Anne Shirley, the orphan child who brings happiness and love into the lives of her foster family, is one of the most beloved heroines in all of literature.
Anne, a wildly imaginative, red-headed chatterbox, tries to fit into the narrow confines of Victorian expectations, but her exuberant spirit keeps leaping delightfully beyond the bounds.
When Marilla Cuthbert and her brother Matthew find that they are getting too old to work the farm by themselves, they decide to adopt an orphan boy to help out. To their dismay, they are sent a girl by mistake—an impetuous girl with a hopeless lack of manners. Pragmatic Marilla is determined to return her, but warm-hearted Matthew urges that she be given a chance to prove herself.
The challenge laid down for this eleven-year-old girl—and the mishaps that befall her before she wins the heart of her foster mother—make for a delightfully charming story.
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"Anne of Green Gables, written by Lucy Maud Montgomery in 1908 is a quaint, period novel. Some of the points of view that come to the surface is the prejudice against women being teachers and the feeling that a woman's life is not quite equal to a man's life. This was a very popular book at the time and, if you think about it, it was before World War I and the suffragate movement. All-in-all this was a very easy-going book."
— Chap (4 out of 5 stars)
“[Anne Shirley is] the most moving and delightful child of fiction since the immortal Alice.”
— Mark Twain“Susan O’Malley’s narrative of this classic story is sensitive and perfectly in keeping with story’s setting.”
— Looking Glass Review“A fine novel for both the boy and girl set. Aside from Pippi Longstocking, there’s no other literary redhead of quite the same tomboyish aspects as our Anne.”
— School Library Journal“[A] highly recommended pick for fans of the Green Gables stories.”
— Reviewers BookwatchBe the first to write a review about this audiobook!
Lucy Maud Montgomery was born on November 30th, 1874, in Clifton, Prince Edward Island, Canada. Although she lived during a time when few women received a higher education, Lucy attended Prince Wales College in Charlottestown, PEI, and then Dalhousie University in Halifax. At seventeen she went to Halifax, Nova Scotia, to write for a newspaper, the Halifax Chronicle, and for its evening edition, the Echo. But Lucy returned to live with her grandmother in Cavendish, PEI, where she taught and contributed stories to magazines. It was this experience, along with the lives of her farmer and fisherfolk neighbors, that came alive when she wrote her Anne books, beginning with Anne of Green Gables (1908). Anne of Green Gables brought her overnight success and international recognition. It was followed by eight other books about Anne and Avonlea, as well as a number of other delightful novels, including her Emily series, which began in 1923 with Emily of New Moon. But it is her delightful heroine Anne Shirley, praised by Mark Twain as “the most moving and delightful child of fiction since the immortal Alice,” who remains a popular favorite throughout the world. She and her husband, the Rev. Ewen MacDonald, eventually moved to Ontario. Lucy Montgomery died in Toronto in 1942.
Susan O’Malley (a.k.a. Bernadette Dunne) is the winner of numerous AudioFile Earphones Awards and has twice been nominated for the prestigious Audie Award. She studied at the Royal National Theatre in London and the Studio Theater in Washington, DC, and has appeared at the Kennedy Center and off Broadway. She lives in Brooklyn, New York.