Reading L.M. Montgomery: What Adult Swedish and Canadian Readers Told Us

This article provides an international comparison of the role of reading L.M Montgomery in the lives of adult leisure readers in Sweden and Canada. Our analysis of open-ended qualitative interviews with Canadian readers and written accounts submitted by Swedish readers focuses on ten themes, all linked by the powerful current of emotion evoked in avid Montgomery readers.

was enjoyable was dangerous," although she admitted it might be somewhat permissible to read improving non-fiction.7 A small but growing body of work focuses on the experience of reading fiction for pleasure and on the importance of such reading in the lives of readers. Recent decades have turned cultural theory toward recognizing the affective dimension in the reception process. One of the strongest advocates of this turn is Rita Felski, who, in her influential study Uses of Literature (2009), champions a positive and embracing aesthetics, in contrast with what she considers the aesthetic narrowness that occurs when critics focus exclusively on critical reading and are blind to the heterogeneous ways in which readers engage with a literary text. Felski argues the motives for reading are manifold, and they all deserve recognition, whether they stem from a desire for knowledge or for a longing to escape.8 The work of reader-response theorists such as Felski as well as groundbreaking empirical studies with everyday readers, such as Janice Radway's Reading the Romance (1984), are changing the way pleasure reading is looked upon in scholarly research in a number of disciplines including literary studies, library and information science, histoire du livre, and psychology.9 Through a range of disciplinary lenses, reading researchers have examined the various roles that leisure reading serves in the lives of readers: from enhancing self-understanding to gaining cognitive insights to fostering empathy with others. For example, work on leisure reading and empathy by the research group led by Toronto cognitive psychologists Keith Oatley and Raymond Mar supports claims commonly expressed by readers who say that they become the characters they read about. 10 Our study joins the body of interdisciplinary work that examines pleasure reading in everyday readers' lives. Unlike reception and reader-response theorists such as Jonathan Culler, Stanley Fish, Wolfgang Iser, Hans Robert Jauss, and others, we are interested in living, breathing readers and their reported reading experiences, not in implied readers as inferred from a critic's close examination of the text. For researchers studying such actual readers, Louise Rosenblatt's classic text Literature as Exploration (1938) offers a useful theoretical framework of reading as a transaction between an active reader and a text. As Rosenblatt puts it, the reader "brings to the work personality traits, memories of past events, present needs and preoccupations, a particular mood of the moment, and a particular physical condition. These and many other elements, in a never-to-be duplicated combination, determine his response to the peculiar contribution of the text."11 To understand reading experience, situated as it is in the lives of readers, we needed to collect stories of reading that are rich in details and contextualized, as much as possible, in the reader's life. We used qualitative research methods to elicit these accounts-open-ended interviews with the Canadian readers and open-ended written statements from the Swedish readers. We did not ask them to respond to researcher-generated questions, standardized across all readers. Instead, we gave our readers an invitation to talk about or write about whatever aspect of reading Montgomery was important and salient to them. Our Canadian and Swedish readers generously told us stories about their Montgomery reading. In presenting and analyzing these accounts from readers, our intention is to give a starring role to the voices of readers. Accordingly, in the analysis that follows, we quote freely from these voices in order to provide a grounded discussion of the range of ways in which Montgomery fans from two countries respond to and remember her novels.

