I am busily prepping for the talk I announced last week for the C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits (CSLKS) conference in Iași, Romania: “’At war with all wild things’: A Settler’s Reflections on C.S. Lewis and Indigenous Spaces.” As I write, I am also thinking about how best to share the material once it emerges in a finished form. This has been one of the most challenging projects I have undertaken in terms of finding the right words–really, trying to find the “story” that emerges from my research and reading.

In my thought process, I realize that I never shared my previous conference talk: “Passports to the Geography of Fairyland: Can C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery be Kindred Spirits?” As it is a light and fun topic, I hope this is something that fans of either or both authors might enjoy!

“Passports to the Geography of Fairyland: Can C.S. Lewis and L.M. Montgomery be Kindred Spirits?”

While few children’s books have sold more than C.S. Lewis’ 1950 fairy-tale, The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe—with perhaps 85,000,000 copies in print—L.M. Montgomery’s 1909 Anne of Green Gables was immediately popular on a global level. With translations within a year of publication, this first Anne book has sold approximately 50,000,000 copies. Is there any connection between these two giant figures in English children’s writing?

Lewis and Montgomery wrote in different genres—Lewis as a fantasist, Montgomery as a realist. Lewis came from the British academy while Montgomery remained a rural Canadian writer.

Despite their differences, the title of “The C.S. Lewis and Kindred Spirits Society” invites comparison. The vibrant, red-headed orphan of Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables is a wiry, curious, precocious character who dearly desires to discover a “kindred spirit,” someone who shares her senses of wonder and adventure. Anne’s creator, Lucy Maud Montgomery, once claimed that she possessed “a passport to the geography of fairyland.” In her novels, Anne transforms the mundane world of Prince Edward Island much like C.S. Lewis’ wardrobe invites readers to another world. Despite all their differences, and though they never met or read each other’s books, Montgomery and Lewis are kindred spirits, for they share this imaginative passport to fairy-worlds of transformation and joy.

Some parts of my work to read further on this topic:

• Brenton D.G. Dickieson, “Befriending the Darkness: L.M. Montgomery’s Lived Theodicy in Anne’s House of Dreams,” The Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies (2021), free, open-sourced here.
• Brenton D.G. Dickieson, “Rainbow Valley as Embodied Heaven: L.M. Montgomery’s Narrative Spirituality in Rainbow Valley,” Journal of L.M. Montgomery Studies (2020), free, open-sourced here.
• Brenton D.G. Dickieson, “C.S. Lewis’s Theory of Sehnsucht as a Tool for Theorizing L.M. Montgomery’s Experience of ‘The Flash,’” The Faithful Imagination (ed. Joe Ricke and Ashley Chu; Winged Lion Press, 2019), pp. 144-165.

Reach out to me if any of that is unavailable to you.

If you are interested in the talk but haven’t read the Anne of Green Gables series or the Emily trilogy, beginning with the brilliant Emily of New Moon, you can catch some of the “spirit of Anne” in the trailers to two television productions: the Kevin Sullivan 1980s mini-series that creates the visual imagination of “Anne” for most Canadians of my age, and the darker, artistic, troubling and beautiful recent Anne with an E serial on CBC/Netflix.

And though it sounds a bit maniacal out of context, Anne of Green Gables: The Musical has run for decades at the Confederation Centre of the Arts in Charlottetown, Prince Edward Island (until COVID broke the record run). Here is the “Kindred Spirits” song. In the “MaudCast: The Official Podcast of the L.M. Montgomery Institute,” And, by the way, a new season is launching this fall.

Though I don’t think we are ready to call Montgomery and Lewis “bosom friends,” here are some “kindred spirit” scenes from the Anne with an E series that captures Anne and Diana’s friendship (though I think Anne Shirley’s truest kindred spirit are those of “the race that knows Joseph” in Anne’s House of Dreams, Leslie Moore in particular).