This is MJ. I'm an author, I'm an artist, I'm an analyzer. Welcome to Fortress Fiction
Episode 10. Join me as I talk about Anne of Green Gables by L. M. Montgomery. This book
was originally published in 1908, and here's the synopsis. Orphan Anne Shirley goes to
live with elderly siblings on Prince Edward Island. And first of all, the big question,
does this book belong in a place of honor in the fortress fiction? The answer is an absolute
unequivocal yes. This is a fantastic book. It's written well. It's not a moralistic book,
but it's a very positive book, very... I don't know, it teaches interesting valuable lessons
through narrative, and the focus seems to be the narrative and the story and this girl's
journey in Anne Shirley, and it's all very interesting. So it was a great book, held
my attention the entire time. I think it's 11 or 12 hours, maybe it's supposed to be
like nine hours long. And it was a great book. I absolutely loved it. It was wonderful, fantastic.
I suggest everybody read it. So now that we're beyond that, if you wanted to read it, how
would you read it? You can get it for free either from a library or through LibriVox,
which is an audio book platform where people record public domain books and they're posted
there. Sometimes they're multicast member dramatizations. Sometimes it's just the book
being read by a single narrator. Sometimes it's the book being read by multiple narrators,
a narrator per chapter. It depends on the project, the book, how popular it is, whatever.
So yeah, you can listen to that on there for free. You can buy it wherever fine books are
sold. You can get an audio book version of it from Kobo or Audible. Audible, I actually,
as part of my membership, I was able to get a free listen. It's included in the Audible
library at whatever level I'm at. So I'm at like the base level. So that's been big, but
I've been a member of Audible for a long time, so I might be grandfathered in. I don't know,
you got to check for yourself, but definitely you can get it somewhere else for free or
inexpensive. So anyway, that's where you can read the book, how you can read or listen
to the book. And now I'm going to go ahead and just share a lot more of my thoughts about
it. But in the very end, I'm going to talk about what other works you can read from LM
Montgomery.
So what's so good about Anne of Green Gables, which is the title of the first book, it's
also the book, it's the title of the nine book series, I would say, or maybe the titles
Anne of Avonlea, I think that's how you say that. I'm not sure. Not Canadian, sorry. So
I might not know. Anyway, what is the story about? Well, I would say it's firmly in the
domestic drama genre. If that is in fact a genre, I got the term domestic drama from
Little Women at the end of book one, which is named for the four sisters that comes before
book two, which is called Good Wives originally before, which is combining to Little Women.
I'm talking about a Marisa Alcott's story book. She uses the term domestic drama saying
if this domestic drama, the first one with the four sisters names as the title is received
well, then you can look forward to this story continuing in the next one. I don't know if
she gives the name of the book or not, but that's what happens. So she makes, she uses
that term domestic drama. I've never really heard that anywhere else before. So I don't
know if that's a thing, if that's a genre or if that's just how it was called by her
at that time. And I don't know if anybody else uses that, but I think it makes sense
to use that. And I'm adopting that term for a certain sub genre of books. That is a domestic
drama and it's fantastic. I would say that I hope I didn't say this already because I
paused in between. I would say that Anne is definitely a domestic drama as well. And I
would say that it's as good as if not better than Little Women, but they really are two
different books. They're two different types of stories. It's almost like, and I don't
know. Well, I think by the way, I had this set up. This book, Anne of Green Gables came
out some years after Little Women, but I don't know how many years after it came out. So
that's a little bit of a problem. I can double check on them. Let me see. Let me live go
on and look this up real quick. Little Women. If I look up Little Women, it should pop up
unless I get the anime and the 27 film adaptations. So 1868 and 1869 is when it was published
in two volumes, 1868, 1869. So one year and then the next. And this was in 1908. So it's
very possible that Montgomery grew up reading Little Women and she decided to do something
of her own. So without spoiling, hold on, does this work? I don't want to give away
all the details of the book because here's the thing. It's not an Epic Quest book. It's
not a fantasy book. It's not a book where big important things happen. It's a book about
life. It's about how everyday life and an everyday ordinary girl even with an extraordinary
imagination can make life beautiful, can choose to see the beauty in life and to live a good,
happy, fulfilling life, I guess. So I'm trying not to spoil the book, but I'll say this.
