Anne Shirley Talked My Ear Off and I Let Her

An Orphan, a Mistake, and a Farm That Wanted a Boy

Here’s the setup, and it’s a good one even if you’ve had it spoiled by osmosis: Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, an aging brother and sister running a farm called Green Gables on Prince Edward Island, decide to adopt a boy from an orphanage to help with the work. Through a mix-up nobody quite explains to your satisfaction, they end up with Anne Shirley instead. Skinny, red-haired, freckled, and utterly incapable of shutting up.

Marilla wants to send her back. Matthew, who is terrified of women and has apparently never had an opinion in his life, falls for Anne in about four pages and quietly wins. That’s the whole engine of the book, really: will this girl get to stay, and what happens to two set-in-their-ways adults when she does. It is not a plot with stakes in the thriller sense. Nobody is trying to kill anybody. The closest thing to a villain is a boy who pulls Anne’s hair and calls her “Carrots,” and she breaks a slate over his head for it, which remains one of the most satisfying acts of violence in children’s literature.

The Talking, the Slate, and the One Real Problem

Look, I need to be honest about something: this book is slow. Not slow like boring, but slow like a Sunday. Whole chapters go by where nothing happens except Anne renaming a pond “The Lake of Shining Waters” and getting a bosom friend and dyeing her hair green by accident (still one of the funniest sequences Montgomery ever wrote, the vanity of it, the sheer horror of green hair, and Anne’s tragic dignity through the whole ordeal). If you came here for a story with momentum, you might find yourself checking how many pages are left in a chapter that is mostly about a picnic.

But here’s the thing, that slowness is the point. Montgomery isn’t building toward a twist. She’s building a person. Anne’s imagination, her need to name everything, her wild swings between tragedy and joy (she is convinced, repeatedly, that her life is a catastrophe, and she is wrong every single time), that’s the actual substance of the book. The famous scene where she breaks the slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head because he calls her “Carrots” isn’t really about the slate. It’s about a girl who has been unwanted her whole life finally having somewhere to belong, and defending the one thing she’s sure of, which is that she deserves to be treated like a person and not a joke.

I’ll admit my one real criticism: Marilla’s arc, the thawing of a woman who has spent her life being useful instead of loved, is genuinely moving, more moving to me as an adult than it was as a kid. But some of the side material, the church socials, the recitation contests, the endless descriptions of orchards in bloom, drags if you’re not in the right mood for it. I skimmed some of it on my second read, sitting on my porch during a heat wave a few summers back, iced tea sweating onto the book jacket, and I felt a little guilty about it, like I was betraying my ten year old self. Maybe that’s the tell that this book asks for a slower kind of reader than I currently am.

And I have to question my own soft spot here, because a book this gentle, this insistent on redemption and belonging and the goodness of ordinary people, could easily tip into saccharine in someone else’s hands. It mostly doesn’t. Montgomery is funnier and sharper than her reputation as “wholesome classic” suggests. Anne is vain, dramatic, a little insufferable, and Montgomery knows it and lets other characters call her on it.

The whole book is really about a girl insisting, against every fact of her life so far, that things can still be wonderful.

About L.M. Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up on Prince Edward Island, raised largely by strict grandparents after her mother died young, which tells you exactly where Anne’s hunger for belonging came from. She wrote constantly and was rejected constantly before Anne of Green Gables finally sold, and then the book made her one of the most famous writers in the world almost overnight. Her own life was a lot less sunlit than Avonlea: an unhappy marriage, a husband dealing with severe depression, money troubles, the quiet grind of producing sequel after sequel because the public wouldn’t let Anne go. There’s a real ache under the cheerfulness of her books once you know that, like she was writing the childhood and the belonging she wished she’d had.

If Green Gables Got You, Read These Next

• Anne of Avonlea and the rest of the series, because Montgomery only gets better at balancing comedy and heartbreak as Anne grows up.
• Little Women by Louisa May Alcott, another book that trades plot for personality and wins anyway.
• The Blue Castle, also by Montgomery, for adult readers who want her voice without the childhood framing.
• I Capture the Castle by Dodie Smith, if you love a narrator who is a little too much and knows it.

For your book club

1. Why do you think Matthew, of all characters, is the one who fights for Anne to stay?
2. Is Anne’s imagination a strength, a coping mechanism, or both, and does the book ever let those be separate things?
3. How does Marilla change over the book, and what does she actually learn versus what Anne learns?
4. Does the slow, descriptive pace of Avonlea add to the story or work against it for you?
5. Why do you think this specific orphan story has lasted over a century when so many others haven’t?

If you want your own copy to underline and argue with, you can grab it here.