- “What’s your name?”
The child hesitated for a moment. “Will you please call me Cordelia?” she said eagerly.
“
Call you Cordelia! Is that your name?”“No-o-o, it’s not exactly my name, but I would love to be called Cordelia. It’s such a perfectly elegant name.”
“I don’t know what on earth you mean. If Cordelia isn’t your name, what is?”
“Anne Shirley,” reluctantly faltered forth the owner of that name, “but oh, please do call me Cordelia. It can’t matter much to you what you call me if I’m only going to be here a little while, can it? And Anne is such an unromantic name.”
And thus we’re introduced to Anne Shirley. This year marks the 100th anniversary of the publication of Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic novel Anne of Green Gables, the first installment in a series of eight books about the inimitable orphan Anne Shirley. When first published, the book was considered a great success by selling 19,000 copies in the first five months. A century later, more than fifty million copies are in print. It has been adapted into a very successful and popular set of miniseries (though the third one, while wonderful, has absolutely nothing to do with the story originally penned by Montgomery), musicals, stage plays, dolls, and other peripheral items such as dishes and linens.
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Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942, called “Maud” by friends and family, known as L.M. Montgomery as an author) was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Her mother passed away (from tuberculosis) when Maud was very young. Her father moved her to Saskatchewan, and shortly thereafter, she returned to Prince Edward Island, to Cavendish, to be raised by her very strict maternal grandparents. Though she would return to Saskatchewan for a brief time, she spent most of the rest of her life on Prince Edward Island, as well as in Nova Scotia. She attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown, where she completed the two-year teachers’ program in a year, then went on to study literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. After teaching in a variety of schools around the islands, she returned to Cavendish, PEI, in 1898 to live with her widowed grandmother. In 1901, she returned to Halifax, where she wrote for the two newspapers, but she returned to Cavendish in 1902 to care for her grandmother. During this time, she began writing Anne of Green Gables, which was published in 1908 (at age thirty-four, if anyone’s counting).
In 1911, she married minister Ewan MacDonald, and they moved to Ontario so he could take up the leadership of St. Paul’s Presbyterian Church in Leaskdale. It was from the Leaskdale Manse that Montgomery wrote her next eleven novels.
Montgomery died in 1942, and is buried in the Cavendish cemetery on Prince Edward Island. Twenty of Montgomery’s novels were published, but of those, Anne of Green Gables remains the most popular and well-known.
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Anne Shirley (that’s Ann-with-an-E) comes to Avonlea on Prince Edward Island when she is eleven years old. She is adopted by brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who live in a large farmhouse with a multi-gabled, green roof, commonly known as Green Gables. Because of her difficult life before coming to Avonlea, Anne has lived in a world of imagination ever since she can remember. She has an overblown ideal of “the romantic” and seeks it in every aspect of her life—leading to some quite humorous “scrapes” and disasters. Living close-by is Diana Barry, whom Anne claims as her “bosom” friend. Believing her own red hair to be a curse, Anne envies Diana’s dark tresses and teaches the very grounded Diana how to dream and pretend.
Though her arrival causes a stir in the small community, especially with neighbor Rachel Lynde stirring the gossip up, Anne eventually wins the hearts of the residents through her kindness, her generosity, her humor, and her accomplishments. Anne is challenged in those accomplishments by Gilbert Blythe, the boy whom she originally cannot abide for his major mistake of calling her “Carrots,” due to her red hair. Anne works hard to beat Gilbert for the top marks in school.
Anne and Gilbert, and a few of their friends, eventually end up in the teachers’ program at Queens College in Charlottetown, where, once again, Anne finds herself in competition with Gilbert for academic honors. Eventually, they reconcile at the end of the first book and become friends.
Like Jo March from Little Women, Anne’s first forays into writing are by penning fantastical stories. Where Jo’s were of marauders and pirates and highwaymen, Anne’s are of fantastical, romantic worlds, with damsels in distress and knights in shining armor to rescue them.
When assigned to write a story for a school composition assignment (by Anne’s beloved teacher, Miss Stacey), Diana admits to Anne that she cannot possibly come up with a story to write. So Anne starts a story club where she, Diana, and their friends will make up and write down stories. Marilla thinks this is complete and utter nonsense, to which Anne responds:
- “But we’re so careful to put a moral into them all, Marilla,” explained Anne. “I insist upon that. All the good people are rewarded and all the bad ones are suitably punished. I’m sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the great thing. Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Only they laughed in the wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and her Aunt Josephine wrote back that we were to send her some of our stories. So we copied out four of our very best and sent them. Miss Josephine Barry wrote back that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. That kind of puzzled us because the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died. But I’m glad Miss Barry liked them. It shows our club is doing some good in the world. . . .”
Though Anne eventually puts her writing aside to focus on raising her children, we can learn a lesson from her fearless approach to life and to writing—the idea of living in the imagination, letting it overcome us until we can do nothing but tell the story, lest we lose it.
Resources and Articles:
100 Candles: Anne of Green Gables Grows Old and Gets Her Due
Virtual Green Gables
Prince Edward Island
The Films
Four of the novels online:
Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Anne’s House of Dreams
Louisa May Alcott (1832–1888.) was not only the daughter of famed transcendentalist Amos Bronson Alcott, she spent her life amongst a community that included Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Nathaniel Hawthorn, Margaret Fuller, and Elizabeth Peabody. She helped out in the school her father founded (the Temple School, based on the ideals of a utopian society), and was active in the abolitionist movement in her early years. Due to her family’s poverty, she began working at a young age—as a seamstress, a domestic helper, a governess, a teacher, as well as an authoress. Her first published work, Flower Fables was published in 1854. It had originally been written for RW Emerson’s daughter Ellen.
In 1867, Alcott began writing Little Women at the suggestion of her publisher who wanted a “girls’ book” to market to younger readers than those reading Alcott’s other works. She finished the manuscript in two and a half months, drawing on her own family (including her three sisters, May [Amy], Anna [Meg], and Elizabeth [Beth]) and experiences for the story. The novel originally ended after Chapter 23, with Meg’s engagement to Mr. Brooke. The novel was an immediate success, and the second part, picking the story up three years later with Meg and John’s wedding, was published in 1869. The two parts were not actually combined into one volume until 1880, in the U.S., while in Britain, the second part continued to be published separately under the title Good Wives (a decision that Alcott had no say in). This was followed by two sequels: Little Men (1871) and Jo’s Boys (1886), which continued to follow the March girls as they had children and as their children grew up.
Jo March was the second of four daughters of a scholarly minister, Robert March, and a feminist-figure mother, Margaret “Marmee” March. Jo is fifteen years old at the opening of the novel and is the central character. Jo is a tomboy, wishing she could go off to war with her father (a chaplain in the Union army), and claiming to be the man of the house in her father’s absence. Jo strikes up a friendship with the “boy next door” Theodore “Teddy/Laurie” Laurence. Jo is not only bold natured, she is impulsive—which has a tendency to land her in hot (or freezing) water. She speaks before she thinks and acts on her first reaction to a situation without taking the time to think it through first. The softest spot in her heart is reserved for younger sister Beth. It is Beth’s influence on Jo that helps Jo to become the “little woman” her father wishes her to be.
