Cavendish, Prince Edward Island ? Because I was born with a weakness for white clapboard houses with green trim, and because the 11-year-old in our house is a particularly persuasive creature, I am here on a faraway Canadian island, shrouded by smoky fog, thinking about orphans and one-room schoolhouses — and plowing through a 100-year-old novel that most people read before they enter their teens.

But the truth is that, in a family of devoted readers, the only male in the car turned out to be the only one who had never dipped his nose into the intoxicating pages of L.M. Montgomery’s well-loved “Anne of Green Gables.”

In a life like most others — that is, full of bad decisions — this was one of the biggest oversights of all.

Especially so because this turns out to be a special book, set in a special place, written by a special woman, full of special pleasures, bristling with special insights. It is, of course, the story of an aging brother and sister on an ancient island, and of the little girl — equipped with “two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair” — they invite into their home and, inevitably, their hearts.

I vaguely knew all that. I knew, too, that Anne was exactly the age of our own little girl, and that the two of them were in possession of “big eyes … full of spirit and vivacity.” I found, in our few days on the Island — and those who live here will tell you that you must always think of it as an upper-case-I island — what Montgomery called “all its delicious vagaries of brook and bridge, fir coppice and wild cherry arch, corners thick with fern, and branching byways of maple and mountain ash.”

But in a few mornings’ poking around in the odd corners of the remnants of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s life here, we found, too, the story not only of Anne but of the author who brought her alive. She was, like her heroine, a precocious girl but one who, in her hurry, discovered, as Anne did, that a life well-lived is a “goblet of excitement.”

There is, in the life of Anne and of her author, both rejection and rejoicing. Montgomery’s grandmother was the local postmistress, the young Lucy her loyal helper, and there was, miraculously, in the post office the paper an author needs and the secrecy that an author requires. (Five times the manuscript for “Anne” was turned down by stuffy publishers, and because the rejection notices were intercepted at the post office, word never got around, which in a small town like Cavendish may have been Montgomery’s greatest achievement of all.)

Finally there came a publisher’s acceptance, and swiftly after that the public, far from the Island and far wiser than the fancy editors, issued its own unmistakable expression of acceptance.

In a letter to her cousin dated Wednesday, July 6, 1909, Montgomery wrote: “It has been a great surprise to me that Anne should have taken so well with ‘grown-ups.’ When I wrote it I thought it would be an amusing and harmless tale in Sunday school libraries and (for) kiddies …” Not so.

Here’s why, the testimony of a father who has watched his other daughter turn from an 11-year-old into a 15-year-old in what seems like the amount of time it takes to drive from one end of this 139-mile-long island to the other. This truth is tucked into the book on page 254 of the paperback edition, amid the musings of Marilla Cuthbert, whose harsh love helped shaped Anne:

“The child she had learned to love had vanished somehow and here was this tall, serious-eyed girl of fifteen, with the thoughtful brow and the proudly posed little head, in her place. Marilla loved the girl as she had loved the child, but she was conscious of a queer sorrowful sense of loss.” That is a sentence, and a sentiment, that no 11-year-old reader, even the redoubtable Anne, could remotely grasp.

Since 1997, an eight-mile bridge has connected P.E.I. with the rest of the Americas, but it remains a place where the best meal on the Island can be found at a lobster supper in a church basement. In Montgomery’s time it was a remote place, accessible in summer by steamboat and in winter by the sort of boat with metal runners on either side of the keel that the half-frozen passengers had to pull along the ice of the Northumberland Strait all the way to New Brunswick.

Three years before she died, Montgomery paused to reflect on fleeting youth and enduring lessons. She left us a thought to ease our own aging. Youth, she said, “is not a vanished thing but something that dwells forever in the heart.” She is right. For that reason, no matter what age we visit her Island, and read her “Anne of Green Gables,” we do so when we are young.

That is Lucy Maud Montgomery’s gift — and it is her gift to us.

David Shribman is a columnist for Universal Press Syndicate.