Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables by Montgomery, Lucy Maude. hardcover edition. ISBN: 9780143301370.

Introduced by Margaret Atwood. Illustrated by Anna C. Lepar Bound in full cloth, blocked with a design by the artist. Set in Fournier with Richmond Old Style display. 9 full-page colour illustrations and numerous vignettes by Anna C. Leplar. 272 pages. A huge cherry-tree grew outside, so close that its boughs tapped against the house, and it was so thickset with blossoms that hardly a leaf was to be seen . . . Wasnt it a lovely place?’ Anne Shirley falls in love with the rambling farmhouse called Green Gables the moment she sees it. Unfortunately she is not quite what Marilla Cuthbert and her brother Matthew were expecting: they had applied to the orphanage for a boy to help on the farm, not a skinny eleven-year-old girl with a head full of romantic notions. At first Marilla is adamant that Anne should be sent back, but her heart relents when she hears about the girls wretched life, and Matthew - though he would never interfere - is clearly already bewitched by the spirited red-head with a temper to match her hair. For the novelist Margaret Atwood, Anne of Green Gables, set in the idyllic countryside of Canadas Prince Edward Island, was so much a part of her childhood that she cannot remember when she first read it. And at one level it is just that - a marvellous childrens book in which the resourceful heroines vivid imagination lands her in endless scrapes: she mistakes currant wine for raspberry cordial, puts liniment instead of vanilla into a cake and dyes her flaming hair green. But as Atwood says in her introduction, this is a book - like Jane Eyre, Oliver Twist and The Secret Garden - that pursues you into adulthood, in which the headlong adventures of an endearing orphan are underpinned by the darker realities of human behaviour - gossip, malice, love withheld.