Two Nations Reading Montgomery, Two Methods of Data Collection
Empirical studies of pleasure readers can be sorted according to the methods used to collect the data. The largest body of such research uses researcher-generated, standardized survey questions administered to large national samples of readers, randomly chosen. These demographic studies typically define a "reader" as someone who has in the past six months voluntarily read a book, in whole or in part, that was not required for work or study. Once readers are sorted from non-book readers, researchers can correlate participation in reading with age, gender, race, level of education, income, library use, book purchasing, and other variables.
Because of their large sample size and random selection, these associations can be generalized to the larger population from which the sample was drawn. Such studies are useful in providing the big picture on voluntary reading because they can be used to make statistically significant generalizations about who reads what kinds of materials for how many minutes a day in what part of the world.12 But for a more fine-grained exploration of reading experience, researchers typically use qualitative interviews or open-ended reader accounts, which are then analyzed for patterns of significance that emerge from the data. In some studies, researchers ask readers to respond in a laboratory setting to the same assigned text, a research strategy that facilitates comparisons of subjects' responses but sacrifices the element of reader choice, which is at the heart of genuine pleasure reading. The studies reported here of Swedish and Canadian Montgomery readers belong in this small group of qualitative, empirical reading studies, in which the material is chosen by the reader and is read for pleasure, not assigned by the researcher.
Comparable studies of readers in different countries who have voluntarily read the same material are especially rare. But because so many readers across generations and nations have found Montgomery books deeply meaningful in their lives, we have been able to elicit the responses of many, many readers in Sweden and Canada who have read the same materials-the Anne books , the Emily books (1923)(1924)(1925)(1926)(1927), The Blue Castle, and others. The comparison benefits from the fortunate circumstance that books by Montgomery  Anne's personality that caught you? What has this reading experience given you?
The reason the call focused on Anne of Green Gables was that it is the most wellknown of Montgomery's books in Sweden, but the wording did not deter respondents from mentioning other Montgomery books, and they did, particularly the other Anne books and the Emily books. Warnqvist got 303 responses from readers, mostly from girls and women, with the majority born in the 1940s, 1950s, and 1960s. As was to be expected with a book that has been in print for a hundred years, the responses came from readers of different ages. The youngest among them was twelve years old, only recently introduced to Anne, whereas the oldest would soon turn ninety-three. A few of the letters were written by men, and many women and girls who responded included descriptions of brothers, fathers, sons, and other men in their lives who also read and enjoyed Anne of Green Gables. The responses, received both in letter and electronic format, ranged from a few paragraphs to richly detailed accounts as long as ten pages. The responses often mixed childhood memories with adult readers' reflections on the significance of reading and rereading Montgomery over a lifetime.
Because the Swedish readers had more time to consider their responses than is usually the case in a face-to-face interview, some chose to enrich their narratives with various graphic supplements: scans or photographs of their own copies of the books, hand-drawn illustrations of scenes in the books, and various other photographs, linked in one way or another to the readers' experience of reading Anne or Emily. Submitted photographs included one of a large tree growing in a reader's backyard (her Snow Queen), a picture of a reader reading Anne of Green Gables as a child in 1959, and various snapshots taken on readers' trips to Prince Edward Island.

The Canadian Study
To investigate the experience of reading for pleasure among Canadian readers, Catherine Ross used open-ended, qualitative interviews conducted with adults who are avid readers and who read for pleasure. In successive offerings over three decades of her course on reading in the Master of Library and Information Science program at Western, Ross and her graduate students have conducted 302 interviews with avid readers. The purpose of these interviews was to find out how readers themselves experience reading for pleasure. Interviewers were asked to pick the most committed pleasure readers they knew who were willing to be interviewed and to conduct with their chosen interviewee an open-ended, exploratory, and conversational interview. As a framework, interviewers were given a list of questions but were encouraged to listen closely to what readers said, to follow up on themes introduced by the interviewees themselves, and to focus generally on aspects of the reading experience that were relevant to the particular reader. The first question was, "What's the first thing that you can remember about your reading, either that you read yourself or that was read to you?" Then interviewers moved forward chronologically to the present, using open-ended probes such as, "What did you read next?", "What do you remember about it?", and "Why did that book make such an impact?" Interviewers asked, among other questions, the following: What would you say is the role of reading in your life? None of these 302 readers was asked specifically about reading L.M. Montgomery or any other specific author, unless the interviewee introduced the author into the conversation. However, when encouraged to talk about reading that was important to them, almost one fifth of the female readers spontaneously mentioned one or more works by Montgomery. As was the case with Warnqvist's readers, the Canadian readers typically first encountered Montgomery when they were growing up, and a great many reported reading and rereading favourite Montgomery books throughout adulthood.
In addition to these general interviews with avid readers, Ross conducted more focused, open-ended interviews with five self-reported Montgomery fans specifically in order to collect data for her L.M. Montgomery and Reading conference talk. These five interviewees were chosen because they had read (and reread) Montgomery.
They were asked the following questions, together with follow-up probes: How would you describe yourself as a reader?
What was your introduction to LMM books? What did you read first, next, next, Anonymity was promised to all the interviewees in both sets of interviews, and, therefore, code names are used in quoted excerpts from the transcribed interviews.

