Hatbox Representing Montgomery’s Stored Manuscript

Before Anne of Green Gables traveled from Prince Edward Island to a publisher in Boston, there was a moment when the journey might never have happened at all. Lucy Maud Montgomery completed the manuscript in 1905 and began sending it to publishers. It was rejected several times. Eventually, discouraged by the responses, she stopped trying and put the manuscript away in a hatbox.

The hatbox displayed in Cavendish bears the name Christys’ Hats, an English hatmaking company whose history reaches back to 1773. Boxes like this were ordinary household objects, made to protect relatively expensive hats from dust, crushing and damage. No one looking at such a box at the beginning of the twentieth century would have imagined it as a place where an unpublished literary classic might wait to be rediscovered.

For Montgomery, putting the manuscript away did not mean that she had stopped writing. By then she had spent years developing her craft. She had been publishing poems and short stories in newspapers and magazines since the 1890s and understood both the satisfaction of publication and the disappointment of rejection. Anne of Green Gables, however, was her first novel.

Then, in 1907, Montgomery took the manuscript out again. She reread it and decided to give Anne another chance. She sent the manuscript to L. C. Page & Company in Boston. This time, instead of another rejection, she received an offer to publish it. Knowing what happened afterward makes the hatbox part of the story that I find most compelling. The hatbox represents the moment before any of that was certain.

The novel existed. Montgomery believed enough in it to submit it. Publishers rejected it. She put it away. For two years, Anne Shirley’s future was essentially contained inside a box. Anne of Green Gables did not become a classic because its path to publication was inevitable. It became possible because, after being told no, Montgomery eventually decided to try once more.