This month Anabel reviews this classic story by L.M. Montgomery
A child sits on a railway platform waiting to be met. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert are an elderly brother and sister living on Prince Edward Island (PEI) in Canada at the end of the 19th century. They decide to adopt a boy to help with the farm chores, but when Matthew goes to the station to collect him, he finds that the orphanage has made a mistake and has sent – a girl! And so we meet Anne Shirley – eleven years old, skinny with red hair, which she hates, and possessed of a vivid imagination and a definite gift of the gab. Matthew is quickly enchanted, Marilla takes a little longer to come round, but they decide to keep Anne and the book tells the story of the next few years as she grows from an impetuous young girl, led into all sorts of scrapes by her imagination and her wayward tongue, into a teenager on the brink of adulthood and destined for a career as a teacher.
This is a children’s book, full of broad humour involving Anne’s misadventures with, variously, ice cream, puffed sleeves, hair dye and accidental drunkenness. However, it can still be enjoyed by adults who will, perhaps, have more understanding of some of the strong emotions it invokes. I have re-read it myself many times over the years and I never fail to be moved by the relationships between the three main characters, which are beautifully drawn. Anne wears her heart on her sleeve, but taciturn Matthew and strict, repressed Marilla, while obviously loving her deeply, have no way of expressing it in words. There is also a varied supporting cast, from Mrs Rachel Lynde, who provokes Anne’s first crisis by twitting her about her red hair, to Diana Barry, a near neighbour of Anne’s age who quickly becomes her “bosom friend and kindred spirit”. However, I would say that PEI is actually the fourth most important character in the book, as Anne’s love for her adopted homeland shines through, a reflection of the love felt by the author in real-life. The vivid descriptions of the countryside are enhanced by Anne’s rechristening of its more mundane features – Barry’s Pond, for example, is far less enticing than the “Lake of Shining Waters” – and have enticed many tourists to visit Cavendish PEI (Avonlea in the book). Last year, I was lucky enough to be one of them. It was wonderful to visit the house on which Green Gables was based and to see for myself Anne’s “Haunted Woods” and “Lovers’Lane” – if you want to know more, I’ve written about what I learned there on both my travel blog and my children’s literature blog.
If you find you fall in love with Anne then fear not: there are several more books in the series. There is also a prequel, Before Green Gables, by Budge Wilson, which fills in Anne’s backstory accurately, is remarkably true to the spirit of the original book and ends, how else, with a child sitting on a railway platform waiting to be met.
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