Something about the Readers
With few exceptions, the readers in both the Canadian and the Swedish study who self-identified as Montgomery readers were girls and women and well educated, many having graduate degrees in fields associated with reading and writing. Most had read their first Montgomery book in their youth, usually between ages nine and fourteen, although some had first encountered Montgomery as an adult. Many reported reading and rereading Montgomery books over a lifetime, sometimes returning to a favourite book during the same season every year or during a critical life event, such as when writing exams, undergoing stressful medical treatment, or right after a child was born. Most readers fell within the age range of thirty-five to seventy-five at the time they submitted reading accounts or the interviews were conducted, with a somewhat wider age range in the Swedish study than in the Canadian study. (See above.) The participants in our two studies were definitely not a random, representative sample of the population at large. When large national surveys in Canada and the U.S. ask, "Have you read a book for pleasure, in part or in whole, during the past six months?" typically only fifty to sixty per cent answer "Yes," with some fifteen to twenty per cent of the population falling into the category of "frequent readers. "15 In Sweden, about seventy per cent of the population claim to have read books during an average month, thirty-six per cent on an average day. 16 The readers in our study, by contrast, were all people for whom reading played an important role in their lives-that is why they self-selected to answer a solicitation for readers of Montgomery or were chosen to be interviewed. In a nutshell, the readers who participated in our two studies were at the high end of reading engagement. These readers are important because they disproportionately buy books, borrow books, give books as gifts, read books, collect books, talk about books, join book clubs, and keep friends and family members within the community of readers. Because of the way we chose the participants of our two studies, we cannot make claims about Canadian and Swedish readers in general. Instead, we have analyzed the many stories, voluntarily told to us by Montgomery readers, and we share some common patterns and themes that emerge.
The different collection methods for the Canadian and Swedish accounts have produced some differences in the types of inferences that we have been able to draw from each data set. The subset of the 302 Canadian interviewees who described Montgomery reading as important discussed that reading in the context of their larger engagement with pleasure reading. Therefore, from the Canadian data, we have been able to tease out ways in which the Montgomery readers resemble each other and differ from other pleasure readers, and we describe some of this variation below. By contrast, because all of the Swedish readers responding to the solicitation were asked to discuss their Montgomery reading, the Swedish material allows for a close and intense examination of patterns of reading Montgomery but does not situate that reading within the context of readers' reading as a whole. In the overview of our readers that follows, we start with a bigpicture look at Montgomery reading within the context of pleasure reading in general. Then, we narrow the focus and describe patterns of engagement of Montgomery readers, with an introduction to some key themes found in the Swedish data related to reading Montgomery.

Pleasure Readers
What did Ross find out from the 302 avid Canadian readers about pleasure reading in general? In short, pleasure readers vary greatly along a number of dimensions:17 Some readers look for "safe" books. Many readers said there are times they want a book that can be counted on not to give them any nasty surprises. On the other hand, horror fans seek out books that provide the intense effects of fear and menace-the more unsafe the better. Avid readers of horror describe a successful book as "one that can scare me," although they acknowledge that hardly any are scary enough.
Some reread books, whereas others say that there are so many new, unread books out there that they cannot afford the time to reread. Some are voracious readers who have many books on the go at the same time.
They describe themselves as omnivores who read everything at all levels of literary prestige and difficulty, from genre books to classics and demanding literary fiction, sometimes simultaneously. Others, by contrast, are very selective readers who read only "important books." These discriminating readers may dedicate themselves for an entire summer to reading, say, nothing but Roberto Bolaño's 2666 or David Foster Wallace's Infinite Jest. They are apt to say that the real question is not whether challenging books are worth the time spent but whether unchallenging books are worth the time wasted reading them.18 Some read mostly fiction for pleasure, while others say they never read fiction because they want to read only about "real things." Some want to read about characters in circumstances that are recognizable and resemble their own. Others want to read about lives they have never lived and experiences that are quite unlike their own.
Perhaps not surprisingly, the Montgomery readers in the Canadian study turned out to have much in common with each other-and at the same time to differ from clusters of non-Montgomery readers, who described very different patterns of choosing and experiencing books for leisure reading. First, on the five dimensions just described, Montgomery readers say they deliberately seek out "safe books," especially during stressful times in their lives. Second, they definitely reread-some say that they have read The Blue Castle ten times or that they read the entire Anne series from beginning to end and then start over. Third and fourth, Montgomery readers tend to be voracious omnivores, who read everything but especially value fiction for the way it can convey embodied truths. These readers reject as snobbish and hierarchical the idea that people should limit themselves to classics and canonical books and say that they themselves read "anything and everything," but only books they love. To those who say life is too short to read "unimportant books," omnivores retort that life is too short to read books you are not enjoying. 19 And, fifth, Montgomery readers enjoy the way the worlds of Anne and Emily are recognizable, but also magicked to be more intense and special than the readers' everyday world. Most importantly, Montgomery fans tend not to like books that try to distance them from the central characters. What they enjoy is the sense that the stories about Anne or Emily and the rest are really "secretly about me." Book cover of The Blue Castle. 1926. Kindred Spaces. 849 BC-HSYJ .

