The novel begins with Anne and Diana in the garret of Green Gables, as Anne tells Diana that she is going to live in a little house of dreams in Four Winds Harbour with Gilbert, her husband. Anne had already decorated the home in her mind and told her kindred spirit that her vision was not of a marble hall, but “a tiny, delightful castle in Spain”.
At the time of writing Anne's House of Dreams, Montgomery had been mistress of her new home in Leaksdale, Ontario, for four years. She had moved there with her husband Ewan, a Presbyterian minister. Though the house was not perfect, Montgomery concedes that it met her needs and her pride in it cannot be mistaken.
Just after moving in, she recorded in her journal in October, 1911, “I am pleased with my home. I think it is furnished as comfortably as its limitations permit and in good taste, with things we will not tire of. At first, all our new possessions seemed to me to be a little strange to each other. But now they have got acquainted. Up to New Years, I was so busy all the time that I really had no time to enjoy my home—to realize it. But now I have more leisure and am beginning to realize the delight and comfort of many things that have been long absent from my life—or were never in it.”
As Elizabeth Waterston writes in Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery, “Montgomery was right, both in a personal and in a general sense, to emphasize the connection between houses and dreams. Nest-building is an activity shared with animals, but for every human, particularly every female human, the choice and adorning of a particular home is deeply individual and tense-making. Being ‘house proud’ means being proud of one’s attitudes and taste. Like most women of her time and class, Montgomery had a sense of her home as being both a private haven and also a public demonstration of her personality.”
Do you feel that your home is a demonstration of your personality? How would you characterize your own dream house?
Sources: Magic Island: The Fictions of L.M. Montgomery, The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery- Volume II: 1910-1921
