Statues, Stamps, and Souvenirs

The Anne of Green Gables Museum, in Park Corner, Prince Edward Island, is a quaint clapboard farmhouse surrounded by a modest garden and lush grounds. Its website invites nearly 200,000 annual visitors to marvel at Anne’s Enchanted Bookcase, view her Crazy Patchwork Quilt, and take pictures by the fictional Lake of Shining Waters. But surprisingly, Lucy Maud Montgomery — the author of the 1908 novel responsible for the whole operation — does not appear by name in the online introduction, where she is referenced only as “the Author.”

The understated substitution is striking, given that, as Carole Gerson observes, “in the realm of public memory, it can be difficult to separate writers from their creations and to distinguish the homes that they once occupied from the sites of their fictions.” In Literary Life After Death, Gerson explores Green Gables as part of a comprehensive survey of local, provincial, and national commemorations of primarily anglophone...