And because they're so, they're distinct, they have their own identities, even though
they're similar and there are parallels to them. I'll say this. In Anne of Green Gables,
you get to see Anne at I think 12 or 13 and the book ends when she's maybe 18 at the most.
I think she's actually 16, but I don't quite remember. It's a little fuzzy because time
moves quickly at some point in the book. So Little Women, you see the March sisters from
the time they're young. I'm going to say 10 is the median age of them. So that means there's
an eight-year-old, well, there's a six-year-old, a nine-year-old, a 12-year-old, and a 15-year-old,
and then time moves on for them. I think that's about right, I think. Anyway, so the March
sisters, you get to see them from then until they're in their 30s, let's just say. So it's
like a 20-year span. Anne of Green Gables, and that's in one book. It's two books, but
it's one book. It tells the same story. So Anne of Green Gables is similar in that you
get to see Anne from when she's little to when she's older. I said, but it stops at
her mid-teens, let's call it, when she's a woman or maiden or however is the best way
to phrase that. And then, I don't know, I suspect, then there's nine, there's eight
more books. So they end up going along and telling, I assume, different stories about
Anne as she's getting older and older and older. So this is if you took Little Women
or you knew the story of Little Women, you liked it, but you said, I want to zoom in
on one character and I want to zoom in on a much smaller part of her life and focus on
that and tell that story there. That's effectively what Anne of Green Gables does. And it does
it so beautifully. I don't really know what to say. I definitely don't want to get into
details and I almost feel so this is interesting. Ronja, last week at Fortress of Striction,
I talked about Ronja the Robber's Daughter and I talked about how Lindren sat in a fantasy
world, a light fantasy world, and yet the lives of the children in it, Ronja and Berk,
were mundane, basically. They had some small adventures, but it was a mundane life. They
appreciated nature and they appreciated relationships with other people and the fantasy elements
didn't really matter to them. And they didn't go on imagining things because they didn't
need to imagine gray dwarves and merc trolls. That's the one I forgot last week. Merc trolls,
that's what they are. Anyway, they didn't talk about those things. They didn't imagine
those things and think about those things because they were living in that fantasy world
with harpies that will tear you to shreds and carry you off to their cave to be your
slave till you die. So it was very light fantasy or it was light fantasy and the kids had no
want or desire to do that. They wanted to live real lives and do real things that you
have to do to survive and whatnot. And they ended up doing that. And that is, especially
for us living today and with all the modern comforts that we have, that's a fantasy of
its own. It's an escapist fantasy because it's in such a different world. I also have
the opinion that period pieces are a little bit of fantasy because I think the fantasy
fan who loves the world building will often get, they're getting something that they want
out of that book, aside from the story. They're getting the setting. I believe people who
enjoy period dramas also get this juicy setting that is exotic to them in those shows and
in those movies and in those books. Downton Abbey, for example. Why do people love it?
There's lots of reasons to like it a lot. It's a great story, I think. Some things in there
that are objectionable, but definitely not for children. Whether or not it belongs to
Forge of Fiction, I will not say for now, but I'm not going to movies and TV shows yet,
so let's just keep it on books. I would say that there's an exoticism there because it's
in the past and it's so faithfully told or shown, demonstrated, and it's just so foreign
to us. That's why we like it. Ann lives in a very sad, dreary world as an orphan. She
knows about both her parents. She knows about them dying when she was very young. She's
grown up in these institutions and she has a natural… I'm not saying her imagination
is solely a coping mechanism to deal with the fact that she was an orphan and being
raised in these institutions, but I'm not not saying that. I'm saying I'm sure it
helped her, but she's very imaginative and she's very interested in indulging her imaginations
to the point where she's distracted from her ordinary life. I guess you could say if
you wanted to really force me to do a masculine examination of this and say, what is going
on here? Dissect it. I would say this first book in the series, this is my perception
of it, is Ann learning to… she's learning to balance imagination with reality. Not that
she's got a runaway imagination. She imagines the whole world like in Bridgette Arbithia
where the kids imagine that they're in this fantasy world. She firmly knows that she's
pretending. She firmly knows she's playing. She firmly indulges in the fact that she is
fantasizing and imagining things to make these things better for herself because she's so
lonesome and has this longing for beauty and has this longing for things to be a certain
way and when they're not that way, she makes them that way, but because she starts off
as a powerless child, her only mechanism, her only way to do that is by imagining. I
really love how the book isn't talking down to her or misrepresenting anything. It's
just very honest that this is who she is, this is what she does and it's negative in
some ways because it causes her distraction, but it also equips her to cope with things
and deal with certain things in a way where she's able to apply that imagination and
that creativity to real things and when she does that, she reaps the benefit from that.
