Imagining Anne: Celebrating

the Creation and Centenary of

L.M. Montgomery's Classic,

Anne of Green Gables

Take a look inside the inspiration for Anne of Green Gables at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery this year. To commemorate the centenary of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s most famous novel, the Gallery presents Imagining Anne, a new exhibition opening June 12. Imagining Anne looks at what inspired Lucy Maud Montgomery to produce Anne of Green Gables, first published in 1908. Among the many rarely seen objects, artifacts and period memorabilia in the show will be the very first handwritten draft of this classic book that continues to be read worldwide.

“Before Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, appeared in 1908, Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was already an accomplished writer, having published almost three hundred short stories and more than two hundred poems, in addition to maintaining detailed journals and correspondence,” says Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, the exhibition’s curator.

Visually gifted, she was fascinated by colour and pattern. In scrapbooks, she transformed colourful fragments of daily life into dramatic mixed-media collages. In photographs, she repeated shapes that would become metaphors in her writing. Perhaps Anne Shirley lives across cultures and time because her creator gave to the fiery, red-haired heroine so many of the deep passions she herself enjoyed in her own scrapbooking: passions for colour, words, poetry, humour, drama, pathos, friendships, fashion, flowers, and also for picturesque and metaphoric landscapes.

Imagining Anne: Celebrating the Creation and Centenary of L.M. Montgomery’s Classic, Anne of Green Gables opens June 12 and runs until September 28 at the Confederation Centre Art Gallery. The exhibition is curated by Elizabeth Rollins Epperly and organized by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery.