The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary

Posted on July 17, 2022 by Val Hewson

By Val Hewson

This month our sister project, the Sheffield Hallam Popular Fiction Group, is celebrating its tenth anniversary by publishing a collection of reviews, The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary: Exploring Popular Fiction 1900-1950.

*We think this wonderful cover image is a publicity photo for Sheffield Libraries (Picture Sheffield. Ref: u02265. Used with permission)*

When the idea of a book was first suggested, we felt that members of the group should choose the books and authors they wanted to review. This was risky, as we might have ended up with 20 Agatha Christie reviews, but the strategy paid off. There are 22 authors and 25 books in The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary. There is everything from children’s classics to dystopian science fiction, from politically radical to conservative, published between 1908 and 1950, mostly British – but also Russian, Canadian, Austrian and French – some still popular and others long forgotten. No Agatha Christies, but she gets lots of attention elsewhere, so we don’t feel guilty.

Helping to edit the reviews gave me the chance to revisit books I know well, like L M Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables (a friend for 50 years now), but also to get to know books new to me, like Vicki Baum’s Grand Hotel. The work made me wonder if our Reading Sheffield interviewees said anything about the authors chosen for the anniversary book.

Dennis Wheatley appears to be the best remembered, with at least 15 interviewees mentioning his tales of espionage, war and the occult. Chris F (b. 1939) recalled:

… the house library at school had one or two Dennis Wheatleys and they all had the salacious bits in them and we all knew where they were, pages 27 and 28, and if you opened the book, they were well-thumbed.

Dorothy Latham (b. 1931) revelled in L M Montgomery’s stories of Canadian girlhood:

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I’d have had a daughter – which I didn’t. I had two sons – she would have been called Anne…I adored it, and I – I was just absorbed with it.

For James Green (b. 1936), Rafael Sabatini brought back family memories:

My mum always used to read romances. And my dad’s two favourite authors which you very rarely hear anything about now were Rafael Sabatini, and Jeffery Farnol. And I think, if I remember right, they’re mainly historical novels about French revolution, and you know, that sort of thing.

Ken M (b. 1928) told of borrowing Leslie Charteris’ Saint books from ‘a tuppenny library down at Fir Vale shops that had a huge selection of stuff’.

Warwick Deeping, Ethel M Dell, Mazo de la Roche, Josephine Tey, Compton Mackenzie and others all appear in at least one interviewee’s account of reading. Alan B (b. 1944) told of being asked at school to name a famous author and answering ‘Mazo de la Roche’, who was one of his mother’s favourites: ‘I was laughed at and … I perhaps realised that perhaps all our authors aren’t equal!’ And here’s James Green again, on Hank Janson, whose ‘not very well written’ books excited many of those charged with upholding public morals:

And Hank Janson was a detective who was a bit Mickey Spillane type. And they were considered very very racy. In fact, the teacher would take it off you if he caught you reading one of those.

Madeleine Doherty (b. 1940) is our only interviewee to mention Charles Williams, a member of the Oxford ‘Inklings’, along with C S Lewis and J R R Tolkien, who wrote Christian fantasy thrillers. Madeleine was ‘hooked’ on Williams’ books, but they made her uneasy: ‘they were weird, they were weird. Sometimes I used to frighten myself’.

Some of the authors chosen for review by the Sheffield Hallam reading group do not feature at all in our interviews: Gaston Leroux, Lettice Cooper, Pamela Wynne, Lady Eleanor Smith, Vicki Baum, Valentine Williams, Mary Dunstan, Yevgeny Zamyatin and Ethel Carnie Holdsworth. This doesn’t mean that they weren’t read by our interviewees but simply that they weren’t remembered. My bet is that many, if not all, were read.

In some cases, books were made more popular by being made into films. Vicki Baum’s novel, Grand Hotel, for example, was a huge success and the 1932 film, starring Greta Garbo, Joan Crawford and John Barrymore, made it still more popular. The case of Lady Eleanor Smith is similar: her 1941 Regency romance-with-touches-of-horror, The Man in Grey, was the source of the first and very successful Gainsborough film of the same name, with the sterling British cast of Margaret Lockwood, Phyllis Calvert, Stewart Granger and James Mason. Ethel Carnie Holdsworth and Gaston Leroux also wrote novels that were adapted for films.

Even where there were no films to help, there were libraries. Tuppenny libraries of the sort found at Fir Vale would certainly have stocked the thrillers of Valentine Williams and the romances of Pamela Wynne, and Lettice Cooper would have featured in the book lists of many subscribers at Boots Booklovers’ Library on Fargate. Sheffield Libraries might also have had copies of some or all of these, as the City Librarian, J P Lamb, took a much more liberal view of fiction than many of his counterparts. Lamb believed that popular books helped establish the reading habit in people, and stocked his branch libraries with Ethel M Dells and Edgar Wallaces, as well as classics.

Whether they are well-known and/or admired today, or lying for now unloved on the shelves of second-hand bookshops, all the authors featured in The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary are interesting for what they tell us about the times in which they were written.

The Good, the Bad and the Extraordinary (ISBN 978-1-4717-0438-3) is available from Amazon or can be ordered from any good bookshop.

The commercialisation of Anne of Green Gables

Posted on June 11, 2021 by Val Hewson

By Natalie Haigh

Here is another blog post by Natalie Haigh from Sheffield Hallam University through their Ideas into Action project.

Anne of Green Gables, written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery and published in 1908, is a wonderful and heartwarming novel that is full of adventure and beautiful landscapes. Moreover, it is a novel that has firmly secured a place in the hearts of millions of readers around the world. The novel’s popularity speaks for itself. Anne of Green Gables has been translated into 36 different languages and has sold over 50 million copies worldwide, making it an undisputed best seller and piece of popular fiction. Although the novel was originally written for readers of all ages, it proved to be exceptionally popular with younger audiences. Subsequently, the novel was established as a children’s classic in the world of literature. The novel follows the story of Anne Shirley, a 12 year old red-haired orphan girl who is adopted by Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert. Matthew and Marilla are siblings who live on a farm called Green Gables in Prince Edward Island, Canada. Anne is sent to the two siblings accidentally as they originally requested a boy. Despite the mix-up, Anne is an extremely curious, high-spirited and imaginative child who brings unexpected adventure into Matthew and Marilla’s lives. With that, Matthew and Marilla decide to keep her.

Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables (Credit: Library and Archives Canada / C-011299)

Upon reflection, one of the reasons why I personally enjoyed the novel so much is because of the many beautiful and inspiring themes within it. From hope and perseverance, to forgiveness, hard work and true happiness, the novel sheds light on how making mistakes and learning from them is what allows Anne to develop and blossom into a better person. Therefore, I could not help but feel touched and inspired by Anne’s fictional character and her remarkable outlook on life at such a young age.

Anne of Green Gables is the first novel in an anthology series. Due to the immense popularity of her first novel, Montgomery went on to write a series of sequels to continue the story of Anne Shirley. She wrote five more novels, in which Anne grows older in each. The overriding response to the novel is that it is a beautiful and heartwarming story. It is the character of Anne and her ability to remain in high spirits, regardless of what life throws at her, along with the beautiful themes in this novel that make it such a popular piece of fiction. And one that holds a special place in the hearts of millions of readers all over the world.

Although the novel was very popular all over the world, it was extremely well received in Japan where it is known as Red-haired Anne. According to journalist Levinson-King, one of the main reasons for the novel’s appeal and popularity in Japan is ‘because the world of Green Gables is filled with kawaii, which means the quality of being cute, romantic and beautiful in Japanese.’ He goes on to write that the Japanese ‘love the story because it is full of beautiful scenery and puff sleeves and cute things, like tea parties’ (Levinson-King, 2017, BBC News Article). Therefore, the immense popularity of the novel in Japan can be attributed to the beautiful imagery it includes which aligns with Japanese interests and beliefs. As a result of the novel’s popularity,

Japan has developed the commercialisation and commodification of Anne as a popular cultural and media image, so that an “Anne industry” has developed (Ochi, 2006, p. 361).

The ‘Anne empire’ that has emerged off the back of Montgomery’s heroine protagonist spans merchandise, books, plays, television series, museums and musicals to name a few.

Why has this commercialisation occurred in both Japan and Canada, particularly in the leisure and tourism industry?

The real Green Gables (copyright Pam Gibson)

One extremely significant and profitable part of the commercialisation of the novel, is the tourist attractions that have been created in Prince Edward Island, Canada. The Green Gables Farmhouse where the novel is set is situated in Cavendish in Prince Edward Island, and is an extremely popular tourist attraction, particularly with Japanese tourists. Scholar Baldwin interestingly writes:

Perhaps the most surprising indication of the continued popularity of Anne is the growing number of Japanese who flock to Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, to visit the recreated home of a Canadian girl who never existed, and to examine objects she might have used had she been a real girl’ (Baldwin, 1993, p. 2).

Baldwin acknowledges how astonishing and bizarre, yet how remarkable it is that thousands of people are so invested in Anne’s fictional character, that they are prepared to fly across the world to Canada to see the recreated home that Anne’s fictional character grew up in, and pay a lot of money to do so. Baldwin goes on to shed light on an interesting question:

Why do so many Japanese people, especially young women, worship Anne Shirley, a red-haired wisp who comes from a very different culture and time period, and who makes allusions to authors, events, and people with whom the Japanese reader is unfamiliar?

Baldwin compiles the opinions of different scholars in response to this question. He writes:

There are several theories about why the Japanese are so fond of Anne. According to American writer Donald Ritchie, a leading expert on Japanese popular culture, the people’s passion for Anne can be explained by the cult of innocence, which is highly prized in Japan.

Emiko Mori, by contrast, attributes the Japanese admiration for Anne to her frankness and spontaneity, which ‘are things Japanese perhaps find hard to be. We are afraid to be that way’ (Baldwin, 1993, p.2). Therefore, it can be suggested that there are many reasons as to why Anne is such a popular figure in Japanese culture, and this cannot be pinned down to one specifically.

But is this excessive level of commercialisation of Anne of Green Gables problematic in any way? It can be suggested that large corporations are taking advantage of Anne’s popularity through the creation of tourist attractions, and are subsequently knowingly profiting from a piece of popular fiction that they did not write or create. Therefore, this raises an interesting question as to whether it is moral and ethical to profit from someone else’s work, especially when the creator of that work is now deceased. These corporations are continuing to profit from Montgomery’s legacy and her work after her death, which could be considered to be problematic and a sensitive subject. In contrast, the commercialisation and commodification of Anne of Green Gables could be viewed as positive and beneficial. Arguably, these corporations are helping to keep the legacy of Anne’s fictional character alive. Moreover, they are providing the loyal and avid readers, who cherish the novels dearly, the opportunity to visit the story world in real life. This experience will undoubtedly evoke feelings of joy, nostalgia and excitement in those people. Not to mention all of the jobs that the ‘Anne empire’ has created, and the boost it has given to the Canadian economy in particular. As Baldwin notes,

the number of Japanese tourists to Canada grew from 2.9 million in 1976 to 5.5 million in 1986, and Japan became Canada’s second-largest source of overseas tourists’ (Baldwin, 1993, p.2).

Bibliography

Baldwin, D. (1993). L. M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables: The Japanese Connection. Journal of Canadian Studies, 28(3), 123-133.

Drain, S. (1986). Community and the Individual in Anne of Green Gables The Meaning of Belonging. Children’s Literature Association Quarterly 11(1), 15-19. doi:10.1353/chq.0.0082.

Gray, P. (2014). “Bloom in the Moonshine”: Imagination as Liberation in Anne of Green Gables. Children’s Literature 42, 169-196. doi:10.1353/chl.2014.0009.

Ledwell, J & Mitchell, J. (Eds.). (2013). Anne around the World: L.M. Montgomery and Her Classic. McGill-Queen’s University Press. Retrieved from: http://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt24hnsz

Levinson-King, R. (2017). Anne of Green Gables: The most popular redhead in Japan. BBC News, Toronto.

