Before Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables has captured the hearts of millions of young girls across the world. There is something about the fiery redhead that inspires girls to never underestimate the power of imagination and appreciate the power of dreams.

However, readers only know a little bit of Anne’s life before Green Gables in the series. There are almost a dozen unaccounted years of the heroine’s life with which readers are not familiar. Thus, a prequel, Before Green Gables, provides a believable life’s beginning to Anne.

Budge Wilson, a native of Nova Scotia, close to the beloved Prince Edward Island where Anne’s adventures happened, wrote the prequel. It was refreshing to know a Canadian native, who lived and breathed the beauties that Lucy Maud Montgomery delightfully described in her writings, drafted the prequel.

Readers are finally introduced to Anne’s parents, Walter and Bertha Shirley. They are a loving and kind couple that feels they are the luckiest parents in the world when Anne is born. They can’t wait to watch their little girl grow up, but they are taken ill with an epidemic and die when Anne is only three months old.

From infancy, Anne is placed into the care of the Thomas family, where she works as an unpaid servant until she is nine. After the drunk Thomas husband dies, she is again placed as a servant to the Hammond family, who have three sets of twins, among other children. At these places, Anne is constantly minding babies, chopping food for dinner, hauling water, changing diapers and doing laundry.

Still, Anne manages to bring happiness into her hardworking world. She creates friends and uses her imagination to escape to faraway lands with fairies, queens and castles.

At first, people are unsure what to think of the skinny and freckled-face girl, but Anne eventually wins over the most hardened hearts in the novel. People are drawn to her imaginative personality and liveliness.

The only disappointing aspect about the novel was Anne’s lack of temper. In Montgomery’s Anne, we see her capable of great creativity and intelligence, but also prone to temper when her peers tease her, especially poking fun at her red hair. Wilson’s Anne has enormous originality, but there was a significant lack of the temper and impulsiveness that would cause conundrums for Anne.

Throughout the course of the novel, Wilson remained true to the spirit and style of writing that Montgomery exhumed. If a reader wondered what Anne’s beginnings were like, Wilson’s tales would be an accurate and worthy summary.