No 50 Anne of Green Gables by LM Montgomery (1908)
Mark Twain was my hero when I was nine because that was when I discovered Tom Sawyer (whose adventures have already been hymned here). But even at the height of my adulation, I would have had to take issue with his assertion, if I had been aware of it then, that Anne of Green Gables was "the dearest and most loveable child in fiction since the immortal Alice". I had read Anne of Green Gables as well as Tom Sawyer, and she had made me as sick as a dog.
Relentlessly cheery. Relentlessly talkative. Relentlessly uplifted by the sight of apple and cherry blossom and with a passion for poetry and puffed sleeves. I placed my copy back on the shelf and went to tap Grandma for whatever medications she had in her capacious handbags for treating childhood nausea.
Another Mark Twain quote will illuminate the problem. "When I was a boy of 14, my father was so ignorant I could hardly stand to have the old man around. But when I got to be 21, I was astonished at how much the old man had learned in seven years." I had come to the book too young. When I picked it up again a few years later, I too was astonished at how much it had improved – and shortly thereafter secretly devastated by the fact that not only could I be an idiot in all matters sporting, artistic and practical I could also be so when it came to reading too.
On rereading, then, I learned that Anne Shirley is indeed a dear and most loveable child. Who could not, after all, adore anyone who insists that her name be spelled with the "E" – "so much more distinguished. If you'll only call me Anne with an E I shall try to reconcile myself to not being called Cordelia." She is not twee and Pollyanna-ish (it suddenly occurs to me that I should almost certainly reread Pollyanna too) but a doughty survivor of a harsh upbringing who has refused to let circumstances crush her spirit. She arrives at Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert's farm in Avonlea with the odds stacked against her – orphaned, unwanted (they are expecting a boy) and, her greatest and most lamented trial, red-haired and freckled.
She proceeds, through her odd way of seeing things, through her patently honest love of beauty and endearing attempts to master her various jealousies and yearnings, to win over the Cuthberts, their neighbours and millions of readers who have met her over the 101 years since the book was first published. When I settle down with it these days, it is the gradual softening of Marilla that seems to me the true miracle of the book, but this only reminds me again of the great truth I stumbled on as I took it down the second time – that you are never too young to start rereading.
