Anne of Green Gables - A New Beginning - Review

Well I saw the movie last night. It was good but it was different. There is NO Gilbert, no Marilla - just brief glimpses of them as a memory.

In any Anne Shirley story you have to have the obligatory crusty old lady that young Anne can charm the pants off. First it was Marilla, then it was Rachel Lynde and in this movie that crusty old lady is Mrs Thomas - played by Shirley MacLaine.



This movie was done as a tie into the third Anne of Green Gables movie that Megan Follows made - the one where Gilbert went off to Europe during world war one. In that movie, Anne and Gilbert adopted young Dominic.

In this new movie, Dominic is grown up and is about to return home (to PEI) from Europe having been away fighting in WW2. The year is 1945.

Anne's early story is told as flashbacks. There are two stories happening here. The first one which tells of Anne's early life before she ended up at the Hammonds looking after their 8 kids. The second story is of Anne as widow and playwrite, waiting for Dominic to come home, looking for her father and then later her brother.

One thing I will say about young Anne (Hannah Endicott-Douglas) - she sure does talk the hind legs off a mule. She just would not stop talking. I realise that it was scripted, and she did a great job with everything she had to learn, but her voice. I felt Hannah's voice grating on me, especially after she had been talking for too long. Megan's voice never had that effect.

I'm sorry, but I think Megan Follows will always be Anne Shirley to me.




Here is the Globe and Mail review from yesterday.

In this season of specials, the biggest event on Canadian television this month is surely a three-hour, made-for-TV movie that presumes to give us both prequel and sequel to the enduring tale of Anne of Green Gables. Well, you mess with a Canadian literary icon at your peril. Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning is both largely unnecessary and mainly disappointing. The one bit of good news is that 12-year-old Hannah Endicott-Douglas is a worthy successor to Megan Follows, who played the character in the original mini-series. Read on.

Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning CTV, Sunday, 7 p.m.

It must be a frustration to those who make their living off the Anne of Green Gables legacy that L.M. Montgomery's original book contained but a few pages of pathetic suffering before the orphaned Anne bonded with her adoptive family and moved on to other exploits. Having long since exhausted the original material, producer Kevin Sullivan, who created the popular TV mini-series back in the 1980s, has invented a largely unnecessary prequel to the story of the red-headed orphan, and interwoven it with a weak sequel in a three-hour, TV movie. Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning is a disappointing affair, an ill-conceived and melodramatic narrative enlivened only by its period setting in New Brunswick and Prince Edward Island and the happy presence of Hannah Endicott-Douglas in the role of the iconic Anne.

The original book was aimed at children and Anne conquered her sorry circumstances pretty quickly. Sullivan, who both wrote and directed this new movie, clearly feels there was a certain lack of drama and worthy opponents in the book, and goes overboard here creating a highly improbable back story that borrows as much from Charles Dickens as Montgomery. After the death of her school teacher mother and desertion of her lumberjack father, Anne is thrown into the local poorhouse: break the ice on the freezing water bucket, throw the kindly old lunatic in a dungeon, and cue the cruel matron.

Fleeing this place, she just happens to run into Louisa Thomas (Rachel Blanchard), a confusingly contradictory character who was a friend of her mother and wife of a drunken doctor who has conveniently removed himself from the plot by dying. Louisa and her children are also on the run from their past, and Anne eventually tags along with them. They are to live with their irascible but wealthy grandmother whose cruel housekeeper banishes Anne first to the stables and then to the lumber mill the family owns. (The notion a girl would be asked to work in these all-male environments is just one of several historically dubious plot points here.) There follows a convoluted story about Anne's reappearing dad and union organizing at the mill. The only thing that makes it watchable is the relationship between Handicott-Douglas's fine reprise of the spunky Anne and Shirley MacClaine's lively version of the redoubtable Mrs. Thomas, as the irrepressible child inevitably wins over the battle axe. Then Mrs. Thomas disappears from the action just as abruptly as her drunken son did.

