The Year of Anne

In midsummer of this 100th year of Anne of Green Gables, the Government of Prince Edward Island’s Department of the Environment announced that “anoxic events” had occurred in at least 20 island waterways. An algae commonly called sea lettuce, fed by an excess of nitrogen coming mostly from the runoff of phosphate-laden fertilizer applied in large doses to rejuvenate the fertility of potato fields, had sucked up all the oxygen in the water, killing off every form of marine life.

There are those of us living on this island who somewhat balefully suggest that another such event—Anneoxia—created by the surfeit of literary and commercial opportunism suffocating the centennial of the publication of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s novel—has sucked most of the oxygen out of whatever literary sensibilities have hitherto survived in the novelist’s home place.

Anne Shirley has been everywhere on Prince Edward Island this year: an overbearing presence in every...