Queen Anne (but not that Queen Anne)

I did a previous post about Anne of Green Gables and L.M. Montgomery’s work. That post was partially an exhortation to read some (more) of her work, and partially an opportunity to explain why the recent Anne adaptation went so terribly wrong. I’ve decided I want to talk about Anne some more. First I need to tell you about a book that is alarming similar to Anne of Green Gables. Then we’ll talk through the eight Anne books, in a hopefully spoiler-free manner, and finally discuss why some of these books have not been adapted as well as they could have been (or, indeed, not been adapted at all). 

First, this similar book. 

Anne of Green Gables was published in 1908. Five years earlier, however, Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm was published, written by American author Kate Douglas Wiggin. I had heard of this book before, but not read it. I recently found out that these two books are apparently very similar. Like, ‘was-this-plagiarised?’ levels of similar. 

! ! !

I had to read Rebecca for myself and see what this was all about. 

Yes, there are similarities between the two books. I kept a list as I read, which I won’t repeat in full here because unfortunately it is quite long, but essentially both stories are based on someone deciding to take in a sensible, hardworking child and winding up with a girl who is always getting into trouble but who ultimately makes them proud. This on its own isn’t such a big deal; other stories about orphans have similar elements. But this Rebecca character talks a lot…so does Anne. Rebecca has an imagination, likes to look for beauty everywhere, and writes poetry …replace poetry with stories and you have Anne here. Rebecca is the smartest girl in her class and she is unjustly punished for something along with a boy she doesn’t particularly like…does this sound familiar? Rebecca has a well-off, loyal, not very imaginative best friend…Rebecca pursues higher education and completes her course in less time than usual… (note, however, that the fact that Anne completes her studies in less time than usual mirrors how L.M. Montgomery did the same thing in her own life). There is even a boy-crazy classmate from whom Rebecca and her friend eventually drift apart. Fortunately, the rest of the story is sufficiently different, but oh! the two books were so similar! 

I even picked up echoes of Emily of New Moon here: Rebecca’s two aunts always speak ill of Rebecca’s father, lamenting the fact that he had married their sister, Rebecca’s mother. Emily’s aunts do the exact same thing with her father. Emily had a teacher who supported her dream of being a writer, and so does Rebecca, although much of Emily’s storyline is based on Montgomery’s own life, so I don’t want to read too much into that being similar to Rebecca. Also, this is a decidedly American story: both the original book and the sequel contain some very patriotic storylines that make it very much of its time and place (i.e. late nineteenth-century Maine). It is clear that Anne’s story is set on Prince Edward Island in the late nineteenth century, but Montgomery is more subtle about it, subtle to the point that Anne’s story could almost happen in another time or place; there is a timelessness to it. 

I shall be honest, and blunt, however: Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm is decidedly inferior to Anne of Green Gables, and, indeed, to Emily of New Moon. It is certainly not ‘bad’, and it has a lot of potential, as does its sequel. The storylines are perfectly enjoyable, generally, and its characters are overall very likeable. It has a good balance between being relatable and being idealised and aspirational, if a bit heavy-handedly moralising at times. It all feels a bit rushed, though, a bit surface-level. The author narrates an event and then suddenly we’re on to the next thing. I didn’t feel as moved to care, or to think ‘yes, this resonates with me’, as I did with Anne of Green Gables. There is an elegance and a sense of beauty to L.M. Montgomery’s work that is decidedly missing here. 

It is not possible now to know whether Montgomery had read Rebecca, or not. All I can say is that oh boy yes are they ever similar, but also that Anne’s story is far, far, more enjoyable to read. 

So let’s talk some more about it. 

Anne of Green Gables was the first of eight novels about Anne:

Anne of Green Gables (1908)

Anne of Avonlea (1909)

Anne of the Island (1915)

Anne of Windy Poplars (1936)

Anne’s House of Dreams (1917)

Anne of Ingleside (1939)

Rainbow Valley (1919)

Rilla of Ingleside (1921)

You’ll notice that two of the books were written much later than the others; Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside were written in response to readers wanting more books about Anne, so Montgomery went back and filled in parts of the chronology of Anne’s life that she hadn’t really covered in the initial six books. 

If you have read the books, see if you agree with my judgements on them, and if you haven’t, I hope said judgements have made you want to read and judge for yourself, and that they haven’t spoiled anything. 

Anne of Green Gables: This is the classic, the original. There is no filler here, this is a timeless story, and can easily be read over and over.

Anne of Avonlea: There is so much good material here, and so many great characters. Anne is a bit older, but she still has that same imagination and love of the romantic, and she’s still getting into all manner of ridiculous adventures. This is where the 1980s adaptation picked up with its sequel, but that adaptation left out a lot. This book always makes me want to go for a long walk in the woods. 

