Demonstration notebook — Anne Shirley

This notebook is a demonstration. It tells a life that never happened: that of Anne Shirley, the heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s novels, published between 1908 and 1921 and now in the public domain. No one here existed, and nothing here took place.

It exists to show what a memory notebook can become when a life runs over fifty years: twenty stories arranged in seven periods, from an orphanage in Nova Scotia to the letters of the Great War; the people who cross them and how they are related; the places on a map; archival photographs; and a search that finds a sentence anywhere in the whole.

Where to begin

The table of contents, above, follows the periods in order — each one a span of years, the way most people remember their own lives. People shows who is related to whom, over three generations. Places carries the map: the real ones, from Charlottetown to Courcelette, and the invented ones, which have a page but no pin. The About page says where the texts and photographs come from, and why no sentence of Montgomery’s has been used.

Three kinds of text can be told apart as you read: a story recounts, a scene starts from a single image, an article explains.