Readers
As noted, the Swedish readers were invited to focus on their experience with Anne of Green Gables and with Montgomery generally, not to comment upon their leisure reading as a whole. In this section, we provide an overview of some overarching patterns and themes related to reading Montgomery in Sweden. Despite differences in emphasis in the readers' accounts, certain themes turned up again and again in the Swedish written submissions (and also, as it turned out, in the Canadian interview material).
The Swedish readers wrote about how the Montgomery books had touched and influenced them-how meeting Anne Shirley and her world was an experience out of the ordinary. In the book series, the long span of Anne's life from childhood, education, development as a teacher, marriage, and motherhood has allowed a diversity of readers-young and old, men and women-to connect episodes in the book series with significant elements in their own lives. When Anne of Green Gables was first published in the U.S. in 1908, it was not specifically marketed to a young audience. Prime ministers and renowned writers as well as young girls and boys all read and enjoyed it.20 By contrast, when Anne of Green Gables was published in Sweden for the first time in 1909, the book was marketed as a novel aimed at young adults. Ever since, it has repeatedly been described on book covers and in reviews as a young adult novel or girls' story.21 But, although it is true that most Swedish readers first meet Anne at a young age, the book continues to be popular among readers of all ages. The Kevin Sullivan TV adaptation in the mid-1980s served to introduce Anne to a wider audience. Broadcast on Swedish television on several occasions, the TV series expanded the book's popularity and recruited new fans of Anne in Sweden as it did in Canada.
Not surprisingly, given the initial Swedish call for submissions, many readers Montgomery's depictions of the natural landscape, admired her spot-on character portrayals, and recalled memorable expressions they had adopted for their own conversational use, such as being "in the depths of despair" or finding a "kindred spirit." Many described rereading Montgomery's novels, some every year and some as many as twenty or thirty times over a lifetime. Readers reported they notice new things every time they reread the books, identifying with different characters depending on their own age at the time of reading.
Readers commented in particular on the deep impression made by Anne herself. A picture emerges of Anne as a character who invites readers to make intensely felt connections between the fictional world of Anne and their own everyday lives.
Readers reported strong emotions inspired by each rereading. Emphasizing how vividly Anne is portrayed, readers described how they were able to immerse The Swedish readers also reported experiences with Montgomery books that extended beyond the literary work itself. In particular, readers described the importance of the books themselves as physical objects, with Anne books passing from generation to generation and eventually becoming family treasures. Copies were kept despite burn marks and threadbare spines. Bookbinders were commissioned to rebind older family members' tattered copies. In short, the work meant so much to many families that the utmost was done to keep the copies as intact as possible, ready to be cherished by new generations. In this way, Anne of Green Gables, thanks to its long publishing history, became a bridge between generations and a link between daughters, mothers, and grandmothers.24

