Lucy Maud Montgomery turns 150 this year — and we still can't get enough of Anne of Green Gables

This year marks the 150th birthday of Lucy Maud Montgomery, the lauded Canadian writer best known for her internationally acclaimed novel Anne of Green Gables. The book has remained beloved since its publication in 1908, spawning countless re-imaginings in film, TV, graphic novels, spinoffs and more. 

Today on Commotion, host Elamin Abdelmahmoud speaks with three Anne experts on the enduring love of a spunky red-headed orphan on Prince Edward Island: L.M. Montgomery scholar Laura Robinson, Anne of Green Gables adaptor and playwright Kat Sandler, and Anne with an E writer Kathryn Borel.

We've included some highlights below, edited for length and clarity. For the full discussion, listen and follow Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud on your favourite podcast player.

Elamin: Kathryn, do you want to talk about returning and re-reading the original work? What is your relationship to it? 

Kathryn: Anne is one of those characters that I go back to every few years and I find new things that I love about her. I think that all iconic, great characters are prismatic, depending on how the light is shining through them at different times in your life, they end up revealing different things about yourself and the world. It's a world that is so full of rich female characters, you've got your young female character, you've got female friendships, you've got perimenopausal characters, you have menopausal characters. They're at every stage of female experiences. Like in the mind and in the body, you have a character that is in these books for you.

But really my knee-jerk response is, I've got to go back to when I first read the Anne of Green Gables books. I was really young, I must have been seven or eight when I was given them. I was given all of the books of the braided girls of yore. So I had Pippi Longstocking, Anne Shirley and Laura Ingalls Wilder, the little freaks who didn't really belong anywhere. I wonder why my parents gave them to me [laughs]. I have this very clear memory in my early readings of the books — because I read them so many times — but this really clear memory of catharsis, like I was so relieved that I was finally interacting with a young female character who got mad and expressed anger and then faced consequences — the consequences of her anger, for sure, but then was also forgiven for it. And was not instilled with a sense of great shame because she had gotten angry. And I got mad a lot as a kid, and I had this very overdeveloped sense of justice, and I don't remember the people around me being very receptive to that. For me, Anne ended up being this very safe harbour for me as a kid, this sort of template for alternate, non-polite, non-pretty ways of expression. And that was such a huge relief and made me feel a lot less alienated as a child. So yes, she was very important to me. 

Elamin: Kat, you're currently developing this new play adaptation of Anne of Green Gables. What does a good Anne of Green Gables adaptation have to have to still feel true to the story? 

Kat: The rough thing of it all is you're just never going to make everyone happy. Everyone identifies with something else magical within that story. But for me, when I was going through and watching Anne with an E and watching the miniseries and reading the graphic novels, I was like, "OK, I think there are hallmarks here that young me and old me would be really upset if they weren't included." So there are certain plot points, like you need a carriage ride, you need Anne at a train station, there are certain plot points that I would be very upset to not see. I know — I know! — I'm going to get letters about not including the brooch because we don't just have the time in the play.

Elamin: Laura's jaw dropped.

Kat: People are so intense about the brooch! I know! I'm sorry! I want to. There's no space! 

But I think it's also this feeling of wanting to build Anne the character in a way that is true to the book because it all centers around Anne. She's such a beautiful, identifiable heroine for any age, so the adaptation really needs to show us how and why Avonlea and all these naysayers fall in love with Anne — that she's smart, she's passionate, she's kind, she's learning from her mistakes and she's growing up. And as she's doing that, so are the people around her. And she's doing all of this with imagination. So I think if I think without that sense of imagination and play and learning, it wouldn't be a true adaptation. 

I think you can't shy away from the darkness in the book. And that's something that I thought Anne with an E did so, so well, because a lot of horrible things happen, even in just the first book, even in Anne's past. And I think it's really important not to just gloss over those because that starting-from-nothing is what makes her journey and her sense of community and belonging that she gains in Avonlea so, so important. 

Elamin: Laura, you teach a course on adapting this work. As you think about this idea of adapting Anne of Green Gables, how far do people take Anne's story in order to bring it to the modern times? What are the questions that people ask that make the story not just like, "Here's an old story made relevant again," but actually, "Here's a story that's always been relevant the whole way through"? What are those questions that you think guide the work of adaptation? 

Laura: People have done such different things. So there's graphic novels that recently came out. One is Anne of West Philly, so Anne is a Black girl growing up in West Philly, a foster child. And An Adaptation of Anne of Green Gables (Sort Of), Anne is also a foster child and a lesbian — sorry, spoiler. So they're very contemporary, very urban. And one of the things that my students and I talked about a lot is that tension between the pastoral, which we see in the [Kevin] Sullivan miniseries [from 1985] and the realistic, which I think Anne with an E fell on, it played with that tension more, but fell into the realistic piece, which was what was so discomfiting for some of the viewers, right? Like, "This isn't the Anne we know, it's not the Sullivan Anne." But what we see with some of those adaptations is that they're taking it into sort of the real. Or, the one we had probably the most fun with was Acorn Press — it's a Charlottetown publishing company – just did the ANNEthology, which is 10 short stories or poems, young adult fiction. And it's taking Anne to the next realm, so vampires, ghosts, sex trafficking. 

Kat: Whoa.

Kathryn: Whoa.

Elamin: Whoa. 

Laura: Right? A drag queen. So, Matthew is Matthew/Marilla, a drag queen. And is a 16-year-old boy who's overweight and gay, seeking his father, who wants really nothing to do with him.

Elamin: Kathryn's like, "I'm going to write that into the next season."

Laura: There's a dystopia in there. The task was for these young adult writers to really rethink Anne in a different setting. So the students and I kept talking about: What are they trying out from the Anne story? What's keeping it Anne? And sometimes it was Gilbert, not always. Yeah, but I just think it's so wide open, which is what's really exciting about Anne. She lends herself to everything. 

You can listen to the full discussion from today's show on CBC Listen or on our podcast, Commotion with Elamin Abdelmahmoud, available wherever you get your podcasts.

Panel produced by Amelia Eqbal.