CHARLOTTETOWN, Prince Edward Island — Canada's tiny island province in the Gulf of St. Lawrence has for nearly 90 years drawn devoted fans worldwide to scenic locales related to Lucy Maud Montgomery and her famous character: verbose, red-haired orphan Anne of Green Gables.
Montgomery wrote 20 novels that have been translated into 20 languages, but the eight Anne books elicit the type of devotion from scholars and fans reserved for only a handful of authors such as Jane Austen and James Joyce.
More than 1,250,000 tourists annually flock to the island of just 135,000 residents known for red earth, potatoes and lobster fisheries. More than 43 percent of the visitors tour the Green Gables sites and revel in Anne memorabilia such as wigs with her signature red braids and porcelain dolls bearing her image.
Most cannot wait to see Montgomery's grave in Cavendish and the farmhouse on which Green Gables is based, complete with Lover's Lane — a pathway outlined in the Anne novels.
And each year about 50 couples from Japan, where the Anne books are taught in school and are wildly popular, travel to the Anne of Green Gables Museum at Parks Corner to get married in the exact spot where Montgomery wed when she was 37.
The house in New London that she left when her mother died when she was less than 2 years old also draws tourists eager to see the author's wedding dress and personal letters. And the site of the Macneill homestead where she grew up with her maternal grandparents draws tourists who want to walk the same route she took to her job at the post office — even though the house was torn down.
In fact, any site mentioned in one of her journals, such as her paternal grandfather's home, still owned by the Montgomerys, is automatically turned into a museum littered with quotations from her work.
All this Montgomery-mania raises a question: How did a turn-of-the-century author writing on a secluded island on the east coast of Canada generate so much worldwide interest?
Gov.-Gen. Adrienne Clarkson, a longtime fan, said Montgomery helped her, as an immigrant from Hong Kong, to understand what it meant to be Canadian.
"She helped me to become a Canadian. I believe she was the writer that made me most understand what Canada was about, and I will always be grateful to those books for it," Clarkson told an audience at an L.M. Montgomery conference in Charlottetown.
Others surmise that it was Anne's origins as an orphan that have endeared her to many parentless readers. Mary McDonald Rissanen, a Prince Edward Island native who is now a language instructor at the University of Tampere in Finland, wonders if the popularity of the Anne novels in Finland is connected with the many children evacuated during World War II.
That sentiment is echoed by other scholars.
"A story of an orphan child — and all children dream they are orphans at one time or another — speaks to all children. It's a story of alienation and the need for acceptance and finding ways to get it," said Richard Sherwin, a professor of English literature at Bar-Ilan University in Israel.
"I think what Montgomery captured, unlike any other writer that I know, is the interactivity between Anne, the family and the community. . . . She is an orphan that wants to join, that desperately wants to be part of something," Sherwin added.
He visited Prince Edward Island to see the countryside for himself, including the reddish earth described so vividly in Montgomery's novels. He said he knows of many Anne fans in Israel and, as a university professor, he brushed off claims that Montgomery was not a serious literary figure.