“After Anne” was a Colorado Authors League award winner in Historical Fiction.
Cavendish, Prince Edward Island
June 1905
Maud set her gardening gloves in their basket in the kitchen. It had taken less time than expected to pull that week’s helping of weeds and issue the garden her stamp of approval. She’d spent the rest of the morning walking through the nearby fields with gardening gloves still on her hands and her hair falling out of its pins. She had been too busy with ideas about the novel to bother with either. She caught herself several times saying lines out loud and clapping, which made her laugh once she’d made sure no one was close enough to hear.
Maud could feel her own heartbeat now in a way that she hadn’t in months. A novel was indulgent, she knew. Her short stories came easily and sold reliably. The novel might be a waste of time. She was thirty and unmarried, and she would need stable rent for a boardinghouse when her grandmother died. “Every woman with a dream better have a banker for a father or a fool for a husband,” her grandmother said once.
But the redheaded girl persisted. Almost real; pestering at times.
Here’s one incident: I’ll want my hair dyed raven black, but it will go horribly wrong. And another: I will be accused of stealing a brooch, but it will turn out to be a false, prejudicial assumption—the plight of the orphan.
Here is how my name should be spelled, the girl instructed: Anne—with an “e.”
Maud opened the pantry shelves once back at the house, eager to find the meal that would get her upstairs and writing the quickest. She decided on canned vegetables, bread, and jam.
UNDERWRITTEN BY
Each week, The Colorado Sun and Colorado Humanities & Center For The Book feature an excerpt from a Colorado book and an interview with the author. Explore the SunLit archives at coloradosun.com/sunlit.
“I see you’ve taken quite the morning detour.” Her grandmother’s voice came from just over Maud’s shoulder.
Maud rose up on her toes. Her grandmother’s footsteps could be so quiet, even in shoes, and the natural shrillness in her grandmother’s voice often caught Maud off guard.
Maud turned around with a few jars in hand. She needed to be careful with her words. She had an agenda today.
“I worked for a while in the garden, which is coming along nicely, I think. It’s a beautiful day, isn’t it? I thought I could feel the rain coming in the air this morning, but now I’m not so sure. Which is too bad. The garden could use it.”
“The rain will come in its own time,” her grandmother said, falling into place beside Maud and slicing a loaf of bread.
“I think I’ll work upstairs for a few hours after we eat,” Maud said. “If you don’t mind.”
“I don’t mind—though I wish you wouldn’t use the word ‘work’ so loosely.”
There it was. One of her grandmother’s signature comments crafted, it often seemed, with the sole purpose of plucking at Maud’s heart.
Maud had been barely twelve when her grandmother asked to read one of Maud’s poems. Maud waited for an afternoon when her grandmother seemed particularly satisfied with the state of the household, then got up the nerve. She recopied her best poem in careful script on a sheet of notebook paper and folded it up, then said nothing as she walked into the kitchen, placed the folded paper in her grandmother’s hands, and walked away.
Peering through the crack between the hinges of the kitchen door, Maud watched as her grandmother checked for her, making sure she was nowhere in sight. Then her grandmother began to read, holding the unfolded sheet straight out in front of her in the same way she would hold Maud’s favorite kitten by its scruff.
It wasn’t long before her grandmother put the page down and chuckled to herself. “Plump, luminous berries indeed,” her grandmother said, shaking her head.
Maud soaked her pillowcase with tears that night.
“After Anne”
>> READ AN INTERVIEW WITH THE AUTHOR
Where to find it:
- Prospector: Search the combined catalogs of 23 Colorado libraries
- Libby: E-books and audio books
- NewPages Guide: List of Colorado independent bookstores
- Bookshop.org: Searchable database of bookstores nationwide
SunLit present new excerpts from some of the best Colorado authors that not only spin engaging narratives but also illuminate who we are as a community. Read more.
When she woke the next morning, she vowed to have a poem published while her grandmother was still alive. She wrote ten new poems the next day, and ten more the day after. Not that her grandmother had read any of them—even those that appeared in print. But at least she knew they had been published.
Her grandmother was still speaking, now in her telltale tone of business to be accomplished.
“We’ve finally started to get some mail for Reverend Macdonald. Took some time for the new boarding address to register with his folks, I imagine. All that talk about why he might have decided to move here from a perfectly good boarding spot in Stanley, all those admirable sermons he’s given, and I’ve yet to formally introduce myself. I don’t suppose you have either.”
“There was a time in Stanley, visiting Frede—” Maud began. But her grandmother wasn’t looking for a response.
“Both of us should be prepared to give him a proper greeting when he comes for his mail,” her grandmother continued. “And I don’t mean one where you say whatever thought comes into your head. Your mother used to do that too.” Her grandmother swallowed, looking away as she tended to after any mention of Maud’s mother. “I mean the kind of greeting your married friends might give.”
Maud tried to rid her face of feeling as she gazed out the window. Years ago, when she was still a girl, Maud might have looked her grandmother in the eyes and told her exactly what she thought of some of those friends and the mindless, obedient chatter that had gotten them married. She might have told her a little of what she had imagined about Ewan Macdonald too—the well-respected reverend who was rumored to have moved from Stanley Bridge to Cavendish after some young lady in his Cavendish parish (who happened to look a lot like Maud) caught his eye. But she had learned very well the look she would have gotten in response, accompanied by some choice phrase. “Best not to count your chickens before they hatch.” “A lady doesn’t excite easily.”
It was much better to look out the window. Better, that is, as long as she could remember to keep the “useless daydream” smile off her face while she dove off the ledge of this world and drenched herself in the imaginative one.
Her grandmother took out the plates and served the bread and jam and canned vegetables. Then she walked the plates to the table. “Come now, child. Let’s eat.” Her eyes closed as she settled herself at the table, hands folded in silent grace.
