SOURCE: Davey, Frank. “The Hard-Won Power of Canadian Womanhood: Reading Anne of Green Gables Today.” In L. M. Montgomery and Canadian Culture, edited and with an introduction by Irene Gammel and Elizabeth Epperly, pp. 163-82. Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1999.

In the following essay, Davey addresses the ways in which Montgomery's Anne continues to reflect women's feelings of social estrangement and prefigured contemporary Canadian literary explorations of the subject.

L. M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables played an ambiguously progressive role in various turn-of-the century ideological conflicts concerning religion, child rearing, and opportunities for women. In its strategic focus on an orphan it linked itself to a textual formation that had already seen such works as Dickens's Oliver Twist (1839) and Great Expectations (1861), Twain's Huckleberry Finn (1885), Kipling's Kim (1901), and—in a less complex way—Frank L. Baum's The Wonderful Wizard of Oz (1900) deploy this figure to interrogate social practices...