Anne of Green Gables Sat Rejected in a Hatbox
Quick answer: Anne of Green Gables was rejected by five publishers and hidden in a hatbox for two years before L.M. Montgomery tried once more and made a classic.
Somewhere around 1905, in the farmhouse kitchen at Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, Lucy Maud Montgomery finished typing a novel about a talkative red-haired orphan and began mailing it to publishers. The replies came back, one after another, all saying no. By her own later account, five houses turned the book down, some with printed rejection slips, none with encouragement worth keeping. She took the manuscript of 'Anne of Green Gables', put it away in an old hatbox, and told herself she might one day cut it down into a short serial for a Sunday school paper. Then she went back to her ordinary work.
The manuscript sat in that hatbox for roughly two years. The book inside it would eventually sell tens of millions of copies, turn a Prince Edward Island farmhouse into a pilgrimage site, and earn praise from Mark Twain himself. The gap between the hatbox and all of that was closed by nothing more dramatic than a second look on an ordinary day, which is exactly why the story is worth telling to any writer with a drawer full of retired manuscripts.
Five letters saying no
Montgomery was no beginner when she wrote Anne. Born in 1874 and raised by her strict grandparents after her mother's death, she had spent a decade building a workmanlike career selling short stories and poems to magazines across Canada and the United States, hundreds of pieces by the mid-1900s, written at the kitchen table while she helped her grandmother run the Cavendish post office. She understood markets, postage, and rejection as thoroughly as any professional of her era.
That experience makes her response to Anne's rejections more interesting, not less. The refusals did not catch an amateur off guard; they wore down a professional who knew the odds. She later recorded the sequence in her journals: publisher after publisher declining, her confidence in the book sinking with each envelope, until putting it away felt like realism rather than defeat. Every working writer knows this exact moment, when shelving a project can be dressed up as good judgement. Sometimes it even is. The hatbox is what it looks like.
Two years in the dark
What did not happen during those two years matters. Montgomery did not burn the manuscript, and she did not carry out her plan to gut it into a serial. She kept working: the magazine pieces continued, the post office continued, the caretaking of her ageing grandmother continued. The novel simply waited, out of sight, while its author stayed in motion as a writer. A shelved book inside a working writing life is dormant; a shelved book inside an abandoned writing life is dead.
By her own account, she came across the hatbox again in 1907 during a spell of ordinary tidying, reread the manuscript, and found it better than she remembered. That rereading is the quiet hinge of the whole story. Two years of distance had turned her from the book's demoralised author into something closer to its reader, and the reader liked it. She freshened the typescript and mailed it out once more, this time to the L.C. Page Company of Boston.
The second look and the yes
Page accepted it, with a contract that required an option on sequels. 'Anne of Green Gables' was published in June 1908, when Montgomery was 33, and the response was immediate and enormous: reprint followed reprint through the first year, with sales widely reported at around nineteen thousand copies in the first five months, a runaway figure for a first novel in 1908. Fan letters arrived by the sackful. Among them, famously, was praise from Mark Twain, who in a widely quoted 1908 letter called Anne 'the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice'.
Honesty requires the sour footnote. The contract that rescued the book also exploited its author: Montgomery's royalty was widely reported at nine cents a copy, a thin slice of the fortune the book generated, and her relationship with Page curdled into years of litigation that she pursued, doggedly and at real cost, into the 1920s, eventually winning. The lesson sits alongside the triumph: the same persistence that gets a writer published has to be kept switched on afterwards, because publication is a business relationship, not a rescue.
Why the turn happened
Strip the story to its mechanism and three things stand out. First, distance: two years turned self-disgust back into judgement, and the judgement said the book was good. Second, the writer had never stopped being a writer; her daily trade in magazine work kept her skills, her habits, and her nerve intact while the novel slept. Third, luck gets its honest credit: the sixth publisher was simply the right desk at the right moment, an American house with the reach to make a phenomenon of a Canadian island story. Five other desks had proved that merit alone decides nothing about a single submission.
There is also a lesson in the number itself. Five rejections feels devastating and is, statistically, almost nothing. Montgomery's near-surrender after five is a useful mirror: most writers abandon work not after a hundred refusals but after a handful, at exactly the depth of discouragement she recorded in her journals before the hatbox opened again.
What a working writer can take from it
Institute your own hatbox, deliberately. When a piece has been rejected enough to blur your judgement, retire it with a return date instead of a verdict. Six months for a poem, a year or two for a book. When the date comes, reread it as a stranger. You will usually find one of two things: the flaws are now obvious and fixable, or the work is better than the rejections made you believe. Both discoveries are only available after distance.
And while the piece rests, keep trading. Montgomery's hundreds of magazine sales were not a distraction from Anne; they were the scaffolding that held her writing life upright while the novel waited. A poet can do the same in miniature: while one poem rests, finish and circulate others, keep a rhythm of completion going. A recurring deadline helps; Writory's contest window opens on the 1st and closes on the 25th every month, and every entry gets a read and a score, which makes it a serviceable metronome for exactly this kind of steady output.
Reading Anne as a writer
Return to 'Anne of Green Gables' with craft in mind and notice how much of its charm is voice engineering. Anne's monologues run long precisely so that Marilla's dry one-line replies can land; the book's comedy is a rhythm section, verbosity against economy. Notice too how Montgomery, herself an orphan in all but name, converts private grief into a character who transforms every adult who tries to manage her. The book is in the public domain, so read it with a pencil, and steal the timing.
What poets can take from this
- Retire rejected work with a return date, not a verdict.
- Reread shelved manuscripts as a stranger; distance restores judgement.
- Keep finishing and submitting other pieces while one rests.
- Count your rejections honestly; five feels like a hundred but is almost nothing.
- Read contracts as carefully as proofs; Montgomery's persistence was needed after publication too.
- Steal Anne's rhythm: let a talkative voice play against a terse one.
Try it yourself
Write a poem or scene about an object shut away in a box, a manuscript, a letter, a photograph, and the day someone finally opens it. Let two years of silence be present in the room without being named.
Questions
How many times was Anne of Green Gables rejected?
By Montgomery's own account, five publishers turned the manuscript down around 1905 and 1906. She then stored it in a hatbox for about two years before revising it and sending it to L.C. Page of Boston, who accepted it.
When was Anne of Green Gables finally published?
In June 1908, when Montgomery was 33. It was an immediate bestseller, reprinting repeatedly in its first year, and it has remained in print ever since, with worldwide sales in the tens of millions.
Did Mark Twain really praise Anne of Green Gables?
Yes. In a widely quoted 1908 letter he called Anne 'the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice', referring to Alice in Wonderland. The endorsement helped cement the book's early fame.
By the Writory editorial team, reviewed by working poets. Updated September 2026.
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