Anne of Green Gables, Her Author, and Me
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TW: Depression, Suicide.
Anne Shirley Cuthbert Blythe. Perhaps no other fictional character has ever influenced my life as much as you. Dear Carrots, with your bright red hair that you hated, but which I secretly yearned for. (Anne was one of two big reasons why I started coloring my hair ginger at the age of 15 and never stopped.) Thank you.
I love Anne of Green Gables for so many reasons. So many, in fact, that I have avoided writing this blog post for a while because I just wasn’t sure how I would be able to even come close to expressing what she has meant to me. I still know I’ll fall short.
Anne isn’t afraid of adventure. She is inspiring to the introvert side of me who would overthink and be scared instead of trying to walk across the ridgepole of someone’s roof. Who would shrink in on herself and cry later if someone called her Carrots, instead of breaking a slate over his head as Anne so boldly did. This aspect of Anne was more an example of who I wished I could be, rather than the reality of who I was as a child, teen, and even today. (Though I have learned to stand up for myself far more than I used to.)
Anne enjoys playing make believe. I think one of my favorite scenes in Anne’s first book is when she and her friends decided to launch her down the river in a boat filled with flowers, so that she could pretend to be the Lady of Shalott. Mind you, she didn’t have a cell phone to take photos while playing dress-up, but I still think of her every time I dress to a theme and run off to the woods. It may sound silly, but as I head out to take my self-portraits, I often feel more like I am actually Anne pretending to be a Viking princess, or Anne pretending to be a fairy queen, instead of feeling like the Viking or the fairy.
John William Waterhouse’s famous artwork of the Lady of Shalott
So importantly to me, Anne is an animist. There can be no question of this fact, when you consider countless lines in her books like…
“I always say good night to the things I love, just as I would to people. I think they like it.”
“Listen to the trees talking in their sleep. What nice dreams they must have!”
“That white birch you caught me kissing is a sister of mine. The only difference is, she’s a tree and I’m a girl, but that’s no real difference.”
Anne didn’t lose her imagination as an adult. That last quote above was actually from Anne of Avonlea, when Anne was getting older and was supposed to be “a grown up.” The lines immediately preceding the birch quote are a perfect example of Anne keeping her whimsy and creativity into adulthood instead of thinking she had to abandon them as childhood ends. “I’m sure I shall always feel like a child in the woods. Here in the woods I like best to imagine I’m a dryad living in an old pine, or a little brown wood-elf hiding under a crinkled leaf.” So do I, dear Anne, so do I.
And finally, Anne was about as nature-worshipping as a girl could openly be in her time. Example? This quote, which is perhaps my favorite Anne quote of them all: “Why must people kneel down to pray? If I really wanted to pray I’ll tell you what I’d do. I’d go out into a great big field all alone or in the deep, deep woods and I’d look up into the sky—up—up—up—into that lovely blue sky that looks as if there was no end to its blueness. And then I’d just feel a prayer.”
Anne is the fictional character I think of first when I ponder role models in my life. She is a combination of character traits I admire (courage, boldness) and ones I already have and most love in myself (imagination, animism). She also reminds me to keep an open mind when meeting new people, to try to find the kindred spirit in them.
Anne has meant so much to me, it’s hard to imagine a world where I didn’t know her as a kindred spirit. But the fact of the matter is that Anne of Green Gables almost wasn’t published at all. L.M. Montgomery worked at the local post office, and therefore was able to send out all of her manuscripts for submissions easily, and she sent out hundreds. But no one wanted to publish her book about a little girl orphan who was sent to a Canadian island instead of a boy. She sent the novel to five publishers, and when they all rejected it, she set the manuscript in a hat box, and put it in her attic for a year. After a year had passed, she came across the box “during a rummage,” and decided to try one last publisher, who agreed to the book. It was an immediate hit.
When I was a pre-teen and I watched Megan Follows as she dramatically recited “The Highwayman” for an enraptured audience at an elegant gathering, I fell in love with the ballad. When I heard her ramble dreamily about the wonders of everyday life, I saw them more in my own. I never thought I’d love another Anne on the screen, and at first when I tried watching the new series on Netflix, it was true. But I approached the new series with an open mind, and I started falling in love with this young, modern Anne with and E as well.
