The 'dark side' of Anne of Green Gables is not news | Fiction | The Guardian

The 'dark side' of Anne of Green Gables is not news | Fiction | The Guardian


The 'dark side' of Anne of Green Gables is not news
If people are surprised at Lucy Maud Montgomery's final book's tough themes, then they didn't read the others very closely

The shadows were always there ... Anne of Green Gables, in 1985 TV adaptation. Photograph: Ronald Grant Archive


Jean Hannah Edelstein
@jhedelstein
Tue 14 Jul 2009 22.10 AEST






10



It's been ages since a bit of book-related news made me feel so excited as the announcement last week that a further instalment of the Anne of Green Gables series is due to be published in full for the first time by Penguin in Canada: my affection for LM Montgomery burns strong and true. And it's a feeling shared, I've no doubt, by women around the world who, like me, were once bookish nine-year-olds with passionate obsessions with Anne, and Emily (of New Moon) and Jane (of Lantern Hill) and Pat (of Silver Bush).

But in tandem with my excitement, I felt surprised by the official line from Penguin, that the book will have "darker" themes than those seen in previous Montgomery books. For I'm quite sure, in fact, that a large part of what continues to make her work so appealing to readers, both adolescent and adult, is that though it might fall short of realism (as Margarent Atwood pointed out last year) and be shored up by happy endings, a vein of darkness has always run between the paragraphs of baking mishaps, classroom shenanigans, and descriptions of bucolic summer days on Prince Edward Island.



While the rampant popularity of the book in which she debuts (and the consequent licensing) has sometimes threatened to turn the childish Anne Shirley into something of a trite cipher of ginger plaits and freckles, the series of eight books that follow the narrative arc of her life are decidedly realistic – and, thus, decidedly dark. Many readers don't get further than the first book, which, in keeping with the age of the heroine, is quite childish. But that's a shame, for those who pursue the further adventures of Anne learn that while she remains at heart a moral person (there's a strong streak of Presbyterianism throughout the books), Anne is also battered by the vagaries of life. Her adoptive father figure dies, one of her best friends dies (beautiful with consumption), her childhood sweetheart nearly dies; she has heart-wrenching relationships with the wrong men and struggles throughout with the challenge of balancing being a wife and mother with her aspirations as a writer. It's never stated explicitly, but Anne is definitely a feminist, and being a feminist in early 20th-century Canada is a difficult path to follow.



In light of all of this darkness, revelation last year that Montgomery may have taken her own life was, furthermore, not entirely surprising: the path of Anne's life, and Montgomery's other characters, often closely followed her own rather difficult narrative, albeit with more positive outcomes. Montgomery, like Anne, and many of her other female characters, had absent parents and difficult love affairs that were in part complicated by her desire for an independence that wasn't granted to women of her generation. I will always remember learning, from a teacher who ran an after-school seminar on Montgomery's work for me and a handful of other Anne-obsessed nine-year-olds, that Montgomery ended one major love affair because she perceived the man in question to be insufficiently well-educated to be an adequate match. There went my innocent, black-and-white view of love.

And indeed this romantic ambivalence is reflected in many of her books in a surprisingly bold manner, considering her era and audience. Anne and her great love Gilbert dance around each other for years; at one point, she's engaged to another man, and after years of marriage, in Anne of Ingleside, she's preoccupied with fears that her husband doesn't love her anymore. Now that I think about it, it seems a little bit strange that I was so fascinated with what became the story of a middle-aged woman when I was a pre-teen: this makes me think that it's time for me to re-read. At heart, Montgomery's ability to incorporate such complex themes into writing that is so accessible to younger readers makes her arguably the grandmother of the YA/adult crossover novel: it will not just be nostalgia that drives adult readers to buy this final work.