“But if you call me Anne, please call me Anne spelled with an E.” This is how generations of readers were (are) introduced to one of children’s literature’s most beloved (and definitely my favourite) characters. Anne Shirley is a name that needs no introduction for those of us who grew up reading about the spirited, lively girl through Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables and the five books that followed.
Anne of Green Gables was a book I picked up at a small, nondescript bookstore in Madras many, many years ago, upon the urging of my mother. I had read my way through Enid Blyton and Roald Dahl and was looking for new authors and books to dive straight into. This hardly seemed like a book that could compare to the heady worlds created by Blyton and Dahl and which I was used to. Unimpressed as I was by its cover, I bought the book anyway and reluctantly started to read. Twenty-five years later, this is a series I hold close to my heart and one that I can revisit again and again.
SHIKHA SASHI
Shikha has been teaching creative writing to students since 2016. She wishes more children would read for pleasure, and to that end tries to incorporate stories in her classes. In her free time Shikha loves to experiment with coffees, cafés and watch her son play.
When we are first acquainted with Anne, she is an orphan who is eleven years old, waiting to be picked up at the station by the family who have adopted her. The elderly brother-sister pair (beautifully written characters of Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert), to whom Anne is sent, are actually looking to adopt a boy who can help on their farm. Thanks to a miscommunication, they are handed Anne instead of the boy, and decide to go ahead and adopt her anyway. This, they realise very quickly, is the best decision they have ever made. Anne comes to mean more to the both of them than their very lives and they are often left wondering at the sort of existence they had led until they met her. She fills their home and hearts with joy and they learn what a blessing it is to be able to love and cherish someone and to have them love you back.
To try and describe Anne to readers who haven’t yet read the books is a difficult task. Where to start? To know Anne is to love her. She is witty, spunky, adventurous, forever getting in and out of scrapes and has an imagination to rival all imaginations. Anne’s imagination is one of her defining traits. She creates elaborate fantasies and dramatises the ordinary. She frequently daydreams and finds beauty in the most mundane.
She hates her name – “I read in a book once that a rose by any other name would smell as sweet, but I’ve never been able to believe it. I don’t believe a rose WOULD be as nice if it was called a thistle or a skunk cabbage.” – she says to an acquaintance. One of her most fervent wishes is to be called Cordelia. Her red hair is the bane of her existence- “You’d find it easier to be bad than good if you had red hair… People who haven’t red hair don’t know what trouble is.” – she sighs at one point. Anne is empathetic, compassionate, loves fiercely and is fiercely loyal to her friends and family.
But most of all, Anne is to us what she herself would call “a kindred spirit”. Through the series we meet many of Anne’s closest confidantes, friends and loves. They are her kindred spirits. People with whom she shares deep, meaningful and unspoken connections. She is forever meeting kindred spirits in the unlikeliest of places. So well has L.M.Montgomery fleshed out these characters that they stay with the reader long after the books have been read.
It is hard to imagine that Anne of Green Gables was written in 1908, more than a century ago. Avonlea, a small village on Prince Edward Island in Nova Scotia, where the story first begins, is as much of a supporting character as any other. It is a place Anne (and the reader) comes to love passionately and where her hopes and dreams take flight. Her story, these characters and locations seem as alive to us today as they were when they were first created.
Anne of Green Gables and the books that follow should be on every young reader’s reading list. Meeting and getting to know Anne is an experience that will not only leave the reader wanting more but will also acquaint them with one of the most-loved characters ever created on page.
1 thought on “Favourite Fictional Characters We Wish Were Real: Anne of Green Gables”
there is no other way I would have imagined Anne, with an e