Anne Shirley came into my life when I was eleven, and at that time, I felt a deep, quiet loneliness.
Not the dramatic kind—no orphanage, no dead parents, no sweeping tragedy. Just the kind of loneliness where you feel like a blot on the world, even when everything around you seems fine. That’s why Anne struck such a chord with me.
It took me twenty years to see that the story wasn’t just about Anne—it was also about the woman who created her.
Lucy Maud Montgomery grew up under strict grandparents after losing her mother and being abandoned by her father. A solitary child on an island, she invented imaginary friends, wrote stories to survive, and sent poems and tales everywhere, facing rejection after rejection, until finally someone said yes.
Anne Shirley is more than a character. She is Montgomery’s inner child preserved in amber. Her red hair, which she hated. Her endless imagination. Her obsession with “kindred spirits” and “the bend in the road.” All of it is Montgomery talking to herself in that quiet farmhouse, hoping that somewhere, someone would understand.
Montgomery once wrote, “I have always had a haunting sense of being different, of being outside things.” That line could be Anne’s. It could be mine. It could be yours.
Montgomery knew this miracle from personal experience. Abandoned by her grandfather, later caring for a husband with depression, writing in secret before dawn, battling her own mental health—she buried her own comfort and dreams over and over. Anne finds a place at Green Gables. Montgomery never fully found hers.
Rereading this book as an adult felt different. As a child, I found Anne funny, dramatic, and entertaining. As an adult, I see that she is furious. She is furious about being unwanted, about her red hair, about a world that values girls by their looks. She channels that fury into words, into imagination, into refusing to stay small.
That is Montgomery’s true gift: a survival manual disguised as a story about an orphan.
Near the end, Matthew dies. Anne, who always fills silence with words, stands at his grave in complete stillness. Montgomery writes: “She looked out over the fields that had been Matthew’s and hers, and something closed in her heart like an unopened hand.” I read that sentence as a child and felt sad. As an adult, my chest cracked open. That grief—Anne’s grief—is Montgomery’s grief. And yet Anne stays. She chooses love over escape.
Montgomery could not always choose love over escape. She stayed in a difficult marriage, a small judgmental town, a body that betrayed her. But she gave Anne the choices she herself never had: a home, a Matthew, a future that did not feel like a slow erasure.
Decades later, I see Anne of Green Gables as more than a children’s book. It is a letter from a lonely woman to every lonely person who would come after her. It says: I see you. I was you. Keep your imagination. Keep your words. Keep your red hair. Somewhere, someone will call you a kindred spirit.
Montgomery could not save herself. She saved us instead. That is not sentimentality; it is sacrifice. And I believe it is the most honest ending any book has ever given me.
