Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery - Carol Gay (essay date spring 1986)

Carol Gay (essay date spring 1986)

SOURCE: Gay, Carol. “‘Kindred Spirits’ All: Green Gables Revisited.” Children's Literature Association Quarterly 11, no. 1 (spring 1986): 9-12.

[In the following essay, Gay examines the reasons literary critics have tended to ignore Anne of Green Gables despite its status as one of the most beloved books for young people in the past hundred years.]

Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series represents a common problem in children's literature, the problem of the enduring classic that retains its popularity through the years without much evidence of what is usually defined as literary merit. Almost as much as Little Women, Montgomery's Avonlea books are a common bond shared by women of our century; but there is no gainsaying that Montgomery is sometimes sentimental, frequently cliché-ridden in plot and style, and often given to excessively flowery descriptive...

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