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L. M. Montgomery's work, including her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, has been tied inextricably, in both scholarship and the popular imagination, to the rural worlds of Green Gables, Avonlea and Prince Edward Island. This article positions Montgomery as a writer offering insight into early Canadian suburban life. It does so via a reading of the third "Anne" book, Anne of the Island (1915), specifically its depiction of Patty's Place, where Anne lives while a student at Redmond College (Dalhousie College) in Kingsport (Halifax, Nova Scotia). For Montgomery, the suburb is a place that combines the best of the country and the city, while moving past the limitations of both. The suburb gives Anne a home and a place of belonging in a new, urban world. Patty's Place also offers the possibility of transformation and independence, especially for women, more than any other place in the novel. This article not only provides a new perspective on one of Canada's best-loved writers, but also contributes to a slowly growing but long overdue discussion of the city and suburbs in Canadian literary criticism, which is still largely preoccupied with notions of the wilderness and of the north. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]