Ochi, H. (2006). What Did She Read?: The Cultural Occupation of Post-War Japan and Translated Girls’ Literature. Retrieved from: http://hermes-ir.lib.hit-u.ac.jp/hermes/ir/re/14565/0100706501.pdf

Shelagh J. Squire (1996) Literary Tourism and Sustainable Tourism: Promoting ‘Anne of Green Gables’ in Prince Edward Island, Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 4:3, 119-134, DOI: 10.1080/09669589608667263

The Enduring Appeal of Anne of Green Gables and L M Montgomery

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Val Hewson

Anne had brought her slate down on Gilbert’s head and cracked it – slate not head – clear across.

Gilbert Blythe was my first literary crush. I said this recently to a group of women, and got more than one nod of agreement. I first read Anne of Green Gables (1908) by L M Montgomery (1874-1942) because it was my mother’s favourite childhood book – she described her best times at school as the rare afternoons of ‘quiet reading’. When at about the age of ten, I found the ‘Anne book’ in my local library, I fell upon it. Over the next few years I probably borrowed it more than any other book. (It helped that, like Anne, I had red hair. I hated geometry too, although my mother suspected, unfairly, that I was just imitating Anne and could learn to love it if I tried. And then, of course, there was Gilbert.)

Lucy Maud Montgomery, author of Anne Of Green Gables (Credit: Library and Archives Canada / C-011299)

I am not alone in my fondness for this book. Some of the Reading Sheffield interviewees remember it well. Dorothy (b. 1931) recalled:

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I had had a daughter…she would have been called Anne.

The hold of this remarkable book is as strong as ever. It is easily Maud Montgomery’s most popular story and remains in print after a century, with millions of copies sold in many languages. Prince Edward Island has a healthy Anne/L M Montgomery tourism industry. There have been around 20 film and television adaptations and related productions (the star of the 1934 movie, Dawn O’Day, even changed her name to Anne Shirley) and a new version is due in 2016, with no less than Martin Sheen playing the role of Matthew Cuthbert. The adventures of an orphan in rural, late 19c Canada apparently remain as enjoyable as ever, and Anne has retained her gift for friendship over the years.

For those who don’t know, Anne of Green Gables is the story of a young girl given a home by a brother and sister living on a farm on Prince Edward Island. What no-one knows as she arrives on the Island is that the orphanage made a mistake. The request was for a strong boy to help with farmwork, not an imaginative, sensitive, lonely chatterbox of a girl. Miss Marilla Cuthbert, who does not like her plans overset, intends to return her but is persuaded not to, and so Anne gets the home she needs and spinster Marilla and bachelor Matthew the child neither expected. Her adventures last for a further five books, well into adulthood, and include the incident quoted above, in which Gilbert, on first meeting Anne, unwisely pulls her hair and calls her ‘Carrots!’ She is, you see, very sensitive about the colour and longs for it to be a ‘handsome auburn’:

Oh I could endure anything if only I thought my hair would be a handsome auburn when I grew up. It would be so much easier to be good if one’s hair was a handsome auburn, don’t you think?

L M Montgomery, it is said, based her novel in part on a newspaper story about an orphan girl sent in error to a couple who wanted a boy. (Does anyone know what happened to the girl? I long to know.) But she also clearly drew on her own difficult childhood and later life. Unlike Anne, she was not orphaned as a baby, but did lose her mother very early and afterwards saw little of her father. She was brought up in a community like Avonlea by her maternal grandparents in an austere household. The Cuthberts and their Green Gables farmhouse were probably based on relatives living nearby (you can visit their house still). Maud had little money and worked as a teacher to fund university, although unlike Anne she did not complete her studies. Both married and lost children.

The real Green Gables (copyright Pam Gibson)

On the strength of this, it is easy to over-estimate the autobiographical element of Anne of Green Gables. I certainly assumed this as a child. But Anne Shirley and Maud Montgomery are not the same. Anne knows sadness but has, through Gilbert and her family, the security to help her overcome tragedy. Maud’s journals, published long after her death but with her permission, apparently show a troubled woman who had a difficult marriage with a depressive man, who lost a child and did not always get along with her surviving sons, all while living a very public life. It comes as a huge shock to the reader of the Anne books to learn that their author may have committed suicide in despair and weariness.

Anne is then not so much the real as the might-have-been-Maud, just as her other characters like Emily of New Moon and Jane of Lantern Hill appear to explore aspects of Maud’s life. Emily develops her writing talents and Jane eventually re-unites her estranged parents in a way Maud never could and is secure in their love.

