Anne Shirley in Anne of Green Gables,
by Lucy Maud Montgomery
“You see before you a perfectly happy person, Marilla,” she announced. “I’m perfectly happy-yes, in spite of my red hair. Just at present I have a soul above red hair.”
LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY,ANNE OF GREEN GABLES
The winter of 1905 wasn’t exactly what you would call happy; in fact, it was the worst winter in recent memory. Cavendish, Prince Edward Island, had frozen from picturesque small town to somber icicle, its quaint roads and houses shut in by huge drifts of snow. The fitful ocean had long since frozen over in spots, preventing even the hardiest icebreakers from reaching the island with their vital cargoes of food and mail. Trapped inside her grandmother’s kitchen, Lucy Maud Montgomery may have been the snowed-in town’s most discontented resident.
Maud had good reason to be unhappy. Her thirtieth birthday had come and gone the year before, leaving her no closer to a settled, independent life. Still unmarried, she depended on her crotchety grandmother, Lucy Woolner Macneill, for shelter. The cabin fever of that winter was just another chapter in a life so far marked by abandonment, loss, and lack of stimulation.
Restless, testy, and depressed, Maud wasn’t exactly poised to live up to a heroine’s promise. And nobody in frozen Cavendish—not even Maud herself—could have predicted that this troubled woman would create one of the happiest heroines in literature.
She inherited her propensity for great despair, but also great happiness, from the stormy islet itself. Prince Edward Island wasn’t always an icy prison: in summer, it was a verdant paradise full of flowers, fields, and landscapes that perfectly suited a moody, almost-orphaned child. Maud didn’t lose both parents as a baby like the typical charity case, but she still received an orphan’s upbringing. Her mother Clara died of pneumonia when Maud was only two, leaving her to the occasional care of a dashing and neglectful father, Hugh “Monty” Montgomery. Unwilling or unable to take responsibility for his daughter, he left Maud with her maternal grandparents, Alexander and Lucy Woolner Macneill, and set out to make his fortune without the encumbrance of a dreamy young child.
Lonely and confused by her father’s wayward life, Maud found it hard to live with her grandparents. The couple was old, strict, irascible—qualities that sometimes threatened to stifle their expressive granddaughter’s spirit. Though there was some pleasure in those early years, Maud was never allowed to forget that she was homeless and unloved. She dreamed of joining her father and escaping her stern upbringing forever.
When given the opportunity to rejoin Monty, who had remarried and moved to Prince Albert, Saskatchewan, 2,700 miles away, she jumped at the chance to buck her grandparents’ iron rule. The long train ride was full of hopes and dreams. Emotionally starved, she gave her father all of the qualities her current life lacked—sensitivity, flair, and romance. Little did she know her trip would be a journey to nowhere.
Maud arrived in Prince Albert and found her father preoccupied, her stepmother distant. Their expectations immediately clashed. Instead of the welcome she had craved, Maud found a family relieved to have another set of hands. The realization that she was to be no more than a glorified babysitter—and that her education would gladly be placed on hold so that she could carry out this expected drudgery—was a crushing blow to sensitive Maud. Her family fantasy shattered, she returned home in less than a year. Even the strictures of the Macneill household were infinitely preferable to her father’s scattered and conditional love. She returned to her grandparents’ home to study, teach school, and wait for life to improve.
Cavendish’s newest teacher wasn’t just well educated: she had grown into a stylish, even vain young woman. Though her marriage prospects still seemed slender due to her poverty, Maud began to feel the power of flirtation and sophistication. Somehow, despite her strict upbringing and her grandparents’ clannish, interior ways, she managed to string together a long chain of beaux, culminating in what she would call “The Year of Mad Passion” ever afterward.
At first it seemed as if 1897 would be the end to Maud’s troubles. After all, it was the year in which she discovered the intoxicating power of her own sweet self. First, she attracted the attentions—and the intentions—of a handsome theology student who made a bright impression on her sensitive psyche. Edwin Simpson was flirtatious, daring, and cosmopolitan—everything that oppressively rural Cavendish was not. Their flirtation became a fervent correspondence and finally, at Maud’s insistence, a secret engagement. But the mad passion wasn’t over yet. Though her heart was busy elsewhere, Maud’s body somehow got caught up in a forbidden obsession with Herman Leard, a local farmer whose attentions she simultaneously encouraged and feared.
