Anne of Green Gables Summary: What Happens and Why It Endures
What it is about
Published in 1908, Anne of Green Gables is Lucy Maud Montgomery's first novel and the start of a long series. It is set in the late nineteenth century in Avonlea, a fictional town on Prince Edward Island based on the real community of Cavendish. The premise turns on a mistake. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, unmarried siblings in their fifties and sixties, send to an orphanage for a boy who can help Matthew work the farm at Green Gables. The orphanage sends an eleven-year-old girl instead.
That girl is Anne Shirley, from Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia, who has spent her childhood passed between strangers' homes and institutions. Marilla's first instinct is to send her back. Matthew, quiet and kind, encourages otherwise, and after some observation and thought Marilla agrees that Anne can stay. The rest of the book follows what happens next: Anne settling into the first real home she has known, doing well at the country school, making friends, getting into trouble and growing up.
The structure is episodic rather than tightly plotted. Montgomery builds the book out of incidents. Anne tries to dye her red hair black and turns it green. She gives her best friend what she believes is raspberry cordial, and it turns out to be currant wine, with predictable results. She clashes with the unpleasant Pye sisters. She nurses a grudge against a classmate for years over a single insult. The small scale is the point. Avonlea is a place where a social error can feel enormous, and Montgomery takes that seriously while also finding it funny.
The main characters
Anne Shirley is fanciful, dramatic, eager to please and extremely talkative, especially about her own imaginings. She insists her name is spelled with an "e" at the end. She is defensive about her appearance, hating her red hair, her freckles and her pale, thin frame, though she will admit to liking her nose. She has literary ambitions and a temper.
Marilla Cuthbert is stern and practical, and her gradual softening is one of the book's real engines. Matthew Cuthbert is shy, gentle and almost wordless with strangers, and he is the first adult in Anne's life to be straightforwardly on her side.
Diana Barry lives next door and becomes Anne's "bosom friend", the term Anne uses for her. Around them are Jane Andrews, calm and placid, and Ruby Gillis, beautiful and boy-crazy. Gilbert Blythe is the classmate who teases Anne about her red hair and earns her instant hatred for it. He apologises more than once. In time Anne stops hating him, but pride and stubbornness keep her from saying so.
The themes
Belonging sits at the centre. Anne arrives as a mistake, an unwanted substitute for the boy the Cuthberts asked for, and the novel is largely the story of a household deciding she is theirs. Family here is chosen and built rather than inherited.
Identity runs alongside it. Anne's constant renaming of places, her insistence on the "e", her imagined versions of herself, all come from a child who has had very little control over her own life. Imagination is her defence and sometimes her undoing.
Friendship is treated with full seriousness. Anne's bond with Diana is not a minor subplot but one of the strongest relationships in the book. And the coming-of-age arc is concrete: Anne goes to Queen's Academy at sixteen to earn a teaching licence, finishing in one year instead of the usual two, and wins the Avery Scholarship given to the top student in English. That would pay for a degree at Redmond College on the mainland.
How it ends (spoilers)
Near the close of the book, Matthew learns that the Cuthberts' money has been lost in a bank failure, and he dies of a heart attack. Marilla's eyesight is failing. Anne gives up the Avery Scholarship to stay at Green Gables and help her, planning to teach at the Carmody school and come home at weekends. Gilbert Blythe then gives up his own post at the Avonlea School so that Anne can take it and stay near Marilla, moving to White Sands himself. The gesture ends their long quarrel, and the book closes with their friendship settled and Anne looking ahead.
Why it still matters
The novel has been translated into at least thirty-six languages and has sold more than fifty million copies, which places it among the best-selling books in any language. It has been taught in schools around the world and considered a classic of children's literature since the mid-twentieth century. Montgomery wrote numerous sequels, and in 2008 an authorised prequel, Before Green Gables by Budge Wilson, appeared for the series centenary.
Adaptations have kept it visible: films, television films, animated and live-action series, plus musicals and plays staged annually in Canada, Europe and Japan. It suits readers of any age who want a book about a child talking her way into a family, and it rewards adults as much as children, largely because Marilla's story is as interesting as Anne's.