Maud’s bedroom (copyright Pam Gibson)

For Maud, there was a long period in the critical wilderness (all those happy endings, all that folksiness and whimsy, all those adjectives…) but ordinary readers apparently always appreciated her. She created a secure, rural world based on the one in which she grew up (and possibly warmer and funnier than the real thing), which is enormously attractive. As are her spirited heroines, who are unusual, as heroines should be, but not so much so that we cannot identify with them. Thousands of girls probably wanted to be Anne and/or one of the others. I certainly did.

Maud Montgomery is not alone in this type of literature: Laura Ingalls Wilder, Jo March and her sisters, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm, Pollyanna and Katy Carr are all cousins of Anne (some more distant than others). But I think Anne has the edge over these others, even Jo and Laura. Through Anne, Maud remains more popular than other writers of her period and type, no matter what the critics thought or think. If you read them in childhood, there seems a good chance that you will remember them with affection in adulthood. As Reading Sheffield interviewee Florence Cowood (b. 1923) said: ‘I just liked the story and the struggle in [it].’

Did you read Anne of Green Gables or other books by L M Montgomery? Why do you think they remain popular?

By Val Hewson

Note: Anyone wanting to know more about L M Montgomery should read Mary H Rubio’s excellent biography, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings (Anchor Canada, 2008), which made me think about the woman who created Anne Shirley. And the Lucy Maud Montgomery Research Centre at the University of Guelph is well worth visiting.

Dorothy Latham’s Reading Journey

Posted on September 16, 2015 by Val Hewson

Dorothy was born in 1931 in Catcliffe, between Rotherham and Sheffield, and grew up there, attending Woodhouse Grammar School. Dorothy became a civil servant, working in careers guidance and employment. She married Derek, who ran his own plumbing and heating business and they had two sons.

Even now I’m always reading, you know…

Always a passionate reader, Dorothy talked of reading in bed from childhood, on the bus to and from work and in the evenings while her husband pursued practical hobbies like joinery and repairing machinery.

I’d often, to be quite honest, read on the buses. I mean you had a long journey sometimes…I still try half an hour in the evenings before I go to sleep in bed. It relaxes me.

But she was conscious of her reading tastes and interests changing over time. ‘I think you alter as you get older on what you like.’

Dorothy’s reading habit was inherited from her mother. She recalled being told Rupert the Bear bedtime stories and then reading for herself: ‘…once I could read, you know, I just didn’t put them down’. This included, you sense, reading to cope with the disruption of the Second World War, when Dorothy remembered standing in her garden and watching Sheffield being bombed in the middle of the night.

The first book Dorothy really loved was the ever-popular Anne of Green Gables by L M Montgomery.

My absolute passion was Anne of Green Gables…I adored all the series. If I’d have had a daughter – which I didn’t. I had two sons – she would have been called Anne…I adored it, and I – I was just absorbed with it.

Within her family, books seemed to be a means of both enjoyment and self-improvement. ‘You know my mother was always encouraging me…in that kind of life.’ Dorothy was unusual in her village in winning a scholarship to Woodhouse Grammar School. There she was introduced, as children usually are, to Shakespeare, Dickens, Jane Austen, the Bronte sisters and other classics. ‘It was always the English that I was good at.’ Meanwhile the war made buying books and much else difficult, and so Dorothy and her mother often borrowed from the private Red Circle library: ‘…I was brought up in an ordinary household but somehow I got the best’.

As she grew older, the reading habit grew stronger. Dorothy’s father was very protective of her, and she spent many evenings reading at home rather than going out.

It may sound strange but I was encouraged in…erm…I mean I never went out. I suppose I was too young in the war but I’d meet some people and they were out dancing and doing all that. Well my father wouldn’t have, he – he was very protective. You could say I missed it really.

Marriage did not stop Dorothy’s reading: ‘…when I got married I had to limit myself to what I did but I’ve always, always loved the reading’. Her husband and mother-in-law were not much interested in books (indeed she thinks her husband was dyslexic), but her father-in-law was, to borrow a phrase from Anne of Green Gables, a ‘kindred spirit’. He told her, for example, about finding a ‘wonderful book’ which she must read: Daphne Du Maurier’s Rebecca.