My artwork of Anne with an E. (original for sale)
Some have objected to the new program for being too dark, and compared to the Follows films that may be true. But Anne’s life had its own darknesses in the original books, from her life as an orphan moving from home to home, to Matthew’s death (which the new series surprisingly eliminates altogether!) to struggles balancing her writing with her family life, Anne’s life wasn’t always sunshine and rainbows.
A few years ago, in my search to find out more about Anne, I started reading more about her creator, author L.M. Montgomery, she of the hatbox and the post office. I discovered that she fell in love with a man who she decided was not intelligent enough for her to marry, and instead married a man she didn’t love. Her husband struggled with a mental illness, melancholia, and Montgomery took care of him and struggled with her own depression and health issues as she also tried to continue writing and maintain a cheerful demeanor to friends and family. She became increasingly reliant on medication to maintain her calm.
TW: Depression/Suicide
On April 24th, 1942, Montgomery was found dead in her bedroom. Although the cause of death was always listed as heart failure, in 2008, her granddaughter, after consulting with the family, made it known in an article that there had in fact been a suicide note, and that the author of one of the brightest, most hopeful female characters in all of literature had taken her own life. She shared this information in order to help increase awareness of depression and start a conversation about this important issue.
L.M. Montgomery’s note read:
I have lost my mind by spells and I do not dare think what I may do in those spells. May God forgive me and I hope everyone else will forgive me even if they cannot understand. My position is too awful to endure and nobody realizes it. What an end to a life in which I tried always to do my best.
It shook me to my core when I found out that Anne’s author had ended her life with suicide. And I didn’t know how to reconcile this terrible fact with my love for her character, the hope and optimism that she represented for me. Writing Montgomery’s words from her note brings tears to my eyes now as I write this post. Anne had so much joy in her heart, so much ability to see the best in people. Why do so many of the best, kindest, most open-hearted people have to also be plagued with moments and feelings of such darkness as well? Why does being an empathic, highly sensitive person mean you struggle so much?
For the last couple of years, since my grandmother died and I had a series of devastating losses, and on into the worldwide struggle of this year with the pandemic, I’ve had recurring depression. Thankfully it isn’t a constant state, by any means, but I’ll find myself sinking deeper and deeper into that dark and apathetic place. L.M. Montgomery’s note has become a signpost to me. Whenever I start entering a headspace that is alarmingly depressive, I find myself googling her note, reading it and fixating on it. I want to make it clear that I have never been suicidal, but I do find myself obsessing over the words she wrote, and as I said above, trying to understand, dwelling on how such light and such dark can exist together. It has become such a sign of my being in a bad place, that I know when I start to type the words into Google to search for her letter, I need to also call my therapist and make an appointment.
One day this spring, during my dark night of the soul I’ve already spoken about, I reached out to my close friend Shveta Thakrar and told her about my struggle. “I just don’t understand,” I told her, regarding the note and the suicide, and Anne and her magic. I was caught in the cycle of having to find a rational explanation, wanting to will L.M. Montgomery’s life to have somehow ended happier. And Shveta, dear friend that she is, found the words to slice through my obsessive-compulsive cycle of ponderance and cut straight to the heart of the matter. “Aren’t you lucky,” she said, “that you have more resources than L.M. Montgomery did.”
Because life is joy, but it is also pain. Anne can be my role model, and her author can also have ended her life in heartbreak and darkness. All of these things can be true. And we can all do the best we can, day by day, to ask for help when our despair overwhelms us. Montgomery’s end is not the whole story. It is not just how she ended her life that matters, but how she lived it, what she gave to the world, what she gave to those they loved, and the magic she helped us to see through her words on the page. L.M. Montgomery suffered and struggled for so long, and fought her demons. I admire her strength, her resilience and her creativity, just as I also admire Anne’s. She gave me the most pivotal fictional character to my entire existence. And now, I can fight my own demons too, with help from the stories she wrote, the character she created, and of course the resources and open honesty about depression and struggles with darkness that are much easier to access today than they were in her time.
