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Children's Literature and the Rise of ‘Mind Cure' New Thought in Anne of Green Gables
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 10 December 2020
Chapter four turns to Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery. New Thought offered Montgomery an escape from the rigid Presbyterianism of her rural Prince Edward Island community and helped assuage her chronic depression and insomnia. Ultimately, New Thought was not enough to save the author, who committed suicide in 1942. But New Thought pervades her fiction, particularly Anne of Green Gables (1908), which features an inspired girl child in the New Thought mold.Anne Shirley’s revitalizing influence on her adoptive parents, her healing of a dying baby, and her transformative imagination all signal her conformity to this role. So do her homosocial relationships with female “kindred spirits” like her “bosom friend,” Diana Barry. Close relationships between women were a common feature of New Thought novels, which appealed to lesbian and bisexual readers and women seeking escape from oppressive marriages. The conclusion of this chapter turns to Montgomery’s later novel, the adult-themed comedy The Blue Castle (1926), to show that New Thought was more than a passing fancy for the author. Rather, it was a coping strategy that she returned to throughout her life and explored in various genres, from children’s literature to romances for adult readers.
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