Thread by @lainasparetime

#LainaReadsAnne I got a cookie. Let's continue.

Common themes in Montgomery's work include questions about maternity and motherhood, orphans, children abandoned by/separated from parents, children in the care of unloving relatives, absent mothers/childless women/"spinsters".

#LainaReadsAnne These are things that Montgomery struggled with in her own life, both as a child and as a mother. She believed motherhood was crucial work for women, and that education of girls was very imporant, another theme in her work.

#LainaReadsAnne The best known of her work incorporates many of these themes and that is of course Anne of Green Gables.

Montgomery wrote the book in 1905 and sent it to several publishers where it was promptly rejected by all of them.

Then she put it in a hatbox for two years

#LainaReadsAnne In 1907, she found the manuscript and decided to try again. It was published in 1908 and was pretty much an immediate success. By 1925, it had been translated into Swedish, Dutch, Polish, Norwegian, Finnish, and French.

#LainaReadsAnne It had also been reprinted in English so many times that the printing plates had to be replaced.

#LainaReadsAnne Anne of Green Gables is one of Canada's most famous and honestly most beloved books. It's a part of our cultural foundation.

It's also very popular in Poland, and Japan, where it appealed to a population that had been heavily orphaned by the war.

#LainaReadsAnne To this day, Anne of Green Gables is very popular in Japan, and it has actually been mandatory reading in the public school curriculuum since 1952.

#LainaReadsAnne It's been adapted over two dozen times, from everything from movies to tv series and musicals, to anime and musicals and even webseries. A few notable examples.

Since 1965, the musical has been the longest running annual musical theatre production in Canada.

#LainaReadsAnne The most well-known in Canada is the 1985 mini-series starring Megan Follows, which was the most-watched television program in Canadian history. I think my mom likes this one, lol.

Others include a recent movie trilogy that I'm going to make Luci watch with me

#LainaReadsAnne There was also a cartoon in the early 2000s that aired on PBS that I liked as a kid, and of course, a lot of you may know the recent series known as "Anne" or "Anne with An E", which is produced by and airs on CBC, but is available through Netflix internationally

#LainaReadsAnne After I reread it, I would like to watch a good number of those adaptations and talk about how they worked.

I know there was one in 1919 that Montgomery absolutely hated, because they made Anne AMERICAN, and changed PEI to New England. Like what???

#LainaReadsAnne Second wave feminists like Margaret Atwood called Anne feminist, and ahead of her time, which it seems the Netflix adaptation has run with from what little I've seen of it.

Slate called her "a patron saint of female outsiders".

#LainaReadsAnne I read AOGG several times as a kid. I got it out of a Scholastic book order and I owned very few books and didn't have access to a library consistently. The sequels, I have read many of but I definitely don't think all of them, and I have fewer memories of.

#LainaReadsAnne Compared to how often I read the first, the sequels I only read once or twice.

I also haven't reread Green Gables in probably over a decade. I want to look at it with both adult eyes, and with an eye to the common themes in Montgomery's work.

#LainaReadsAnne And just for fun, I grew up with this cover (left), but I had to leave it when we moved, so I'm reading from the 100th anniversary Puffin Classics edition, which itself is actually 11 years old now.

And that's as far as we are getting today, because it's almost 10pm and I only did background research yesterday because I wasn't sure people would like this. #LainaReadsAnne #LainaIsHonest

I'm also gonna drop my ko-fi link at the end of this thread, so if you liked this, maybe throw a tip in the ole jar. ko-fi.com/A0602GN

#LainaReadsAnne will probably continue tomorrow!