Impact: Anne of Green Gables

Who Was L.M. Montgomery

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in 1874 in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, and knew grief early. Her mother died of tuberculosis before Montgomery turned two, and her father eventually moved away to western Canada, leaving her to be raised by strict, elderly grandparents in the rural community of Cavendish. The landscape she grew up in — the red clay roads, the white-blossomed orchards, the Gulf of St. Lawrence glinting in the distance — became the landscape of Anne of Green Gables with an intimacy that only a lonely child who had made the land itself into a companion could achieve.

She was brilliant and ambitious and almost entirely self-educated beyond a basic level, devouring everything she could find and writing poetry and stories from childhood. She worked as a schoolteacher and as a postmistress's assistant, writing fiction in the margins of her other duties. The idea for Anne reportedly came from a newspaper clipping she had saved about a couple who had accidentally received a girl orphan instead of the boy they had requested. Montgomery recognized the story's potential, gave it her whole imaginative heart, and then — characteristically, perhaps — shoved the finished manuscript in a hatbox under her bed when the rejections came. She retrieved it years later almost on a whim, sent it out one more time, and changed her life.

A Sensation from the First Page

Anne of Green Gables was not a book that crept quietly into the world. L.C. Page and Company published it in June 1908, and within months it had gone through six printings. Montgomery received a flat fee and no royalties on that first deal — a contract she would spend years fighting to escape — but the book's success was instant and undeniable. Mark Twain's endorsement arrived early and was widely quoted. Fan mail poured in from across North America and Britain. Prime Minister of Canada Wilfrid Laurier reportedly told Montgomery that Anne was his favorite heroine. A sequel was demanded almost immediately, and Montgomery, who had not originally imagined one, eventually wrote seven more books in the series.

What's striking about the original reception is how clearly readers understood what Montgomery had done, even if critics were slower to take it seriously as literature. Readers recognized that Anne Shirley was something genuinely new: not the saintly, self-sacrificing girl-heroine of Victorian fiction, not the cautionary tale, not the lesson. She was funny and vain and furious and wrong sometimes, and she talked in great soaring flights of romantic language that were both ridiculous and oddly moving. People loved her with a personal intensity that surprised even the author.

What the Book Is Actually About

On the surface, Anne of Green Gables is about an eleven-year-old orphan girl who is sent by mistake to a middle-aged brother and sister on Prince Edward Island who had wanted a boy to help with farm work. The brother, Matthew, falls for her on the train ride home. The sister, Marilla, tries to send her back. Anne stays. That's essentially the plot of the first third — and it is, in execution, both funnier and more emotionally precise than any summary makes it sound.

Montgomery opens the novel with a chapter entirely devoted to Mrs. Rachel Lynde, the village busybody, noticing that Matthew Cuthbert is dressed up and driving his buggy somewhere unusual on a Tuesday afternoon. The chapter is a small masterpiece of comic observation: even the brook that runs past Mrs. Lynde's door, Montgomery tells us, runs quietly, "for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum." This is the world Anne is about to land in — orderly, gossipy, easily shocked — and the comedy of her arrival in it never entirely lets up.

But beneath the comedy, the book is deeply concerned with belonging. Anne has never had a home, never had anyone who wanted her specifically, never had her name spelled the way she prefers (with an 'e'). Her desperate need to be loved is never pathetic, because Montgomery gives her too much spirit and too much imagination to be pitied. What makes Anne extraordinary is that she transforms everything around her through the sheer force of her attention. She names the places she loves. She makes friends with her own reflection in a glass door. She turns a bare room into somewhere she can live. The book argues, quietly and consistently, that imagination is not an escape from reality but a way of inhabiting it more fully.

The Cultural Footprint

Prince Edward Island's entire tourism economy is substantially built on Anne of Green Gables. The house that inspired Green Gables is now part of a national park. Visitors come from around the world to walk through it, and many of them are Japanese. The book's popularity in Japan is one of the more remarkable literary facts of the twentieth century: first translated in 1952 as part of a postwar effort to provide uplifting literature for young people, it became a genuine cultural phenomenon, studied in schools and beloved across generations. Japanese visitors to PEI often dress in period costume for the occasion.

The adaptations are almost too numerous to catalog. There have been multiple film versions, the most famous being the 1985 Canadian television miniseries starring Megan Follows, which introduced the story to several new generations and remains widely beloved. There have been stage musicals, a long-running theatrical production on PEI that has played every summer since 1965, anime adaptations in Japan, and a recent Netflix series, Anne with an E, that deliberately darkened the story's edges to address trauma and identity. That last adaptation is interesting precisely because of the resistance it provoked: some viewers felt it had violated something essential. Few fictional characters inspire that kind of proprietary devotion.

Montgomery's influence on subsequent literature is harder to trace directly but real. The tradition of the spirited, outspoken girl-heroine who refuses to be diminished — from Harriet the Spy to Hermione Granger — has Anne somewhere in its ancestry. The specific mode of comedy she perfected, in which a character's excessive romantic imagination collides with a sensible, understated world, runs through a great deal of beloved children's literature that followed.

Montgomery's Own Story, and Its Shadow

There is a complicated irony in the fact that the woman who wrote the world's most famous story about a girl finding a home and people who love her unconditionally spent much of her adult life in a quietly miserable marriage to a Presbyterian minister named Ewan Macdonald, nursing him through severe depression, fighting her publishers in court for decades over rights and royalties, and suffering from depression herself. Her journals, published after her death, reveal a private life that bore almost no resemblance to the warmth and light of Green Gables.

Montgomery died in 1942 under circumstances that her family long disputed; her death certificate listed heart failure, but her son later acknowledged that she likely died by suicide. The woman who had given Anne Shirley her inexhaustible capacity for joy had, in the end, run out of her own. Knowing this doesn't diminish the books, but it does add a dimension to them — a sense that the world Montgomery created with such extraordinary vividness was not a reflection of the life she was living but a refuge from it, built word by word over forty years.

Why It Still Matters

Books for children that endure tend to have something real at their center — not a lesson, but an emotion that readers recognize as true even before they have the words for it. Anne of Green Gables has survived for over a century because it captures, with unusual precision, the feeling of being someone who feels too much and talks too much and wants too much and is too loud for the space they've been given. Anne is not a role model in any prescriptive sense. She makes mistakes constantly. She holds grudges. She is spectacularly, operatically dramatic about minor slights. But she is also genuinely kind, genuinely imaginative, and genuinely herself in a way that readers find both aspirational and consoling.

Montgomery also wrote Prince Edward Island as though she could see it with her eyes closed, which she essentially could. The book's descriptions of landscape — the orchard in bloom, the road up the red hill, the brook running through the hollow — have a specificity and love in them that make the place feel real to readers who have never been there and probably never will be. That quality of observed, beloved place is increasingly rare in fiction and increasingly worth seeking out.

Read it as a child and it feels like company. Read it as an adult and it feels like an elegy — for the places that shaped us, for the version of ourselves that named everything and felt everything too hard, and for a writer who gave the world a character full of light while living much of her own life in the dark.

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