The British scholar Faye Hammill observed that such is the popularity of Shirley that she has overshadowed her creator, L.M Montgomery as license plates in Prince Edward Island bear the slogan "P.E.I Home of Anne of Green Gables" rather than "P.E.I Birthplace of L.M Montgomery". The actress Mary Miles Minter played Shirley in the 1919 film adaption of "Anne of Green Gables" later had her career ruined when the film director William Desmond Taylor was murdered in 1922, and her name came up as a suspect, through she was never charged. When Minter attempted a comeback as an advice columnist later in the 1920s, she used the pen-name Anne Shirley in an attempt to restore her wholesome image, which had been ruined by the Taylor murder scandal. The actress Dawn O'Day who played Shirley in the 1934 film adaption of "Anne of Green Gables" liked the character so much she legally changed her name to Anne Shirley. Montgomery during her youth had experiences of what she called "the flash"-moments of quiet contemplation of the beauty of nature when she was walking alone that gave her emotional ecstasy and what she regarded as the awareness of a higher spiritual power running through nature and her. Despite Montgomery's claim that Shirley was not autobiographical, the moments when Shirley experienced moments of a mystical communion with nature are almost word for word the same as Montgomery's descriptions of "the flash" in her diary.