Twentieth-Century Literary Criticism | Anne of Green Gables, L. M. Montgomery - Patricia Kelly Santelmann (essay date 1994)

Patricia Kelly Santelmann (essay date 1994)

SOURCE: Santelmann, Patricia Kelly. “Written as Women Write: Anne of Green Gables within the Female Literary Tradition.” In Harvesting Thistles: The Textual Garden of L. M. Montgomery. Essays on Her Novels and Journals, edited by Mary Henley Rubio, pp. 64-73. Guelph, Ontario: Canadian Children's Press, 1994.

[In the following essay, Santelmann explores the details of women's lives that are portrayed in Anne of Green Gables and the ways in which the novel advances the female literary tradition.]

In A Literature of Their Own, Elaine Showalter discusses the lack of a female literary tradition, and she begins by quoting a male critic—G. H. Lewes. In an 1852 essay entitled “The Lady Novelist” Lewes remarked, “hitherto … the literature of women … has been too much a literature of imitation. To write as men write is the aim and besetting sin of women; to write as...

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