Revisiting Anne of Green Gables as an adult

Books and movies about living an unexpected life

Our painted cover edition of Anne :)

One of the joys of getting older is revisiting childhood favorites and realizing you have a new, deeper understanding of them. For example: when I read Little Women in the third grade, I was mostly concerned with the tragedy of Beth’s death and the drama of Jo refusing Laurie. But revisiting it as an adult, I was deeply moved by entirely different things—the pain of saying goodbye to childhood, siblings growing up and apart, Marmee, etc.

Luckily, I get to have this experience all the time because I’m the mom of an eight year old and we read a lot of classic children’s literature. My reflections are only hampered by my inability to remember most of these books, even though I know I read them. Is it just that too much time has passed? Or was I just speeding through way too many books as a kid? Probably both (I am old). Either way, I remembered very little about Shiloh (I had to Google “is the dog ok in Shiloh?” before we read: yes), Heidi, Charlotte’s Web, or Mrs. Frisby and the Rats of NIMH. They were basically new books to me! But I really wasn’t prepared for my experience reading Anne of Green Gables.

I thought I remembered Anne, but it’s possible that I mainly remembered a few quotes from Anne that are eternally popularized in Pinterest graphics. You know the ones…I’m so glad I live in a world where there are Octobers. These quotes would be enough to convince you that Anne was a proto-Mary Oliver.

I wasn’t expecting a book that would make me cry so hard that I freaked out my family, or one that I couldn’t stop thinking about long after turning its last page. Perhaps this is no surprise to you—perhaps you’ve read the book often or have a better memory than me. But just call me Marilla Cuthbert because I’ve been reluctantly bewitched by this red-headed orphan!

We first meet Anne when she’s a young girl. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, siblings with no other family of their own, have sent off for an orphan boy to help around the farm. Things were different on Prince Edward Island in the late 1800s. If you did such a thing now, you would likely have a thriving YouTube channel before getting an HBO miniseries made about your eventual arrest. But it was normal and encouraged back then to take in an orphan for child labor. However—and this is the part of the story we all know—the Cuthberts don’t get a boy. They get Anne, a girl. And a talkative, whimsical girl, at that! Matthew can’t immediately send her back because he’s shy and specifically afraid of all women, which comes up a lot.

Anne’s method of conversation is to monologue at people, which is so funny to see in the text because there will just be unbroken blocks of text for, like, two pages whenever she speaks. Matthew likes her immediately, and so does the reader—she’s spunky, she’s romantic, and most importantly, she’s a little kid. Of course we don’t want her to go back to the orphanage.

Marilla needs to be won over a bit, though. Marilla has the personality of so many romance novel heroes: initially standoffish and hard to crack, but ultimately she has a heart of gold. To put it in romance novel terms, she’s the grumpy and Anne’s the sunshine.

So of course they keep Anne, or else we’d have no story, and Anne gets into a series of scrapes that I thought would take up the entire book. For example, she:

-yells at Mrs. Lynde, Marilla’s busybody best friend

-gets her new bestie Diana DRUNK (accidentally)

-smashes a slate over THEE Gilbert Blythe’s head because he has the audacity to call her carrots (one thing about Anne: she does not like having red hair) and then she refuses to forgive him for the first 98% of the book

-falls off a roof

-dyes her hair green (accidentally)

It’s basically mishap over mishap. I thought Anne of Green Gables would have more of a Heidi structure—a child growing up and getting into trouble and finding a family. And that is part of it, but there’s a lot more going on here. For starters, Anne grows up a lot during the book. She begins it as a young child and ends it ready to be a teacher. She’s functionally an adult when the book ends! When Anne finishes school in Avonlea and goes away to school with the best and brightest of her friends, the book’s tone shifts pretty rapidly. Suddenly, Anne is learning adult lessons. It’s her goodbyes to Marilla and Matthew that made me cry, which I wasn’t expecting at all.

Anne is reciting a poem for Matthew and Marilla when Marilla starts crying. Perhaps this is best explained with a lengthy passage from the novel.

I just couldn’t help thinking of the little girl you used to be, Anne. And I was wishing you could have stayed a little girl, even with all your queer ways. You’ve grown up now and you’re going away; and you look so tall and stylish and so—so—different altogether in that dress—as if you didn’t belong in Avonlea at all—and I just got lonesome thinking it all over.”

“Marilla!” Anne sat down on Marilla’s gingham lap, took Marilla’s lined face between her hands, and looked gravely and tenderly into Marilla’s eyes. “I’m not a bit changed—not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me—back here—is just the same. It won’t make a bit of difference where I go or how much I change outwardly; at heart I shall always be your little Anne, who will love you and Matthew and dear Green Gables more and better every day of her life.”

