Have you ever read anything by L.M. Montgomery? You’ve probably heard of her work, even if you don’t recognise her name: she wrote Anne of Green Gables, along with nineteen other novels and many, many, other short stories. There has been a recent TV adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, which, I do not hesitate to say, I do not like. I have watched it, all of it, in order that I might come to an informed judgement and critique it properly. This post will explain why I was so unimpressed with ‘Anne with an E’, and then talk a bit more about L.M. Montgomery’s work.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was from Prince Edward Island originally, where much of her writing is set, and she knew all of her life that she wanted to be a writer. She published short stories and poems initially, before Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, was published in 1908. Her writing (particularly the Anne books) is still popular even today – she was even named to the British Royal Society of Arts (the first Canadian woman so named) and the Order of the British Empire; she is also a Person of National Historic Significance in Canada.
I have read all twenty of L.M. Montgomery’s novels, and many of her short story collections. Her work is immersive, it’s escapist, it’s not stressful just for the sake of making it ‘exciting’ (though sad things and negative things do happen in the stories). On a personal level, I find many of the characters are relatable, or at least admirable in some way. Nearly all of her novels or short stories are set in rural places, and her descriptions of nature are profoundly evocative. There is something immensely reassuring about her work and I can re-read her novels over and over, and read through her numerous short stories without being tired of them.
None of this is here in Anne with an E (or just ‘Anne’, depending where you are in the world). This show is trying to do too much, and not managing to do any of it particularly well. It is trying to adapt the story of Anne of Green Gables, and trying to make it appeal to a modern audience, and trying to tell other stories that really have no connection to the original novel. In doing this, it manages to produce a programme which is about one-third Anne, and two-thirds something else entirely.
Anne was ambitious and intelligent; she found beauty in everything and marched to her own tune. This Anne is meant to be a ‘modern’ girl, but not in a timelessly relatable way like in the books, but in the sense that she embraces ideals which are somewhat at odds with the time in which she lives. This Anne admires her new teacher, Miss Stacy, because she is modern and liberated and non-conforming, which a) feels shoehorned in to appeal to modern audiences b) was not Miss Stacy’s role in the book – it was a more subtle, but just as valuable role, in that she encourages Anne’s love of learning and helps her grow into the role of intelligent, ambitious, young woman (qualities which make Anne so admirable). They’ve amplified this here into something that feels very out of place; the Miss Stacy that we see here would be a great character somewhere else. On a more general note, the dialogue often contains some jarringly modern turns of phrase – this is set in the nineteenth century but the period feel is only surface level.
There is so much material in the book that would work well adapted on screen, and yet much of it is disregarded in favour of storylines that are either changed beyond all recognition, or which have nothing whatsoever to do with the original story. It’s as if the writers of this show thought, ‘what are the issues affecting people today? Not just the issues that were relevant when the show is actually set, but today?’ Then they found some way to squeeze them into the show, using the basic story of Anne Shirley and her life at Green Gables as a vehicle to tell these stories, which may well have been seen in quite a different light at the time they are supposed to be taking place.
There is nothing inherently wrong with these stories, of course, and on their own they would actually be rather compelling: a young man from Trinidad making a life for himself in rural Canada against the racism of the time, a boy struggling with his identity and ‘outsider’ status and finding acceptance among open-minded/like-minded people, an Indigenous girl being taken away to a residential school…by all means, tell these stories on TV. But if these storylines are going to crowd out and distort the material adapted from the book to the extent that they do, then why bother even basing this show on Anne of Green Gables, however loosely? Why not just write your own show, set in nineteenth-century eastern Canada and telling all these other stories that you clearly want to tell? Honestly this show gets to the point of ‘what I am even watching here? We’ve left Anne and her story far behind’. A running theme here is ‘it works fine, but not here’, or ‘I like this character…somewhere else’.
