L.M. Montgomery published Anne of Green Gables in 1908 and introduced a character who has not stopped talking since. Anne Shirley arrives at Green Gables as a mistake. Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert ordered a boy from the orphanage to help on the farm, and they received instead a thin, red-haired girl who talks in paragraphs and sees enchantment in everything. She renames the Avenue of birch trees the White Way of Delight. She renames the pond the Lake of Shining Waters. She looks at a perfectly ordinary Prince Edward Island landscape and describes it as though she is the first person to notice that the world is beautiful.

Montgomery wrote from experience. Dr. Mary Henley Rubio of the University of Guelph, in her biographical research on Montgomery, documented that the author drew Anne's emotional intensity and her habit of romanticizing her environment directly from her own childhood, spent with elderly guardians on a farm where imagination was the only entertainment available. Anne's capacity to transform the ordinary into the extraordinary is not whimsy. It is a survival strategy developed by a child who had nothing and decided that if the world would not give her beauty, she would assign it herself.

The Orphan Who Chose Her Own Family

Anne does not passively accept her adoption. She campaigns for it. She talks Marilla into keeping her through a combination of sincerity, persistence, and a monologue about the depths of her despair so dramatic that Marilla cannot decide whether to be moved or annoyed. This is Anne's method throughout the novels: she overwhelms resistance with enthusiasm until the other person either surrenders or discovers that they actually wanted to say yes all along.

The relationship between Anne and Marilla is the quiet masterpiece of the novel. Marilla is everything Anne is not: reserved, practical, emotionally guarded. Anne cracks Marilla open through sheer emotional force, and Marilla provides the structure that Anne's imagination needs in order to function in the actual world. They complete each other in the way that the best adoptive relationships do: not by replacing what was lost but by creating something that could not have existed otherwise.

Red Hair as a Life Sentence

Anne's red hair is her great grievance, the physical characteristic she considers a permanent injustice. She dyes it green by accident, which only makes things worse. Montgomery uses the hair as a metaphor for everything about Anne that does not fit: her intensity, her vocabulary, her emotional volume. The world keeps telling Anne that she is too much, and Anne keeps being exactly as much as she is.