Emergent Themes on Reading Montgomery
We examined the statements provided by Canadian and Swedish readers, and, after a back-and-forth process of comparison, winnowing out, addition, and refinement, we ended up with a set of ten key themes. In the sections below, we illustrate each theme with quoted statements from Canadian or Swedish readers or both. For any particular theme, many examples occur in our data sets, ranging from very brief statements to elaborated narratives. In choosing our illustrative quotations, we have picked those cases that provide the most detailed and contextualized versions of the theme, irrespective of whether the reader was Canadian or Swedish. We found a strong similarity in the responses between the two groups of readers, even in their expressions of very personal insights. This finding is strengthened by the triangulation, or convergence, in our data provided by the two different methods of data collection used to elicit reader statements in the two studies. This convergence is apparent, despite the different marketing targets (readers of all ages in North America, young adults in Sweden) and changes and abridgements done to the translation to accommodate a younger audience.25 One general observation is that In the following sections, for each of the ten central themes that emerged from our analysis, we provide quoted statements from our readers as the basis for drawing out implications for understanding the reading experience of committed  Here is Gillian, a Canadian reader who described Anne of Green Gables as "a landmark in my childhood reading." As Gillian told the story, she was nine years old and a Brownie (the junior level in the Girl Guide movement). To win her Brownie reader's badge, she had to read a book chosen from a "pretty long list of books" provided by Brown Owl, the Brownie leader. Gillian picked Anne of Green Gables because it was the first book on the list-it started with A.

1) The Inaugural Book
When I got it-I borrowed it from the library-I discovered that it was a thick book.
And furthermore it had small print and not much white space and many, many chapters. So at first I was really, really intimidated by that book because: how on earth was I going to read this? Maybe I would never get my reader's badge, even though I loved reading. I kept thinking about how hard it was going to be to read this book. But it became less hard, because Anne is such a wonderful child. And it was an orphan story, and orphan stories were a particular favorite of mine. I got caught up in the life . … It was the story itself that took me along. You get to live with Anne. You get to live inside her head. … And the materiality of the book at the time, I see now as an adult, was also really important to me. It was substantial. I remember thinking: "Well, I did it! I did it! I finished this book! And I got my reader's badge!" … The book was so big and thick that by the end I actually had had a lot of practice with that level of writing. It was part of that sense of accomplishment. I, as a small gap-toothed girl with red hair, had always dreamed of long, curly, blonde princess hair. Freckles were hardly a desirable attribute for a princess, and though I found Pippi Longstocking crazy and funny, she was hardly a realistic role model for a tiny carrot like myself. Anne, "Anne with an E," was a different matter.
She became my very first role model. Not just because of the hair, it was more of a common denominator reminding me that we were kindred spirits of the same disposition. No, I remember suddenly being prouder than ever of the fact that I read so much. Because so did my heroine. (Linda Karlsson Eldh, born in 1980, translator/freelance writer) Another Swedish reader, Karin, was in the fourth or fifth grade in a small village school in northern Sweden in the early 1950s when she first met Anne. As with Gillian and Linda, the introduction came about not through a family member but through a teacher. While the boys were being taught woodworking, the girls were given weekly lessons in needlework, "crocheting pot-holders, cross-stitching or knitting socks." Their sewing practice sometimes was enlivened when the needlework teacher read them a story: One day she had brought a rather thick book with a girl with red hair on the cover, and she began to read to her very attentive audience about Anne, Matthew, and Many readers say that in childhood a particular landmark book marked the transition from one kind of reading to another. "That was the first chapter book I read on my own," they might say, or "This was the first book that made me understand that through reading I could be transported to other amazing worlds." It is notable that these three readers described their landmark book, Anne of Green Gables, in strikingly similar terms as "big and thick ... with small print," as a "thick book," a "heavy book," "a rather thick book"-in short, a challenge to novice readers. All three of these quoted readers recognized in Anne of Green Gables something qualitatively different from any other book they had ever experienced.
Gillian sensed that it was "a much more serious book" than other books, such as the Enid Blyton adventure stories. Linda recalled that the Anne book "devoured" her in manner unmatched by other books she had read with young female protagonists.
For these readers, the experience of encountering this landmark book was described as a combination of elements that together explained its impact: the challenge posed by the "thick book"; the sense of pride and achievement in reading this substantial book; the breakthrough in one's identity as a reader as one moves to a new level of reading and accepts the invitation to go through "the door to literature"; the association of the desire to "read and read and read" with the compellingly immersive nature of story; the recognition that reading Anne was a rite of passage into becoming a reader; and the sense that this identity as a reader was reinforced by the book's representation of Anne herself as an avid reader.
Gillian makes some of these links explicit: "So it was such a significant book, first because it was a major accomplishment to get through it but then there was the growing understanding that this was a really good story." By the end, Gillian's identity as a real reader was confirmed-with a reader's badge and with her own strong response to the compelling power of story. She had joined the club of people who know themselves to be readers. Similarly, in characterizing Anne as her "very first role model," Linda was "suddenly ... prouder than ever of the fact that I read so much" because, she said, "so did my heroine."

