SOURCE: '"Too Much Love-Making': Anne of Green Gables on Television," in The Lion and the Unicorn: A Critical Journal of Children's Literature, Vol. 11, No. 2, October, 1987, pp. 63-72.

In the following essay, Drain discusses the manner in which plot alterations in the television adaptation of Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables shifted focus from Anne's maturation to her romance with Gilbert Blythe.

"Ruby Gillis . . . put too much love-making into her stories and you know too much is worse than too little."

—(Chapter 26)

Lucy Maud Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables has been a popular book since it first appeared in 1908. Generations of girls have followed Anne's misadventures with love and sympathy, recognizing beneath the regional colour and the particular details the aspirations and periods of loneliness which are part of all growing up. It is one of the few books still commonly read that emerged from the nineteenth-century...