Looking For Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic

By any standards, Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables is a stunning success. Published in 1908 (and not once out of print), Anne has sold more than 50 million copies, been translated into more than 17 languages (including Braille), and become the focus of international conferences devoted to its interpretation.

Anne has remained, as Matthew sings in the musical, forever young, no small feat for the spunky, in-your-face redhead who, in 2008, celebrates her 100th birthday! But why Anne? How does Montgomerys classic work pull so many international readers into the vortex of Annes freckled face and carrotty braids? How does this little book create such enduring interest around the world? The answer is far more intriguing than any story even Anne could have imagined. In her journal, Maud's quick pen would froth up the tiniest details of her life into dramatic events, but that same pen never revealed a single word about Anne. As a result, the novels secrets have remained sealed for over a century.

Looking for Anne is the untold story of a literary classic and a writer who found inspiration in many places including the popular images of the era, such as beauty icons, fashion plates, and advertisements; a writer who quietly quarried her material from American mass market periodicals; who consciously imitated formula fiction to create marketable stories for juvenile periodicals, religious newspapers, and glamorous women's magazines and who ultimately, in the storm that brewed up the novel, also transcended these influences to create a twentieth-century literary classic that would conquer the world. Blending biography with cultural history, penetrating and uncensored, this is the definitive book on Anne of Green Gables. Looking for Anne captures both the spirit of Marilla's critical probing for bald facts and Annes belief in the infinite power of the imagination.

It is a must-read for anyone who has ever fallen under the spell of Anne with an e.