If this weren't enough, this tale is told in flashbacks from a sequel that picks up the story years later at the end of the Second World War. Anne is now a mother, grandmother and successful writer, returning to Green Gables to seek inspiration for a play she is trying to write, and to await the return of her adopted son from the war in Europe. When she finds a 30-year-old letter from her father beneath a floorboard, she suddenly goes charging off after him. (Why she has not thought to find him in the intervening years is never explained, along with a lot of other motivations.) She discovers he is dead - her assumption that at her age he would be anything other seems a bit odd - but also runs into various members of the old Thomas entourage still up to their nasty tricks. This section of the movie is even more improbable and ill-explained than the earlier one, and this time we have no formidable orphans and widows to cheer things up. As the aging Anne (a character based as much on Montgomery herself as on her fiction) Barbara Hershey offers a limp Katherine Hepburn imitation that somehow produces Anne's flightiness without any of her charm.

Perhaps fans of the original series will feel more Anne in any guise is necessarily a good thing, but this movie, which is accompanied, of course, by a larger marketing effort featuring all kinds of Green Gables paraphernalia, never justifies its presumption in inventing a new creation story for a Canadian literary icon.

Anne of Green Gables - A New Beginning

Just a quick note to tell you all that on Sunday (in 2 days) the NEWEST version of Anne of Green Gables will be shown in TV in Canada. Time from 7 - 10pm Eastern Time on CTV. It's called Anne of Green Gables - A New Beginning.



Remember this is all celebrating 100 years of Anne Shirley since the first book was published in 1908. Here is a review of Anne of Green Gables - A New Beginning which the reviewer saw at the Boston Film festival in September. It does have SPOILERS!!!!!!!!!

This movie covers Anne's life from when she was a child up until she went to the Hammonds right before she went to the orphanage and to PEI. It is told in flashback.

Edited to add

I also just found a review published in todays Globe and Mail.
Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning CTV, Sunday, 7 p.m.
Since Globe and Mail dont keep their article available for free - I will post the entire review next week after I have seen the movie.

The Gift of Wings - Book Review

LUCY MAUD MONTGOMERY
The Gift of Wings
By Mary Henley Rubio
Doubleday Canada
Published October 2008
684 pages
$39.95


'Maud had lived much of her life, like her volatile little heroine Anne, between the soaring of the imagination and the 'depths of despair.' " This sentence from the final chapter of the much-anticipated new biography by veteran scholar Mary Henley Rubio might serve as its motto. The result of several decades of research, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings soars with the energy of its title, but delves even deeper into the darker side of the author's life.

The book begins with Montgomery's birth on her beloved Prince Edward Island, and with her family roots in Scotland, closely following The Selected Journals of L. M. Montgomery, co-edited by Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston. But the voluminous biography's most revealing parts ponder her life in Ontario after she became the celebrity author of Anne of Green Gables.

Rubio deftly paints the portrait of a multitasking modern woman with an amazing work ethic and discipline. She wrote fiction, gave recitations and talks to thousands of people, promoted Canada's national literature through the Canadian Authors Association, supported younger authors, wrote letters to her fans and read at least one book a day. A loyal wife, she supported her husband on parish visits, organized theatre performances and kept an immaculate house. The main breadwinner, she was generous to a fault, making loans to friends and family. Yet there is a tendency for Maud's house of dreams to turn into a house of disappointments.

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl, in her book Subject to Biography, writes that female biographers often turn to their subject in search of an ideal, "an ideal friend or sister, a sexual ideal, an ideal of productivity, and of creativity, an ideal liver of life - and in some way, often more than one way, being disappointed." The biographer works to find a balance toward the subject.

In the introduction, Rubio recollects such a moment of disillusionment when, in "the late 1970s," she first met Dr. Stuart Macdonald, whom Montgomery called her "one good son." The young Rubio made the mistake of telling Stuart that Montgomery must have been "the ideal mother": "That ill-advised remark clearly hit a nerve, and I will never forget Dr. Macdonald's slow, appraising look, first at me and then into me and finally through me."

