Course:Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery
CRWR 501P 003 |
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Advanced Writing of Poetry |
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Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables is considered to be a Canadian classic children's novel originally published in 1908 by author Lucy Maud Montgomery. The novel, the first in a series of 8 books, follows eleven-year-old Anne Shirley, a red-haired orphan from New Brunswick with a tragic past, as she arrives in Avonlea, Prince Edward Island, to be adopted by middle-aged siblings Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert. Wherever she goes, Anne has a proclivity for getting into "scrapes" and causing trouble. Her wild imagination and radical kindness set her apart from the children of Avonlea.
There is so much I could say about Anne. I received a box set of the first three books (Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island) before I can even remember. The second book has a yellowing purple stain over two thirds of the pages from a blueberry smoothie, the kind my mother would make in the morning before school that I would stupidly keep in my locker, uncovered: the result is the aforementioned bruise on its pages.
This book, maybe because it’s from a different era of literature, doesn’t really have a plot. It’s just life. It focusses on the importance of human interaction, of interpersonal relationships, and most of all, the worlds we build in girlhood that transcend common sense. Having this point of view changed me as a child. It convinced me that even I, a little girl in a cowboy-kitties T-shirt, could have a story worth telling, and that, in fact, everything was worth making a story out of. You can see its influence in my silly little poems about Thanksgiving dinner and blue hair, in my decade-and-a-half old Google doc story that recorded the tribulations of the fourth grade. Hell, you can see it in the way I said “decade-and-a-half”, one sentence ago: every detail, every mundane year, is worth accounting for, because, as Maud showed me, a girlish existence is worth recording.