Sandra Oh is the narrator of the new Anne of Green Gables audiobook.Emily Shur/Supplied
Any Canadian worth their weight in potatoes knows the story of Anne of Green Gables: An old Scotch maid and her bachelor brother adopt an orphan to help work their farm in Prince Edward Island. Expecting a boy, they are not prepared for the spunky Anne Shirley who shows up. Likewise, no one could have prepared for the endless fascination with the redheaded heroine, introduced to the world by Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908.
The literary franchise boasts a number of sequels from Montgomery, and, in 2008, a prequel was authorized by the author’s heirs. The 1985 film version of the original novel that aired on CBC Television was a two-part ratings blockbuster that screened theatrically in Europe, the Middle East and Japan. Film and TV spinoffs followed.
On stage, in 2019 Canada’s Ballet Jorgen premiered Anne of Green Gables – The Ballet, which tours Canada (from Guelph, Ont., to Trail, B.C.) in January and February. The ballet is based on the novel and on Anne of Green Gables: The Musical, mounted annually from 1965 to 2019 at the Charlottetown Festival at the Confederation Centre of the Arts, where it sang and danced its way into the hearts of tourists and freckle fans alike.
In 2022, it was announced that the Don Harron-Norman Campbell musical would be only be presented on alternate years. Does that mean the enthusiasm for all things Anne is waning? Perhaps, but a new Anne of Green Gables audio book from Amazon’s Audible service is evidence that adaptations may well be inexhaustible.
“It’s always been in the Canadian psychology,” says actress Sandra Oh, who narrates the new audio book. The double Golden Globe winner was a teenager in Nepean, Ont., when she saw the 1985 film. “It really stuck for me, in a very fundamental Canadian storytelling way.”
Megan Follows, who won a Gemini Award as the titular trouble maker in the original miniseries and also took on the part in a pair of follow-ups, directed the audiobook. The cast includes the voices of Michela Luci (as Anne) and Catherine O’Hara and Victor Garber as the hands-full foster parents.
“It’s a story about a family – a dysfunctional family,” says Garber, busy on stage and screen since making his film debut as Jesus Christ in 1973′s Godspell. “Everyone experiences that dysfunction in some form or another in their life. The story is intelligent. It’s not sentimental in the way you think it might be.”
If not sentimental, it is certainly a quant representation of a life as an orphan girl in the rural Canada of the 1890s. Reviewing the sequel Anne of Avonlea in 1909, a Globe book critic, described the first novel as “that delightfully fresh idyll of Prince Edward Island life.”
In 2017, Canadian producer/writer/director Moira Walley-Beckett took a more realistic look at that idyll with Anne with an E, a critically hailed loose adaptation of Montgomery’s work for CBC and Netflix. “I wanted to tell the story in a different way, in a way important to a new generation,” Walley-Beckett told The Globe and Mail then. “I read between the lines, to mine what isn’t there but has been there all along. Themes of identity, gender boundary issues, bullying, prejudice, being an outsider, being unaccepted, what it takes to belong …”
The cast includes the voice of Catherine O’Hara.Supplied
The issues of identity and being an outsider resonated with Oh, who, growing up near Ottawa in the 1970s and 80s as an Asian-Canadian, didn’t see a lot of kids who looked like her. “Voicing Lucy Maud Montgomery for this audio book was tremendously satisfying, because I felt connected to the storytelling,” she says. “But, of course, on another level, I never did. These are characters set in a certain time. There’s no one of colour. Everyone is white.”
Anne’s Canada of the late 19th century and the young Oh’s Canada of the late 20th century are different places from a country in 2023 that is much more racially diverse and increasingly less agrarian. The scene-setting first sentence of Anne of Green Gables presents a place absent of urban sprawl and industrial farming (while setting a land-speed record for semicolons).
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops, and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her door, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
Imagine the busybody Mrs. Rachel Lynde in today’s PEI, working herself to death ferreting out the whys and wherefores of a province undergoing changes like the rest of Canada. According to a 2019 Public Service Commission report, there are currently islanders from 90 different cultures residing there. It is no longer the homogeneous island of old; migrant farmers and international students populate communities.
As well, cities and towns are encroaching upon rural lands. The farms themselves are less adorable, more machined.
At the Confederation Centre for the Arts in Charlottetown, a group of artists from Stratford, Ont., the Common Collective, have erected their multimedia installation called 40-Tonne Viewfinder. It is an old grain bin of a relative small size that used to be standard. Today, with farms expanding, a bin once big enough to sustain a typical family farm is obsolete.
Tanya Davis, PEI’s poet laureate, has been commissioned to write a poem inspired by the 40-Tonne Viewfinder exhibition. She grew up Summerside but moved off-island after high school to live in Halifax, Ottawa and Montreal. She now operates a hobby farm with her partner in remote Iris. To her mind, the province still is pristine but has its problems.
On the plus side for Davis, PEI is no longer as culturally homogeneous as it was when she grew up there, and the artistic community is much more diverse. And the downside?
“Anne of Green Gables romanticizes rural life, but we just had a storm that has left us without power for 24 hours. It’s not even winter yet. And the health care is a travesty.”
(Last week PEI signed a $94-million deal with the federal government to fund improvements to the province’s health care system.)
If the province is changing, its favourite fictional daughter Anne (a Nova Scotia transplant, mind you) endures as a character universally beloved.
“She appeals to a certain sense of duty, a certain sense of outsiderness, a certain sense of merit and a certain sense of kindness,” says Oh. “But also originality and frankness.”
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