There is pathos in little Stuart learning to recite all 50 stanzas of Walter Scott's The Lady of the Lake, one of her favourite poems, to attract his busy mother's attention. There is even more pathos in a woman who comes to motherhood late in life only to have her adored son Chester grow up to become a liar, thief, swindler, manipulator and, from all accounts, an exhibitionist. (The reader is startled to see an image of Chester in handcuffs, arrested for embezzlement in 1954, fortunately after his mother's death). Her first-born was a spoiled brat who knew how to charm his mother.

The biography is also the tale of the marriage of a celebrity author and a country pastor, the Rev. Ewan Macdonald, who cannot possibly understand his talented wife's ambitious desires, let alone satisfy them. Flaubert's Emma and Charles Bovary come to mind, though Maud was no Emma when it came to sex. She kept a screen in her bedroom, and advised her daughter-in-law to do the same in order not to let her husband see her naked. If there was extramarital desire, as a gossipy maid insinuated, it was sublimated into the writing of The Blue Castle. Fiction was the canvas for the projection of emotion.

Meanwhile, Ewan remains curiously voiceless in this biography, as Rubio admits: "His side of his story will never be told." Described by his son Stuart as a hypochondriac, Ewan had several severe mental breakdowns; he escaped into prescription medication (carrying his cough medicine like a flask and apparently begging various doctors for codeine). After his retirement, when asked to help with chores in the house, he sought refuge with neighbours, who thought him a lovely and lonely old man.

It is here, in interviews with neighbours, maids and friends, that Rubio provides fascinating new insights into the toxic family dynamics, although students and scholars might wish for more consistent notes so as to be able to gauge the sources' reliability, given also that the famous L. M. Montgomery was subject to a great deal of rumour.

In a life filled with drama and fights with powerful men, such as her Boston publisher L. C. Page, a fight she won, and William Arthur Deacon, book review editor of The Toronto Mail and Empire (1928-36) and The Globe and Mail (1936-61), which she lost. Her most agonizing struggle, however, was against depression, her husband's and her own. Rubio details the couple's spiralling dependency on prescription drugs.

On Sept. 20, 2008, Kate Macdonald Butler, Stuart's daughter, revealed in The Globe and Mail that her famous grandmother took her own life, a dark secret the family had kept for decades. Rubio, in contrast, argues that cause of death cannot be conclusively determined: Montgomery could well have died of an accidental overdose, or from natural causes. No autopsy was performed. Stuart, a medical doctor, and intern at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, and Dr. Richard Lane, the family physician and close neighbour on Riverside Drive, where the Macdonalds resided in Toronto, disposed of the evidence after reading the scene as a suicide.

What Rubio doesn't say in the biography, but disclosed at a recent talk I attended at the University of Guelph, is that three decades ago Stuart had entrusted her with the very note dated April 22, 1942, he found on his dead mother's bedside table and pocketed. Identifying it as a rough note for her journal (including final instructions of what is to happen with the journal posthumously), Rubio concludes that it was not a suicide note per se.

Or was it? Did Montgomery not have an ingenious way of always speaking through indirection? If we look at all the evidence provided by Rubio and others, it seems that Montgomery, fragile and exhausted, was taking us eerily close to the door of death in a planned and volitional manner. She had said goodbye to her friends, had burned her private papers in a bonfire, had delivered a final manuscript to a publisher (letting nothing go to waste) and had placed the note with provisions for her journal on her bedside table where it had to be found. (Given that she was highly protective of her personal writings, is this not evidence of volition?)