They met late at night, driven into each other’s arms as much by the secrecy of their relationship as its physical intensity. Her desire ignited, Maud dabbled with the idea of indulging it fully. But when Herman finally propositioned her, fear of pregnancy, her engagement to Edwin, and the lessons of a chaste upbringing overrode her body’s demands. Was he appealing? Yes. Was he appropriate? No. Maud had promised herself she’d only give herself to a man worthy of his prize. “Impossible,” she concluded. She ended both relationships, perhaps thankful that Herman’s kisses had highlighted Edwin’s shortcomings.
The period that followed the Year of Mad Passion could have easily been dubbed “The Years of Intense Frustration.” Self-sacrifice seemed like the only option for Maud, alone for now. She grudgingly quit teaching and moved in with her grandmother upon her grandfather’s death, though he pointedly left Maud out of his will. Then the tragedies started: Herman died unexpectedly in 1899, and Maud had to close the door on her desire for good. And any fantasies she still harbored about her father died with him in 1900. To make matters worse, Grandmother Macneill was a testy living companion, whether due to dementia or just cranky old age. The increasing gap between Maud’s inner life and outer reality wasn’t just striking, it was depressing.
Annoyed and dejected, Maud threw herself into reading and writing, a pastime she had taken up secretively since graduating from college. The farmhouse’s tiny kitchen served as the community’s post office, giving Maud the perfect means by which to secretly submit and track the progress of the stories she had begun to send to magazines and newspapers around North America. But even that pleasure faded in the winter of 1905. Isolated from the mainland and in the grips of a brutal winter storm, Maud felt trapped and miserable.
It was during those long winter months that Maud relived her greatest unhappiness: the solitary childhood that had created a sensitive, imaginative, and painfully lonely woman. Housebound, Maud reached something near despair during those lonesome months. Cut off from reality, left with only her old journal entries and letters to reread, she became more and more depressed.
Amazingly, the first seeds of spring were sown with those recollections. For by the time the buds returned to the trees, Maud’s own imagination and pen had thawed. The seed she planted was a girl, almost inseparable from the girl Maud had been years ago. And the fruit it bore has long outlived its creator.
To understand the heroine of Anne of Green Gables, you must first know what she isn’t. Anne Shirley is not a boy. And that’s where all the trouble begins.
When Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a brother and sister set in their ways and their simple country existence, send off for an orphan to help around the farm, they have no idea they’re going to receive a redheaded, motormouthed, imaginative, and utterly unorthodox girl instead of the obedient boy they ordered. But arrive she does, cracking open the Cuthberts’ quiet lives along the way.
As she makes her way in Avonlea, a rural town that gives Cavendish a run for its money in terms of lack of imagination, Anne gets herself into an endless series of scrapes and mishaps. She inspires the teasing and then the competition of Gilbert Blythe, the handsome young boy who loses her respect after he makes fun of her red hair. She infuriates Mrs. Rachel Lynde, the town’s resident busybody, with her lack of manners. And—awkwardly, miserably, slowly—she becomes a young woman and a community pillar, transforming herself from outcast orphan to everyone’s child.
For a girl with a start in misery, Anne Shirley sure doesn’t realize it. True, she’s lonely, lowly, and doomed to perpetual ridicule for her one distinctive feature—her bright red hair. But unlike her creator, she’s skilled at making the best and brightest of every situation. It’s certainly not what you’d think would come from the pen of a woman who felt so stifled and out of place in her own home. Anne, unlike Maud, has a capacity to create happiness where she sees none. Her overactive imagination immediately goes to work in even the most distasteful situation, transforming a nasty pond into a Lake of Shining Waters and a tree in bloom into a beautiful bride.
Even despair can be delicious to such an imaginative heroine. Anne’s all-or-nothing approach extends to her miseries, which are as overblown and intense as her author’s. Consider her ecstasy of sadness when she whips herself into an emotional frenzy over the imagined wedding of Diana Barry, her best friend:
“Whatever’s the matter now, Anne? “ [Marilla] asked.
“It’s about Diana,” sobbed Anne luxuriously. “I love Diana so, Marilla. I cannot ever live without her. But I know very well when we grow up that Diana will get married and go away and leave me. And oh, what shall I do? I hate her husband—I just hate him furiously. I’ve been imagining it all out—the wedding and everything—Diana dressed in snowy garments, with a veil, and looking as beautiful and regal as a queen; and me the bridesmaid, with a lovely dress, too, and puffed sleeves, but with a breaking heart hid beneath my smiling face. And then bidding Diana goodbye-e-e—” Here Anne broke down entirely and wept with increasing bitterness.
