A Life With Anne
When I was a child I adored the Anne of Green Gables series. I still do. But the height of me reading through the series was between the ages of 7 and 10, when I knew I could read all eight books in the 19 hour drive from Houston to Denver. I was an avid and precocious reader back then. Now I’m just avid. So color me surprised when I tried to introduce my oldest daughter to Anne during her elementary school years and the book fell flat for her. What we discovered, now that she is totally smitten with the series, is that she didn’t understand the appeal in a character who just sounded exactly like herself. For real, people have commented on how much my kid reminds them of Anne her whole life, but this year is the first year my darling girl has truly delighted in it.
I, apparently, had introduced my dear girl to Anne too soon which was mistake number one regarding my favorite auburn haired heroine (and my life for that matter, despite her being called my mini-me all the time, she is not–in fact–very much like me at all). Mistake number two was assuming everyone else I knew was thoroughly acquainted with her. So when we decided to choose Anne of Avonlea as our first San Salvatore Book Club pick, we were shocked to learn that these women we love and admire had actually never read Anne of Green Gables (some, not all, had watched the Megan Fellows series).
Naturally, I began to approach it as I do teaching. Having been raised on Anne’s beloved Miss Stacy being presented as the ideal teacher (which grew into a love of most things Charlotte Mason as I researched homeschool options), my notes always either begin or end with these questions: What did you notice? What did you wonder? What did you discover? What, if anything, did you find good, true, or beautiful about this book? Are there any other stories you’ve heard or know or read that are echoed in this story?
This post, specifically, is on the first two books and the things I noticed reading the Anne books as a woman in my forties instead of as a girl with a wild imagination.
I love how L. M. Montgomery begins both books with an exotic character. In the first, Anne is the exotic, and in the second Mr. Harrison is our foreign, otherworldly character. He is from elsewhere, new to the neighborhood, and comes with an unruly parrot named Ginger, who reminded me of my Uncle’s macaw, Chicken. Just as Anne asked to called Marilla her aunt in the first book, the opening sequences of Anne of Avonlea includes Mr. Harrison mistakenly calling Marilla Anne’s aunt. In Green Gables, Marilla shuts it down as a falsehood, and in Avonlea, Anne does the same. Harrison and Anne’s exchange regarding the cow invasion mirrors Anne’s first meeting with Rachel Lynde. In the first book, Anne is the outsider throwing a temper tantrum, in the second Anne is established as a true citizen of Avonlea as she suffers a newcomer’s temper tantrum. Montgomery’s alluding to her previous work is beautifully done.
As an adult, I also delighted in Harrison’s stab at Anne’s reading “yellow-jacket” novels. As a child I could visualize the novels perfectly because I grew up haunting antique stores and their book corners. Often, as a child, books were not worth my notice unless they were old, dusty, and had a faint smell of vanilla and moth balls (bonus points if there was a lingering odor of pipe tobacco). As a retired bookseller, this portion hit a bit differently and I laughed out loud. Yellow-jacket (“yellowback”) novels were “railway novels.” They were the equivalent of NY Times Bestselling thrillers or romances perched in a kiosk at an airport terminal (I’d say “today” but I really don’t fly much and I don’t know if people buy airport books these days). They were sensational fiction, much like dime novels, brightly colored (usually yellow) with ads on the back to cover the costs of the printing. Often they were simply cheaper reprints of already popular books. They were in direct competition with the “penny dreadfuls” G. K. Chesterton discusses in his essay A Defense of Penny Dreadfuls. Dracula was one such publication.
I also noticed, diving into the series as an adult, how much the Anne series had saturated the corners of my brain. In my late twenties I wrote two books in what is called The Bookshop Hotel series (book three was written just after I turned thirty, books four and five are still sitting unpublished on my computer). I wrote them under duress and my brain was completely fried, grasping at straws. One of my character’s names is Maud Montgomery. A few years ago I was asked by a reader if I had done that on purpose. I can firmly say, no, I did not. But reading now, I see how my mind had pulled something from a dark corner, something it had known and forgotten, and ran with it. L. M. Montgomery (Lucy Maud), called Maud by her friends, was a deeply religious person who functioned as a caretaker for her mentally ill husband. I can see in hindsight why my mind pulled this name out of the abyss during that time, as I thought I was the caretaker to a mentally unstable alcoholic husband myself. (Turns out, I was wrong, I was actually just a narcissist’s favorite toy. Thank God, that part of my life has passed.) The thread that holds so many of these episodic adventures in Avonlea is often the nuggets of wisdom and religious belief that seep through the pages, the empathy and compassion, the search for the divine, the delight in creation and whimsy.
Another strange moment for me was when I read in Anne of Avonlea:
“I think an old, deserted house is such a sad sight,” said Anne dreamily. “It always seems to me to be thinking about its past and mourning for its old-time joys.”
Leave it to my exhausted brain to also personify a house in my Bookshop series. What we read in childhood truly shapes the way we think.
I was amused to discover how much my parenting seemed to mimic Marilla’s and startled to get to know Miss Stacy as an adult reader. I have been homeschooling my children from the beginning. Public school was never going to be an option for us for many reasons, but as I was reading about Anne’s favorite teacher, whom I had read about hundreds of times in second and third grades, I realized that she embodies all my favorite elements of classical British educators during the turn of the century. More specifically, she has so many qualities Charlotte Mason hailed as correct.
Charlotte Mason lived from 1842-1923 and was known as a turn of the century educational reformer. She established the House of Education in Ambleside in the late 1800’s, which focused on teaching classically but with the added emphasis that “children are born persons.” She wrote a Home Education series I have read several times. When I was using Classical Conversations as a co-op opportunity for my oldest, people often told me I was too “Charlotte Mason.” (Classical Conversations is a nationwide neo-classical homeschool organization based out of North Carolina. There are things I love about their curriculum and things I could do without.) When we tried to connect with Charlotte Mason homeschoolers, die-hard AmblesideOnline families, we were often told we were “too neo-classical.” I now see the truth: we were never Classical Conversations people, nor were we Charlotte Mason followers… my aim has always been Miss Stacy. We are Miss Stacy homeschoolers! We do nature studies, literature based learning, Euclidean geometry. I still use McGuffey’s Readers and Susan Wise Bauer material, while adhering to a lot of AmblesideOnline’s schedules. We have always narrated, as advised by Cindy Rollins and Karen Glass. But in all these details, what I chose to use and what I have discarded, I have shaped my entire homeschool culture off a picture in my mind of the perfect educator–Miss Stacy!– and I wasn’t even aware I was doing it.
My daughter and I read Anne of the Island together, and we will resume the rest of the series soon, but took a break to focus on Homer’s Iliad. I am looking forward to seeing how Anne of Windy Poplars measures up to my memories of it being the best in the whole series, and what other things I notice and wonder, as someone who has been noticing and wondering for a much longer time than when I read it last. I’m excited to see what my real life Anne-girl thinks of her literary counterpart as she reads each book hereafter for the first time as well.
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Anakalian Whims 