Anne of Green Gables and all but one of its sequels take place in the Canadian province of Prince Edward Island, near the end of the nineteenth century.

Montgomery consistently emphasizes place; each book in the series contains a thorough and affectionate description of Prince Edward Island. But Montgomery leaves the temporal setting vague, possibly because she wants her work to seem timeless, equally applicable in any age, or possibly because she wants to create in Avonlea a magical place outside the realm of ordinary times. Montgomery refers only twice in the entire series to events that place her fiction in historical context: the Crimean War (which ended in 1856) has occurred a generation or two in the past, and World War I (which began in 1914) is an event of the remote future. Montgomery captures the innocence of peaceful times in simple farm communities where political awareness is limited...