[LINK] "Anne gets a new beginning"

[rfmcdonald]

John Adams' article in The Globe and Mail yesterday, "Anne gets a new beginning", called my attention to the fact that Anne Shirley of Anne of Green Gables fame now appears to have two canonical but conflicting backstories, in the form of Budge Wilson's Montgomery heir-authorized prequel Before Green Gables and the Anne of Green Gables: A New Beginning media project by movie producer Kevin Sullivan.

Budge Wilson's yarn accepts as gospel the story in Anne of Green Gables that Anne's parents, school teachers Bertha and Walter Shirley, died of "fever" within weeks of each other in Nova Scotia, when their only daughter was just three months old. From that point, plucky Anne endures years of adoptions and orphanages before finally being sent, at age 11, to PEI and the Cuthberts' farm.

In Sullivan's interpretation, the dual-death story is a fiction, dreamed up by the precocious Anne to cover her shame at the actual circumstances of her mother's death, her father's involvement in that death and Walter Shirley's eventual desertion of Anne to start a new life in New Brunswick. It's a fiction that the 57-year-old Anne is still holding onto at the start of Sullivan's tale.

I'm tempted to add that a third backstory would be L.M. Montgomery's own thoughts on the matter, but since she never wrote a prequel I suppose that they don't count, if they have been recorded at all.