Anne of Green Gables! Oh, how I loathe thee!
When I was a teen it was fashionable amoungst my compatriots to denounce Anne of Green Gables (musical and book) and the author of that monster, Lucy Maud Montgomery, as the cause of all our youthful teen-angst problems. We despised the very tourists who supplied our seasonal employment because most of them had come for Anne. How gauche! The sentimentality killed us.
Who would ever have guessed that golfers would take their place and beloved Anne would be a sideshow? Well, I never would have. And now I see the value in Anne and Lucy Maud. There is a genuine and enduring interest for the two of them from people all over the world. My closed little teenaged mind could only see the kitsch.
The path from Anne hater to Anne . . . well, I hesitate to use the word lover, let's just call it tolerance . . . was a long one. I had only read the first Anne book and I enjoyed it, as much as I enjoyed all the other books we had to read in junior high. To this day I have never read another Montgomery book.
But then Meagan Follows appeared in the TV movie and after years of lusting after Jenny (from Matt and Jenny, anyone remember that?) I, of course, watched the entire thing. Still my aversion to the tourists who flocked to the Confederation Centre every year flourished like a mould spore. Would I ever find room in my heart for the red-haired orphan?
For a while the whole thing fell off my radar. I moved to Newfoundland where Anne was but a distant mystery. Newfoundlanders were too interested in Nanny Hines and Figgy Duff to concern themselves with hundred-year-old books.
Then shortly after I got married we were honeymooning in Scotland . Through a series of Byzantine events I ended up tending bar in a hotel. One day I was serving customers when this man asked me if I was from Canada . This was a treat because most people in the UK assumed I was either American or Irish (thank you Island accent). Turns out he was a professor of linguistics at some U.S. university, in Scotland with his family on vacation. He had his 13-year-old daughter with him and when she found out through our conversation that I was from Prince Edward Island she almost went into hysterics. Turns out she had read every book by Lucy Maud Montgomery and wanted to talk about all of it with me. I shamefacedly told her I knew very little about her books, but we had a nice chat about the Island in general, which her family was going to visit shortly.
So these people thought a lot about Anne and 'Rilla and whatever and they were educated (I know she was 13, but her father knew all about the books as well). Maybe there was something more to this whole thing.
Another incident sticks in my mind. My wife and I were living in New London , Prince Edward Island and I was working at a local resort. Again an American family came in to eat and through talking the young daughter told me that they were here because of her interest in Lucy Maud. I told her that I was living on Lantern Hill (I don't know if it's necessarily the one from the books but it was about 100 meters from Lucy Maud's birthplace). Again, this girl went ballistic and wanted to talk about all things Montgomery .
These two meetings in particular helped come to terms with my Montgomery-phobia, my anti-Anneness. Finally moving away from the Island made me realize how ridiculous it was to feel the way I did when I was younger. It was like hating puppies for crying out loud.
Recently, here on the Island the L.M. Montgomery Institute of UPEI held its 7th international conference on L.M. Montgomery. Storm and Dissonance: L.M. Montgomery and Conflict was held last week, June 21-25, at the University of Prince Edward Island .
The L.M. Montgomery Institute hosted people from Canada , the United States , England , Japan , Scotland , Germany , Finland , and Lithuania and more than thirty talks by international scholars and readers.
Margaret Doody, Notre Dame University in Indiana, discussed the darker side of Montgomery 's works which "many contemporaries would regard as highly unsuitable in what is now known as 'children's literature.'"
Two Finnish journalists, Suvi Ahola and Satu Koskimies, spoke. They recently published an edited anthology in Finland called The Girls of New Moon and Green Gables. Detailing the reactions of Finnish readers of Montgomery , this anthology revealed that the stories of Anne and Emily still manage to raise dissonance and conflict.
See, who knew that there was this much going on?
I love you Anne!