Years earlier, Montgomery had told her pen-pal Ephraim Weber: "I envy those who die in their sleep," adding, "I have a horrible fear that I'll die by inches." Suicide was a recurrent romantic fantasy in her journal as in one entry dated June 15, 1939, that eerily anticipates the scene of her death. She is in her bedroom, her beloved cousin and friend Frede Campbell, who had been dead for two decades, is looking down on her from the picture on the wall, and Maud imagines the day "I really will step into that picture and hold out my hands to her as she stands among the shadows and say, 'Beloved, we are together again and the years of our severance are as if they had never been.' "

But perhaps this story remains to be written.

A significant contribution to the field, Lucy Maud Montgomery: The Gift of Wings will find a home on the bookshelves of Anne and Emily and Pat aficionados alongside other cherished books, including The Wheel of Things: A Biography of Lucy Maud Montgomery, by Mollie Gillen, who celebrated her 100th birthday on Nov. 1, 2008, in a nursing home in Toronto. When Gillen was recently asked what she thought of Montgomery's death, she replied: "Angels came down to take her away."

Some kindred spirits will prefer that ending.

Irene Gammel is Canada Research Chair in Modern Literature and Culture at Ryerson University. She is the author of Looking for Anne: How Lucy Maud Montgomery Dreamed Up a Literary Classic, a book that uncovers the mystery of how Anne was born.


The Gift of Wings can be purchased from Amazon

Anne of Green Gables Musical.

Next year (May 2009) the Anne of Green Gables Musical is coming to Toronto. Its been running in Charlottetown, PEI for quite some time. It is supposed to be the longest runing musical in Canada's history - started in 1964. It's as old as I am (GASP)

May 7 to 31. 2009 at ELGIN Theatre in Toronto

Now tickets should be available at Dancap Tickets (turn your speakers down - there is a lot of music) Just click Coming Soon on the left and then click Anne of Green Gables.


This is Megan Followes' original audition for the famous TV series made in 1985.
4 minutes

Lucy Maud Montgomery committed suicide

Lucy Maud Montgomery suicide news helps public understanding

From Saturday's Globe and Mail
September 19, 2008
By Kate MacDonald Butler

For many years, my family has kept a troubling secret. What has made things even more difficult is the fact that the person it involves was not only my grandmother, but one of Canada's most beloved authors, Lucy Maud Montgomery.


Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, is still a bestseller after 100 years. In addition to Anne, my grandmother wrote 19 other novels, personal journals and hundreds of short stories and poems. As well, she has been the subject of several biographical studies.

Despite her great success, it is known that she suffered from depression, that she was isolated, sad and filled with worry and dread for much of her life. But our family has never spoken publicly about the extent of her illness.

What has never been revealed is that L.M. Montgomery took her own life at the age of 67 through a drug overdose.

I wasn't told the details of what happened, and I never saw the note she left, but I do know that it asked for forgiveness.

After having read the poignant Breakdown series on mental health in The Globe and Mail during the summer, I was inspired to reflect upon my own family's history with depression.

Additionally, the recent focus on my grandmother's creativity – this is the 100th anniversary of the publication of Anne of Green Gables, with events around the world celebrating Anne and her creator – has encouraged me to end our silence.

I have come to feel very strongly that the stigma surrounding mental illness will be forever upon us as a society until we sweep away the misconception that depression happens to other people, not us – and most certainly not to our heroes and icons.

Obviously it can happen to anyone. The public faces of such prominent Canadians as Roméo Dallaire, James Bartleman, Valerie Pringle and others who supported mental-health awareness during the Centre for Addiction and Mental Health's recent publicity campaign have also had a powerful effect on me.

But, most important, the legacy of L.M. Montgomery, and my grandfather, Rev. Ewan Macdonald, and its related responsibilities and joys, are taken very seriously by my family. I spoke with them before writing this essay and we agreed that it was important for us to share our family's story.

I never knew my grandmother. She died in 1942, before I was born. My grandfather, who also suffered from serious mental illness, died the following year. I got to know them through my father.

After my two older brothers married and left home, I had my parents all to myself for a few short years before my father, a physician at St. Michael's Hospital in Toronto, died in 1982. I became closer to him while I studied at the dining-room table – a time when we had a lot of conversations together. We developed a deeper connection during his last years and I am grateful for those memories of our time together.

