Looking For Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic

How do great characters emerge from a writer's mind? What popular cultural influences, subconsciously or consciously, impact the way in which a character is formed? Gemmel answer these questions in her book, Looking for Anne. By digging through Montgomery's unpublished and published manuscripts, letters, scrapbooks and other collections, Gemmel slowly uncovers one possible explanation as to how Montgomery shifted and shaped the character that we know as Anne Shirley.

This books is not only impeccably researched, but builds on existing Montgomery scholarship. She is clearly having fun with the material and, as a reader, you feel like you are along for the ride, digging through the archives with her.

Gemmel's narrative is a combination of autobiography, literary history and popular cultural theory. And sometimes, I felt like I was not only reading about Montgomery's life but Anne's as well.

I highly recommend this book to anyone who is interested in Montgomery's work and loves Anne of Green Gables.

My eyes have been opened to the passions of women during the ages, by all ages. We more mature women can fall in love with Anne of Green Gables all over again. Research by Irene Gammel was done in a sensitive manner, allowing us a glimpse into the extraordinary mind and imagination of Lucy Maud Montgomery and her life as an minister's wife in the 1900's.

Her life was not without sorrows, joys, forbidden pleasures, and the usual mundane trappings of any life. Her gift to herself and to all of us, is her capacity for storytelling and her imagination that takes us into another time and place with such ease and joy. We can smell the flowers she loved, feel the trees, know her friends as she did. We can visit her beloved Prince Edward Island, live in Leaksdale, Ontario as a new wife and mother. We can walk beneath her beloved Russel Pines in Norval, Ontario.

In her forthright but exceptional way - we are allowed to see a woman's mind at its best - working with life around her and using her imagination and love of words, colours, nature and people to teach us about the times, the country and its people.

In doing so, she allows us a rare glimpse into ourselves and how imaginations offer any of us little tidbits of joy and happiness. These are usually tucked away in our minds, never shared or enjoyed. Women of all ages get busy with life, nuturing, and working. We put away our precious selves in this process. Lucy Maud didn't. She wrote and recorded all her feelings, joy, sorrows, loves and dislikes too. She wove it into a legacy of emotive books, poems, plays, essays, and more. She engaged the community then. She does now. Her writings literally pulse with life.

Irene has brought all of this out in this book , Looking for Anne:How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic. She makes Lucy Maud come alive in a modern world, permitting us to stop and wonder at the capacity of this busy, yet ordinary woman. Irene's legacy to us to make us think about our own imagination, thoughts and joys during our own lifes. Perhaps giving some of us more mature women, and younger ones too, a reason to stop and dust off our own imaginations. Irene is using her education and research abilities to unlock a door for all of us to open. I urge anyone, whether you have ever read an Anne book or known about Lucy Maud Montgomery - to open the door to imagination and joys or your own as you read and marvel at the workings of a woman's passion.

I had the great pleasure of meeting Irene Gammel this past weekend at the Lucy Maud Museum in Norval, Ontario at a book signing by her for Looking for Anne. She was a pure delight with her personality as fresh as her writings. Thank you Irene for writing your story. I loved the passion you have for this mammoth project. I am constantly astounded at what we women do in our lives. I love the story of any of us as we educate each other and look for ways to let our passions shine.

So to all of you women of any age - get out and buy a copy of this book. Give yourselves a gift of imagination from Irene and Lucy Maud herself. I think Lucy Maud would be amazed and very content to think that after 100 years her story is still inspiring others to think and to tell their own.
Dawn Falls

Find out why L.M. Montgomery felt so skeptical about biography despite spending endless hours shaping and re-shaping her journals for public display; using them to incubate ideas for her novels. Find out too how biography can, according to Ms. Gammel, provide valuable cultural and historical context within which to interpret, understand and appreciate works of art. And, if this isn't enough, listen to what makes Anne of Green Gables a classic: how it appeals to young and old, takes Emerson, gives him a heart, tempered with satire, how it appeals to universals, answers yearnings with pagan fairy tales, subverts and transcends the formulaic, and traces the lives of characters who evolve from stereotypes to complex, contradictory human beings.
If this still doesn't do it, or even if it does, buy the book, Looking for Anne, written by Irene Gammel who, in addition to owning a delightful Montgomeryesque style, shares many of the characteristics of the heroines she so admires.

Listen here: http://nigelbeale.com/?p=818