Anne of Green Gables

About this book

Anne of Green Gables is a 1908 novel by the Canadian writer L. M. Montgomery. It tells the story of Anne Shirley, an eleven-year-old orphan sent by mistake to an elderly brother and sister on Prince Edward Island who had asked for a boy to help on their farm. Montgomery wrote it in the evenings while working as a postmistress in the village of Cavendish, and the island setting, called Avonlea in the book, is drawn closely from the place she grew up in.

The novel was a success from its first year and led to seven sequels and a steady stream of stage, film and television adaptations. It has been translated widely and has an unusually strong following in Japan, where it has been read in schools since the 1950s. Prince Edward Island’s tourism is built in large part around the book.

The story

Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a shy bachelor and his brisk sister, live at a farm called Green Gables near Avonlea. They arrange to adopt an orphan boy, but the child who arrives at the railway station is a thin red-haired girl who talks without stopping and has already decided she loves the place. Matthew cannot bring himself to send her back. Marilla, more reluctantly, agrees to a trial.

The rest of the book follows Anne through about five years: her first friend, Diana Barry; her feud with a boy named Gilbert Blythe who calls her “Carrots”; a series of disasters involving hair dye, a cake, a dramatic reenactment on a borrowed boat and a bottle of what she thinks is raspberry cordial; and her progress through the village school toward the entrance examination for Queen’s Academy in Charlottetown.

Themes and historical context

The book was published at the end of the long Victorian period and belongs to a wave of fiction about orphans and spirited girls that includes Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm and, later, Pollyanna. What sets Anne apart is Montgomery’s ear for talk and her refusal to make her heroine good. Anne is vain, quick-tempered and given to speeches, and the novel’s comedy depends on her colliding with a community that values restraint.

Avonlea is a Presbyterian farming village at the turn of the century, and the book records its rhythms in detail: church, Sunday school, the sewing circle, the one-room schoolhouse, the social hierarchy of who visits whom. Montgomery’s own childhood was lonely; she was raised by strict grandparents after her mother’s death, and the novel’s picture of a child winning over two undemonstrative old people has usually been read in that light.

Education and a girl’s prospects are a quiet theme in the later chapters. Anne’s path through school to teacher training was one of the few open to a clever girl of her class in 1900, and the book takes her ambitions seriously without making them the whole point.

Who should read it

Anne of Green Gables is one of the easiest books in the classic canon to read and one of the easiest to read aloud. The vocabulary is a little old-fashioned and Anne’s speeches run long, which is the joke. It is suitable for readers of around nine upward and has a large adult readership. The book is a moderate length and the chapters are episodic, so it works well in short sessions. The sequels, several of which are also on Project Gutenberg, follow Anne into adulthood.

Edition notes

The Gutenberg transcription was prepared by David Widger and Charles Keller.