2) The Series Effect
An unmistakable theme repeated by both Canadian and Swedish readers is the drive to read all the books in the Anne series, or all the Emily books, or all Montgomery books translated into Swedish28. A commonly stated element in both sets of data was the readers' sense of excited anticipation when they discovered there were more books. Here is a Canadian reader, Renée, who was in grade three when she first read Anne of Green Gables. She said that that book "sort of started [me] off." Renée described how she would ask for, and get, books as Christmas gifts. She said, "I used to get 9 or 10 books for Christmas, so I used to spend all Christmas day sitting in this corner reading all these books ... I read all the Anne books, Emily of New Moon, Pat of Silver Bush, and all the individual ones. It was just about two years ago I finally found A Tangled Web."

R:
Have you ever read A Tangled Web?29

I:
No, I haven't, but I have it.

R:
And you haven't read it?! Oh my God! I looked for that book for twenty years, They gobbled up five or ten or fifteen books in the series until suddenly they stopped, having discovered that the books were "all the same." As readers, they had moved on. But many Montgomery fans continue to read Montgomery books throughout their lives. They do not leave Anne, Emily, or the others behind. Why?
Readers say they reread Montgomery because the books remain unchanged-"old friends" or "old reliables" that you can count on. And, paradoxically, the books are also described as different-every time you reread them, you see something different that you had not noticed before. The books have the winning mix of the familiar and the new that keeps readers rereading. Here is an explanation from Evelyn, whose reading is featured in theme four on reading Montgomery as a link between generations: To read a book from the perspective of a child is one thing, but to read it as an adult Swedish reader Maj described how the books changed for her, following her own progression, as she read over a lifetime the editions published in 1920 that had originally belonged to her mother: Anne has followed me through life, from the age of ten.

I:
Typically when might you decide to reread an LMM book?

R:
When I'm trying to connect the narrative of my life and make sense of my

4) Link among Generations
When books such as Anne of Green Gables are beloved by readers for over a hundred years, they become a bridge across generations. Reading Montgomery can be a family affair, in which the parent or grandparent, aunt or uncle explicitly initiates the child into Montgomery reading, sometimes by giving a new gift book and sometimes by passing on an old tattered copy that belonged to a mother or grandmother. Warnqvist has noted that in the accounts from Swedish readers many emphasize that two, three, or even four generations of women in the same family have read the Anne series.37 Mothers and grandmothers share the ways in which Montgomery's novels have been important to them, and also express a wish to introduce the novels to their daughters and granddaughters. Swedish and Canadian readers equally report on collections of Montgomery books, carefully preserved and lovingly handed on to a younger generation of readers.
In Evelyn's case, reading Montgomery was definitely a family affair. When she was four-and-a-half, her sister, who is three years older, taught her to read, after which Evelyn became a voracious and omnivorous reader. She described herself as a "constant reader" of Montgomery. Evelyn's mother and her aunt had read Montgomery as the books were being published. When Evelyn's aunt was ten years old, she wrote to Montgomery to say how much she enjoyed the books. Evelyn reported that Montgomery "wrote back this gracious little response, saying how pleased she was to have heard from her, how she wished her the very best." Evelyn's mother made sure that her own two daughters had all the Montgomery books, and she read these books to them aloud as bedtime stories, well beyond the years when they began to be able to read for themselves. Evelyn and her sister, between them, received the full suite of Montgomery books as gifts to mark special events such as passing to the next grade in school. Then when Evelyn was eleven, she and her sister were taken to Cavendish as part of a family visit to Prince Edward Island. As adults, Evelyn and her sister split the family Montgomery collection between them. To fill in the gaps in the divided collection, her mother, described as

