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Children's Fiction Classics

Anne of Green Gables & Anne of Avonlea

by (author) Lucy Maud Montgomery

Publisher
Wordsworth Editions Ltd
Initial publish date
Jan 2018
Category
Classics
  • eBook

    ISBN
    9781848701854
    Publish Date
    Dec 2012
    List Price
    $2.49 USD
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781853261398
    Publish Date
    Jul 1994
    List Price
    $5.99 USD
  • Paperback / softback

    ISBN
    9781840227598
    Publish Date
    Jan 2018
    List Price
    $6.99 USD

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Description

Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne's influence in some way. We see her grow from a girl to a young woman of sixteen, making her mistakes, and not always learning from them. Intelligent, hot-headed as her own red hair, unwilling to take a moral truth as read until she works it out for herself, she must also face grief and loss and learn the true meaning of love. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jane Eyre, by the end of Anne of Green Gables, Anne has become the heroine of her own story.

The sequel, Anne of Avonlea, follows her progress as a teacher as she seeks to put into practice the lessons she has learnt, helping at the same time to keep Green Gables going, pursuing her enduring friendships, and finding first love where she least expects it.

Both books conjure an enchanting landscape of wild blossom, lakes and brooks, woods and ocean, seen through Anne’s ‘beauty-loving eyes’, whose vision of the world she brings us to share.

About the author

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, in 1874. After the death of her mother in 1876, Montgomery was raised by her maternal grandparents in the nearby community of Cavendish. She received a teaching certificate in 1894, and studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, in 1895. After a brief career as a teacher at various island schools, she moved back to Cavendish in 1898. In 1911, she married the Reverend Ewan Macdonald and moved to Leaskdale, Ontario, where Macdonald was minister in the Presbyterian Church. A prolific writer, she published a number of short stories, poems, and novels, but is best known for Anne of Green Gables and its sequels: Anne of Avonlea, Anne of the Island, Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne's House of Dreams, Anne of Ingleside, Rainbow Valley, and Rilla Of Ingleside. Montgomery died in Toronto in 1942 and was buried in her beloved Cavendish, Prince Edward Island.

Lucy Maud Montgomery's profile page

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