During a holiday in Prince Edward Island last month, I thought more about ways of introducing Jane Austen to children, not because my daughter and I were reading Austen, but because we were completely absorbed in the literary world of Anne of Green Gables. L.M. Montgomery’s Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe are a lot like Austen’s Elizabeth Bennet and Mr. Darcy (or Shakespeare’s Beatrice and Benedick from Much Ado About Nothing)–only much younger. Anne is eleven when she famously breaks her slate over her classmate Gilbert’s head after he teases her about her red hair. Like Elizabeth, who vows never to dance with Mr. Darcy after he has “mortified” her pride by judging her “tolerable; but not handsome enough to tempt me,” Anne insists, “I shall never forgive Gilbert Blythe” because he “has hurt my feelings excruciatingly.” I really like Miriam Rheingold Fuller’s analysis of Austen’s influence on Montgomery in her essay “Jane of Green Gables.”
We visited several of the sites in PEI associated with Montgomery: the
The view from Montgomery's room in Bideford
one-room school where she taught in Lower Bedeque, the parsonage where she boarded when she taught in Bideford, her Campbell cousins’ house (now the Anne of Green Gables Museum), her Grandfather Montgomery’s house at Park Corner, and, of course, “Green Gables.” We went to “Anne of Green Gables: The Musical” (the longest running musical in Canada, newly updated this year), and to “Anne and Gilbert” (now in its seventh season, a musical based on the second and third “Anne” books). We listened to Anne of Green Gables on CD while driving to and around the Island. We started reading the novel aloud before we left, and we’re still reading a little bit every day. And while we didn’t get tired of the story, the death of Matthew Cuthbert at the end is so sad that I began to wish, for my daughter’s sake, that we were reading Pride and Prejudice instead, because no main characters die. (However, there is no green hair or raspberry cordial in Austen’s novels either, and if I couldn’t see the humour in Pride and Prejudice when I was a teenager, it might be just a little early for my daughter to read it). The musicals were both wonderful, except that the ending of “Anne of Green Gables” was too abrupt, and the focus was still more on Matthew’s death than on the new beginning of Anne’s friendship with Gilbert. The book is more hopeful about what lies around “the bend in the road” for Anne.
We loved visiting Montgomery’s world, reading and rereading scenes from her most famous novel, and drinking raspberry cordial at the Blue Winds Tea Room in New London. My daughter is keen to try making raspberry cordial at home, though she agrees with me that someone in the PEI tourism business should be marketing currant wine as well, because no one actually drinks raspberry cordial in the book. Anne accidentally serves currant wine instead to her “bosom friend” Diana, and gets her drunk. My daughter has been inspired to re-create this scene, along with the “broken slate” scene, the “green hair” scene, and the scene in which Anne arrives at Green Gables, and she often acts them out at home. I’m sure seeing the musicals played a role
in her newfound interest in performance, but I know she is also inspired to act out these scenes because she saw them performed a few times at “Avonlea” in Cavendish. She was fascinated with the actors who played Anne, Diana, Gilbert, Matthew, Marilla, and Charlie Sloane–this Charlie plays a much larger role at Avonlea than he does in the books–and she loved the playground, the sandcastles by Maurice Bernard, the wagon rides, the farm animals, the sack races, the square dancing, and the opportunity to dress in period costume and play the role of Anne herself. When we visited PEI a couple of years ago, we went to Green Gables, but were disappointed to find that “Anne” wasn’t there. My daughter was very happy this time to meet someone playing Anne at Avonlea, just up the road from the iconic house. Green Gables, the Parks Canada site, is the place on which Montgomery based her fictional house and farm, and therefore has some claim to authenticity. But if you’re going to visit a place that never existed, I think it might as well be a complete fiction, with the fictional characters as well as a fictional setting, like Avonlea Village.
I’m happy that my daughter’s creativity is being fueled by literary pilgrimages to both historical and fictional places, and I was also pleased to find that she was inspired by the music and step-dancing that she saw at Avonlea and at the ceilidhs we went to in Stanley Bridge. She made up many new songs, including one about “Imagination”: “You’ve got to go the way your imagination’s going….” The music at
Avonlea, with Leon Gallant and Mike Pendergast singing songs like Margie Carmichael Scotto’s “The Red Dirt Road” and other Island favourites, including many of their own songs, was definitely a highlight of the trip. So was my daughter’s delight in discovering that the drummer, Brendan Peters, also played the role of Anne’s schoolteacher, Mr. Phillips. It’s worth going to Avonlea for the music alone, whether you’re an Anne fan or not. Many of the songs are on the band’s new CD, “Songs from the Shanty.”
I have no plans to open a tourist attraction inspired by Longbourn or Pemberley. But I can already imagine my daughter someday as a lively Elizabeth answering Darcy’s first proposal–“I had not known you a month before I felt that you were the last man in the world whom I could ever be prevailed upon to marry”–and sounding just like Anne rejecting Gilbert.
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JASNA Nova Scotia will meet in February to talk about papers on Sense and Sensibility from the 2011 Annual General Meeting in Fort Worth, Texas. We’re meeting on Sunday, February 12 at 2pm at Christina’s house; please email me (semsley at gmail dot com) if you’re interested in attending.