When the last volume of The Selected Journals of L.M. Montgomery was published in 2004, I sobbed through it and, in fact, I couldn't even finish it – there was such a profound sadness for me in imagining how my father must have coped with two such depressed parents.

For a young man in the prime of his life, it must have been an overwhelming responsibility. I remembered our late-night conversations and how he shared many memories, yet rarely talked about the burdens he must have felt during his young adult life.

My heart aches for my father, who was left behind to deal with the grief of losing his beloved mother. He carried the secret of the circumstances of her death and maintained the façade of a proper and well-adjusted family because of his desire to protect them and their reputation in the community.

Reading between the lines

L.M. Montgomery's most famous character, Anne Shirley, declared, “My life is a perfect graveyard of buried hopes,” and readers find it one of Anne's more endearing sayings. That particular lament has always been especially significant to me as I imagine my grandmother must have felt the same sadness at times in her life. The fictional Anne went on to happiness and a life full of love and fulfilment. My grandmother's reality was not so positive, although she continues to inspire generations of readers with her books, which reveal her understanding of nature – both in matters of the heart and the world. Although she was a very successful author, her life was overshadowed by her depression, coping with her husband's mental illness and the restrictions of her life as a clergyman's wife and mother in an era when women's roles were highly defined.

Even though I never met them, I've always regarded my paternal grandparents with great affection because of their influence on my father and, therefore, on me. I grew up admiring their achievements, both professional and personal, through my father's stories and reminiscences.

My heart aches for them, as well, because I know they were part of a generation that simply did not acknowledge personal dysfunction, let alone seek help.

I have great admiration for my grandmother, for her contribution to Canadian literature and culture, her strength of character, and the love, pride and sense of responsibility she gave to my family.

I am proud of her courage, given how isolated and lonely she must have felt during certain periods of her life. I wish that her family or community had had some of the tools that are available today. I expect that most families continue to be bewildered about how to help loved ones who suffer from debilitating depression.

I hope that by writing about my grandmother now there might be less secrecy and more awareness that will ease the unnecessary suffering so many people experience as a result of such depressions.

An encouraging light

The recent Globe and Mail series certainly sheds an encouraging light on the notion of the “perfect” family, acknowledging that it may include the reality of depression and other mental illness, and suggests that the shame surrounding these subjects may be lifting.

I'll never know if my grandmother might have been inclined to seek help if she had lived in a less judgmental era or if she had had access to supportive therapy or the medications available today. I would like to think so.

I long to tell her how I wish her family could have known how to help her and how proud we all are of her accomplishments. I also wish that, while my father was still alive, my family could have helped one another more by talking more openly about our feelings around her death. We realize now that secrecy is not the way to deal with the reality of depression and other mental-health issues.

Kate MacDonald Butler is the daughter of Stuart Macdonald, who was the youngest son of L.M. Montgomery. (see photo above)


One of the comments on the Globe and Mail article has this to say.
(I mention it because next week this article will be gone).

Bob Gervitz from United States writes...But there is even more to her tale. Prince Edward Island has been associated with Lucy and Anne for many years, and rightly so, but there is another place that has been forgotten, but which also deserves mention.

That place is a small town just outside of Uxbridge, Ontario. The manse in the hamlet of Leaskdale is where LMM wrote 11 of her 22 books. She moved there in 1911 as the new wife of the local pastor, bore her chldren there, and she wrote Chronicles of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne's House of Dreams, The Blue Castle, etc. The manse is now a National Historic Site. In 1926 she moved to Norval and later Toronto where she took her life in 1942.

A great, great Canadian author whose glory won't be diminished by her tragic death.

Anne of Green Gables at the CNE

Well my husband went to the CNE today to see the AOGG exhibition. He is not a reader. He was curious to see what it was like, and reported that it was not very big. About the size of our lounge. We live in a 2 bedroom apartment. Our lounge is not very big.





