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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]

This article posits elite metropolitan culture centred on London's West End as a significant force shaping Romantic-period suburbs. It furthermore explores the experiences that elite women – from the affluent middling ranks, the gentry, and the nobility – had of suburban homes. I consider three key types of suburban: West End relationships characterized, respectively, by transplantation of the beau monde to the suburbs, middling-rank emulation of fashion, and retreat from the West End. I explore whether or not these various suburban–West End interpenetrations allow women to achieve physical health, emotional well-being, social standing, and financial stability. Ultimately, I argue that Smith presents a suburban retreat occupied by noble and gentry characters as most successful in these terms. This investigation intervenes in debates on the suburbs taking place in literary Romanticism and more generally in the field of pre-railway suburban history. In particular, I move beyond the social ranks and lifestyles conventionally included in suburban scholarship, such as virtuous middling-rank activity. This article moreover reveals Charlotte Smith – whose writing on rural and natural places and landscapes scholars have celebrated – as an astute commentator on (sub)urban spaces. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]