[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 passages. What explains her enduring appeal and gives her a place in the history of literature, a history that continues to ignore her in spite of her impact on millions of readers in the past seventy-five years?

One explanation is that those readers were mostly women and girls, and thus invisible. Gerda Lerner called attention to their invisibility in her The Female Experience: An American Documentary in 1977, and in 1979 gave us a new way to look at history in her seminal The Majority Finds Its Past: Placing Women in History. “Women have been left out of history,” Lerner tells us in the latter,

not because of the evil conspiracies of men in general or male historians in particular, but because we have considered history only in male-centered terms. We have missed women and their activities, because we have asked questions of history which are inappropriate to women. To rectify this, and to light up areas of historical darkness we must, for a time, focus on a woman-centered inquiry, considering the possibility of the existence of a female culture within the general culture shared by men and women. History must include an account of the female experience over time and should include the development of feminist consciousness as an essential aspect of women's past. This is the primary task of women's history. What would history be like if it were seen through the eyes of women and ordered by values they define?

What Lerner suggests for historians is a legitimate task of the literary critic as well. Pursuing it will not only help elucidate the “development of feminist consciousness,” but should place in a new perspective the role and impact of a large number of books for children and young adults written by women, Anne of Green Gables among them.

There are six books in the Avonlea series by one count, eight by another, and the count could go up to ten if all Montgomery's books with the Avonlea setting and some connection with Anne were included. Mollie Gillen, Montgomery's most reliable biographer and bibliographer, cites eight and lists them chronologically in sequence of Anne's life. Anne of Green Gables appeared first in 1908, and introduced to Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert and the world the red-headed orphan “without a pick on her bones.” They were expecting a boy. On that slight donnée depend all the books that follow: Anne of Avonlea in 1909, about Anne's experiences as a teacher; Anne of the Island, 1915, about her college days; Anne of Windy Poplars, 1936, about her engagement to Gilbert Blythe and her term as school principal; Anne's House of Dreams, 1918, about her marriage and the death of her first-born child; Anne of Ingleside, 1939, about the raising of her six children; Rainbow Valley, 1910, more about the children; and finally, Rilla of Ingleside, 1921, about Anne's daughter and her reaction to the war.

These capsule summaries and Montgomery's chapter titles mirror Lerner's feminist categorization of history, in which she discards such familiar headings as “The Age of Revolution” and “The Age of Jackson” for such categories as “Childhood,” “Marriage, Motherhood, and the Single State,” and “Just a Housewife.” In Montgomery's books we have “Anne Is Invited to Tea,” “Gilbert and Anne Disagree,” “Just a Happy Day.” Not much happens, but only if one defines the action against Moby Dick. And why should we? Especially since, as Lerner points out in The Majority Finds Its Past,

women's culture is not and should not be seen as a subculture. It is hardly possible for the majority to live in a subculture. … Women live their social existence within the general culture and, whenever they are confined by patriarchal restraint or segregation into separateness (which always has subordination as its purpose), they transform this restraint into complementarity (asserting the importance of woman's function, even its ‘superiority’) and redefine it.

In Lerner's words, then, “What would history be like if it were seen through the eyes of women and ordered by values they define?” Very much like life in Avonlea. When Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908, there had been nothing like it in children's literature since Alcott's Little Women. Little Women spawned the so-called “family story”—The Five Little Peppers and such—but no one until Montgomery took the female protagonist and, with the realism that Alcott had pioneered, created a worthy successor to Jo March. It had been a long time for readers to wait, and perhaps this is one reason why the response to Anne of Green Gables was so immediately strong and to Montgomery, so unexpected.

But it is not Alcott who comes to mind when one is reading Anne. It is Sarah Orne Jewett and her superb The Country of the Pointed Firs, written in the tradition of the New England local colorists with its depiction of “a rural realm that existed on the margins of patriarchal society, a world that nourished strong, free women” and which “created a counter-tradition to the sentimental/domestic convention that dominated American women's writing through most of the nineteenth century” according to Josephine Donovan's recent New England Local Color Literature. Unlike Jewett's women, Alcott's Jo is clearly constrained within a patriarchal world. She doesn't succumb, but she doesn't overcome it either. This is the paradox (and tragedy) of Alcott and Jo. They remain the perennial tomboy. But not Anne; she's always a girl.