Closeup of the sign at the entrance. DH was also a sweetie and purchased a bound copy of LMM's biography called The Alpine Path for me. That cost $11. LM Montgomery married a pastor and they moved to Leaskdale in Ontario, not far from Uxbridge (NE of Toronto). Although the first book Anne of Green Gables was written in Prince Edward Island, most of the rest of the books were actually written in Ontario.





This is an example of a school room. On the blackboard (at top right in this photo) were written the lines "Anne Shirley has a very bad temper".







And lastly this is a portrait of L.M. Montgomery. There were other things at this exhibit, such as mannequins wearing clothes from the 1985 TV series and lots of photos on the walls. Unfortunately DH was trying out a new camera, and some of the photos are blurry.

Anne of Green Gables - 100 Years Anniversary

As you all know, I have been supporting the 100th Anniversary of Anne of Green Gables this year. For those of you who live in Ontario, Toronto or anywhere else in Canada, the CNE (Canadian National Exhibition) has begun. There is an exhibition of Anne of Green Gables on. My husband is going to see it tomorrow.

100 Years of Anne (Scroll Down)
Celebrating the 100th Anniversary of Anne of Green Gables
Heritage Court, Direct Energy Centre, (MAP)
Toronto, Ontario, Canada


The Lucy Maud Montgomery Society of Ontario (LMMSO) and Uxbridge Township in association with Gribble Landscape Creations (GLC) bring to the CNE a fascinating tribute to this popular Canadian author in an exhibit celebrating her many literary accomplishments as well as her love of the garden. Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables (first published in 1908) celebrates its 100th anniversary this year.


The enchanting CNE exhibit will showcase the author’s writing and photography, her love of gardens through beautiful landscape installations, her life at Leaskdale, Ontario and the world of her most famous heroine: Anne Shirley, Anne of Green Gables.

How much does it cost to attend the CNE?
General Admission = $14,
Seniors (60 & better) = $10,
Children (13 & under) = $10,
Babes in Arms (2 yrs. & under) = free,
Disabled and Anyone riding a Medical Scooter = free
Family Pass (2 adults & 2 children or 1 adult & 3 children) = $42.

All prices include GST and are PST exempt.

Rilla of Ingleside - Book Review

Rilla of Ingleside
by L.M. Montgomery
Originally published 1921


Anne and Gilbert have now been married for 24 years. Jem is 22, Walter 21, Nan & Diana 19, Shirley 17 and Rilla is 15. The year is 1914, and we all know what happened in 1914. The Archduke of Austria is shot and killed in Sarajevo and war breaks out.


This war is later known as the Great War (but we know it as World War One). Fortunately it did not encompass the entire planet. It was confined mainly to Europe, although soldiers from many parts of the British empire did travel to Europe to fight.

At the beginning of the war, Jem and Walter sign up and head off to Nova Scotia to do their basic training and then they are sent to England. From there, they are sent to the Front lines. Newspapers, radio and letters give details of the major battles.

Rilla starts a junior Red Cross group, and finds a baby with no parents. The mother died in childbirth and the father had signed up and was in the army. So Rilla brings the baby home to Ingleside in a Soup Tureen. (there being no cradle or basket available). Rilla's father tells her that she must be responsble enougfh to look after the baby if she wants to keep it, or she can give the baby to the local orphanage. Rilla decides to raise the baby and names it "James Kitchener Anderson" but everyone calls him Jims.

Walter is killed in the war. Shirley turns 18 and signs up for the newly created airforce. He and Jem do come home safely from the war. And Rilla's sweetheart Kenneth Ford (son of Owen Ford and Leslie Moore from Anne's House of Dreams) also comes home from the war safely and finally proposes to Rilla on the last page of the book.

I remember reading a comment on a book forum somewhere where the thread is talking about the very successful Sullivan TV miniseries starring Megan Follows (1985 & 1987). The third series was about Anne Shirley following Gilbert to Europe during World War One. Their comment was - But...But That's Rilla's war.

