Green Gables

Listen for a moment. Wind moves through tall spruce, and somewhere beyond the trees the Gulf of Saint Lawrence keeps up its low, steady hush. Under your feet the path is a rusty red. That colour comes from iron in the island's soil, and it stains boots, tyres and the hems of trousers all summer. In front of you stands a white farmhouse with green trim and steep green gables. For millions of readers around the world, this is one of the most familiar houses in fiction.

This is Green Gables, in the small community of Cavendish on the north shore of Prince Edward Island. It is part of a national historic site dedicated to the writer Lucy Maud Montgomery. Her friends and family called her Maud. In 1908 she published a novel called Anne of Green Gables. It tells the story of an orphan girl with red hair and a large imagination. She is sent by mistake to an elderly brother and sister who had asked for a boy.

Here is the first surprise. Montgomery never lived in this house. It was a working farm that belonged to relatives of her grandfather, the Macneill family. Maud lived close by, on her grandparents' homestead, a short walk through the woods. As a girl and a young woman she knew this farm, its fields and its paths very well. When she imagined a home for Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, this place gave her the shape of it.

Maud's own childhood explains a great deal about Anne. Her mother died when Maud was still a baby. Her father later moved west, and she was raised in Cavendish by her maternal grandparents, who were strict and elderly. She grew up surrounded by adults, books and open countryside. Like Anne, she found company in her own imagination. She gave names to trees, ponds and paths, and she wrote constantly in journals that later became famous in their own right.

The novel did not succeed easily. Montgomery sent the manuscript to several publishers, and it was rejected. According to her own account, she put it away in a hatbox for a time. When it was finally published, it became a bestseller almost at once. Sequels followed, and Anne's world grew across many books. Avonlea, the village in the stories, is fictional. Even so, readers have always recognised Cavendish inside it.

When Prince Edward Island National Park was created in the 1930s, this farmhouse came under the care of the government. It was restored and furnished to look the way a reader might picture the Cuthbert home in the late nineteenth century. So it is worth being clear about what you see inside. The rooms are not Montgomery's own belongings, frozen in place. They are a careful recreation, built from period furniture and from details in the novel itself.

That recreation is part of the charm. Walk through the kitchen and you will find the wood stove and the plain, practical things of a farm household. Upstairs, look for the room set up as Anne's. Many visitors search for one item in particular — a dress with puffed sleeves. In the novel, Anne longs for puffed sleeves, and the shy Matthew finally buys her a dress with them. It is a small moment in the book, and many readers remember it for life.

Back outside, notice how the house sits in the landscape. The farm buildings, the lawns and the line of trees all frame it. Behind the house, trails lead into the woods. One is called Lover's Lane, a name that comes from the novel. Another is the Haunted Wood. In the book, Anne and her friend Diana frighten themselves so badly with invented ghost stories that Anne is afraid to walk through it at dusk.

The Haunted Wood trail is more than a literary reference. It follows the general route toward the site of Montgomery's grandparents' home. This was where she actually lived and where she wrote the novel. The house itself no longer stands, but the site and its old foundations remain. If you have time, walking from Green Gables to that site lets you follow, roughly, the same ground Maud crossed herself. It turns a visit to a fictional house into a visit to a real life.

A second surprise waits in the visitor book, so to speak. A large number of people who come here travel from Japan. A Japanese translation of the novel appeared in the early 1950s and became deeply loved there. For many Japanese readers, Anne is a familiar childhood heroine, much as she is in Canada. You may hear several languages on the porch on a single afternoon. The story of a lonely girl who finds a home has travelled very far.

Montgomery herself also travelled far from this shore. She married a minister and spent most of her adult life in Ontario. She kept writing novels, short stories and journals for decades. Her later life held real sorrow, and her journals show it. But she asked to be brought back to Cavendish. She is buried in the community cemetery not far from here, close to the fields she wrote about.

If you continue your day nearby, the north shore beaches are only a short drive away. There the red cliffs meet pale sand and cold, clear water. The same colours you see on the path here run all the way to the sea. Many of the place names in the stories match this mix of farmland, ponds, woods and shoreline. Reading the landscape and reading the book become almost the same activity.

Before you leave, stand back from the house for a moment. Look at the green of the gables against the green of the trees. Listen again for the wind and the far-off sound of the Gulf. A plain farmhouse on a small island became a home for readers who never set foot here. As you walk away along the red path, notice the trees, the light and the turns of the trail. Maud gave names to places like these... and you are free to name them too.