind this century-old character, Gammel soon discovered that Anne actually evolved through a complex process that included a large cast of characters.
“Lucy Maud Montgomery always said . . . that Anne of Green Gables was the offspring of an inspired moment that happened in early 1905, and no doubt there was such a flash.
“But what I show in the book was there was a fairly long evolution, that Anne of Green Gables took a very long time to come about actually and that it consisted of an accumulation of a great deal of information that she had accumulated over several decades.”
One surprising character influence was Evelyn Nesbit, a popular New York model and glamour gal of the early 1900s. The clue to her connection to Anne came in the form of an old Metropolitan Magazine clipping of a photograph taken in 1903 by a well-known photographer Rudolf Eickemeyer.
It was tucked in with a Montgomery journal entry dated Nov. 29, 1934, in which Montgomery noted that image, in which Nesbit looked like a ethereal wood nymph, provided the face for the original Anne.
“She basically had clipped out this image from a magazine, put it up in her room and there it was, an inspiration for Anne,” Gammel says.
“I recall when I first saw this picture I was just blown away. This picture of this glamour girl looked so different than what I had imagined Anne to look like. We imagine Anne in this cheap little whimsy dress, this faded sailor hat and these long red flaming braids down her back and here is this glamour girl.”
The Metropolitan Magazine was just one of the many glossy cosmopolitan magazines of the day that had a powerful influence on the evolution of Anne.
Two other surprising finds from the pre-Anne era were magazine stories that featured two individual orphans, Charity Ann and Lucy Ann, the latter of which was red-haired and freckled.
Gammel refers to these as “the formula Anne stories.”
“They’ve never been disclosed. We’ve never been aware of these before and my heart was thumping as I stumbled over one,” she adds.
“I remember finding Lucy Ann. It’s basically a blueprint for Anne of Green Gables. Montgomery used those formula stories to kind of build Anne and somehow the novel took off on her . . . . So by using these kind of formula stories, she distilled them but also injected herself into the novel and made it essentially the classic that it is.”
In studying Montgomery’s journals and letters, Gammel also found many parallels to the author’s life and Anne’s, with one stark exception. Anne’s situations always seemed to turn out for the best.
“I would see Lucy Maud Montgomery very much writing a wish fulfilment novel. In other words, almost like a bit of a personal fairy tale . . . . What Lucy Maud Montgomery couldn’t have in real life she would make up in fiction.”
Gammel’s book uncovers for the first time the multi-layer quality of Anne.
“We understand that it took a very long time for Anne to come about, we understand about her complexity and we understand that there is not just a one-dimensional Anne. But there are many different Annes that the character herself refers to in the novel, ‘There’s such a lot of different Annes in me.’ ”
As for the author, the book gives a frank and uncensored portrait of a woman who was literally born before her time.
“At the time, the large publishing markets were in the U.S. and Lucy Maud Montgomery was writing from little rural Cavendish, and I think we understand the kind of chutzpah that she had as a young girl at age nine to realize that she wanted to be a writer, who as a child dreamt of achieving the fame of the Brontës.
“That’s pretty amazing and then to go out and actually do that.”
Anne influences on display in outdoor exhibition
By Mary MacKay
The Guardian
A new outdoor exhibit at the Green Gables Heritage Site in Cavendish will help Anne Shirley fans put more than one face to the complex evolution of this century-old character.
Anne of Green Gables: A Literary Icon at 100 includes a short video documentary produced by Ryerson University and nine visual panels detailing the portraits, photographs, magazine advertisements, cover art and posters that provided the inspiration for Anne.
The exhibit coincides with the release of Irene Gammel’s book, Looking for Anne, which uncovers the secret origins of Anne.
“With the book, I found so many visual culture products, so many magazines covers, images, posters and so on that I decided to do an exhibition.
“And it is a cross-Canada exhibition,” says Gammel, who curated the travelling Anne exhibit.
The nine panels, displayed in both French and English, cover themes, including The Face, The Formulas, The Fashion, The Home Place, Friends and Foes, Family and The Future: 1908.
They jointly tell the tale of Anne’s conception and the influences and circumstances that brought her forth.
“There are definitely things that I hadn’t heard before, but nothing really surprises me about L.M. Montgomery’s inspirations. They came from all over. She’s such a creative and descriptive writer that she had to take things from everywhere,” says Chantelle MacDonald, visitor services supervisor for this Parks Canada site.
Rachel Williams and her parents, Kathy and Jeffrey Williams of Virginia, travelled a long way to visit Prince Edward Island and the Green Gables site.
Although they haven’t yet read the novel, the 1980s movies starring Megan Follows were enough to inspire them to make the cross-border journey.
The outdoor exhibit featuring the story of Anne’s evolution was a bonus.
Kathy and Rachel were both surprised that the glamour girl image of Evelyn Nesbit was Montgomery’s inspiration for Anne.
“I thought she was more of a waif-looking character, a younger girl to base the character upon, something not so sophisticated,” Rachel says.
“I think we’ve learned today from what we’ve seen here at the museum is that there was a lot of parallels to events that happened in her real life that she used as part of her book,” Jeffery adds.
Another Anne exhibit is also at the Confederation Centre of the Arts.
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