Anne's sorrows are not those that come from chafing against her womanhood and the deprivation this entails in a man's world; her sorrows are those of womankind: the death of a child, the loneliness of old age, separation from a child, the loss of a beloved. For Anne lives in a woman's world. Not that men disappear. There are a few, Matthew, for instance, and Gilbert, of course, and Mr. J. A. Harrison, and Captain Jim and Owen Ford and a few others, but they, most of them, are “kindred spirits” who share traditionally women's values and who, without becoming emasculated, share with Anne the world she inhabits.

That world is a very real one, situated squarely on Prince Edward's Island's rocky coast with its fruit trees and farms and woods that still thrill with their beauty. Here, in a realistic credible world, the reader is introduced to an extraordinarily rich menage of female characters.

Few writers can characterize so adeptly, so quickly, and frequently, so poignantly, as Montgomery. She does it as well as Jewett and better than Harriet Beecher Stowe. And she has a sense of humor. There are always the shifting groups of girls, and, later, women, which Anne draws around her wherever she settles. And there are the memorable individuals that stand out so clearly. There is Rachel Lynde, who appears on the first page of Anne of Green Gables, “notable housewife,” “one of those capable creatures who can manage their own concerns and those of other folks into the bargain.” There are also Janet Sweet, in Anne of Avonlea, who waited twenty years for John Douglas to propose; Miss Lavender, whose pride let her lover leave her over a petty quarrel and who then retires to a life of solitude; Leslie Moore of House of Dreams, the gorgeous beauty married to a husband with the mind of a five-year old; Mrs. Allan, of Green Gables, the minister's young wife, whose joy of following her husband to his next parish is marred by the grief of abandoning the grave of her first-born. Or Miss Patty, age seventy, and Miss Maria, age fifty, in Anne of the Island, who live together contentedly and quietly in a house called “Patty's Place” until one day they up and go to Europe. As Miss Patty declares, “I daresay I'd gone to Europe before if the idea had occurred to me.” When they hear of Anne's approaching marriage they write in House of Dreams: “We send you our best wishes. Maria and I have never married, but we have no objection to other people doing so.” And there is Miss Cornelia Bryant who knows everyone around Four Winds Harbor in House of Dreams and hates all men.

The life stories of these women, joyful and tragic, do not disturb the plot line of the novels. They are, indeed, the fabric of Montgomery's work, for the novels depend not on plot, but on the even flow of life, women's life. They revolve around a steady pattern of breakfast, dinner, and supper, and the intricate relationships between neighbors, mothers and sons, mothers and daughters, and the problems of growing up and raising children.

We need to look more closely at the lives of Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert as they are lived out within the narrow boundaries of Green Gables farm, for they reveal much. Through them, we catch glimpses of a harsh and rigid upbringing that stressed endurance, duty, and righteousness. We catch glimpses of marriage or a life beyond the farm passed by because of duty and obedience to family. Marilla and Matthew have survived the rigor of their upbringing and their harsh farm life and cling to the values that give it substance, just enough unsure of the methods that had produced them to bend a bit in the raising of Anne. Their lives have been lived mostly in silence. They are unused to expressing their feelings; the deeper emotions—love, sorrow, a sense of loss—remain deeply buried in their hearts, and the softer emotions—exuberance, mirth, joy—have disappeared. Matthew had looked as grim at twenty as he does at sixty. The silent strength, the repressed emotions, the deep goodness, and the lack of an imagination are common characteristics that Marilla and Matthew share with the older inhabitants of Avonlea. Marilla is the strongest of the two, and although Matthew does the outside work at the farm, it is Marilla who manages and runs the farm and takes care of him. The deep love that they share for each other is unexpressed; in fact, what they are most appalled by and yet most fascinated by are Anne's exuberant, imaginative outpourings and her direct and unconventional way of seeing and saying things.