Anne of the Island: This is one of my favourites, because this is Anne as a university student, a woman pursuing higher education at a time – the 1880s – when that was still not entirely common. Also, the city where Anne attends university is based on Halifax, and the university itself based on the main university in Halifax, Dalhousie. There is a chapter where Anne goes for a walk in an old cemetery (so relatable!), which is based on the Old Burying Ground in Halifax. I would love to visit this cemetery one day, in part because of this book. (Also, in this book a friend of Anne’s nicknames her ‘Queen Anne’, which inspired the title of this post.)

Anne of Windy Poplars: You might recognise a lot of this story from the 1980s adaptation. This one is set just after Anne of the Island, but was written much later, because people wanted more stories about Anne, and you can tell it was written much later. It retains some of the spirit of the other Anne books, of course, but you can almost feel the author just getting tired of writing about Anne. There are also a lot of anecdotal filler stories, some of which are good, some of which are repetitive and reduce Anne to a fairy godmother character who just makes everything sunny again.

Anne’s House of Dreams: And we’re back to the original early series. This is another of my favourites. This book contains some absolute gold: the characters are people you kind of want to meet in real life, and while one of the storylines might seem a bit farfetched, the various threads of this story are so compelling. This book would have adapted to TV very well. 

Anne of Ingleside: This is the other one that was written long after the others, and again, you can tell. It feels like we’re revisiting the same kinds of characters and the same kinds of storylines, so it can be a bit repetitive. A lot of this is told from the point of view of  children, which is rather relatable at some points, but wears a bit thin at others. 

Rainbow Valley: Here we are, back safely to the originals. There are some interesting themes here of religious hypocrisy, and some genuinely likeable characters.  This one is more narrative-driven than Anne of Ingleside, which was quite anecdotal, and I personally prefer the narrative approach. Again, another one that would have adapted well for TV. 

Rilla of Ingleside: This is excellent, and the most moving.  Again, another good candidate for adaptation, which is especially frustrating given how Anne and World War I were adapted for TV (more on this later).

I’ve flagged up a few of the books as being ideal for TV adaptations. Not that every book needs to be adapted for the screen, of course, but one might be left wondering why some of these later books have not been turned into something for TV, while Anne of Green Gables has had many adaptations. 

The 1985 version of Anne of Green Gables is very good: it captures the feel of the book and stays quite true to the story. The sequel to this is a kind of smushing-together of Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, and Anne of Windy Poplars. Again, it captures the feel of the book and is very enjoyable to watch, although conflating elements of three different books makes for something that is very different to the original material. But then, in 2000, another sequel was released. I remember at the time, when I hadn’t read all the books and was only twelve, thinking that it was not really that great, but looking back now, when I have read the entire series and when I know how good those books about Anne’s later life are, I think this Anne of the Green Gables: The Continuing Story is a bit of a travesty. Why bother making up some commonplace story about Anne going off to New York and getting caught up in World War I, when L. M. Montgomery has furnished us with an infinitely superior story of what happens to Anne after she finishes university? 

As far as I can tell, we can blame the executive producer, Kevin Sullivan, for this. There was, it seems, a dispute between L.M. Montgomery’s heirs, and Sullivan, who had produced all three of the Anne films. Sullivan had withheld profits from the first two films that were due to Montgomery’s heirs, which resulted in a legal dispute, which resulted in Sullivan not being able to use the material from the other Anne books. Something like that. So apparently he had to dig himself out of this mess by just making something up. He also decided to set his adaptations about twenty years later than the books (because the Edwardian era ‘looked’ better than the late Victorian period, it seems, although there may have been other reasons than just that), which of course will mean that the First World War comes up sooner in Anne’s life than it should. 

This is all incredibly frustrating when you realise that the last Anne book, Rilla of Ingleside, is set during the First World War, and is unusual in being a novel about the war written by, and from the perspective of, a woman who lived though it. L.M. Montgomery stated the year it was published that, while the other Anne books were written for anyone, Rilla of Ingleside was written specifically for girls because it was about their experience of the war. Despite being fictional, it is a very moving insight into the experiences, in Canada, at least, of people affected by the war: you have the young woman who is forced to grow up quickly and contribute to the war effort, you have the mother of sons old enough to enlist, you have the young man who wants to enlist right away, the one who is too young to join up, the one who is afraid of joining; you can see how the war would have affected a whole range of people. It is such an excellent book, and yet the television sort-of-equivalent is some absurd story about Anne herself going off to France in search of a missing Gilbert – ??

I think that is enough of that. We’ll do one more Anne-related post soon, I think, and then move onto something different. I leave you with yet another exhortation to read the books. Watch the 1980s adaptations, too, but be aware that the second one is quite different from the original story. Feel free to ignore the Continuing Story and the one that’s on Netflix right now. 

Further Reading

The Anne books themselves are the further reading here, naturally! All of them are digitised (Project Gutenberg) if you can’t get hold of the physical copies (although those are the most fun to read), and there are also links to everything L.M. Montgomery published here: https://www.fadedpage.com/sc/montgomery.php