kindred spirits

December 1, 2020 1:07 PM

"I love Anne of Green Gables. I have for years. That’s one of my favourite things. She’s such a can-do kind of girl, that’s why I’m crazy about her. And that Gilbert Blythe? He’s a charmer. And Marilla, a lady who knows just how she wants things to go? Oh yes, I think I can appreciate that as well.” Aretha Franklin loved Anne of Green Gables, and Canadian author and journalist Evelyn C. White explores why that might be.
posted by ChuraChura (16 comments total)

As an Anne fan myself, It’s pretty special to know that the same literary character loomed large in the childhoods of both the ordinary me and the extraordinary Aretha Franklin.

Also does anyone else feel that there are two types of people: Little House people and Anne people and that one group is obviously more sophisticated and interesting than the other? ;)
posted by Brain Sturgeon at 4:52 PM on December 1, 2020 [14 favorites]

(some of us manage to be both!)
posted by ChuraChura at 5:32 PM on December 1, 2020 [15 favorites]

Anne people and Emily people.
posted by betweenthebars at 6:01 PM on December 1, 2020 [8 favorites]

This thread has inspired me to make this winter an L.M. Montgomery re-reading winter. Re: Anne people and Emily people, I am wholeheartedly for both, although I think as I get older I appreciate Anne's optimism more, maybe because I'm a little too much Emily myself.
posted by rogerroger at 7:45 PM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Did anyone exhibit dry humor in any of the Little House books? Please to report since I do not feel like rereading for it.

(I re-read Anne for the first time in many years and was struck by the realization: I don't know that Anne is so neurotypical. I mean, where Anne wants to draw Venn diagram lines around herself is her business, and I wouldn't say it's *not* compatible with neurotypical development, but I now see certain facets of autistic mind. As she ages it's less apparent and now I wonder if she's changed internally or only externally.)
posted by away for regrooving at 11:55 PM on December 1, 2020 [1 favorite]

Anne was the first character who was as "bad" as I was and for that I loved her.
posted by dame at 4:49 AM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

Anne people and Emily people.

Also Jane people, Valancy people, Beverley people...

I don't know if the other series and books were widely available in the US, but LM Montgomery had a whole shelf to herself at Canadian bookstores.
posted by jb at 6:29 AM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I don't know if you all saw Anne With An E, the recent Netflix adaptation of Anne of Green Gables, but it was amazing.
posted by MythMaker at 7:07 AM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

Amazing Grace, the documentary film of the concert where Aretha Franklin recorded the live album, is streaming on Hulu right now and it is, indeed, amazing.
posted by ChuraChura at 7:25 AM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

MythMaker, I didn't see Anne With An E, because some LMM purists in my life at the time that it came out said that it was disappointing. As an Anne fan would you recommend it and why?
posted by rogerroger at 8:55 AM on December 2, 2020

and jb, growing up in California, at one point I owned nearly every book she had written (including those short story compilations that I think were published later) and had my mom drive me to the nearby university library that had copies of her childhood journals. At least in the 1990s, YA readers here had Montgomery fever, but I don't know if all of those are still in print. A lot of my paperbacks fell apart due to shoddy glue and frequent re-readings.
posted by rogerroger at 8:58 AM on December 2, 2020

I had the pleasure, at age twelve, of introducing my mother to Anne of Green Gables.. My mother was only six years older than Aretha Franklin, so I suppose she counted as part of that generation.

I was in sixth grade, and L M Montgomery's books were making the rounds among the girls in my class. I'm not sure how it started; just all of a sudden Anne of Green Gables was the book that us girls were checking out of the library. I loved it the moment I read it that autumn, and requested the full series for Christmas. My dutiful parents presented me with the Bantam paperback collection, which I read as quickly as possible.

Mama was curious about my passion for the series, so as I put down one book she would pick it up and start reading. Soon we were talking about it, and she was telling me how much of it reminded her of being a poor little girl in rural Kentucky--the one-room school, the behaviors and games of the school children, the social life of PEI and its towns and churches, the details of everyday life on a farm, and more. Really, to hear Mama tell it, there wasn't too much difference between Anne's life in the late 1800s and her life in the early 1940s, with the exception of Jim Crow laws.

I know Franklin grew up in Detroit, but I also know that--given when she was born--her community would have had lots of country folks due to the first and second Great Migrations. I'm speculating here, of course, but Franklin likely would have learned to do many things the "country way" from the women in her family while growing up in the big city, and that might have helped her relate to Anne at some level.
posted by magstheaxe at 11:47 AM on December 2, 2020 [5 favorites]

rogerroger, it departs from the books with entire plots that don't happen in the books, but I thought they were in-the-spirit-of/LMM probably would have liked them if she could somehow be a modern version of herself.
posted by joannemerriam at 12:54 PM on December 2, 2020 [2 favorites]

I like Anne with an E and there are a lot of great aspects to it, but it diverged so much that I kind of wish it had just been an original series altogether. I especially like some of the social topics that were introduced on the show that can be educational for the younger viewers, for instance, the terrible policy of putting Indigenous children in boarding schools and the horrors that came with that.

I am deep in my reread of the Anne series and am on book five. I'm not sure what my favorite book is but I have a particular love for Anne of the Island. There's something about the joy of being a young adult, going away to college, and setting up house with your college roommates that I can relate to far more than anything from Anne's childhood years, even if I identified with a lot of her personality.
posted by NotTheRedBaron at 4:51 PM on December 2, 2020 [3 favorites]

I also love LM Montgomery with a passion, and basically listened to my unabridged book tapes of the Anne series read by Megan Follows pretty much every night when i was an insomniac kid who wasn’t allowed lights on to read.

But I’m pretty sure Anne with an E is a CBC production, and does Netflix just stick a label on stuff they didn’t make? Do they pay the CBC?
posted by Valancy Rachel at 7:07 PM on December 2, 2020

It was a CBC/Netflix co-production. And a really interesting modern interpretation and extension of the stories. It was centrally about intersectional feminism, and quite lovely.
posted by MythMaker at 1:35 PM on December 12, 2020 [1 favorite]