Anne of Green Gables(1908).

One of the most memorable exchanges in this classic story happens early in the book. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a middle-aged brother and sister, are farming on Prince Edward Island in Canada. This kind of sibling household was a feature of small farming societies everywhere. There wasn’t enough money in the farm to dower or educate the daughter, so she had to stay on the farm, and not enough money, either, to enable the son to marry and support two women, assuming they’d have agreed to live together. So the man farmed and his sister kept house for him. In this situation, it was usual for a nephew or younger cousin to be taken on as additional farm labour and eventual heir. The Cuthberts have no such relatives, so they have sent for a boy from the orphanage in Nova Scotia; they intend to give him a good home and an education and probably the farm, eventually. But an eleven-year-old girl, the red-haired chatterbox Anne Shirley, is sent to them by mistake. She cannot be left at the railway station overnight, so Matthew brings her home and Marilla, having packed her off to bed for the night, is telling him that they have to send Anne back, because she’ll be no good to them. And Matthew – like many farmers a man of few words – responds unexpectedly: ‘We might be some good to her.’

I discovered Anne through the Collier’s Junior Classics when I was very young, and my sister and I got a present of two of the books, in nice white-dust-jacketed green hardbacks; Anne of Green Gables and Anne of Windy Willows – the latter is the fourth in the series, but we read it before we read Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, so we skipped the bit where she rejects school-frenemy Gilbert Blythe definitively (as she thinks) and gets engaged to a handsome stick (Royal Something or Something Royal), and went straight to where she was a teacher at Windy Willows, engaged to Gilbert (spoiler, I’m sorry.) Later I read them all and loved them all, but here I want to write about that brilliant, beguiling first book.

Anne, it emerges, was reared in an orphanage, from which she was periodically boarded out to a series of foster-homes where she served as a helper to hard-pressed mothers of big families. Never abused, she was emotionally neglected (we’d say nowadays) and she feels this acutely and has the intelligence to name it. Her brilliant imagination and voracious reading of romances has sustained her through many hardships.(She tries to get Marilla to call her Cordelia, because it is a much nicer name than Anne. And she pines after an ‘alabaster brow’.) When she shamelessly tries to guilt-trip Marilla into keeping her, she uses the language gleaned from her reading:

‘You would cry too if you were an orphan and had come to a place you thought was going to be home and found that they didn’t want you because you weren’t a boy. Oh this is the most tragical thing that has ever happened to me!’

After Marilla decides to keep Anne, her neighbour, the elderly busybody Mrs Rachel Lynde, indignant that she has not been consulted about this decision, comes to inspect Anne and pronounces her skinny and ‘homely’ and freckled with ‘hair as red as carrots’. Anne, who flies into a temper and insults Mrs Lynde back, is duly sent to her room,but the following day she delivers (on her knees) a flowery and well-rehearsed apology to this neighbour. Mrs Lynde, who isn’t very subtle, raises Anne regally from her knees and tells her she knew a girl once with carrot-red hair that turned auburn when she grew up, and loves Anne from that day on. Marilla is left with the suspicion that Anne has enjoyed the drama of the occasion tremendously and is cross with her all the way home. And she is often cross with Anne throughout the book, because Anne is very annoying and trying, with her constant talking and imagining and pining and whining after things she is not allowed or cannot have – puffed sleeves, ice-cream, you name it. Still, if she hadn’t wanted something more and demanded it more than once with fancy language but real tears the night she arrived by accident at Marilla’s house, she’d never have got her forever home.

All the Anne books contain interesting details about food and clothes, household routines and community rituals in early twentieth century rural Canada that delight the social historian. It is, however,the descriptions of nature in all its seasons that are most arresting:

…a harmonius consciousness [in Marilla] of red fields smoking into pale purply mists in the declining sun, of long, sharp-pointed fir shadows falling over the meadow beyond the brook, of still, crimson-studded maples around a mirror-like wood pool…

As well as the beauty of Prince Edward Island, which appeals to her romantic soul from the very beginning, Anne has unswerving commitment from Marilla and unconditional love from Matthew, warm approval from Mrs Lynde, friendship from Diana Barry and other girls. She has gained a family and a community.

Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942), shunted from one set of relatives to another as a child and teenager, knew that being related to people didn’t mean you belonged with them and to them. Anne and the Cuthberts, however,can start afresh without any expectations or obligations at all. ‘I dare say I’ll make a terrible mess of it. But I’ll do my best,’ Marilla tells Matthew after she’s made her decision. Making it up as she goes along, Marilla makes a better job of child-rearing than the blood relations of Emily (in her Emily books) or Valancy in The Blue Castle.

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L.M.Montgomery, Anne of Green Gables (1908: innumerable reprints.) The sequels are Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Willows, Anne’s House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley all published over the following decades. Interestingly, Rilla of Ingleside, which is about Anne’s daughter, was published earlier than some of the sequels. Chronicles of Avonlea (1912) and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, (I920) mine the rich seam of local characters and events. Montgomery is an acute observer of people with a great sense of the ridiculous, but she is never cruel or cynical.

________Emily of New Moon, Emily Climbs, Emily’s Quest (all published between 1923 and 1927). These brilliant books are bleaker and more subtle than the Anne books but I wouldn’t say they’re better – they are just different. They also embody very good expositions of the writing process – from inspiration and ‘writer’s block’ right down to the practical problem of getting enough paper in rural households in the early twentieth century (a young Emily uses the backs of old invoices and receipts). The dangers of manipulative mentors and false artistic friends are also highlighted and there is lots of the ethnographic detail that make the Anne and Avonlea books so memorable.

__________ The Blue Castle (1926). This was one of Montgomery’s few books for adults, about a crushed young woman whose bid for freedom is all the more successful because it is originates in genuine concern for another person’s unhappiness. It is quite frank (for its time)about sexual desire.

Mary Henley Rubio, L.M.Montgomery: the gift of wings (Toronto: Anchor 2008). A truly fascinating biography of this remarkable writer.