2024 is L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday! The L.M. Montgomery Institute (LMMI) at the University of Prince Edward Island is celebrating with 150 tributes – celebratory statements or greetings – that reflect upon personal connections to Montgomery or on an aspect of her life, work, or legacy.
Many of the tributes that we received were from Islanders – or Islanders at heart – living abroad. Here are four of them: Kristie Collins, Gracie Finley, Mary McDonald-Rissanen, and Claire Campbell.
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Kristie Collins’s tribute from Japan:
Growing up in Prince Edward Island in the 1980s, Montgomery’s creations were simply woven into our everyday lives. We sang songs from Anne: The Musical in music class, went to Rainbow Valley for end-of-year school trips, and swooned over Anne and Gilbert in the Anne of Green Gables miniseries on television. Never in my wildest dreams, though, could I have imagined her work becoming inextricably linked to my own, decades later, on the other side of the planet. Indeed, if my grandmother – who also taught in the same one-room schoolhouse where Montgomery had taught years before – had told me that one day I’d be teaching Anne of Green Gables to university students in Japan, publishing papers on her ‘spirited single’ female characters, and hosting an international Montgomery studies conference at my university, I’d never have believed her. And truth be told, it still astounds and delights me.
Kristie Collins is currently an Associate Professor in the Faculty of Foreign Studies at Reitaku University, Japan, but forever an Islander in her heart.
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Gracie Finley’s tribute from the UK:
Lucy Maud Montgomery has been a part of my life for as long as I can remember. I have very early memories of being read the Anne books, snug under a blanket, listening to the beautiful language and imagining the fields and shores and picturing that wonderful little girl. Little did I realise that a decade later I would be inside the soul of that girl, finding her voice, her depths and her joys. Playing Anne was truly a gift, a chance to introduce people to the magical, timeless quality of Montgomery’s stories, and for those who already were acquainted with her writing, a chance to reconnect once again to the spirit and beauty of the Island.
Thank you, Maud, for the world you created for all of us. It has been an honour to speak her words and dwell in Green Gables.
Gracie Finley is an Island actor best known for her portrayal of Anne Shirley at Confederation Centre of the Arts. To date, she holds the record for years played, for being the youngest actor to have played Anne at the Centre, and the oldest! She has lived in the UK for the past thirty years but returns to her PEI home every year to work and be nourished by her Island.
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Mary McDonald-Rissanen’s tribute from Finland:
Happy 150th Birthday!
As an Islander I always knew of our pride in our famous Lucy Maud Montgomery, but when I left the Island to live elsewhere, I became increasingly aware that she was truly a much appreciated literary icon. Everyday encounters with Finns, whose literacy rate soars beyond most other nations, led to my more profound appreciation of Montgomery. PEI’s landscapes echoed back to me by Montgomery’s Finnish readers drove me to study the impact of place and identity. With my research and publication on other PEI women, I realized that they too expressed their relationship with their home place in rather idiosyncratic ways through autobiographic acts and performances.
Montgomery has been a point of departure for many Finnish readers. Many significant publications on Montgomery have emerged from these readers and many more will come as Montgomery continues to be widely circulated in our libraries.
Mary McDonald-Rissanen is author of In the Interval of the Wave – Prince Edward Island Women’s Nineteenth- and Early Twentieth-Century Life Writing (2014) and Choosing the Island “through the warp and woof of time”: Women Who Made Twentieth-Century Prince Edward Island Their Home (2021).
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Claire Campbell’s tribute from the USA:
For the past ten years I have lived in a small town in central Pennsylvania. (You can’t buy twenty pounds of brown sugar at the hardware store, but it’s that kind of place.) It’s nice enough, but it isn’t home.
As someone who grew up in Toronto – attended a girls’ school – and then went east, I was probably fated to identify with Jane Stuart, Jane of Lantern Hill. I wasn’t born on the Island; I can’t make jam; and I was born decades too late to take the train from Union Station across on the Tormentine ferry. But I thrill to mornings on the Island and long for its sea winds, and just like Jane, I live through being away by never really being away: “Because in a very real sense Jane was still living on the Island.” I may live here, but I am there.
I’m glad that L.M. Montgomery understood how that feels.
Claire Campbell is a double expatriate, a Canadian living in the United States and an Upper Canadian-born who misses the Maritimes.
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Next week we will be celebrating International Women’s Day.