Like many Canadian girls, I grew up on Anne of Green Gables. My sister and I watched the movies so often we’d recite scenes in our bedroom at night. The “fishing for lake trout” episode was our go-to favorite. When an elementary school friend visited Green Gables on Prince Edward Island, she brought me a porcelain figurine of Anne I still have on my shelf. A few years ago, I made my own pilgrimage to the Island that inspired L.M. Montgomery’s beloved series.
Despite this history, I’d never actually read the books, much to my husband’s bewilderment. “How in the world can you call yourself a fan?” he wanted to know. “Isn’t reading the books the whole point?” The question bothered me enough that I read all six this summer: Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne’s House of Dreams and Anne of Ingleside.
I loved the first four, where we journey with Anne from ages 11 to 25. Here was the character from the movies in all her spunk, wit, ambition, and imagination. She writes stories, goes to college, teaches, almost marries the wrong man, becomes a school principal, befriends prickly people, wins over the conniving Pringle clan, and comes to know herself better.
But when Anne Shirley becomes Anne Blythe, she doesn’t seem like the same person. I barely recognized her. I couldn’t find the spark and ambition of her earlier years. While she retains her quirky expressions, love of nature, and propensity to meet kindred spirits, her voice changes. After marriage it flattens and, in some cases, disappears altogether.
Few authors make the leap with their characters from singleness to marriage. Often the stories are all about the chase. Marriage is supposedly less interesting; the book ends at the altar. Yet in L.M. Montgomery’s hands, master of the ordinary, this transition could be surveyed to show that marriage is a whole new territory. There’s so much fodder: endearing-turned-annoying traits, different expectations and communication styles, lingering bachelor/ette tendencies, etc. But apart from a tense relationship between the couple and Aunt Mary Maria who stays with them for a while, Montgomery doesn’t explore this complex terrain. Oddly, Anne’s House of Dreams isn’t even about the newlyweds. Gilbert disappears early on, consumed with establishing his medical profession. Montgomery focuses Anne’s House of Dreams on Anne and her neighbours—mainly the beautiful Leslie Moore and her tragic life of caring for the invalid husband she never loved.
The author sums up Anne and Gilbert’s marriage by simply saying how happy they are. Seriously? This book is where we first witness Anne and Gilbert physically together as lovers, and Montgomery denies us their long-awaited union. By not seeing their quirky, everyday interactions, we don’t see their relationship develop—how they navigate as individuals and as a couple. Anne of Ingleside, the series finale, concentrates on their six children, so, similarly, we don’t see Anne and Gilbert together much.
Despite Anne’s and Gilbert’s feistiness in their school days, competing for top marks and scholarships, they only argue twice in their marriage. The quarrel in Anne’s House of Dreams comes near the end, and it’s Gilbert’s first prolonged appearance. They disagree about surgery for Leslie’s husband. The episode reminded me of the “carrots” scene from the first book. Here is their familiar spunk! Gilbert ends up being right, and Leslie’s tragic situation is miraculously overturned. Anne jokes, “I shall never be able to have a different opinion from Gilbert’s again!” Gilbert thankfully responds with, “At least do not become my echo, Anne. A little opposition gives spice to life.” Anne’s joke isn’t terribly funny, though; she has lost her “spice” as a married woman. Her pluck only flavours the narrative when she’s recalling her Avonlea days or visiting old friends. Anne’s House of Dreams made me wonder what it implies about marriage and a woman’s identity. Knowing how much Anne influenced me as a child, I’m thankful I read it as an adult when I could critically appraise its message.
Inquisitive and opinionated, Anne is known for talking. She poses philosophical conundrums, asks inconvenient questions, and discloses her heart with kindred spirits (of which she has many). It was her voice that captivated me as a young girl. Despite L.M. Montgomery’s late-Victorian context, it’s hard to believe Anne doesn’t share her hopes and fears about marriage, sex, pregnancy, labour, and motherhood with close friends—if not her husband. I missed hearing her thoughts, even if in a monologue.
