Anne of Green Gables Read-A-Long: Background

So lately on Twitter, I've been doing this thing where (almost) every day, I read a chapter of Anne of Green Gables and do a recap of it, with a modern eye and a particular lean towards pointing out how queer some of this stuff sounds now. Since I do wipe my tweets now and then, and I'm putting a lot of work into this, I thought I would do a backup on my blog.

Plus that way, if your preference is blog posts over Twitter threads, you can do that. I also will eventually be building a masterlist of all my posts about this, and you'll be able to find it here when it's done.

I'm taking inspiration from Ana Mardoll's twitter deconstructions epecially here, as I think xie really has xers organized well. So, thanks!

Oh, and I am going to edit typoes as I see fit because, well, they're annoying, and probably add in punctuation that character limits didn't allow.

(Link to thread) Let's talk background, starting with L. M. Montgomery, who I did some research on last night.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born November 30th, 1874 in Clifton (aka New London), Prince Edward Island. Her mom died of tuberculosis when she was two.

Honestly her father seems like he was kind of a douche, and he took off to Saskatchewan and left Montgomery with her elderly maternal grandparents. They were not particularly affectionate people, and though she had nearby family, she spent a lot of time alone as a child.

She read a lot, and started writing very young. Her first published piece was a poem in a PEI newspaper when she was around 16 or 17.

She completed grade 10 and then got her teacher's licence. She finished a 2 year course in a year with honours, because she was cool like that. Not that she LIKED teaching, mind you. She did not.

Montgomery left teaching to study English literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. She was pretty rare in her time period for seeking higher education as a woman, though she had to leave school for financial reasons and didn't complete her degree.

She began supporting herself with writing. By 1899 she made $96.88 in writing, which I think would be around $4000 Canadian today, and by 1903, she made $500 a year, which would be a tidy sum of about $20,000 Canadian today.

Which tbh is nothing to sneeze at.

When her grandfather died, she moved home so her grandmother could stay in their home and lived with her I believe until she passed as well.

Montgomery had kind of an interesting romantic life as a young adult? I'm not going to go too much into it, but she had a few very hot affairs and more than one secret engagement, one lasting from 1906-1911.

(Abuse/child death CW) Unfortunately, after she married, her life got rather difficult. Her second son was stillborn. Both she and her husband suffered from depression, and he also became abusive at times, beating her. She almost died of the Spanish flu, and considered him to care so little that she considered divorcing him, which in 1918 was really saying something. However, she thought it was her "Christian duty" to make the marriage work. (He was a minister, also.)

(Suicide CW) She passed away in 1942, and at the time it was ruled heart failure, but in 2008 her family came out stating that they believed she may have died by suicide. She was on very heavy medications to manager her depression.

Throughout her life, she totally struggled with Imposter Syndrome. She thought her work wasn't literary or modern enough to compare to her peers. Despite her success, she never felt she wrote her one "great" book and once said she was in writing "to make a living".

Which, frankly, respect.

Personally I think she put a whole lot of herself into her work and was very protective of her characters, but those things are not mutally exclusive.

In her lifetime, Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote 500 short stories, 20 novels, two poetry collections, and numbers journal and essay anthologies.

I'm nervous this thread is about to break, so we'll talk about her most famous work (and the subject of my hashtag) next.

(Link to second thread) I got a cookie. Let's continue.

Common themes in Montgomery's work include questions about maternity and motherhood, orphans, children abandoned by/separated from parents, children in the care of unloving relatives, absent mothers/childless women/"spinsters".

These are things that Montgomery struggled with in her own life, both as a child and as a mother. She believed motherhood was crucial work for women, and that education of girls was very imporant, another theme in her work.

The best known of her work incorporates many of these themes and that is of course Anne of Green Gables. Montgomery wrote the book in 1905 and sent it to several publishers where it was promptly rejected by all of them. Then she put it in a hatbox for two years

In 1907, she found the manuscript and decided to try again. It was published in 1908 and was pretty much an immediate success. By 1925, it had been translated into Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Norwegian, Finnish, and French. It had also been reprinted in English so many times that the printing plates had to be replaced.

Anne of Green Gables is one of Canada's most famous and honestly most beloved books. It's a part of our cultural foundation.

It's also very popular in Poland, and Japan, where it appealed to a population that had been heavily orphaned by the war.

To this day, Anne of Green Gables is very popular in Japan, and it has actually been mandatory reading in the public school curriculuum since 1952.

It's been adapted over two dozen times, from everything from movies to tv series and musicals, to anime and musicals and even webseries. A few notable examples.

Since 1965, the musical has been the longest running annual musical theatre production in Canada. The most well-known in Canada is the 1985 mini-series starring Megan Follows, which was the most-watched television program in Canadian history. I think my mom likes this one, lol. Others include a recent movie trilogy that I'm going to make Luci watch with me

There was also a cartoon in the early 2000s that aired on PBS that I liked as a kid, and of course, a lot of you may know the recent series known as "Anne" or "Anne with An E", which is produced by and airs on CBC, but is available through Netflix internationally

After I reread it, I would like to watch a good number of those adaptations and talk about how they worked. I know there was one in 1919 that Montgomery absolutely hated, because they made Anne AMERICAN, and changed PEI to New England. Like what???

Second wave feminists like Margaret Atwood called Anne feminist, and ahead of her time, which it seems the Netflix adaptation has run with from what little I've seen of it.

Slate called her "a patron saint of female outsiders".

I read AOGG several times as a kid. I got it out of a Scholastic book order and I owned very few books and didn't have access to a library consistently. The sequels, I have read many of but I definitely don't think all of them, and I have fewer memories of. Compared to how often I read the first, the sequels I only read once or twice.

I also haven't reread Green Gables in probably over a decade. I want to look at it with both adult eyes, and with an eye to the common themes in Montgomery's work.

And just for fun, I grew up with this cover (left), but I had to leave it when we moved, so I'm reading from the 100th anniversary Puffin Classics edition, which itself is actually 11 years old now.

And that's as far as we are getting today, because it's almost 10pm and I only did background research yesterday because I wasn't sure people would like this. #LainaReadsAnne #LainaIsHonest

I'm also gonna drop my ko-fi link at the end of this thread, so if you liked this, maybe throw a tip in the ole jar.

#LainaReadsAnne will probably continue tomorrow!

Works Cited:

Adams, James. “Lucy Maud Suffered 'Unbearable Psychological Pain'.” The Globe and Mail, The Globe and Mail, 24 Sept. 2008, www.theglobeandmail.com/news/national/lucy-maud-suffered-unbearable-psychological-pain/article17971634/.

Butler, Katie MacDonald. “The Heartbreaking Truth about Anne's Creator.” The Globe and Mail, The Globe and Mail, 20 Sept. 2008, www.theglobeandmail.com/incoming/the-heartbreaking-truth-about-annes-creator/article17971607/.

Caplan-Bricker, Nora. “Why Anne of Green Gables Is a Patron Saint of Female Outsiders.” Slate Magazine, Slate, 14 Jan. 2016, slate.com/human-interest/2016/01/why-anne-of-green-gables-is-a-patron-saint-of-female-outsiders.html.

McIntosh, Andrew, and Cecily Devereux. “Lucy Maud Montgomery.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 1 Jan. 2013, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/montgomery-lucy-maud.

McIntosh, Andrew, et al. “Anne of Green Gables.” The Canadian Encyclopedia, 26 May 2009, www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/anne-of-green-gables.