Reading L. M. Montgomery: Anne of Green Gables
Plus other updates!
Hello friends!
I finished Anne of Green Gables last night, so this is my first of 20 emails covering my thoughts on every novel L. M. Montgomery wrote.
But first! Let me just say, I don't know if it's the weather turning or that I'm now a month into taking stuff to help my haywire hormones, but a cloud seemed to lift after my last email. I've been much more energetic, and what a relief.
It might also have helped that I decided to just go ahead and get back to rewriting Alfred's story. Ever since I started talking on my channel about the Hidden Lands, I've felt some regret that no one knows my "core" characters, but I felt I should wait because they're later in the timeline and maybe I should write it in order. But my Discord crew confirmed what I felt in my heart--just write the thing that screams at you!
It seems that working on this story has helped free up other blocks as well because last week I rewrote the outline for the Broken Queen sequel and I realized I had been going in the wrong direction there as well.
Long story short, I've been writing A LOT in September so far.
And my dreams are back! I had two deep, involved dreams about my characters in a row! It's been so long since that happened. I know I'm doing something very right!
Anyway. Anne of Green Gables.
I liked this book a lot more this time than when I read it as a kid or a teenager. Not that I didn't like it then, just that different aspects resonated now. Particular, that this is Marilla's story as much as Anne's. As a kid I was mainly focused on the other kids. As an adult, I am more moved by Marilla's growth.
Note: I will mention spoilers in this email. This is not a book where I think "spoilers" will matter to many people, but if they do to you, go read it and come back!
I also will not summarize Anne of Green Gables, because the story is very well known. I might do that for the other books, though.
When Maud Wrote Anne
First, some background context. Maud wrote Anne of Green Gables throughout most of 1905 and finished it in January of 1906. "It was a labor of love. I cast 'moral' and 'Sunday school ideals' to the winds." Anne, as a character, was as real to Maud as if she had given birth to her, as she noted in her diary, although--as is always the case with the best books, it seems!--it was rejected by a number of publishers including Macmillan and Henry Holt, before finally being accepted by L. C. Page, who would not treat her very well.
Still, it was a joyous occasion to see one's first book in print, and Maud received her first copy in June of 1908. "Not a great book at all--but mine, mine, mine"-- I think a lot of people, over the years, would argue with her on that point, but we can never judge our own work!
Anne was an immediate success, going into a 5th edition within just a few months. Maud noted, "One of the reviews says 'the book radiates happiness and optimism'. When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom under which it was written I wonder at this. Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work."
Anne of Green Gables was written while Maud lived with her grandmother, who had raised her (along with her grandfather, who had since died). Maud was sometimes resentful at being stuck as the caretaker of her grandmother into her 30s. Her grandmother was a rather strict, controlling person whom Maud described as being kind "in her way". In October of 1905, while she would have been working on Anne, she described an incident of some other relatives trying to force them out of their house. "Grandfather's absurd will put her completely in their power--the power of selfish, domineering men eaten up with greed."
Marilla's slow growth into being warmer and kinder, and Anne remaining with her at Green Gables, setting aside some of her own dreams to protect the dear old place after Matthew's death, must have been rather therapeutic. There are many parallels, but Marilla shows more warmth, and Anne has more agency, than what Maud describes in her journals.
Anne's Personality
When I was younger, Anne struck me as just a bit larger than life. I liked the Emily books better because Emily felt more believable. However, while it is true that there probably aren't too many 11 year old orphans so persistently stuck in a fanciful and deeply intelligent dream world as Anne, i did appreciate how well it captured the intense emotions of tween girls.
Every tiny despair is such a tragedy! And such a selfish one. Anne is continuously selfish but in a very unaware, well-meaning way. I can look back on myself at the same age and see some very similar behavior! And there was absolutely nothing worse than disappointment. Marilla realizes "that the ups and downs of existence would probably bear hardly on this impulsive soul and not sufficiently understanding that the equally great capacity for delight might more than compensate."
I bet Maud felt that herself, quite often...boy, it's hard to be a sensitive person sometimes.
