My first evening on Prince Edward Island, I found myself on the shore, scrambling across sun-bleached beach grass to circle an abandoned lighthouse. The Gulf of St. Lawrence crashed in moody bursts before me, the water reflecting the deepening gray of the sky. My feet sank into drifts of sand until I turned inland, down a spongy red clay road that edged a verdant meadow. In the distance, the cheerful lights of my bed-and-breakfast, a rambling 19th-century farmhouse, beckoned.

Less than an hour earlier, I had been driving past a spangly strip of tourist attractions — miniature golf courses, water theme parks — that promised “family fun” with suspicious exuberance. But on this country lane, with the roar of the gulf filling my ears, I could almost imagine myself a solitary traveler and not one of the thousands of tourists who flock every year to the green gabled house only a few miles from where I stood.

I had come to this Canadian island to follow in the footsteps of L. M. Montgomery, who made her island home famous with her novel “Anne of Green Gables.” An instant best-seller when it was published in 1908, the book tells the story of the verbose, red-haired Anne Shirley — an 11-year-old orphan who is accidentally sent to a middle-aged brother and sister instead of the boy they had requested to help with their farm. Starved for love, with a vibrant imagination and a knack for comic mishap, Anne has charmed readers for over a century, including Mark Twain, who proclaimed her “the dearest and most lovable child in fiction since the immortal Alice.”

The book, which has sold more than 50 million copies and has been translated into at least 20 languages, started Lucy Maud Montgomery’s career. Today it anchors the island’s multimillion-dollar tourist industry, with summer musical performances, gift shops, house museums, horse-drawn carriage rides, a mock village and more — all devoted to scenes and characters from the book and its seven sequels.