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Originally Posted by issybird
As I know I said when this first came up, this was a childhood favorite of mine; I read it over and over and had it virtually memorized. I still retain huge chunks of the text.
I’ve found with some childhood favorites, the love remains for always. Even though as an adult reader I see the flaws, I can reread it with dual eyes, both critical eyes and the eyes of love, and it’s fun. Love does not alter. However, what I feared with Anne turned out to be true; a good memory collapsed under the weight of the reread.
I agree with those who found Anne flatly unbelievable. She’s appealing when we meet her, weird, fearful and defiant, but once we know her backstory, she’s not credible. It is tempting to like her because despite all her hardships, she has remained strong and true to her inherent sweetness, but it’s too much to swallow. Worse, it seems bolstered by turn of the last century notions of class, ethnicity and eugenics. Anne is what she is because her parents were nice people, Manila thinks. None of those nasty scrubwoman genes; nature conquers nurture.
I also don’t think the book is well-written. As noted by victoria, it’s a series of vignettes with no plot at all. There’s a lot of unrelated funny business and then hey, presto! Anne’s grown up! In fact, Manila has more of a character arc than Anne. It’s also overwritten; Montgomery has a flare for description, but I got tired of the purple prose and purple sunsets and I found myself skimming the nature bits. To an extent I know that was the taste of the time, but it’s a reason I think the book is dated and not great.
I found the book more interesting as a text than as a story, but that way love no longer remains and I’ve been thinking about it as an example of a genre; more later. I’ll add that I think my distaste is enhanced in that having read all the books (over and over) and knowing how Montgomery chooses to continue Anne’s story is deeply unsatisfying; there’s no way to make Anne an early feminist icon. That defiant child is beaten down into a very typical idealized self-sacrificing woman.
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issybird I’m sorry to read you lost an old favourite! It makes we wish we hadn’t chosen the book.
I feel the same way about how Montgomery developed Anne’s story in later books. I read the first three books at aged 10 & 11, and loved them. I later read the rest of the series as a teenager, and was very disappointed. She just didn’t seem like Anne at all.
I decided to not read Montgomery’s diaries. I guess I’ve wanted to hang on to my childhood love of the story. But my sister has shared many things from them with me. I’ve gotten the impression that the person Anne becomes in the later books mimics the outward facade Montgomery had to play as a minister’s wife, especially in light of her husband’s hidden mental illness.
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Originally Posted by CRussel
You forget, issybird. The Maritimes are not strictly anglophone. In fact, New Brunswick is the only province with two official languages, and has a large (32%) Francophone minority. And while I'll agree that Anne probably resonates with New Englanders, it also resonates with much of the prairies. (And apparently resonates strongly with Japan, if the number of Japanese tourists is any indication!)
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Very true
CRussel. The story seems to have had universal appeal.
Your comments about Francophones sparked my interest, because most of my French Acadian neighbours had New England ties too, and I couldn’t see why, since they came here directly from France. That sent me digging and I found an interesting article explaining that when the 10,000 Acadians were stripped of their land and expelled from Nova Scotia by the British in 1755, 2000 of them went to Massachusetts.
https://www.sec.state.ma.us/mus/pdfs...en-Exhibit.pdf