LOOKING FOR ANNE OF GREEN GABLES

Oblique, somewhat frustrating attempt “to piece together the fragments that inspired” the beloved Canadian novel.

Gammel (English and Modern Literature and Culture/Ryerson Univ.; Baroness Elsa: Gende, Dada, and Everyday Modernity, 2003, etc.) concentrates on the years from 1903, when the germ of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel Anne of Green Gables took root, to its publication in 1908. Maud, as friends and family always called her, kept notebooks while writing the book, but “only the distilled version that she wanted us to see was allowed to survive,” comments the author. She also edited her voluminous diary with an eye to publication: “her journal was the stage on which Maud performed her artful versions of the truth.” She acquired habits of secrecy and self-deception early, avers Gammel. Her mother died of TB when Maud was a toddler, her father left and she was raised by undemonstrative maternal grandparents on Prince Edward Island. Though her fiction enveloped the old homestead in misty nostalgia, it was more like a prison to the ambitious young writer, whose dreams of becoming self-sufficient and famous found stimulus in such popular magazines of the era as The Delineator and Godey’s Lady’s Book. Gammel doggedly pursues a clipping of a girl pasted in Maud’s journal and determines this “model for Anne’s face” to be teenaged Evelyn Nesbit, who made her living posing for artists before the Stanford White murder trial made her notorious. The author links the theme of “bosom friends” in the novel to Maud’s own intense female friendships, concluding that the writer was probably not a lesbian, but sexually frustrated in her subsequent marriage to the “sub-thyroid” (depressed) Reverend Ewan Macdonald. In the end, Gammel’s triumphant declaration of “the mystery of Anne revealed” is judiciously countered by Anne’s own assertion in the novel: “There’s such a lot of different Annes in me.”

Much ado about nothing, though loyal fans will celebrate this work on the centenary of Anne of Green Gables’ publication.