She knows loss and sorrow and pain, not just of being an orphan, but throughout her life,
throughout the story, bad things happen to her and she makes mistakes, but they're innocent
childish mistakes probably encouraged by and increased by the fact that she's so indulgent
in her imaginings and her imagination, but her imagination also opens her up to good
things and to connecting with other kids and having these positive relationships and she's
not unsocial or antisocial, she's not a loner by choice. She has been disconnected from
these things and she hasn't been properly brought up to paraphrase Matthew Cuthby. I
know she's finding her way into a family, obviously by being adopted and into a community
and I don't know, it's a coming of age story I guess because she learns to let go of some
of her childish imaginings and deal with hard things in the real world and she's in school
and there's some stuff that goes on there and I don't know, it's a really interesting
story. It's dramatic. I felt for Ann, I laughed at her sometimes when she's being super dramatic,
but I also felt a little bit of pain for her as well because I was a kid too and I wasn't
a little girl, but I was a little boy and I know what it's like to be that age and to
feel your feelings are so important and I see it with my kids now too, how the littlest
things will be this huge deal to them and then five minutes later they're fine. It's
funny, I was talking to my daughter about this and she said, oh, so this is the girl
version of Sam is, he doesn't call himself Sam, Samuel Clemens, he calls himself Mark
Twain, Mark Twain's Huckaberry Finn, Tom Sawyer, Huck Finn is lighter. So she said,
oh, so it's like the girl version of Tom Sawyer and I said, yeah, but you know, and therefore
it's better in some ways. It's definitely more wholesome, but it's very much like that.
It gives you a very accurate picture, I think, of what a girl's life would have been like
at that time and a little bit of a boy's life too because there's boy characters that she
interacts with, actually one really, which she heavily interacts with and there are a
few others, but there's no romance in here even though the girls talk about lovers and
talk about suitors and there's the schoolmaster is interested in the 16 year old girl and
I don't know if they end up getting married or not, I think I blanked out on the detail,
but it kind of feels like they went off and got married with each other and I don't know
if the guy could have been like 20 or 22 from college and at that time, you know, this was
in the mid 1800s or whatever, that would have been perfectly socially acceptable, but it
just still feels pretty weird. So yeah, like there's not really romance in it, it's like
family life and it's like about Anne learning to like use her imagination to fuel her ambition
and I don't know, like also learning to be content in life because she wants all these
grand things and then she ends up accomplishing these great things, these great feats for
her at her level, at her station, where she is and in the context she's in and she's very
happy with that, very content to do the work and to live life and by the end, she makes
some decisions to that kind of compromise what her trajectory was because she makes
a choice that forever kind of cements who she is and where she is and like drastically
changes the trajectory of what the story could have been or will be and it's really interesting.
It's just like, like it's an inspiring book, it's a beautiful book, it's beautifully written,
Anne's imaginings are really great, it's a very dialogue heavy, she's so verbose, there
will be times when Anne is talking for, and I'm listening, I'm thinking, is she still
talking, like is she just talking to Marilla, like who is she talking to, who is she talking
to and what's going on, because she just goes on and on and on and on and on, but it's like
it's very realistic, it's very realistic and it feels very true to life and it feels like,
like sorry, the author Montgomery, like captured real life and put it in this book and it's
just beautiful, it's a beautiful encapsulation of what life is like for a child, for a family
and like, I don't know, the fact that she ages over the book is interesting, is not
drastically like, you know, she's not romantically involved yet, she's not going to have a suitor,
she's not going to be getting married or anything like that, she rejects those things at this
point and even has possibilities because they're just not, it's just so interesting.