Here is a happy heroine: a girl contented to talk to her reflection in a mirror, who does her best to imagine puffed sleeves on plain calico dresses. Here is a heroine who glides through Avonlea’s fields, gardens, and meadows in blissful reverie, who breaks her slate over Gilbert Blythe’s head in vain anger and hurt feelings. She dares to walk the ridgepole of Mr. Barry’s kitchen roof with a casual bravado that anxious Maud, who could not abide even a drawbridge, could never hope to replicate.
Like Anne, Maud walked her own fine line. For Maud, the balancing act was between her desolate nature and her highest hopes. Some of these she expressed in her books: the ways in which Anne inverts Maud’s own struggles are as poignant as the ways in which she reflects them. Given a lonely, abusive childhood (Anne is shuffled off from home to home and treated as less than a servant before arriving at Green Gables), Anne manages to find happiness in the unlikeliest places. Though she shares parts of Maud’s personality—touchy vanity, passionate hopes, runaway dreams—Anne has far fewer boundaries and hang-ups than her creator. Scared and scarred, Maud withheld affection for others and hid her true thoughts from one and all; in contrast, Anne approaches life with trust and unconditional love.
Take Anne’s unconventional arrival at Green Gables. Blissfully unaware that she’ll be shipped back to the orphanage the next day, Anne introduces herself to Matthew Cuthbert and readers in a rapturous monologue that is happiness itself. The next morning, she befriends the tree outside her window and awaits her fate. But her happiest moment is the one in which she’s told that she belongs:
“I’m crying,” said Anne in a tone of bewilderment. “I can’t think why. I’m glad as glad can be. Oh, glad doesn’t seem the right word at all. I was glad about the White Way and the cherry blossoms—but this! Oh, it’s something more than glad. I’m so happy. I’ll try to be so good. It will be uphill work, I expect, for Mrs. Thomas often told me I was desperately wicked. However, I’ll do my very best. But can you tell me why I’m crying?”
Though she had trouble enacting it in her everyday life, Maud passionately believed that creativity could transform the negative into something positive. She wrote this into her spunky heroine, creating a girl who translates her lonely childhood into a useful young womanhood. When Diana’s sister comes down with the croup, estranged Anne takes the experience of her neglected, overburdened childhood and turns it into something wonderful. Ipecac-soaked and full of hacking coughs, Minnie Mae’s rescue is more than just a close escape. It’s redemption, Maud-style… sadness translated into joy à la Anne Shirley. And it’s even more powerful when we learn that Maud herself unsuccessfully nursed her young cousin Katie, who died of pneumonia on her watch in 1904.
No, Anne isn’t content to merely transform trees into buddies and sinking boats into romantic biers. Her mission is greater and harder: armed with an extravagant imagination and a loud mouth, she sets out to change an entire town’s worldview—and succeeds.
Any woman who grew up thinking Marilla was bitchy and unapproachable should run, not walk, to the bookshelf and reread Anne. Over the course of the book, we see a familiar old spinster encounter a force of nature—and learn to love it. Just as Anne shatters the provincial town’s preconceptions of what to expect from an anonymous orphan girl with devilish red hair, she also explodes plain Marilla’s idea of what it’s like to love and be loved. We need only to watch Marilla secretly snuggle with a sleeping Anne to realize that a true transformation has occurred.
But for all of Anne’s happiness, there’s a bittersweetness to the Anne books that can be traced directly back to their creator. 1905, the year that birthed Anne, was the start of Maud’s own tentative attempt to balance happiness and despair. During the turbulent year in which she penned her first successful novel, Maud was not just immersed in the story of her “red-headed snippet"; she was faced with the most important choice of her life. Vain Maud loved to flirt and knew she would not easily be wooed; comfortable with subterfuge and mystery, she tried to keep her newest admirer, attractive Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald, at a comfortable distance.
But as her book neared completion, Maud’s own walls fell. She succumbed to Ewan’s measured courtship despite serious concerns about his temperament and prospects. Anne of Green Gables was already finished and making the rounds with publishers when Maud made her final decision, opting for the security of a home and a stable income in spite of her questions about Ewan’s stringent Presbyterianism and her concerns about the even stricter role of a minister’s wife. When Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908, Maud’s engagement was still a secret. She married Ewan only after the death of her grandmother in 1911.
Maud paid a heavy price for her supposed happiness; married life was not what she had bargained for. Unable or unwilling to purchase her own home through the proceeds of what was by now one of the most successful children’s books of its time, Maud opted instead to let Ewan make all the decisions. She followed him away from the island, experiencing increasing homesickness, isolation, and grief at their new home in Ontario. The years that followed would bring a child’s death, the onset of a devastating world war, and an exhausting legal battle with Maud’s publishers. Worse still was the loneliness Maud suffered every day. Ewan had waffled between attentive and distant during their six-year courtship, but once they married, things changed. He turned out to be mentally ill, abandoning her during his many nervous breakdowns.
