Anne of Green Gables

Eleven year old orphan Anne Shirley arrives at the Cuthbert farm on Prince Edward Island by mistake, since the aging siblings Matthew and Marilla had asked the orphanage for a boy to help with the farm work instead. Montgomery lets Marilla's reluctance to keep her soften slowly across the opening chapters, and the rest of the novel follows Anne through school, an intense friendship with Diana Barry, a running rivalry with Gilbert Blythe that curdles into real regard, and enough scrapes involving dyed hair, broken slates, and accidental engagements with imagination to fill several ordinary childhoods. The book's close turns more serious than its early chapters promise: Matthew dies of a heart attack after the family's savings collapse in a bank failure, and Anne, offered a university scholarship she has fought hard to earn, gives it up instead to stay home and help the now nearly blind Marilla keep Green Gables. Gilbert, in the gesture that finally settles their long rivalry into friendship, gives up his own local teaching post so Anne can take it and stay close to home.

Montgomery gives Anne an unstoppable, talkative imagination that carries the book's comedy, but she never lets that same imagination make Anne foolish; Anne's mistakes come from a real child's impulsiveness; her recoveries from real character. The novel reads quickly and warmly, built for a young reader but never condescending to one, and Anne's fierce attachment to beauty and naming things, red hair reimagined as auburn, a plain path renamed the White Way of Delight, gives the book a personality that has outlasted more conventional orphan stories by a century.

Montgomery reportedly used a photograph of the actress Evelyn Nesbit as a model for Anne's face, and she distinguished her heroine from ordinary storybook Anns by insisting on the extra silent e.