I rather liked that 3rd series, but the reality of the books is that it should have been Rilla's war. Anne was just turning 50 at this time. In the third Tv series Anne was still in her 20's.

I liked this book. The only reason it took me longer than usual to read it, is because I needed a break from Anne Shirley (after reading 3 books in a row) and also having to deal with going back to school as well.

Anne of the Island - Book Review

This year, 2008, is the 100th anniversary of the very first Anne Shirley (Anne of Green Gables) book being published. I decided it might be nice to read some of the later Anne Shirley books, because for some reason in all the 40+ years of my life, I have never read them.

I chose the following four books
Anne of the Island
Anne's House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rilla of Ingleside

These are all for the second Canadian Book Challenge.

Anne of the Island
By L.M.Montgomery
originally published 1915


I actually read Anne of the Island online at Gutenberg, (see link above) because it was not on the shelf at the local library. This is the story of Anne Shirley while she is a student at College.



At age 18 Anne leaves Prince Edward Island and travels to Kingsport in Nova Scotia where she attends Redmond College. Gilbert Blythe also attends Redmond College as well.

During Anne's 4 years at Redmond, she makes a new friend with Phil Gordon who becomes a roommmate along with Priscilla, Stella and Aunt Jamesina in a small house called Patty's Place.

Anne recives four proposals while at college. The first one is from Jane Andrews' brother Billy - submitted to Anne via Jane herself. Ann turns him down. The second proposal comes from Samuel, a local farmer.

Halfway through their studies, Gilbert proposes to Anne. Anne turns him down saying that she would prefer to be just friends. Gilbert then stays away from Anne while he finishes his studies. Anne hears rumours that Gilbert is going out with Christina Stuart.

That summer Diana Barry gets married to Fred Wright. Anne is the bridesmaid and Gilbert is the best man. Thus an awkward situation ensues, but the wedding goes off without a hitch.

Back at College Anne meets Royal Gardner (aka Roy) who begins to court her. Near the end of Anne's final year at Redmond, Roy proposes to her, and just when Anne is about to say yes, she realises that she does not want to spend the rest of her life with him, so she refuses him. Roy gets very upset with her for leading him on all this time.

After Anne graduates from College,(now 22 years old) Anne visits the Irvings at Echo Lodge for a few weeks. When she arrives back at Avonlea, she hears that Gilbert is very ill with Typhoid fever, and Anne spends the night in her window bay praying that she does not lose the man she truely loves.

Gilbert survives and within days he proposes to Anne again. This time she says yes. But their wedding will have to wait because Gilbert has been accepted to medical school,and that will mean another 3 years of study. Anne spends those 3 years as the principal at Summerside High school. That story is told in the next book Anne of Windy Poplars.

An Excellent novel. Finally Anne and Gilbert are together. Gilbert says he has been in love with her ever since that day at school when Anne broke her slate over Gilbert's head.

Before Green Gables - Book Review

Before Green Gables
By Budge Wilson
Penguin 2008

This is the story of Anne (with an E) Shirley and her hardknock life growing up in Nova Scotia as an orphan. I read this book during my stay at the Sick Kids hospital.




This story reminds me of two other movies - Pollyanna and Annie. Pollyanna played the glad game, which Anne never did. Anne let her imagnination run wild and that is what helped her get through the tough times. But Anne was used by various foster families as free labour. And she did spend a short time in an orphanage. Anne certainly did have a hard knock life. She grew up knowing how to prepare and cook dinner for 11 people. She raised babies, she washed and cleaned the floors and the clothes. And she knew how to cure the croup.

Anne's one escape was school. At the age of 6 years old, her foster family was informed by the authorities that she MUST attend school - that it was the law. For the first time in her life, Anne was free to dream, to imagine and to learn how to read. She was curious - not so much about the world around her - but more about words and language. Even from an early age Anne's interest in words and language was very obvious.

