![]() ![]() Montgomery neatly disrupts expectations as Anne brings herself into their life as their child, but without the normal parental context or expectations. And though they guide her as best they can, she too remains herself, a free spirit at whom they wonder.įundamental to this is that Matthew and Marilla are not childless husband and wife, they are brother and sister L. She, and they, never deny her orphan nature she remains Anne Shirley, never taking their name or calling them father and mother – they are themselves, Matthew and Marilla. But unlike Jane, Anne finds in Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert a natural parentage, a place to call home, and a safe haven in which to find herself. Indeed, Anne calls to mind the child Jane Eyre, with her rebelliousness, her life in the imagination, and her essentially orphaned nature. But the world it spoke of was so far removed from my own that it might have been a full century earlier. It was published in 1908 I suppose I read it around 1958 when I was eleven – Anne’s own age. Whatever it was, I fell for that book, with its really quite difficult child-heroine, its exotic landscape on the far side of the world, and its reference points so very distant from my own. Maybe it was ‘Green Gables’ – mysterious but redolent, though of what? Maybe it was ‘Anne’ – with an e. Anne of Green Gables I did not write Green Gables for children: Sally Minogue ponders a story for all readers. ![]()
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