Anne laid her fresh young cheek against Marilla’s faded one, and reached out a hand to pat Matthew’s shoulder. Marilla would have given much just then to have possessed Anne’s power of putting her feelings into words; but nature and habit had willed it otherwise, and she could only put her arms close about her girl and hold her tenderly to her heart, wishing that she need never let her go.

Matthew, with a suspicious moisture in his eyes, got up and went out-of-doors. Under the stars of the blue summer night he walked agitatedly across the yard to the gate under the poplars.

“Well now, I guess she ain’t been much spoiled,” he muttered, proudly. “I guess my putting in my oar occasional never did much harm after all. She’s smart and pretty, and loving, too, which is better than all the rest. She’s been a blessing to us, and there never was a luckier mistake than what Mrs. Spencer made—if it was luck. I don’t believe it was any such thing. It was Providence, because the Almighty saw we needed her, I reckon.

Imagine me starting that passage out with a steady voice and slowly devolving into tears so intense I couldn’t even keep reading. Anne grew up so fast! That’s the thing about these children’s books: they’re very often about how painful it is to leave childhood behind, and just as often they put you into the parent’s point of view (this is also true of Charlotte’s Web).

And so Anne goes off to school and does amazing, and she even wins a big deal scholarship. But then something happens that I actually forgot about—Matthew Cuthbert dies. I honestly felt bad for introducing this story to my son because he was shocked.

Things change quickly for Anne. Marilla gets a diagnosis that she’s going to go blind if she doesn’t stop 1. reading, 2. sewing, and 3. crying. That’s just a lot to ask of a person. Also, she has to sell Green Gables because the entire reason Matthew died is that he had a shock-induced heart attack after getting a letter saying that they lost all their money because their bank crashed. But she’s like, “Good thing you’ll be safe off at college because you have that scholarship. Don’t you worry about me. I’ll just be blind and living with Rachel Lynde, who consistently annoys me.”

What do you think Anne does? Do you think she peaces out and leaves Marilla, the only mother she’s ever known, to sell Green Gables, the only home she’s ever known? No. Of course she doesn’t. Anne gives up her scholarship, takes a teaching position (which becomes a whole thing with her enemies-to-lovers schoolmate Gilbert Blythe¹), and stays on to help Marilla.

It is, of course, possible to see this as a tragedy for Anne—she has to give up her dreams. She has to put aside her ambitions. She’s triumphed over so much adversity (the abuse she endured before coming to Green Gables and then Rachel Lynde running her mouth constantly about how women shouldn’t be educated), only to…stay in Avonlea after all.

But the book doesn’t present it that way, and that’s why I’ve been thinking about it ever since we finished. Most of my favorite books and films are about people (usually women) who find themselves in lives they never expected, perhaps for the worse. They did not get what they wanted—they may have gotten something they very much did not want. Maybe they’re sick, or stuck, or they didn’t end up with the person they wanted to marry. And there are for sure many, many versions of this story that are bleak, and sometimes I love those too. You know, the cautionary tales about how terrible life can be. I’m tempted to say “that’s called literary fiction” but of course I don’t mean that. Don’t call the literary fiction brigade on me! What I’m saying is that I love a book that tells us, “Life is never perfect. You never have everything you thought you wanted. You have to learn to love that.”

My favorite book of all time, Katherine Heiny’s Early Morning Riser, is a book about accepting your life as it is, even when it’s hard. It’s a difficult book to describe because it’s sort of the ultimate in Nothing Happens Literature (which you know I mean as the utmost compliment). It’s about Jane, a teacher who lives in Michigan, and the people she encounters as she makes a life there. They are all annoying and hilarious and weird, and they are always in her way. Her mother is difficult, to say the least. And, through a complicated series of events, Jane ends up caring for a person whose presence makes her life significantly less convenient. It is easy, I think, to view these people as burdens. But what the book shows us is that the people we care for aren’t burdens—they’re the whole point. That’s life.

I was going to quote a passage from the book here, but I couldn’t because what I really want to do is quote the entire book. The final scene is the one that always brings me to tears and makes me remember how lucky I feel that books exist and that this book in particular exists. It’s a late summer evening on the beach and nothing hugely dramatic is happening, but Jane has a realization that takes her from blinding anger about so many things out of her control to gratitude for the people right in front of her. It’s such a visceral, gradual realization, full of tiny details, that it takes my breath away.

So much of our lives now (and maybe I’m speaking to things I see on the internet, which may be part of the problem!) are about ourselves. People tell us to focus on self-care, ignoring the fact that true self-care isn’t selfish. We’re encouraged to cancel plans if we need a break, regardless of how this makes another person feel. We can send a quick text to tell someone that we’d rather stay in than leave the house and make time for them. We don’t join clubs or social groups—we are Bowling Alone, as the book says. We’re supposed to cut out anyone in our lives who is toxic, without understanding that we, too, are toxic sometimes. “Boundaries” is a buzzword, as if there can ever really be true boundaries that aren’t constantly being changed among family or friends. We don’t even have the friction of ordering our food from human beings anymore².