She thinks she's ugly, she has red hair and freckles, she thinks that makes her hideous,
although she likes the shape of her nose and she's skinny and upset that she's not fat
and doesn't have dimples on her elbows and things like that and I know there's just like
funny, interesting anthropological, anthropological, yeah, and like cultural aspects that are preserved
in this book that you get to hear because it was written at a time and honestly at the
time by the author and I don't know, it's just like, I honestly, here's the thing I
was going to say, I was edging towards the night, veered off into a weird place, I identified
with Anne in some ways because there's things to identify with her about and I think, I
fight with Matthew and Marilla too because there's things to identify with them about,
like it's just a very good book, it has great characters, Anne definitely steals the show,
she is the main character and she gets the most focus, she gets the most dialogue, but
her world, I don't know, her world is our world and her world is beautiful and so is
our world and the book helps you to see that if you're not seeing it right now, it helps
to open your eyes and look beyond the page, look beyond the book, look beyond wherever
you are now and see that yeah, we do live in a beautiful world and there are very good
things here and I know it's just like encouraging and inspiring, so I would say this is definitely
deserving of a place of glory in the fortress fiction, it's definitely part of the fortress
fiction, part of the foundation, it's a good strong book and I think it's beautiful, would
boys enjoy it?
I don't know, give them a chance, maybe they will, it's a very girl book, Girls I think
is definitely important for girls to read, great thing for a father to read to his daughters,
it's what it would be, part of the whole family if possible, that'd be even better, it's a
fantastic book and I don't have much else to say about it, I'm going to tell you about
Montgomery's other works, you can find, I think you can find the books also, I forgot
to mention this is where you can buy at the L.M. Montgomery Institute, so if you go to
lmmontgomery.ca because they're from Canada, you can find the website that has a bunch
of information and resources, from the wiki I pulled this directly, there are nine books
in the Anna Brink Able series, I won't read you all their titles but they came out, well
I'm a little confused by this but, they didn't come out super regularly, whoa, ok, 1908,
1909, 1915, 1936, that must have been like a reissue or something, or a misprint 1916
maybe, 1917, 19, ok this is weird, 1939, 1919, 1921, I don't know, I don't know, interesting,
and then there's like select stories, so anyway, then there's an Emily trilogy, Emily of the
moon, Emily climbs, Emily's quest from the 1920s, then there's the Silver Brush series,
which is 1933, 1935 it looks like, maybe, yeah I'm a little confused by some of these,
and there's standalone novels as well that Montgomery wrote, Kilmany of the Orchard,
The Blue Castle, Magic for Marigold, A Tangled Web, Jane of Lantern Hill, and there's a lot
of short stories, oh, also one more thing, Montgomery must have been a very well read
author because she was quoting stuff, Anne, and Anne is very well read because she's quoting
all sorts of stuff from all sorts of literature, she's quoting stuff from Shakespeare, she's
referencing all sorts of things, and I don't even know what some of them are, but I know
like ah it's a reference to some book, and that's pretty cool because it like elevates
this idea of bookishness, which I think is pretty nice, believe it or not.
So anyway, that's all I have to say for now, I don't know yet what the next book I'll be
covering is, but if you indulge me for a few moments, I will very quickly find out what
the next book is, the next book is going to be Hatchet from 1987, and that's by Gary Paulson,
so yeah, Hatchet, 1987, Gary Paulson, that's the next book that I will be reading, and
I don't know if I'm looking forward to it or not, I don't really know about it, and
I'm not going to read about it right now to you, you can look it up on your own.
Until next time folks, take care, be well.
I hope you enjoyed that, go to MJMunoz.com to leave any questions, comments, or other
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