KEY POINTS:
What did my copy of Anne of Green Gables look like? I no longer have it, and if I was a sentimental person this might cause me to shed a few tears. Not being a sentimental person ... it still might.
When I went looking for this book of my childhood and couldn't find it, it was like looking, in Anne-speak, for a rainbow, for a bend in the road, for a faded bunch of pressed violets. Which is to say, it was like looking for a memory, of some purple prose, perhaps, of the kind I seem to have just written.
That rainbow, that bend in the road, those faded violets. All very Anne and, surely, the stuff childish fancies are made of. The magic appeal, I thought, could not last into adulthood.
And yet ... I opened this new edition, published to celebrate the publication of Anne of Green Gables 100 years ago, and let it fall open at random. Page 117: "I think amethysts are just sweet. They are what I used to think diamonds were like. Long ago, before I had ever seen a diamond.
I read about them, and tried to imagine what they would be like. I thought they would be lovely glimmering purple stones. When I saw a real diamond in a lady's ring one day I cried. Of course, it was very lovely, but it wasn't my idea of a diamond. Will you let me hold the brooch for one minute, Marilla?
Do you think amethysts can be the souls of good violets?" Anne of Green Gables, for anyone who doesn't know, is the first book in the series by Lucy Maud Montgomery about a little orphan girl, with green/grey eyes, freckles and red hair.
A girl of uncertain temper, an impetuous romantic soul of a girl given to ridiculous flights of fancy, a girl who invites trouble. I probably first met her when I was 7 or 8; she was 11. I was entranced. I wondered, holding this 100th year edition, whether it was wise to open the covers. I knew much of it by heart (and it is a book that gets inside a young girl's heart.) I knew that when kind, shy farmer Matthew Cuthbert went to the Avonlea railway station to pick up an orphan boy to help out on the farm, that that red-haired girl would be waiting instead.
She would be wearing a drab, too-tight, too-short dress of the dreaded "yellowish white wincey." I still don't know what wincey is, but I don't need to know to be able to imagine it. Anne wasn't wanted, nobody had ever wanted her. Matthew's stern-faced, stone-hearted spinster sister Marilla, who lives with him on the Prince Edward Island farm, is determined to send the girl back.
She talks her way into their hearts because, oh boy, can Anne Shirley talk. And dream and yearn. She yearns for puffed sleeves. Even Anne can't talk Marilla into such silly, fashionable nonsense. But Matthew sees how Anne yearns.
He buys, after much embarrassment and a comic scene - he returns home with a rake he doesn't need and sugar Marilla doesn't want - a length of pretty stuff. And gets Rachel Lynde, the busy-body neighbour, and Marilla's rival in housekeeping matters, to run up a dress with the longed-for sleeves. Thereafter Anne's dresses have puffed sleeves.
Marilla is not about to be outdone by Rachel Lynde. And, besides, her heart of stone has long since been talked into submission, which looks very much like love. Does it matter what Anne looks like? What the frocks, from wincey to puffery, look like? Oh yes, it does. I did manage to find my copy of Anne of Windy Willows (which really doesn't work: unless you like reading a series of coy love letters from another age. I still wept, though.)
There is no cover now, but this book did originally have one. I ripped it off, despite my early reluctance to deface a book, because I hated the picture of Anne on the front. From memory: too cute, too auburn, too drippy looking. I hate the picture on the front of this centennial issue copy even more. But really I just don't like any pictures of Anne. What Anne doesn't look like is important: she was an imaginary friend.
Anne knew about imaginary friends. She made up friends before she had them, and when she met Diana - who lived across the field from Green Gables - she imagined what she might look like before she met her. That Diana was a stolid girl, a practical girl whose own imaginings never matched Anne's, mattered not at all. As girlfriends, real or imaginary should be, she proved a loyal, loving foil to Anne's flights of fancy.
They would be Bosom Friends For Life. They were. And are mine, too. I'm pretty sure I know what my copy of Anne of Green Gables looked like. It was my mother's copy, published, probably, in the late 40s. I still have a copy of another LM Montgomery book, Emily's Quest, a rather drippy romance, and my Anne had the same cover: a faded pinky brown with tiny sprigs of red flowers and green leaves - what I always imagined a sprigged muslin frock might look like.
Is Anne of Green Gables a good book? I opened this 100th year edition with trepidation. I read the amethyst nonsense. Then I handed it to a 7-year-old girl of my acquaintance (this old-fashioned formal writing is catching) and asked her to read the first page. Would it be an exaggeration of the Anne kind to say I held my breath while I waited to hear what she thought?
She read that first page, eagerly, engrossed. "That," she said, happily but gravely, "is lovely". It is. It's funny, too. Here's Anne meeting Diana's mother for the first time. In response to Mrs Barry's formal "how are you," Anne replies, "I am well in body although considerably rumpled up in spirit, thank you, ma'am," said Anne gravely.
Then aside to Marilla in an audible whisper, "There wasn't anything startling in that, was there, Marilla?" What scrapes Anne gets into. She buys hair dye from a pedlar and her hair turns green. She gets Diana drunk, mistaking Marilla's homemade wine for raspberry cordial. She breaks her slate over Gilbert Blythe's head when he calls her "carrots". She will never, ever speak to Gilbert Blythe, as long as she lives.
Until Matthew drops dead after the shock news that the bank has collapsed, and all of his and Marilla's hard won money with it, and Anne gives up her scholarship to stay in Avonlea to help Marilla save the farm. Gilbert had been given the school teacher's job at Avonlea. He gives it up for Anne.
She finally speaks to him and, yes, there is a frisson. Of course she will later marry him. And if you don't cry a lot while reading those scenes you have a heart of stone. Yes, it is a good book. Well constructed, lively, with characters who are as attractive today as they were 100 years ago.
As for Anne, it is not hard to imagine her going on being a delightful imaginary friend to little girls for another century - starting with my 7-year-old friend. I've promised her this new edition. I don't need it. I know it by heart.
* Michele Hewitson is a Herald features writer.
- NZ Herald