As soon as her grandmother heard Maud’s chair pull back and creak, she let out her best weary sigh and opened her eyes.
As soon as she was back home, Maud hurried to the small desk in her upstairs room and pulled out her notebooks. There was only one way to know if she had a novel in her. And that was to begin.
Sitting her notebooks on her lap, she spread her palms wide across them. She looked around at the room’s objects with their familiar colors and shapes: the pale pink quilt on the bed that had been in the family for generations, gray in the spot where the cat Daffy slept after outsmarting her grandmother’s attempts at exile by coming in through an open window at night; the paintings and portraits in well-worn white and brown frames; and most of all her bookshelf lined with different-colored spines. On top of the bookshelf sat a stack of library books that had arrived last month after the terrible ice blockade in the Northumberland Strait finally lifted and ferries to the mainland started back up. She’d read those books day and night when they first arrived, copying out any parts that made her feel sentimental. On the lowest bookshelf, she kept a picture of her father—alone and smiling handsomely in his best jacket—and the lockbox that held her journal.
Opening the notebooks sitting under her palms, Maud removed a photograph tucked underneath, propping it up in front of her. It had been taken a few years earlier, at the Cavendish beach not far away. She and a friend managed to get their hands on a camera, the newfangled device her grandmother had scoffed at. They designed their own bathing costumes out of leftover scraps of fabric and made off to the beach one morning in a fit of laughter, talking about the ways they might pose and the potential suitors to whom they might show the photos.
The day had continued in laughter until it had come time to take the photo sitting in Maud’s hands. For the minute or so when the picture was being taken, Maud remembered feeling not at all different from the rock where she sat or the sea that stretched out in front of her. Molecules on top of molecules looking out at more molecules. She had learned as much in school and never quite believed it, but in that moment she did.
And then, in the next breath, Maud had been overcome by a feeling that was nearly the opposite: her potential to become someone important. It was a deep, private feeling, composed less of pride than of intuition. This confidence had been followed by thankfulness, a deeper thankfulness than she could remember feeling, for being different than the rock or the sea. To be alive in an interesting world, and to tell about it. That was something.
Ever since the photo was taken, she had pulled it out whenever she started a writing project. A glance could bring back those two feelings in quick succession: the ease and relief that came each time she appreciated the vastness of the natural world and the glorious insignificance of any possible thing she could do with her life, followed immediately by the glorious significance of her own conviction.
“Chapter 1,” she wrote in a large scrawl on the first page of one of the notebooks.
Maud clapped her hands against her thighs. Let the experiment begin.
She skimmed the other notebook containing her spadework—the character sketches and plotlines she had developed so far. The girl would come from an orphan asylum. Not a place so hard for her liveliness to be unbelievable. But colorless. Two trees in whitewashed cages sitting on either side of the front entrance.
Anne would be sitting at the train station, waiting, thinking about climbing a wild cherry tree. Maud thought of how Anne would describe that tree, dressing it up with adjectives; how old and quiet Matthew would respond to seeing a girl with red braids instead of the orphan boy he had expected to help with his farm.
But how to begin? Not with the cherry tree. The story wasn’t only the girl, after all. It was also the story of a small island town on the outskirts of a lesser-known country, deeply tied to its Scottish roots, full of judgment and unexpected humor. It was also the story of a secluded house, nondescript mostly, with one exception: the forest-green paint on its gables. Maud had a picture of this house in mind early on, drawing inspiration from a house across the road where a shy old bachelor, Maud’s great-uncle, lived with his sister.
Maud looked out the window for some action, something to start her pen moving. A few swaying tree branches. A swarm of bees emerging from a rosebush. Nothing.
Now, if she had been looking out the window of a house situated close to the main road instead of tucked away in the trees surrounding her grandmother’s house, she would have been able to see anyone coming and going. She would have been the first to spot any unusual event.
This felt like a beginning. A house situated at the dip in the main road, making for easy viewing of the neighbors. An afternoon early in June. Someone would sit near a window, looking out. Someone who believed she already knew every possible thing there was to know about that town.
“Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow,” Maud wrote. “Since Avonlea occupied a little triangular peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence with water on two sides of it, anybody who went out of it or into it had to pass over that hill road and so run the unseen gauntlet of Mrs. Rachel’s all-seeing eye. She was sitting there one afternoon in early June.” Maud looked out her own window. “The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope behind the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees.” The sentences came quickly.
She continued, stopping only to notice which neighbors were coming by for their mail, comforted in her work by the sounds of their stilted talk with her grandmother downstairs. Nothing unusual. The same sounds as before, when she had written the stories.
The sun was low in the sky, tingeing the bark of the birch trees a pale pink, when she saw a man outside the house. His gait caught her eye. Although she had seen him—studied him—in church, she did not recognize him until he paused and looked up at the house.
Then she saw his black hair with its single coifed wave and his dark mournful eyes; she saw him straighten his shoulders the way he did before taking the pulpit.
Maud flexed her feet and reread a few sentences. She liked them. When she stood, she had her notebooks and pen still in hand. She ran downstairs with them, managing to curl a few strands of hair behind her ears and situate herself at the kitchen table just before the Reverend Ewan Macdonald came in for his mail.
Logan Steiner is the award-winning and USA Today bestselling author of “After Anne,” which tells the story of “Anne of Green Gables” author Lucy Maud Montgomery. Steiner also writes a weekly Substack newsletter called The Creative Sort. After graduating from Pomona College and Harvard Law School, she clerked for three federal judges, spent six years in Big Law, and served for three years as an Assistant United States Attorney. Steiner now specializes in brief writing at a boutique law firm. She lives in Denver with her husband, daughter, and a Russian Blue cat named Taggart.
