I don’t have a Netflix account to watch Anne With an E, the newest retelling of Anne of Green Gables, which debuted on May 12, but it provides an opportunity for me to reflect on the impact the fiery “Anne spelled with an e” has had on my life since I first read her story.
I discovered Anne Shirley one spring day in sixth grade, not knowing that I would meet the greatest love of my literary life. We’d watched a video about Nova Scotia-born artist Maud Lewis in my art class and the substitute teacher had mentioned that Anne Shirley was also from Nova Scotia. Being a book nerd, I’d thought about how I had never read Anne of Green Gables before and determined to check it out from the library on my next trip there and read it.
What I found in those pages was an imaginative, romantic, accident-prone and vivacious young girl in whom I saw myself. Anne’s trials and triumphs were (and still are) painfully real to me. When she runs with her “bosom friend” Diana to help nurse Diana’s croup-stricken sister, I remember running to my neighbor’s house to ask them at my mother’s behest to watch me and my brother when my other brother had croup and my mom had to accompany him to the emergency room. When she bravely holds back tears her first night away from home at Queen’s College, I am reminded of my first night alone in my dorm room freshman year of college. The feeling of exaltation she feels after she nervously enters a school building with her friend Jane to find out if she won the Avery scholarship and hears students cheering her name reminds me of how I felt when got a high enough grade on the math portion of a standardized test in middle school that my mother agreed to sign me up for ballet.
I’ve found that many experiences in my life can find a parallel in a scene from Anne Shirley’s life. When L.M. Montgomery created Anne Shirley, she created a character that could relate to anyone regardless of age or gender on a fundamental level just as much today as when Anne of Green Gables was first published.
Anne speaks to my innermost self – the part of me that dreams big, passionately anticipates large “thrills,” and revels in the small, everyday beauties of life. Like her, I wish that my hair was a different color and that my parents had named me differently. Like her, “my life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes.” Like her, I have looked up to women who are my equivalent of Miss Stacey and Mrs. Allen.
But Anne also represents the alternate me I wish I could be – smart, beautiful, witty, a fantastic writer, loved dearly by everyone she comes in contact with, possessor of a bosom friend and the object of Gilbert Blythe’s affections. Perhaps it’s the fact that I can live vicariously through this amazing creation of a young woman from Prince Edward Island, and imagine that I am her, that leads me to return to the book time after time.
Ever since I first read it, I have made it a tradition I keep faithfully to re-read Anne of Green Gables every spring break. Although I do that every year, it took me until my sophomore year of high school to finally read the rest of the series. L.M. Montgomery gives Anne a wonderful, full life, but watching as the bright, passionate young girl I came to love so dearly suffered after the death of her children and became a woman not immune to the hardships of life made me ache for the young girl Matthew Cuthbert picks up from the station.
Life is rough even for Anne Shirley, but watching the strength and fortitude with which she conquers it gives me hope that I too can conquer what life throws at the young, bright-eyed dreamer who first read Anne of Green Gables and knew she would love it for life.
