The wandering trails, patchwork fields, seemingly endless coastline and sprawling forests of Prince Edward Island have long captured the imaginations of fans of L.M. Montgomery’s classic Anne of Green Gables. Roslyn Jolly shares with us how her recent visit fulfilled a lifelong dream.
Imaginary roots: Discovering Anne of Green Gables’ charmed world
On first reading Anne of Green Gables as a little girl in the 1970s, I immediately fell in love with the characters. Anne, the red-headed orphan in desperate need of a home, her best friend Diana, arch-rival and love interest Gilbert, adoptive ‘parents’ Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, and all the other residents of Avonlea village became as real to me as my own neighbours and schoolfriends.
Prince Edward Island’s literary allure
I also fell in love with the story’s rural setting on Canada’s Prince Edward Island, which was so lovingly described by the author Lucy Maud Montgomery and played so active a part in Anne’s experiences that it seemed like a character in its own right. Part of its attraction, I’m sure, was the fact that it was an island: a miniature world, complete in itself, and tucked against a crook of land jutting into the Atlantic Ocean at the edge of a vast, sprawling continent. For fifty years I carried the idea of Prince Edward Island in my heart as a sort of ideal childhood dream. Now, at last, I had the opportunity to see it for myself.
Prince Edward Island’s unique landscape
With a land area less than one-tenth that of Tasmania, Prince Edward Island is by far Canada’s smallest province. Yet the tiny province has an outsized literary reputation. Anne of Green Gables is believed to be the most widely read Canadian book of all time, making Prince Edward Island a real presence in the minds of millions of readers worldwide. Montgomery’s evocation of the island has appealed to people from vastly different backgrounds, providing them with, in one of Anne’s favourite phrases, ‘scope for the imagination’.
Green Gables reimagined: The literary sanctuary in reality
From the air, the first thing you notice as you approach Prince Edward Island is its distinctive red soil. I’m talking real, Central-Australian-desert red, which stands in eye-catching contrast to the lush emerald greens of field and forest covering most of the countryside. The ‘red roads’ are the first thing Anne notices, too, when she arrives on the island from the mainland orphanage. No adult can tell her why they are this colour, nor is the reason — a high level of iron oxide, which derives from eroded red sandstone — revealed to the reader. By choosing to withhold the scientific explanation, Montgomery makes the unusual colouring of the landscape part of the island’s almost mythic aura.
These days there aren’t as many unsealed red roads on Prince Edward Island as there were in the late nineteenth century. Still, agriculture has thrown a patchwork quilt of ploughed and unploughed fields over the land, maintaining its distinctive red-and-green patterning. Dotted with crisp white wooden churches and barns brightly painted in scarlet and teal, the resulting scenery has the vivid simplicity of a child’s painting – especially when embellished, as during my June visit, with glorious swathes of wild-growing pink and purple lupins.
It’s all very much as I had imagined it would be, and during the forty-minute drive across the island from Charlottetown in the south to Cavendish (the original setting of ‘Avonlea’) in the north, I remembered Anne’s words from her own first journey through this landscape: ‘It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it?’ That feeling was only slightly dented by the sight of the huge visitor centre and car park at Green Gables Heritage Place – evidence, if any were needed, of the book’s huge international appeal. Once through the cavernous ticket hall, it was straight on to the farmhouse and, once again, the sense of an intensely imagined story-world suddenly materialising.
Contrary to a widely held belief, the farmhouse now known as Green Gables is not the house in which L. M. Montgomery grew up. That was the home of her maternal grandparents, to whose care she was consigned at just under two years of age, when her mother died and her father moved away to start a new life in western Canada. The Green Gables of the story was inspired by the whitewashed, green-shingled home, 500 metres away, of her grandfather’s cousins David and Margaret Macneill. Beautifully situated amidst orchards, forest and farmland, this farmhouse became, in Montgomery’s literary rendering, the ideal sanctuary for a homeless, orphaned, unloved child – Anne.
With its white paling fences and tended garden beds, Green Gables today has been neatly maintained to represent Marilla’s spick-and-span ways, while the earthy tones of the venerable-looking farm buildings conjure Matthew’s patient stewardship of the Cuthbert property. For an expression of Anne’s personality, you need to go inside the house and upstairs to the room designated as her bedroom, which has been furnished to capture her transition from unwanted orphan to cherished daughter of the house. On the floor is the shabby old carpetbag she brought with her from the orphanage, but also, hanging up, the famous puffed-sleeve dress that Matthew insisted on buying for her. Boots, books, flowers, china jug and faded bedside rug all speak to some aspect of her experiences in the story. It’s not so much a reconstruction as a carefully detailed – and very successful – interpretation.
Exploring Anne’s haunts and haunted wood
After visiting the Green Gables homestead, it’s time to explore the surrounding area. After all, Montgomery herself reflected in her journal that it was ‘not so much the house itself as the situation and scenery’ that inspired Anne of Green Gables. Right beside the house is the so-called Haunted Wood, where (in the book) Anne and Diana would meet almost daily, whether to walk to school, tell each other harrowing ghost tales, or make protestations of their undying friendship. The Haunted Wood Trail is an easy 900-metre loop that takes visitors right through the heart of the lovely forest that featured so prominently in Montgomery’s, and by extension Anne’s, imagination. I could certainly see, as they did, the ‘delightful possibilities’ of the slender silver-trunked birches, darkly branching spruce trees and blue and pink forget-me-nots peeping from the ferny undergrowth.
Another part of Anne’s world that should not be missed is the powerfully atmospheric Cavendish Shore. This wild stretch of driftwood-strewn, pink-tinted sand, backed by steep red sandstone cliffs and pounded by
WORDS: Roslyn Jolly
The writer was a guest of Destination Canada and Tourism Prince Edward Island.
Want to visit Prince Edward Island? Here are our tips:
Getting there: With regular flights from the Canadian mainland to Charlottetown Airport, it’s easy enough to access the beautiful Prince Edward Island. You can also drive across the Confederation Bridge from New Brunswick or take a ferry from Nova Scotia.
Where to stay: Whether you prefer camping in the great outdoors or cosy cottages and luxury bed and breakfasts, there is a vast array of accommodation options for your perfect stay on Prince Edward Island. Visit www.tourismpei.com/where-to-stay for more.
This article was originally published under the title Where imaginations come true in Issue 34 – Secrets of Self-Care. You can purchase this issue and enjoy more enchanting content here.
