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Reviewed by:
  • 100 Years of Anne with an 'e': The Centennial Study of "Anne of Green Gables,"
  • Kathleen A. Miller (bio)
100 Years of Anne with an 'e': The Centennial Study of "Anne of Green Gables," ed. by Holly Blackford. Calgary: University of Calgary Press, 2009. 306 pp. $29.95.

The 2008 centennial of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables sparked a publishing boom, both in new editions of the novel and in studies of its author. Penguin Group Canada commissioned three books for the occasion: a "Collector's Edition" of Anne; Budge Wilson's prequel, Before Green Gables (2008); and Elizabeth Epperly's Imagining Anne: The Island Scrapbooks of L. M. Montgomery (2008). In addition, Anne enthusiasts were treated to Irene Gammel's Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed up a Literary Classic (2008), Mary Rubio's comprehensive biography Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (2008), and Elizabeth Waterston's Magic Island: The Fictions of L. M. Montgomery (2009). Holly Blackford's edited volume of essays, 100 Years of Anne with an 'e': The Centennial Study of "Anne of Green Gables," is also part of the florescence of Montgomery scholarship, which encompasses the fields of literary, women's, and childhood studies, among others. Like other works occasioned by Anne's centenary, Anne with an 'e' addresses a diverse readership of academic and mass audiences as it accounts for the [End Page 212] novel's enduring legacy and international appeal by "placing the novel in its original historical and literary context, as well as by investigating the continuing aesthetic and cultural life of the novel in other times, places, and media" (p. xxx).

Blackford's introduction sets the tone for the depth and breadth of the collection by deftly interweaving Montgomery's biography with Canadian social and cultural history during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. For Blackford, the creation of Montgomery's protagonist reflects changing ideals of childhood during the author's lifetime. Thus, Anne Shirley embodies "a twentieth-century approach to childhood" that still resonates with modern readers (p. xiii).

Anne with an 'e' is organized into three sections, each containing three essays. In the first section, Irene Gammel's "Writing and Placing Anne" illuminates Montgomery's engagement with popular culture by locating a series of prototypes for Montgomery's heroine in stories from nineteenth-century ladies' magazines. While the essay makes a strong contribution to the volume, readers already familiar with Gammel's Looking for Anne (2008) will recognize the argument as merely a condensed version of one she presented there. The next essay, in which E. Holly Pike details Montgomery's composition process and her practice of revising old materials to meet audience demands, also reveals Montgomery's savvy manipulation of the literary marketplace. Completing this section, Joy Alexander's fresh treatment of the geography of Anne's landscape sheds light on the heroine's control of place, space, and time.

Melissa Mullins's "Romancing Anne: Language and Silence," which opens the second section, charts Anne's development from Romantic poet to Victorian writer-critic, while Eleanor Hershey Nickel offers an interesting analysis of the role of Anne's suitor, Gilbert Blythe, in the 1934 film adaptation of Anne and in Kevin Sullivan's 1985 miniseries. Of special note in this section is Hilary Emmett's "'Mute Misery': Speaking the Unspeakable in L. M. Montgomery's Anne Books," in which she traces the movement, over the course of the eight novels in the original Anne series, from repressed articulations of personal trauma to open expressions of cultural grief. Emmet's reflections on images of maternal suffering, as evidenced both in Montgomery's life writings and in her fiction, are particularly powerful.

The essays in the third section, "Quoting Anne: Intertextuality at Home and Abroad," evaluate Montgomery's relationship to the global literary canon. Laura M. Robinson examines the influence on Anne of the coming-of-age fiction for girls by the British novelist Charlotte Yonge and by the American writer Louisa May Alcott while Theodore Sheckels identifies eight literary motifs that originated with Anne and that have appeared frequently since then in other Canadian fiction. In addition, [End Page 213...

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