(Having said this, however, I found myself fascinated by the Season 3 storyline with the residential schools. I wanted to know if the schools really were presented to people in such an innocent way, and if people really were as ignorant about what they were actually like, as Anne and the other characters initially seem to be. It doesn’t fit here with Anne, but it’s a storyline that made me think and want to know more, which is surely a good thing. However, there’s a bit of a problem here: PEI and New Brunswick were the only provinces not to have the schools, so the show gets it right by setting this school in Nova Scotia, but the one that actually existed in Nova Scotia didn’t start to operate until 1922, about twenty years after the show is set…so now this storyline feels really shoehorned in.)
Many of the characters from the book are here in this new adaptation: some are recognisable (Matthew, Marilla, and Mrs Lynde are actually rather good in this version, and I do like Aunt Josephine as well) and some are changed a fair bit (the aforementioned Miss Stacy, and even Gilbert Blythe has quite a different story here), and some are changed beyond recognition for no discernible reason, unless it’s to act as a vehicle for telling another jarringly modern story.
There are moments in the story that are done well (the Lily Maid scene starts out so recognisably, as do some of the scenes with the Story Club); there are some little details they include that are true to the book (the plum puffs, the milk cooling by the brook), and there are some changes which still maintain the ‘feel’ of the books (the Haunted Wood ordeal becomes a harrowing evening home alone, rather than a desperate run through the woods at night, and it still works very well). And as I said, some of the characters are still as you would imagine them. But it’s often the superficial things they get right, while the key elements of the original story are the things that get changed or shoved aside in favour of some unrelated thing.
This show adds in drama and stress that was never in the book: like, what was even the point of Anne running away in the first episode? What, oh what, was the point of the boring and drawn-out gold storyline? There was so much figurative ‘gold’ in the book that trying to add in a story about literal gold just felt like a bit of a trade down. In this series Anne goes to the orphanage where she lived pre-Green Gables, and it’s like she has all of these doubts and demons about her past that need exorcising: did her parents love her? Did they really want her? Understandable through this might be in Anne’s case, it runs contrary to the book. There, Anne clings to quite a rosy picture of her parents, and in Anne of the Island, she goes and visits the house they lived in and it’s all very comforting for her, but it’s not made into a massive deal. Here, it’s like they’ve had to spin out all of the human drama just for the sake of it. Part of the appeal of the books was that they were not like this: the books were very much of their time, but also timeless somehow; the story was relevant and appealing without having to make it modern and flashy. There is something very prosaic and mundane, almost commonplace, about a lot of the storylines in this version, which was not the vibe of the book at all.
Speaking of commonplace…it is said of Anne when we first meet her in the book that ‘no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this…child’. Part of her appeal is that she is not quite like the other children. She has a vivid imagination, and goes through life with one foot always in fairy-land. This Anne, I am afraid, does not capture this. The actress who plays her is very good, in a general sense: it is clear she is good at acting, just not such a good fit for this particular role (although she does actually look like a child at the beginning of the series: Anne is meant to be eleven, and this Anne looks that…although they upped her age by two years for some reason, so that she’s thirteen at the start of the show). It’s like she’s been told that Anne gets a bit overdramatic about things, that she speaks with such passion and enthusiasm, and is just so full of a love for life and all of its possibilities, and has therefore ticked all of these boxes by over-emphasising her speech, making everything sound a little bit pained and forced…nothing is ‘tragical and romantic’ the way this Anne says it (also she sounds American…most of the other characters have the accent right – why doesn’t she?)
The trouble with Anne with an E is that it is feels less like an adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, and more like a vehicle for dealing with modern-day issues. If you want to adapt this classic book for a new audience, fine, but this has been done in such a way that the classic story has been distorted so heavily – if you watch Anne with an E and then read Anne of Green Gables, you’ll find a lot of differences. I was frequently left wondering whether the writers thought the original source material wasn’t good enough, but it abundantly was, so let’s talk about it for a moment.