5) Being Shaped by Childhood Reading
There is a back-and-forth movement between the reader's everyday world and the world of the book. Readers bring to their reading understandings and preoccupations from their own lives. But then they take things from their reading which shape their view of the world and of human relationships. Often readers said that reading the right book at the right time gave them an insight into their own life and helped them make a decision or resolve a problem or take a course of action.
(See also theme three, above. Accounts from both Swedish and Canadian readers include many varied ways in which reading Montgomery shaped their lives: for example, choosing teaching as a career as Anne did; deciding to be a writer like Emily; play-acting the friendship of Anne and Diana with their own friends; self-consciously paying attention to natural beauty in their own environment and making explicit connections with the Lake of Shining Waters or the Snow Queen or the Wind Woman (see theme ten); seeking out "kindred spirits"; and so on. One Swedish reader reported finding "orphaned, brave, and creative girls and young women of girls' fiction irresistible," and that, of all the creators of spunky female heroines, Montgomery was her favourite: "There is so much more to say, but the most important aspect of my relationship with

6) "I Wanted to Be Anne"
Now we come to the very heart of the matter: the intimacy of the connection readers feel to a Montgomery character. Both Canadian and Swedish readers reported various efforts to become that character, to be as close to her as possible. Another Swedish reader, Margareta Swerre, reported that when she was a twelve- year-old on holiday with her family in the small Swedish town Osby, her mother said that she could pick out a book to buy. In the bookshop, she was looking at the Jill series books when her mother saw Anne of Green Gables and said, "We'll take it." Upset that she hadn't been allowed to pick out a book herself, Margareta started reading somewhat reluctantly at first. But then: I think it was the first time I "devoured" a book. I met someone who was like me! I found a language that didn't exist in my family, but in me. I found someone who and so on. Notably the readers quoted in this section use similar images and metaphors to capture the sense of intimacy they yearn for: "slipped inside me, became my shadow, my companion, and my very own secret"; "become one with a literary character"; "the need to get as close to Anne as possible"; "someone who was like me ... just like me"; "a key to my own, inner world"; "gave me a dream world to visit that mirrored reality with love"; "they became one-my world and Anne's." Going well beyond the claim that a particular character became a role model for making a choice or a decision, these readers seek identity and oneness.
They report wanting to be like Anne because they admire her spunk, her imagination, her loving nature, and her goodness. (See theme seven).
But there is another aspect to this desire for closeness. Because there is "a little bit of orphan in each of us," as Joseph Gold remarks in Read for Your Life,44 reading Anne offers hope that, by being Anne, the readers may share in her happy ending.
Eleonora said, "In a world that wasn't always safe, I could relate to her longing to have a home and to belong somewhere. ...
[I]t made me feel hopeful: things had turned out well for Anne, so I would probably be fine, too." Margareta, who has provided a foster home for children of broken families, said she may have been "inspired by how Anne, feeling unloved, came to a home where she was accepted and loved." And Inga, a foster child herself, demonstrated how a book may be "crucial, heartening at a particular stage in a person's life" when she described how her world and Anne's world "became one."

7) "L.M. Montgomery Brought Us Up": The Anne Effect
The decision to interview Eunice was clinched when she remarked, "My sister and I always say that L.M. Montgomery brought us up." During the interview, Eunice explained that, for her and for her sister, who is younger by two years, "the Anne books were a sentimental and moral education," which she defined as an expansion in "one's sensibility; what you notice, what you feel about people; one's capacity for empathy." Eunice described herself as the oldest daughter in a family with "a very unhappy mother, too many kids [six, one of whom died at birth], and a father who was the kindest person possible but who was feckless and who couldn't handle money." She said, "So [Avonlea] was a different world from the world of our her. But I probably didn't formulate that. I didn't say, "I'm going to read this book because it's going to make me sentimentally more empathetic and morally more wanting to be good." But I did grow up with that sense that I should be doing good.
... So Anne was lovable and she was loving. It was just this-and maybe you attribute it to romance as a genre-but it was the world. I longed for that world. Historically children's literature has quite often been written to make children "good"-to be obedient, to be pious, to carry out their duties diligently, to be neat, and so on. But when Eunice says that Montgomery brought her up, along with her sister, and gave them both a "sentimental and moral education," she meant something different. Anne provided a moral education and training in empathy not because she was a model of decorum, but because she wasn't. Instead "Anne was lovable and she was loving," and she inspires readers in general to want to be more loving and more kind. As Eunice puts it, despite "having peccadilloes and wreaking havoc on small levels," Anne helps people be their best selves: "She always brought about transformations in people." Eunice explicitly links Anne's being both good and loving to the existence of an innocent world of romance, which is described in the next theme.

