It is 1945 and Anne Shirley (Barbara Hershey) now a successful, middle-aged writer has returned to Prince Edward Island. On a whim, she agrees to write a play for a theatre producer. The play, she reasons, will keep her busy enough to not go out of her mind with worry about her only son, who has yet to return from the war overseas. But a long-hidden secret in the form of a letter from her errant father, discovered under the fl oorboards at Green Gables, provides a distraction of its own. Anne delves into long-buried memories, reliving the troubled years before she arrived as an orphan at the Green Gables farmhouse. She is forced to confront the fact that she made up stories about her life; after her mother died and when her father deserted his young daughter. Over the course of one remarkable summer, Anne Shirley discovers the astonishing truth about her father, the origins of her quest for "kindred spirits" and the roots of her brilliant, magical imagination.