Visit the Anne of Green Gables Centenary Website
Anne of Green Gables: A Literary Icon at 100 was presented on the occasion of the centenary anniversary of the publication of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s iconic novel Anne of Green Gables. Curated by Dr. Irene Gammel, the exhibit tour is organized by Ryerson University’s Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre with the support of the Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council of Canada.
The exhibition assembles in panels images selected from a treasure of new visual sources such as portraits, photographs, daguerreotypes, manuscripts, magazine advertisements, cover art, and posters. A short documentary produced in the Modern Literature and Culture Research Centre accompanies the visual panels.
The narrative told in the exhibition is based on new research that presents the many faces of Anne as Maud pieced them together in 1905. For the first time, viewers are able to see how the iconic character was influenced by Maud’s reading of glossy magazines, and how she was composed by the blending of glamour girls and orphan girls whom Maud discovered by reading the magazines in her grandmother Macneill’s homestead in Cavendish, Prince Edward Island. The exhibit reveals the complex evolution of the world’s most famous redhead.
As Anne herself says in the novel: “… There’s such a lot of different Annes in me. I sometimes think that is why I’m such a troublesome person. If I was just the one Anne it would be ever so much more comfortable, but then it wouldn’t be half so interesting.”
