Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. When Anne was only 21 months old, her mother died of tuberculosis. Her father consequently left her with her maternal grandparents. Her own solitary upbringing, half-orphan status and fertile imagination formed the main character of her novel, ANNE OF GREEN GABLES.

ANNE is a thin, homely, red-haired, freckled faced orphan-girl adopted into the siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthburt family. She has a widely developed imaginary world, fueled by fantasy and romance, which frequently overlaps into her everyday reality and causes her trouble.

"It's five miles; and as you're evidently bent on talking you might as well talk to some purpose by telling me what you know about yourself."

"Oh, what I know about myself isn't really worth telling," said Anne eagerly. "If you'll only let me tell you what I imagine about myself you'll think it ever so much more interesting." 1

For ANNE, her imagination is sometimes used to gain freedom — in a fantasy world — from a reality she does not want to face. Likewise, some of the characters described in the short stories gathered in HISTOIRES D’ORPHELINS 2 [the precursor to ANNE OF GREEN GABLES] share her wild imagination. In La quête de Charlotte, a girl finds a long-lost grandmother after enlisting Penny la Sorcière to find her a mother. In Les Dames de Charlotte, a girl living in an orphanage on a diet of sulphur and molasses, finds a mother through a hole in a wall.

In Retrouver sa famille, and Une invitation spontanée young girls alone over school holidays — due to finances and lack of family — are invited into their friends homes only to be reunited, through an amazing set of coincidences, with long-lost relatives.

The situations in these stories betray a terrible loneliness and reveal how Montgomery sympathized with orphans and perhaps wished a different childhood for herself.

Her stories of ”lost-and-found” relatives struck a chord with me because as a young girl I nursed fantasies of uncovering a whole set of family members waiting to ”embrace me in loving arms”. When I finally met birthfamily, I realized I had an unhealthy set of expectations based on over-idealized and childish concepts of what family should be.

I am not an orphan though at times, when I thought I would never meet birthfamily — they could be dead for all I knew — I worried that I would become one. These thoughts surfaced over fears that something would happen to my adoptive parents. I would then be all alone.

At the same time, I was attracted to the unfettered life of the orphan, so glorified in literature and on TV, free to travel and explore the world, to embark on wild adventures. Free to invent myself.

 

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1 ANNE OF GREEN GABLES, Lucy Maud Montgomery, 1908.

2 HISTOIRES D’ORPHELINS, [Akin to Anne: Tales of other orphans], Lucy Maud Montgomery, McLelland & Stewart, Toronto, 1988.

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