Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic by Irene Gammel ~ 2008. This edition: Key Porter, 2008. Hardcover. ISBN: 978-1-55263-985-6. 312 pages.
My rating: 4.5/10. I certainly wanted to like this book, and I picked it up with optimistic anticipation. Sadly I ended up feeling less than thrilled with my reading experience.
I did like bits and pieces – the factual bits and pieces – and I learned a few things about Lucy Maud Montgomery I didn’t know before, but the disjointed presentation and the frequent “It could have been like this” and “She must have felt like that” and the “I am certain that x was influenced by y, even though I have no proof” soon put me off.
While Irene Gammel is obviously a dedicated researcher and undoubtedly a well-informed Lucy Maud Montgomery scholar, I feel that her presentation of her theories in this book come across as unprofessional because of her continual admitted fabrications and assumptions.
Is it better if she admits it? Here’s a thought – why not stick to the facts? Or else drop the flowery, gushing, pseudo-Lucy Maud “voice”, which served merely to annoy rather than bewitch this particular reader.
*****
The questions Irene Gammel pose as the thesis statements for this book go something like this: What is the mystery behind the writing of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s magnum opus and incredibly successful book, Anne of Green Gables? Why did LMM not document the process of writing Anne much more thoroughly, and, while we’re on the topic, who actually inspired the red-haired heroine?
(Because of course it must have been a real person! There’s no way an author could just dream up a character out of her own head!)
Well, I must admit that such questions have never personally troubled me regarding Anne of Green Gables, a piece of entertaining fiction which I do indeed like a whole lot and which I re-read with deep pleasure every few years. I have always happily accepted that LMM just struck a lucky chord with this one, and that the character Anne was likely an amalgam of various personalities LMM knew in her daily life, with a good dash of artistic creativity rounding out the details.
Does it really matter if we don’t know the exact details of Anne’s origins? Well, it obviously bothered Irene Gammel enough so that she went ahead and assembled a vast array of evidence to support her own theories. Sometimes her enthusiasm carried her away. While the factual passages of this ambitious book are fascinating reading, they all too often degenerate into speculation. The author readily identifies her frequent forays into the imaginary, but they do detract from the value of the research.
Gammel theorizes that Anne’s key ancestor was young photographer’s model Evelyn Nesbit, identified many years after the publication of Anne of Green Gables as “the face of Anne” in one of LMM’s journals. I’m including the photo in question for your edification – see left.
Gammel then goes on to speculate about a vast number of other celebrities, acquaintances and fictional characters who might have added their characteristics to embryo Anne as her creator formed her and defined her in writing.
Fair enough, but these are all speculation, as the Gammel admits over and over. She throws out a daunting array of possibilities and mulls each one over in detail, before admitting that she just can’t quite be sure. I ended up feeling like the writing of this book, much like my reading of it, was a bit of an exercise in futility.
I think I’ll end with this. I could go on and share all sorts of annoying examples from the text – as well as some quite lovely and informative passages concerned LMM which are actually documented and provable by genuine references – but I’m full up to here with this one, so this is all my enthusiasm amounts to.
As usual, Goodreads – Looking for Anne has a wide selection of interesting reviews. I am quite relieved to find that I am not alone in my somewhat faint enthusiasm – others appear to feel the same, though there are some fans.
And if you are a serious LMM fan, by all means go ahead and tackle this ambitious personal project – it’s certainly interesting enough, if one can keep focussed – but keep the salt-cellar handy!
On the plus side: Some unusual LMM photographs are included, and the biographer does manage to give a wide-ranging picture of the time in which LMM was working on the book, and the artistic, literary and cultural mood of the era.
Oh – and a little heads-up – speculation as to LMM’s sexual proclivities abound in this one, though Gammel doesn’t come right out and say the “L-word” except to paradoxically refute the insinuation which she herself seems to make. Many salacious references to Sapphic friendships!
Now, to be quite honest, it doesn’t matter to me one whit what LMM’s sexual orientation was, but obviously it matters a whole lot to Gammel, as she teasingly parades this theme throughout the book. It got tiresome.
Leaves & Pages 
My grandmother, who read these books growing up in Saskatchewan, gave me Anne of Green Gables when I was nine, and I’ve loved the books ever since. I’ve never really read anything about L.M. Montgomery herself – it doesn’t sound like this book is the place to start. I don’t mind speculation, sometimes it’s unavoidable when there’s no hard evidence, but not carried to extremes, and I get particularly irked when there is too much of the ““I am certain that x was influenced by y, even though I have no proof” that you mention.
Oh no! – don’t start with this one if you’re looking for background on L.M. Montgomery! It is a very *narrow* biography, and though it does cover LMM’s childhood to early marriage years in a very superficial way, it is mostly focussed on the time of the writing of Anne of Green Gables, which was 1905 into 1907, according to Gammel. Though it was interesting in some of the details Gammel dredged up, the speculation overshadowed the research.
LMM did have a rather awful life in many ways – her mother died when she was a young child, her father basically abandoned her, remarrying and moving to Saskatchewan and starting a new family, leaving LMM in the care of her strict and humorless maternal grandparents. LMM struggled with her feelings of loneliness and abandonment all of her life, and may indeed have suffered from clinical depression as a number of biographers maintain. It is thought that her death at the age of 67 may have been caused by a deliberate overdose of medication – suicide – though there is much controversy about this claim among her fans and biographers.
I’ve read LMM’s published journals and a number of biographies over the years; the picture I have of her is of a basically introverted, imaginative person, who did have an active social life, at least from the teen years on, filled with good friends, relatives, and many correspondents. It seems that she wrote first for a way of expressing herself, for the deep artistic need she felt to create, and then, when she realized how lucrative a field this could be, also for the money and the recognition. It was a way for a “charity child” – which was how she was treated by her relations – to gain independence and a feeling of self worth.
LMM definitely drew many characters from life, but she had a marvelous imagination as well. I prefer to enjoy her works for what they are, without delving too deeply into the gory details of how she produced them, though of course a *bit* of a backstory is always interesting! (As long as it is *true*.) 🙂
I agree with your take on this book entirely. I too was put off by the endless speculation. I didn’t even finish this, unusual for this LMM aficionado. I really like the bio The Gift of Wings though some of the shorter ones do cover her life quite well. Still, I will just go on enjoying Anne of Green Gables for itself.
I was wondering about The Gift of Wings. Have heard about it, but not yet read it. Must add it to my library list. I’m not *seriously* into LMM but I have always been interested in her because I’ve enjoyed reading her stories for so many years, since that first girlhood reading of Anne when I was about 10 or thereabouts. Sometimes LMM’s stories annoy (though most often they entertain), but I find that knowing some of the author’s back story helps to put the fiction into context, and I then can understand/”forgive” the “misses” among the “hits”! Biographies like Gammel’s I don’t much care for – she was overly preoccupied with manipulating facts and making dubious “discoveries” to prove her own theories. Bad, bad science! Sometimes a cigar is just a cigar. 🙂