“Not a ‘usual’ property”: a hundred years of protecting Anne of Green Gables

L.M. Montgomery’s 1908 novel, Anne of Green Gables, has remained continuously in print and under some kind of protection for a hundred years, notably, within the public domain, which the book entered in 1983 in the US and in 1992 in Canada, and without the advantage of copyright extension. This paper traces the ways in which Anne of Green Gables has been protected since its first publication in 1908, undertaking to demonstrate how the history of this novel relates, on the one hand, to the role and the rights of the author, and on the other, to the place of the text in matters of copyright and the public domain.