One of my favorite chapters is The Story Club Is Formed, where Anne writes a story called 'The Jealous Rival; or, in Death Not Divided", featuring a heroine with "velvety purple eyes". Swap the trends of nowadays for the trends of the 1900s and the mood is VERY much the same. Back then, they didn't have internet snobs deriding their girlhood passions, but they had a lot of stern adults noting that THEY never read novels when they were growing up!
Sometimes I Wish I Was a Kid in 1908
I mean, I'm not blind to all the problems. For one thing, just the fact that Anne comes from an orphanage! This was an era where death came easily and a lot of children lost their parents (as well as parents losing children), and we'll get to classism and prejudice in a minute.
BUT...as I read I couldn't help but think how nice it sounds that these kids are just kids for so long, playing outside so much, so freely. Marilla orders Anne to run through the "Haunted Wood" to Diana's house after dark and is baffled that Anne has scared herself into not wanting to run through the woods at night by imagining it is haunted. How many kids nowadays run to their friends' houses through the woods after dark? I'm not a "things used to be so much better" type, because I think for everything we mess up, we get something else very right, but...I just have to say that there are some parts of childhood in this book that just sound SO wonderful.
Prejudices
I remembered that Anne messes up a cake by accidentally putting liniment in it instead of vanilla. I forgot that at the end of the incident, Marilla says the cake isn't even fit to feed the hired boy, Jerry Buote. Like most of the French Canadians in these books, Jerry is basically a non-person. He works for Marilla and Matthew for quite a while and boards with them, but never has a personality or a single speaking line. He's basically treated as just one step above the pigs, in that no one expects him to eat the liniment cake!
This is certainly not something as I noticed as a kid, and it certainly doesn't jump out in a modern reading as much as the racist or xenophobic moments in some other older books. For the most part, people who are not of the class, race, or ethnic background of the main characters are just out of the picture entirely...except that we are occasionally reminded that they are, in fact, very much around on a day to day basis!
Diana Barry
I read Anne of Green Gables AFTER Emily, and one other reason I liked it less was because Anne's best friend was somewhat of a non-character. They fall into an instant, deep friendship, which is fairly convincing for that age...but then it got rather boring to me, as Diana just doesn't have that much of a personality. To me, Emily's friendship with Ilse is far more convincing. But more on that in October when I reread Emily!
Puffed Sleeves
Throughout the book, Anne is obsessed with getting a dress with puffed sleeves. In one of his most touching moments, Matthew goes out of his way to get her one. As I read, I thought it was odd that she was so obsessed with puffed sleeves, a fashion of the 1890s. Was this book supposed to be set ten years before it came out? Could you imagine that nowadays??
However, in her diaries Maud noted that puffed sleeves were "back" in 1905 as she was writing Anne, bringing her back to her own college days. They were certainly, by and large, out again by the time of publication.
Anne's Growth
I forgot that Anne is sixteen by the end of the book. She's matured and no longer speaks out entire pages of fantasy, and is off to study to become a teacher. (Like all of Maud's heroines, she has also become somehow extremely beautiful, in an unconventional way that cannot quite be pinpointed as "beauty" but manages to sound extremely alluring.)
One disappointment about the later Anne books is that she no longer is the Anne we all remember most of all, the young Anne. But it would also be kind of odd if she stayed that way. As a single book, it works well. As Marilla has grown more able to express her love for Anne, Anne has also grown more steady and disciplined and ready to succeed in the world. They've both taken on some of the best of the other.
I really do miss when "children's" books carried their heroines all the way into adulthood. It's one reason I keep reading them all my life.
I also love how rich the vocabulary is in this book. Maud's writing felt so accessible to me when I was 11 but also so DELICIOUS with its language, and all the little unfamiliar bits of vocabulary and day-to-day of early 20th century girlhood. No one ever worries that kids won't know what "a wincey dress" is when they read Anne, but my editor was on me about mentioning a homburg hat in Dark Metropolis because "no one will know what that is". One reason I like self-publishing is that, I'm sorry, but readers can GOOGLE THE HAT IF THEY WANT TO KNOW, OKAY? (Wincey, by the way, is a plain coarse twill!)
All right. I could actually say so much more about Anne, but I've been writing this for two hours and I told myself that was my limit, so I will have to save any other thoughts for my next email.
Please chat freely about Anne of Green Gables! I would love to hear any and all thoughts!
xo,
Lidiya