She and Diana used to tell each other everything, and in her letters to Gilbert in Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne confides in him about her frustrations as the new high school principal, along with less consequential things. So, we know they talk. But at key moments of their marriage, the reader gets stonewalled. We barely know Anne is pregnant before she delivers her stillborn baby Joyce. And when Gilbert tells Anne that Joyce didn’t survive, we don’t hear them discuss it further. We don’t observe how this shared pain shapes them. Instead, Anne processes it with Marilla and even with neighbours Captain Jim and Leslie. While I enjoyed Anne’s and Marilla’s reunion, it felt amiss for intimate souls like Gilbert and Anne to be silent with each other. Montgomery is strangely silent about Anne’s journey towards motherhood, too. In the one-paragraph lead-up to Anne’s second child, she introduces it with a passage about a weary stork choosing the right house on which to land. The distant fairy tale voice is jarringly at odds with the rest of the narrative. It feels less like a creative way of announcing the birth and more like an escape from reality. I wanted the author to be as candid as Anne and take us on the journey with her towards these watershed moments.
While married Anne grows quieter about momentous life transitions, she seems chattier about trivial things. As a child, she had always been concerned with appearances—her red hair, her perfect nose—but she seems even more obsessed as an adult. Montgomery frequently reminds us that Anne has kept her figure, while Avonlea friends like Diana were “stouter than in years agone.” When Anne and Diana have precious face-to-face conversation at the beginning of Anne of Ingleside, they engage in a lot of fat talk. Diana says, “We’ve all changed so . . . except you. You never change, Anne. How do you keep so slim? Look at me!”
Similarly, Anne admires Leslie for her goddess-like beauty that seems to make her tragic situation all the worse—the story refers to her “wasted” life many times. Would the characters care so much if Leslie were old and ugly? Although Leslie becomes Anne’s close friend, she practically vanishes from Anne of Ingleside. It’s as if once Anne helps arrange Leslie’s happy ending with Owen Ford, there isn’t anything more to say about their friendship, although I would think both of them becoming moms would provide plenty of opportunity.
An aspiring writer and gifted teacher, Anne abruptly gives up these passions to follow Gilbert to a rural village where she is known as “Mrs. Doctor.” Though few women worked in that era, what does Anne think about abandoning her career’s momentum to get married at (what was then) the ripe old age of 25? It was surprising to see her disown her gifts even as avocation. She loved connecting with misunderstood, sensitive children like Paul and Elizabeth. Are there no such children at the village school or church? Is matchmaking really her main interest now?
With regard to writing, Montgomery only records one instance of Anne putting pen to paper (an obituary in Anne of Ingleside). From a child who had “millions of ideas” for the Story Club she formed, to a young woman who wins a writing competition, there’s a gap. Anne has the opportunity to write Captain Jim’s life story, which Gilbert encourages, but she insists she’s not the right person. Maybe not, but what about recording her own life adventures, of which there is no shortage? I was also baffled that Anne doesn’t refute Captain Jim when he says women can’t write. Anne Shirley would have given him an earful.
Anne’s change in direction—from career to domestic—sheds light on a significant tension for women of the time: Why pursue an education if the goal is to marry? Marilla exemplifies this as well, encouraging Anne’s education (“I believe in a girl being fitted to earn her own living whether she ever has to or not”) but living with her own big regret of not marrying Gilbert’s father. Though Anne, herself, is educated, her dreams for her children’s futures are only that “the boys would go away to their life work and the girls … ah, the mist-veiled forms of beautiful brides might be seen coming down the old stairs at Ingleside.” Though known for her vivid imagination, Anne can’t conceive of her own daughters’ prospects apart from their beauty and their roles as wives.
At the end of Anne of Ingleside, an acquaintance asks Anne the question that was burning in me as I read the last two books: “Do you really never feel like you want a broader life? You used to be quite ambitious, if I remember aright. Didn’t you write some rather clever little things when you were at Redmond? A little fantastical and whimsical of course, but still… And you’ve quite given it up?”
Anne answers: “Not altogether . . . but I’m writing living epistles now,” thinking of her six children. Finally, we hear in Anne’s own voice how she feels about her new life in relation to her old. She’s reframed her story, and, while I hear contentment in her answer, I also hear a longing that matches mine as I wonder about the ambitions she abandoned—or at least postponed until her children grow older.
Montgomery, herself, implied that the later Anne books aren’t as good as the first. Anne is 25 to 40 in the latter two, and the author believed her strength was in writing about either very young or very old characters. I really wanted to like all six books, but I wish Anne Blythe sounded more like the spirited Anne Shirley who captured my young imagination.
The back of the Bantam edition of Anne’s House of Dreams assures the reader she’s “still the same Anne.” I’m not so certain. I’ll take the old one.