Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L. M. Montgomery (review)

In the spring of 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery's first novel, Anne of Green Gables, was published, receiving immediate acclaim. Montgomery and her heroine have continued to achieve international recognition in the hundred years since the novel's publication. Marking this hundred year milestone, in Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L. M. Montgomery, Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, founding chair of the L. M. Montgomery Institute, offers representative pages from Montgomery's scrapbooks. These pages, combined with Epperly's commentary, provide an intimate portrayal of the many facets of the author's autobiography and inner world that contributed to the creation of her vibrant, well-loved heroine.

The folio-sized volume, with its rich blue and gilt cover and full color reproductions of the scrapbook pages, is attractively presented, and Epperly provides sidebar notes summarizing some of the major themes of Montgomery's life and work as reflected in the scrapbook items. Adrienne Clarkson, former governor general of Canada, has added a touch of class with a foreword highlighting the place held by the Anne of Green Gables stories in Canadian culture.

Born in 1874, Montgomery spent the first thirty-six years of her life in Prince Edward Island, before moving to Ontario. She kept scrapbooks throughout her life, some dedicated primarily to writing and literature, and others comprised of souvenirs, photographs, clippings from newspaper and magazines, pressed flowers, and swatches of fabric or cat fur. This volume contains the so-called Blue Scrapbook (1893 to 1897) and the Red Scrapbook (1890s to mid-1910), which were compiled during Montgomery's life as a student, teacher, and writer on the island.

These early scrapbooks depict Montgomery's vital spirit and her love of beauty, nature, and literature. Mementos of friendship, social gatherings, and significant events, reveal a woman who values her friends highly, and the portraits of fashionable and spirited women clipped from magazines and newspapers reveal that Montgomery was intrigued by women of character, beauty, and inner strength. The character of Anne emerges as a compilation of many of the scrapbook's female portraits, as well as the author's own fascination with the Gibson Girl and the Kodak Girl.

Epperly shows us the subtle shifts in the author's circumstances and inner world, elusive aspects of relationships, and juxtapositions of irony, humor and self-reflection in the placement of scrapbook memorabilia. In the Red Scrapbook, for example, we find a newspaper clipping of a poem, "The Bend in the Road" by Grace Lichfield placed beneath a picture of a country path and alongside a photograph of a bend in the river. Epperly reminds us that in Anne of Green Gables "a bend in the road" is a metaphor for life's surprises. The scrapbooks help us to appreciate the multi-layered process of perception and experience contained in the author's process of "imagining" Anne.

The scrapbook items also provide a glimpse into the life of rural communities in Canada in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—souvenirs exchanged between friends, mementos from church and school commemorations, newspaper clippings related to local and international events. And we see how an intelligent, literary, and sensitive woman of one hundred years ago perceived her world and carved out her creative response. The reader may well come away from this volume with the sense of having shared a pleasant afternoon with Lucy Maud Montgomery, receiving her insights on topics from fashion to cats, gossip to social events, and poetry to matters of the heart.