And you know, I’d discuss books with him and all sorts and you see my eldest son, his first memory of being taken to a library was being taken by his grandpa.

Dorothy sometimes made compromises between reading and looking after home and family:

…you know I thought I could just be a bit of a monkey and sit down and read and not get on with what I was doing. I mean my husband never bothered, I could have done what I wanted really. I mean you have to look after the children and things and I tried to look after my parents. So you’ve got to fit things in, haven’t you?’

Warwick Deeping’s Sorrell and Son was an example: ‘Oh, yes! Oh I thought that was fantastic. I found it…it absorbed me, yes it did. I didn’t want to put it down.’

By now L M Montgomery had been replaced in Dorothy’s favour by Emily and Charlotte Bronte. She liked Jane Eyre but her favourite was Wuthering Heights. ‘Soooo romantic and now I just think: “oh, not so much”.’ The past was always interesting. Dorothy liked history and so looked for classics like Jane Austen and Anthony Trollope and also lighter, historical novels by writers like Georgette Heyer, Margaret Irwin, Baroness Orczy and Jean Plaidy. But her reading was very wide. She happily quoted: Graham Greene, Kingsley Amis, Margaret Mitchell, Catherine Cookson, Rosamund Pilcher, Agatha Christie, Dorothy L Sayers, P D James, Ellis Peters, Edgar Wallace, Anthony Hope, Nicholas Monsarrat, Dennis Wheatley, Betty Neels, Arnold Bennett, A J Cronin, Nevil Shute, J B Priestley, Somerset Maugham and Howard Spring.

When it came to books vs television and/or film, Dorothy preferred books:

If I’ve read a book and it’s made into a film, I’m disappointed because your mind works with the book and when I read them, they don’t, they’re not the same…I’ve always felt let down… [Filmmakers] don’t go into the detail and I don’t think they realise that when you read your brain is working out and in your brain visually you are imagining the positions and the circumstances…

(Not that Dorothy disliked all adaptations: Great Expectations, Pride and Prejudice and The Forsyte Saga all gave her a lot of enjoyment.)

Dorothy’s sight, hearing and mobility deteriorated as she got older and over time she relied more and more on the home library service and audiobooks. ‘I’ve been very grateful for that, very grateful.’ She let others choose her books but she would give feedback: ‘…sometimes I say “oh I did like that” and then they send me a lot, you know. Because I’m, I’m very choosey and they know exactly what I like’. This did get her into trouble once when a friend picked up a book from the library, which turned out to be more explicit than she usually read. ‘Phft do you like this stuff then?’ he said. Dorothy had to explain how the book had been chosen without her looking at it. Sadly she couldn’t recall the title or author, but she remembered it as ‘very, very embarrassing’.

This reliance on libraries throughout her life gave Dorothy strong views about their value.

‘I was so annoyed when I came here that they sold the library… I thought it was disgusting…and they said “Well, you can go into town” and I thought I’d come here because I was disabled and I thought no library! I thought that was a shame. I hope we don’t lose the libraries.’

After years and years of reading, did Dorothy re-read the favourite books of her youth?

I don’t know about Anne of Green Gables. I absolutely was besotted with it…and I mean now I don’t want to read it. Also I though Wuthering Heights was so romantic, I don’t anymore now, I don’t know, I think it’s a bit over the top. It doesn’t seem quite real. But as young person I was telling everyone that’s my favourite book. I must have been about 20, I don’t know. Yeah, that was my favourite and I don’t think it is anymore. I think you alter as you get older on what you like.

Asked if reading changed her life, Dorothy agreed.

…as I’ve got disabled, I have to say I’d be quite lost without my books because I have to fight against getting depressed. I’m not but…because of how I am, I’m not one for just needlessly sitting about like this. I like to be occupied…I’ve switched off from what I can’t do because I’m filling my life with things that I can and that may sound strange but it’s no good…I’ve reached a good age. I’m 80 in a month and, and I think “well, I’ve done quite well really”.

By Val Hewson

Access Dorothy’s transcript and audio here