Anne doesn’t think twice about giving up her scholarship to stay with Marilla at Green Gables, and it isn’t a burden for her. She couldn’t ever be happy if she left—how could she be, knowing that she could never return to Green Gables? Or knowing that Marilla, a woman she loves, is alone? She doesn’t mourn the life she could have had, because it never existed. This life does. She’ll make it into the life she wants, because it’s what she has.

This quote may sound preachy or cheesy out of context, but I’m sharing it anyway because, when I came to it at the end of the book, it almost made me cry:

Anne’s horizons had closed in since the night she had sat there after coming home from Queen’s; but if the path set before her feet was to be narrow she knew that flowers of quiet happiness would bloom along it. The joy of sincere work and worthy aspiration and congenial friendship were to be hers; nothing could rob her of her birthright of fancy or her ideal world of dreams. And there was always the bend in the road!

I recently read Oliver Burkeman’s Meditations for Mortals, a book that also shares this philosophy. As Cal Newport’s blurb on the back says, it helps you “find a liberating joy in the limits and imperfections of life.” The book tells us that, despite our cultural belief that we can optimize our life, that if we only lock down the right routine or make all the right decisions we’ll have the one perfect life we’re meant to live, there is no perfect life. It doesn’t exist! All we have is the life we have. As a perfectionist with a lot of anxiety, this realization was so freeing to me. I often feel like I need to make the decisions necessary to put me in the one, correct life I’m meant to live, and if I make the wrong decision…well, then I screwed up. As Burkeman puts it:

Our problem, as it turns out, was never that we hadn’t yet found the right way to achieve control over life, or safety from life. Our real problem was imagining that any of that might be possible in the first place for finite humans, who, after all, just find themselves unavoidably in life, with all the limitations and feelings of claustrophobia and lack of escape routes that entails.

Anne is happy to stay with Marilla because this is her life. She has limitations, but they aren’t burdens.

This weekend I finally finished the 1979 Australian film My Brilliant Career. It’s directed by Gillian Armstrong, who went on to direct the 1994 Little Women (also an example of many people making the best of their unexpected lives). The film follows Sybylla, a girl who dreams of being a writer even though her family is very poor. When she gets to go live with her fancy rich grandmother, she gets a taste of a life very different from her own—which includes having a crush on Sam Neill (relatable). But then she’s forced to go be a nanny/teacher for a family her father owes money to. Sybylla has already turned down Sam Neill’s marriage proposal (!) and now she’s stuck with these bratty kids. Things are looking bad! Her rich family members tell her she must simply make the best of the situation she’s in (it’s giving out of touch influencer), and she…does! Part of this involves using corporal punishment on these terrible children, which I don’t recommend, per se, but soon Sybylla is teaching them to read via the newspapers on their wall. The girl is literally covered in mud and children are yelling at her all day, but this is her life. Anne Shirley would’ve had a way more cheerful attitude, but I think she’d relate.

This is what I love so much about literature and film: they help us see our own lives more clearly. I love my life and I’m living my dreams, but all of us have things that didn’t turn out exactly the way we wanted. It is so easy to look at social media, see someone else’s life, and assume that they have figured out the right way to do things. Nothing is guaranteed to us, no matter how hard we work or wish for it. There are certainly characters who spend their lives ruminating on mistakes of the past, wondering what might’ve been if things only went different (why did my mind immediately go to Uncle Rico and his football career?). But who wants to live like that? Those are the cautionary tales, the roads to avoid.

What characters like Anne and Marilla remind me is that even the happiest, most caring people you meet most likely have their own secret pain. Everyone is just trying, or failing, to make the best of the one life they’ve been given. I would never say that things were easier for Anne (all that pre-Marilla abuse, the fact that she lives on a farm which I’m sure is significantly harder than writing books), but maybe it was easier for her and Marilla to remember that real life is here, in front of us, not in some faraway fantasy land. They saw it every day, after all—there was no social media for them to use so they could compare themselves to some random lady in Utah. The only people Anne could compare herself to were Diana and Ruby Gillis and all the other girls (NOT Josie Pye, she sucks). She didn’t have a million options. She had one: her life. I’ll probably (definitely) never face obstacles with the cheerfulness of Anne because I’m a real person and not a fictional character, but maybe things would be better if I tried.

Thank you, as always, for reading and subscribing. See you soon. xo

1. I asked my son what he thought would happen in future books and he said, “I think she’s gonna marry Gilbert Blythe.” He understands the romance novel structure.

2. I won’t go on a DoorDash rant right now because Hollis has heard it enough.