8) "L.M. Montgomery Trained Me in Romance"
The impact of reading and rereading a beloved author may go beyond the localized influences to shape a reader's entire world view. Evelyn-the reader whose aunt

I:
So in a nutshell, what is that narrative?

R:
The narrative is the creation of a world which is similar to our own, but better.
And the characters are recognizable going all the way back to fairy tales and all the way forward into popular movies. ... It's that world in which things are just slightly magicked from one's own real humdrum existence in Saskatoon, Saskatchewan. PEI just seemed like this magical place. You could see the beauty through Anne's eyes. This is where we all identified with Anne. We were sure that we had that magic sight. ... I believe that this is the Canadian narrative, the Canadian story. It is fundamentally to imagine a better world than the one in which we are currently dwelling. (Retired professor of English, age 64) Different readers are attracted to stories with very specific and particular appeals, shaped and patterned in particular ways to produce particular effects in their readers. Horror fans, as noted earlier, seek out books that scare them. By contrast, Montgomery fans choose to read and reread her books because they want to live for a while in a chosen fictional world that is happier, more gracious, more loving, and more interesting than their own everyday world. When Evelyn talked about romance patterns and the creation of a fictional world better than our own, she was closer to the heart's desire than is our everyday world. When readers choose to read or reread Montgomery, they get to live for a while in this "magical place," whose beauty is seen through the eyes of an imaginative child. (See theme ten on nature.)

9) A Sense of Place
Some books stamp in our memories an indelible sense of place. 46  expressed enthusiasm over what we have called the "series effect," described multiple rereadings of their favourite Montgomery books, and pointed to a strong female reading tradition and a female reading context.54 Both sets of readers emphasized how they had been shaped in numerous ways by their reading of Montgomery's novels. They said that they wanted to get as close as possible to Anne or Emily and that they tried in their own lives to emulate the courage, goodness, kindness, love of nature, vivid imagination, and ambition to write that they saw represented by Montgomery characters. In short, the concordance between the responses of the Swedish and Canadian readers is striking. The similarities are undeniable, despite the different marketing strategies used in the two countries to recruit readers (initially the target audiences for Montgomery books were readers of all ages in North America and young adults in Sweden) and despite the two different methods we used in our study to solicit the reading experiences from readers.
Although we have discussed the ten emergent themes separately and one at a time, it is inescapably the case that, in the readers' experience, these themes are inextricably linked. In one way or another, all ten themes are connected by a powerful current of emotion, the quoted examples illustrating reading experiences remembered for their emotional impact. We know that different kinds of readers do variously seek out books with strong emotional effects-books that arouse anger over the world's corruption and inequity, books that cause readers' hearts to race in suspense, books that fill readers with a menacing sense of dread, and so on. Kannas comes to similar conclusions in her analysis of the responses of Finnish readers to Montgomery.59 She makes the case that there is "something deeply emotion-driven in Montgomery's books that permeates the [readers'] accounts of reading them" and gives the readers "such a close relationship with them that reading becomes an emotional experience." She summarizes that "it is not the content of the text but the long relationship the readers have with the books and the characters that matter the most in establishing the emotional effect."60 To illustrate this "long relationship," we give the last word to a Swedish reader, Solveig Thun Johansson (born in 1936, retired), who in her reading experience gave perhaps the best example of the depth of the emotional connection that a reader can feel to a Montgomery book. It is not her own story she tells, but a story told to her by a family friend about a woman who turned to Montgomery during a terminal illness.
Knowing that she was dying, this woman chose to spend her last days listening to her husband reading the Anne books: The wife had been ill for a long time, and eventually she was too weak to read. Her husband would read her magazines and books. But towards the end, all she wanted him to read to her were the Anne books, and he read them to her many times, and listening to these well-known stories from her childhood and adolescence made her calm and relaxed. Returning to those settings made her feel safe.

About the Authors:
Catherine Sheldrick Ross