Recently I got into reading some of L.M. Montgomery’s short stories: I had heard she’d written a story about some women who go on strike at a church, not doing any of the day-to-day admin things they usually do, until the men allow a female missionary to give a talk. This intrigued me, and so I found the collection of short stories in which it appeared (it’s Short Stories 1902-1903, ‘The Strike at Putney’, if you’re interested). But there were so many more, and they are all available in collections ranging from those written in 1896 through to 1922. Some were published in magazines or newspapers, though I’m not sure about some of the others. These stories are very much of their time in terms of some of the characters’ attitudes and even some of the language (things like they way they talk about the French Canadians, or the First Nations people, or some of the attitudes towards women – a lot of this would never fly nowadays) but you just have to realise that, and move on.
It has been particularly fascinating to notice the patterns in these stories – was this just a case of trying out variations on a theme, just to practise, or can we read something into them about themes and plots that resonated with the author (personally I find it fascinating to notice where an author may have been influenced by external factors and how those show up in their writing). Something that comes up a lot is people meeting long-lost relatives and reconciling with old lovers, frequently achieved through inviting someone somewhere by mistake or on a whim. But what is even more fascinating is seeing how her characters and storylines changed over time, and how elements of short stories would appear later in her novels.
I could provide an actual list of the things I have noticed (I have in fact compiled such as list, just for the fun of it), but I feel like that would be incredibly niche and only really appeal to people who had read a substantial portion of L.M. Montgomery’s work. So I’ll just go with some highlights – there is a 1908 short story called ‘Matthew Insists on Puffed Sleeves’. Now, if you know the story of Anne of Green Gables, you will know that this is a chapter in that book, published the same year. Other short stories would later be reworked into chapters of novels, or elements of a short story would appear later on in a novel. Even characters are tested out in short stories before appearing in novels later: sharp-eyed readers of Anne of Avonlea will notice in the short stories a couple of iterations of Miss Lavender, an immediately recognisable Charlotta the Fourth, and Paul and his rock people. I love this – I feel like it shows an author’s process and makes you wonder why these characters and stories were recycled or reused or reworked as often as they have been. Accidents involving cooking also seem to surface a lot: for example, a story appeared in an 1898 magazine about flavouring a cake with anodyne liniment – this was reworked for Anne of Green Gables ten years later (what is anodyne liniment? It was some sort of painkiller/cure-all, made from morphine and alcohol – and Anne accidentally mistakes this for vanilla and puts it in a cake!)
In short, these short stories are fascinating if you go into them having read the novels, although I’m sure they would be good without that context as well. The novels, of course, are great, often for very different reasons: Rilla of Ingleside is set during the First World War and offers in intriguing, albeit fictional, perspective on those years; Anne of the Island is one I personally find very relatable, being about Anne’s years at university; The Story Girl and its sequel, The Golden Road, are both seriously underrated books, blending nostalgia and timelessness. There was an unrelentingly bleak, and disappointingly loose, adaptation of Emily of New Moon made about twenty years ago, which, what little I managed to see of it, actually put me off the books for a bit, but I am so glad I did eventually read them: they are darker than the Anne books, but there was something about Emily’s character that I found fascinating and kind of relatable. She is supposed to be the most ‘autobiographical’ character, and if you read LMM’s autobiography, you can plainly see this. Anyway, I think what I really just want to say here is: ‘Go read some L.M. Montgomery’, and approach the new Anne of Green Gables adaptation with caution.
P.S. According to her autobiography, LMM visited York, describing the Minster as ‘a dream of beauty made lasting in stone’. She also bought two china dogs at an antique shop there. Living in York, I very much enjoy this fact.
Further Reading
https://www.fadedpage.com/sc/montgomery.php For a list of all of L.M. Montgomery’s work, and links to most of it, as a lot of it has been digitised. It’s not the same as reading an actual book, of course, but I’m glad it’s so easily available.
https://www.thecanadianencyclopedia.ca/en/article/montgomery-lucy-maud For more on the author herself.
How It Was Because 