Anne has a gift for pleasure – whether she’s taking apple blossoms up to her bedroom “for company”, walking a ridgepole or savouring her first ice cream. Because what’s wrong with a bit of beauty? Fun is a serious businessĪnne’s mantra that “you can nearly always enjoy things if you make up your mind firmly that you will” is nothing like Pollyanna’s nauseating “glad game”.

But Anne gets her dream dress, and her red hair even, eventually, goes auburn, just as she wished it would. You can be bright and ambitious and still go nuts for a nice frockĪnne prays, “Please let me be good-looking when I grow up.” In any other children’s book – I’m looking at you, Little Women – she’d be punished for vanity. And he takes her anger seriously and respects her for it. When Gilbert teases her about her hair, Anne breaks a slate over his head. Their (spoiler alert) relationship gave me hope that even swots and misfits could find love. Anne doesn’t cede first place to any boy, and certainly not her school rival, roguish Gilbert Blythe. But they soon admit she’s made them happier than a boy could have done. Matthew and his sister Marilla decide to get an orphan boy to help out on their farm and are miffed when, due to a mix-up, Anne arrives instead. She taught me things I still think about every day. I’d get to the end of book eight and start again, with plucky red-headed orphan Anne Shirley waiting at a train station for her new life to begin.

I read LM Montgomery’s 1908 novel and its seven sequels over and over as a girl. I ’ve just had a baby so I’m up a lot in the small hours, and when I can’t get back to sleep, I’ve been indulging in the guilty pleasure of reading everything I can find about the new TV adaptation of Anne of Green Gables.

Anne of green gables anne shirley