It was a time when her talents as a writer were first being recognized. In one week in 1896, her short stories and poems were accepted in three different publications: $5 + $5 + $12! she wrote. I really feel quite bloated by so much wealth.
Her affection for 窪蹋勛圖厙comes through on the pages of her scrapbooks, in the snips of black-and-gold ribbon, newspaper clippings, convocation programs and fin-de-siecle fashion illustrations of women wearing satin gowns with glorious puffed sleeves.
Montgomery scholar Elizabeth Rollins Epperly, a Dal alum herself (MA 1974), writes about the scrapbooks and the profound influence they have on L.M. Montgomerys fiction, in Imagining Anne (Penguin Canada). Like Budge Wilsons Before Green Gables, the beautiful book has been released to coincide with the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables.
She wrote about 窪蹋勛圖厙in her journals and its there in her scrapbooks, says Ms. EpperlyBetsy to her friends. She looks back on it so fondly. And, of course, she fleshes out the experience in Anne of the Island, calling 窪蹋勛圖厙Redmond College. The year she spends at 窪蹋勛圖厙turns into a full-fledged BA for Anne.
While at 窪蹋勛圖厙College, L.M. Montgomery boarded at the Halifax Ladies College, an imposing mansion that used to stand on the south-end of Barrington Street. At one point, after a bout of measles, she was moved out of the infirmary to a tiny white room on a floor called third-and-a-half, which included only five rooms. Even after she recuperated, she asked to remain.
During the writing of Before Green Gables, Mrs. Wilson and Ms. Epperly discussed the authors stay at the Halifax Ladies College. And it struck Mrs. Wilson: she believes she stayed in the same room when she was a student at the school half a century later.
I actually feel shivery thinking of it, says Mrs. Wilson, whose parents transferred her to the school because she was constantly sick while attending what was then LeMarchant Street School. (Her Grade 2 class there had 66 children compared to the six students at the ladies college.) The room was very, very white: a white bedspread, white chair, white lamp. If Montgomery was in that room and didnt want to leave it, she was happy there. I was also so fond of that room. It is still very vivid to me today.
Mrs. Wilson surmises that when L.M. Montgomery was imagining Annes room in Green Gables, she was remembering the little room at the Ladies College. Described at the beginning of the 1908 novel as painfully bare and of a rigidity not to be described in words, Anne comes to regard the room as a peaceful sanctuary, where she would sit and daydream at the open window.
I feel in my bones that it was the same room, says Mrs. Wilson.
Ms. Epperly finds the connection spooky. I cant say definitively because I never saw that room. But I think authors have intuition about these things. And I would trust Budges instincts on that.