Matthew does not represent an intrusion of the values of a patriarchal culture. If anything, he and the other members of the older generation in Avonlea are victims of that which Donovan (and of course others) define as “the masculine tyranny” of Calvinism. His humanity has survived because of the “feminine values” that predominate in his make-up. He is gentle, forgiving, soft. Indeed it is he who first recognizes (intuitively, for Matthew is not logical) the saving grace that Anne offers. At key points in Anne's upbringing, he insists on the softer act. At one point, when Anne has shown forth at a concert, Marilla concedes, “Anyhow, I was proud of Anne tonight, although I'm not going to tell her so,” fearful of encouraging the sin of pride. “Well now,” says Matthew, “I was proud of her and I did tell her so 'fore she went upstairs.” His simple statement represents an enormous concession on the part of Matthew, who has not in sixty years made himself so vulnerable.

While the dimmed patriarchal shadows cast by Calvinism are an element in Avonlea's culture, they operate as something that the women have overcome. They seem to have seized the strength that the harshness and rigidity can instill; those softer ones who didn't survive or who became totally twisted never surface for Montgomery peoples her landscape with the survivors. And their lives are based on what society defines as traditionally women's values. Their strength is fostered by a strong sense of sisterhood, the “networking” that is everywhere expressed either implicitly or explicitly; and a large part of this “networking” is based on an intuitive recognition of imaginative insight. Perhaps the strongest example of it is expressed in a scene between Anne and her best friend Diana, in Anne of Avonlea:

“Do you remember that evening when we first met, Diana, and ‘swore’ eternal friendship in your garden? We've kept that ‘oath,’ I think … we've never had a quarrel nor even a coolness. I shall never forget the thrill that went over me the day you told me you loved me. I had had such a lonely starved heart all through my childhood. I'm just beginning to realize how starved and lonely it really was … I should have been miserable if it hadn't been for that strange little dream-life of mine, wherein I imagined all the friends and love I craved. … And then I met you. You don't know what your friendship meant to me. I want to thank you here and now, dear, for the warm and true affection you've always given me.”

“And always, always will,” sobbed Diana. “I shall never love anybody … any girl … half as well as I love you.”

The close bond evidenced here is given expression in the catch-phrase of the series—“kindred spirit”—by which Anne identifies those who have the power of the imagination and whose values, like hers, are predominantly feminine. It serves as a common motif that appears throughout the series.

Although Maud Montgomery created in her fiction a landscape dominated by “woman's culture,” she herself lived in a man's world. It was a world that brought her pain, confusion, and ultimately, like many other women writers, tragedy. In order to accommodate it, she lived an almost schizophrenic life as a minister's dutiful full-time wife, while maintaining at the same time an active, full-time career as a professional writer in which she consciously and unconsciously gave free rein to the intellectual and imaginative world she was afraid to reveal as a wife and mother. Montgomery reveals her “strange little dream-life” through her writings; Anne is one of the characters who expresses it. Anne, with her talkative ways, makes Marilla and Matthew and all her friends see things from a new perspective: the road leading to Green Gables becomes “The White Way of Delight,” the small pond near the farm becomes “The Lake of Shining Waters.” Marilla never manages to train her out of having too much to say; in fact it is her ability to communicate, her feminine “romantic” way of looking at things, her “ladylikeness” and her strong “womanliness” that helps to illuminate the Avonlea landscape and every life she touches. Anne offers to her children and those around her, as well as to her readers, a romanticized and passionate way of viewing life and nature that will wrest happiness from it in spite of everything.

This romanticized, often sentimentalized, viewpoint is the major flaw of the Avonlea books just as it is one of their major strengths. Romance and sentiment are not strong enough weapons to win with. They merely offer escape. However, Montgomery may not have realized, or wanted to accept, that you cannot substitute imagination for reality, her books show that a life lived without imagination is not worth living. She created through her Avonlea series a world where the traditional women's values of love, warmth, sensitivity, imagination, and quiet endurance, survive and overcome a world where kindred spirits are intuitively identified and cherished. It is a world that has enough reality for women and girls of the past seventy-five years to respond to with deep recognition, and thus, it serves as an important document in “the development of feminist consciousness.” This helps explain Montgomery's lasting appeal, perhaps even more than her sense of humor, her descriptive skill, and her talent for creating lively, authentic characters.