“When
I’m on Prince Edward Island in the summer I always understand an old Scotch
Islander I met once in Winnipeg. He was always talking of ‘the Island.’
Somebody once asked him, ‘What island do you mean?’ He simply looked at that ignorant man. Then he
said, ‘Why, Prince Edward Island, mon. What
other island is there?’”
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| Lucy Maud Montgomery's Birthplace |
Not many authors can claim to have
single-handedly put their home on the map. But when most people hear the name
Prince Edward Island, the first thing likely to come to their minds is Lucy
Maud Montgomery. Her
Anne of Green Gables
series made her famous around the world and made Prince Edward Island one of
the most beloved literary landmarks ever. Is there anyone who hasn’t longed to
live in Avonlea after reading those books?
But Anne was by no means
Montgomery’s only heroine to have an Island home—altogether, nineteen of her
twenty novels were set on Prince Edward Island.
Kilmeny of the Orchard, published in 1910, is also set in a country
village by the sea, similar to the ones featured in the Anne series, and is
filled with beautiful descriptions of the lush woods and farmland surrounding
it:
The
distant hills and wooded uplands were tremulous and aerial in delicate
spring-time gauzes of pearl and purple. The young, green-leafed maples crowded
thickly to the very edge of the road on either side, but beyond them were
emerald fields basking in sunshine, over which cloud shadows rolled, broadened,
and vanished. Far below the fields, a calm ocean slept bluely, and sighed in
its sleep, with the murmur that rings forever in the ear of those whose good
fortune it is to have been born within the sound of it.
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| Silver Bush Farm |
After reading passages like that,
it’s no wonder that so many of Montgomery’s readers wanted to go and see the
Island for themselves. Ever since the publication of
Anne of Green Gables—her first novel—in 1908, thousands of tourists
have visited Prince Edward Island every year to enjoy the beautiful scenery and
see the places that inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery’s books. Nearly every spot
where she lived and worked has become a tourist attraction—
her birthplace
in New London, the
Montgomery
family farm that inspired ‘Ingleside,’ her
aunt and uncle’s farm which she
used as the setting for her novel
Pat of
Silver Bush, a
parsonage
where she boarded while teaching school, a
one-room
schoolhouse where she once taught,
the manse where she lived
after her marriage, and of course the
Cavendish
farmhouse that was the model for Green Gables, which is part of Prince
Edward Island National Park.
Kilmeny of the Orchard by Lucy Maud Montgomery
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