Throughout her long marriage, self-censoring Maud was often silent on her loneliness, despair, and depression. She was accompanied by her happy heroine for the rest of her life, penning nine sequels and gaining international literary acclaim. But eventually Maud herself gave up the balancing act, exhausted by a tightrope walk that had stolen over thirty years of her life. In 2008, her family revealed that her 1942 death, formerly thought to be of congestive heart failure, was actually due to a self-inflicted drug overdose.
What is there for a modern heroine to learn from Maud’s own sad story? Surely a woman who went to such lengths to conceal her inner struggles, carefully commenting on her diaries and destroying inconvenient letters, doesn’t have much to teach about happiness. But Maud left us Anne, and Anne’s passionate embrace of now. That contradiction, and Anne’s own story of books not quite matching their covers, is a powerful reminder that internal and external circumstances don’t always match. Even if Maud wasn’t capable of living out true happiness, she gave it to generations of girls and women all over the world through books that have long outlasted her unhappy life. The most pleasant and vivacious person among us still has inner battles to fight; the ugliest orphan can bring beauty and love to her new world.
As modern heroines, we may have been teased for the color of our hair, but hopefully none of us has ever been told that our not-boyness is an unacceptable disappointment. No matter: Anne’s story belongs to us even if we’ve never laid eyes on a bottle of raspberry cordial. So what if Anne’s desperate longing to fit in is manifested in a passionate but outdated interest in puffed sleeves and the grandness of spare bedrooms? It doesn’t mean her story is any less powerful or relevant today.
As a weird, melodramatic child, I longed to do or say the one thing that would make me just like all other girls, no matter what the cost. It’s the kind of impulse that leads a girl to douse herself in Love’s Baby Soft or cover herself in hideous-but-stylish early 1990s flannels that threaten to engulf her entire teenage frame. This need to fit in at all costs smacks of reality-show antics designed to attract Z-list fame. It’s the enemy of progress and of self-esteem, something that drives a heroine off her higher path and into a world of trivialities and bad decisions. Yes, it’s hard to be a Cate Blanchett when you feel like a desperate Heidi Montag inside, but it’s not too hard to choose between the two.
Anne succumbs to that impulse, too. Tempted by what others possess, she accidentally dyes her red hair green, and gets Diana drunk on currant wine she mistakes for raspberry cordial in a dreadful parody of a proper visit. Every time she fumbles, she is reminded that happiness lies within, not in the trappings of a rich or popular girl. She isn’t a heroine because she finally gets the puffed sleeves she covets; she’s memorable for the little things, the springtime walks through verdant fields, her insistence on playing Tennyson’s Elaine in a sinking dinghy, the strength of her passionate likes and dislikes.
Elegant adult Anne will never leave gawky, self-hating Anne-who’d-rather-be-called-Cordelia altogether behind, but as the book progresses she focuses far more on what she has than on what she thinks she wants. Once she learns to trust that inner source of happiness, she’s free to be the Anne everyone loves—dreamy, impractical, fresh, and eternally unique. It’s not surprising that this Anne, who boldly flavors cake with anodyne liniment and tells off the town busybody, reflects the most appealing qualities of her creator. But Anne’s embrace of her own self, her fearless pursuit of her own happiness, is as much a cautionary tale as an inspirational one. Like the girl who falls off the kitchen roof and breaks her ankle due to her fear of unpopularity, a heroine is better served when she opts for internal pleasure rather than appeasing others. And like Anne, we’d do well to cultivate happiness on the inside in the hopes that we’ll start to see it all around. Yes, there is something to be said for happiness. Just ask Maud:
“One of the reviews says ‘the book radiates happiness and optimism,’ “ she wrote in her journal in 1908, shortly after the publication of Anne of Green Gables. “When I think of the conditions of worry and gloom and care under which it was written I wonder at this. Thank God, I can keep the shadows of my life out of my work. I would not wish to darken any other life—I want instead to be a messenger of optimism and sunshine.”
READ THIS BOOK:
• When someone repeatedly misspells your name or implies that they’d rather interact with a man
• When life gives you wrinkled yoga pants instead of puffed sleeves
• At three in the morning when you can’t stop coughing and are propped up in bed, drowsy and discontented
ANNE’S LITERARY SISTERS:
• Betsy Ray in Maud Hart Lovelace’s Betsy-Tacy series
• Ramona in Beezus and Ramona, by Beverly Cleary
• Flora Poste in Cold Comfort Farm, by Stella Gibbons