Anne gets a few lucky breaks while she is growing up. Her school teachers adore her (Anne attends at least 2 different schools) - because of her intelligence and her love for learning. One of her teachers introduces her to Prince Edward Island - by showing a few postcards. Anne decides that her dream in life is to live on PEI.

Anne also find another mentor who teaches her 5 new words every week. Her vocabulary increases rapidly. Anne desperately wants a friend, but in her search for a "bosom" friend - she is betrayed by a few people, and she quickly learns that some people are just not nice.

This is an excellent novel, and well worth the wait to finally learn exactly HOW Anne came to be the person we know and love at Green Gables. I am reading this for the Canadian challenge.

It's a hard knock life - lyrics

Before Green Gables - review 2

Before Green Gables was reviewed in the Globe & Mail over Easter weekend.
Before Green Gables
by Budge Wilson,
Penguin Canada,
447 pages, (hardback)
$25

I am trying to get as many people interested in reading this book as possible.
When I can afford it, I will buy my own copy.

Before Green Gables

The new Anne of Green Gables book is reviewed in the Toronto Star today. It's called Before Green Gables.
Before Green Gables
by Budge Wilson,
Penguin Canada,
447 pages, (hardback)
$25,

Prequel to Anne of Green Gables

I posted a story about Anne of Green Gables a few days ago. I didn't realise that there was a book being published this week.

The new book, Before Green Gables, will focus on the young girl's hard-luck life with a string of foster families and at a Nova Scotia orphanage in the years before her momentous appearance as an 11-year-old adoptee at Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert's farm in turn-of-the-century Avonlea.

The prequel is to be written by award-winning Nova Scotia children's author Budge Wilson and released in early 2008 as part of an array of centennial tributes to Montgomery and her cultural legacy.

I saw a brief item on this book on the TV on Saturday evening. If it doesn't cost too much I will try and buy a copy.

Anne of Green Gables turns 100 this year

Megan Follows as Anne Shirley
Jonathan Crombie as Gilbert Blythe.
Anne of Green Gables - The Sequel. CBC TV - 1987.
Books originally written by Lucy Maud Montgomery
First Published 1908.



Who amongst us booklovers have not heard of Anne of Green Gables? Who amongst us readers have not read the books? Who amongst us knows that Anne actually turns 100 years old this year? That's right the very first book Anne of Green Gables was published in June 1908.

Anne, who's about to celebrate her centennial birthday, has been captivating readers since June 13, 1908, when the Page Company of Boston, Mass., published her story, a first novel by Canada's Lucy Maud Montgomery. The book was an immediate bestseller, with more than 19,000 copies sold in the first five months. Since then, an estimated 50 million copies have been sold worldwide.

Who amongst us has NOT seen the very successful CBC produced TV series Anne of Green Gables, starring Megan Follows, Jonathan Crombie, Colleen Dewhurst and Richard Farnsworth, which aired in 1985. (That's over 22 years ago - Gosh has it really been that long?) Anne of Green Gables, The Sequel was made in 1987, and a 3rd part aired in 2000.

Megan Follows, who set the standard for portraying Anne in the 1985 film produced by Sullivan Entertainment and its two sequels, says playing Anne opened doors around the world.

"I loved playing her," Follows says from Los Angeles. "I've pretty much found that wherever I go in the world ... people have been very touched and loved that character. So I've found a tremendous amount of generosity of spirit from people when I have travelled. And people I have met really just loved the story and that character."

Well, Guess what. Sullivan Entertainment are now making a remake of their own series. The NEW Anne Shirley is a young Canadian actess named Hannah Endicott-Douglas.

The new movie, set for broadcast later this year, comes on the 100th anniversary of the publication of the original novel by Lucy Maud Montgomery, which launched a century-old love affair with the pig-tailed orphan. But a century hasn't dimmed the relevance of the spunky Anne Shirley, Endicott-Douglas says.