‘Anne of Green Gables’ recognized as heritage document in UN agency’s registry

CAVENDISH, P.E.I. — The manuscript for the novel “Anne of Green Gables” has been added to a United Nations registry that highlights Canadian heritage, further celebrating the novel’s legacy on an international stage.

The work by Lucy Maud Montgomery has been included in the Canada Memory of the World Register, an archive administered by the Canadian Commission for UNESCO, in honour of the author’s 150th birthday. Included in the registry are 475 handwritten pages by Montgomery and an additional 96 pages of her notes that record additions to the celebrated text.

Montgomery was born on Prince Edward Island on Nov. 30, 1874, and drew inspiration from her childhood home in the town of Cavendish for the setting of the novel.

Since it was published in 1908, “Anne of Green Gables,” which recounts the adventures and shenanigans of an 11-year-old red-haired orphan, has drawn thousands of tourists to the Island each year.

Alan MacEachern, a history professor at Western University in London, Ont., and author of the recently released book “Becoming Green Gables,” says he’s pleased the manuscript is being recognized.

“The manuscript itself is just lovely. It’s a woman of a century ago putting together her first novel and you can see all the effort, all the changes, you can see the revisions that are going into it as they’re going along,” MacEachern said in a Friday phone interview.

The registry is just one of the ways that the novel’s status as a fixture of Canadiana has been confirmed.

The work itself received almost immediate acclaim and drew people from around the world to P.E.I. after it was released. Almost 30 years later, a farmhouse that belonged to Montgomery’s cousins, known as “Green Gables,” and the surrounding land was turned into a national park.

Montgomery’s text also brings roughly 200,000 visitors a year to the province as visitors seek to experience the landscape her characters inhabited, according to MacEachern.

One of the remarkable things about the text, MacEachern added, is the story keeps getting reinvented in new ways. He said at various points since its first publication the tale seemed to have had a “good run,” only for the story to be reimagined for a new generation.

Kevin Sullivan’s 1985 film of the same name and the 2017 TV series “Anne with An ‘E’” are examples he listed.

Montgomery’s novel has also been translated into more than 36 languages worldwide and has a particularly large following in Japan.

The cover of one early translation depicted Anne as a blond girl, making her a “representation for the West” for the Japanese public, MacEachern said.

MacEachern, who grew up on the Island himself, remembers seeing a Japanese film crew shooting a scene from the novel in front of his house when he was young.

“You always felt growing up that ‘Green Gables’ was a very local story, but it was also of such international appeal,” he said. “It’s given the Island a certain definition that has continued remarkably for over a century.”

This report by The Canadian Press was first published Nov. 29, 2024.

— By Cassidy McMackon in Halifax.

The Canadian Press