Clarkson is probably best known by Canadians as the Governor General (Canada's representative of the Queen). Clarkson served Canada in this capacity between 1999 and 2005. However, prior to her appointment as Governor General, she had a lengthy career as a reporter, journalist and author.
Clarkson credits Lucy Maud Montgomery and Anne of Green Gables with helping her to feel at home in Canada. In the foreward to Elizabeth Epperly and Irene Gammel's book, L.M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, Clarkson wrote:
"I have loved Prince Edward Island and Anne of Green Gables since I first read the book when I was nine. It was given to me by the next-door neighbours in our apartment building in Ottawa, who had a beautiful baby boy whom I would go over and play with while his mother took a nap or was preparing dinner. Once I had read the first Anne book I never looked back. The entire canon of L.M. Montgomery was devoured, read and reread, in the next five years. Anne, Emily, Pat, and Jane - and Valancy - they all became my spiritual sisters. I loved them. I knew them. In this, I was no different from millions of little girls in the twentieth century, in Canada and all over the world, who identified with and entered the fictional lives of these heroines.
But more importantly, L.M. Montgomery in all her books gave me a profound understanding of what Canada is. Through the particularity and peculiarities of Prince Edward Island and these girls' fictional lives, I became a Canadian. L.M. Montgomery educated me at a very profound level about how Canada operated in a rural setting, with smart people, in the birthplace of Confederation.
I had come to Canada only six years before reading my first Anne book. My family and I were refugees from Hong Kong - just the four of us, thrust by war out of our home and into Ottawa, then a small white town, filled with snow, in the cold winter of 1942. L.M. Montgomery's world gave me an extended family that taught me about the rivalries of Tory and Grit, Protestant and Catholic, in a highly sophisticated microcosmic way; it was a background, a heritage that I gained literarily and that made my becoming Canadian very easy and attractive. Anne and Emily, the Story Girl, and all the others were my cousins of the imagination and the spirit, and so what they were, I became also."
Clarkson also chaired a national jury for a "100 Years of Anne" letter writing contest in 2008. In accepting this position, she wrote: "I am delighted to help celebrate the 100th anniversary of Anne of Green Gables by chairing a panel of national judges. It's a terrific idea and I look forward to reading the letters. In my memoir, Heart Matters, I write about how Anne helped me, as a little immigrant girl, become a Canadian. Anne is the most important "character" in my life! Count me in!"
High praise indeed, from one of Canada's most prominent stateswomen.
