50 Fun Facts About Anne of Green Gables

Who called Anne the dearest child 'since the immortal Alice'?

Mark Twain: his praise crowned a turnaround for a manuscript that every publisher Montgomery first tried had rejected, and that she had put away in a hat box before trying again in 1907.

Anne is sent by mistake to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had asked the orphanage for what?

A boy to help on the farm: Matthew was sixty and slowing down, but the message went astray, and when he drove to the station to collect his new farmhand he found an eleven-year-old girl waiting.

Shy Matthew Cuthbert gives Anne a Christmas dress with which fashionable feature she had longed for?

Puffed sleeves: too flustered to ask the shop girl for a dress, he came home with a garden rake and a load of brown sugar instead, then had to ask a neighbour to make it.

When Marilla first asks her name, Anne begs to be called which 'perfectly elegant' name instead?

Cordelia: Marilla will have none of it, so Anne settles for her real name on one condition, that it is spelled with an 'e', because 'A-n-n looks dreadful'.

To be allowed to go to a picnic, Anne falsely confesses to losing which treasure of Marilla's?

An amethyst brooch: Marilla grounds her until she owns up, so Anne invents a tale of dropping it off a bridge, only for Marilla to find it snagged on her own lace shawl.

What name does Anne Shirley give to the rare people who truly understand her?

Kindred spirits: she decides that shy Matthew is one after a single buggy ride, and he is the one who argues for keeping her when Marilla means to send her back.

Anne accidentally gets Diana drunk by serving what, believing it to be raspberry cordial?

Currant wine: Marilla had moved the cordial to the cellar and forgotten to say so, and Diana got through three tumblerfuls of her homemade wine before staggering home.

What nickname does Gilbert call Anne in class, prompting her to break a slate over his head?

Carrots: Gilbert only wanted the new girl to look at him, but the jibe cost him dearly, because she refused to speak to him for years however often he apologised.

Anne accidentally dyes her hair which colour while trying to make it black?

Green: she bought the dye from a travelling peddler who swore it would turn her hair raven black, and when it would not wash out Marilla had to cut her hair short.

Anne wins the Avery Scholarship for the top student in which subject at Queen's Academy?

English: the prize would have paid for four years at Redmond College, but she never takes it up, choosing to stay at Green Gables and teach.

How does Matthew Cuthbert die late in Anne of Green Gables?

A heart attack after a bank failure: he collapses in the porch doorway still holding the newspaper that reported the crash of the Abbey Bank, where all the Cuthberts' savings were kept.

Which post does Gilbert give up so that Anne can stay near Marilla?

The Avonlea School teaching job: he takes the White Sands school instead, and Anne's thanks at last end a feud that had run ever since he teased her in class.

Which busybody neighbour gets off on the wrong foot with Anne Shirley but later becomes close to her?

Mrs. Rachel Lynde: she calls the new arrival skinny and homely to her face, Anne flies into a rage, and it takes a gloriously theatrical apology on her knees to mend things.

Which teacher replaces the unpopular Mr. Phillips and becomes a mentor to Anne Shirley?

Miss Muriel Stacy: the first woman to run the village school, she takes lessons outdoors and sets up the after-hours class that gets Anne into Queen's Academy.

Anne's late parents Bertha and Walter Shirley worked as what?

School teachers: both died of fever within four days of each other when she was three months old, and the woman who scrubbed their floors took the baby in.

Which wealthy relative of Diana's calls Anne 'the Anne-girl' and sends her beaded slippers for Christmas?

Great-aunt Josephine: the rich old lady is furious when the girls leap onto her in the spare-room bed, but Anne's apology amuses her so much that she stays on and becomes a friend.

Anne Shirley is unhappy with her looks, but which of her features does she call 'a great comfort'?

Her nose: a schoolmate's passing remark that it was pretty was the first compliment she had ever been paid, so she treasured it, and later scolded herself for thinking about it too much.

Montgomery said she wrote the novel at twilight looking over the fields of which real community?

The Green Gables farmhouse there, along with Balsam Hollow and Campbell Pond, became the heart of Prince Edward Island National Park.

Roughly how many copies has Anne of Green Gables sold worldwide since it first appeared?

50 million: yet little of that fortune reached Montgomery, whose first contract paid small royalties and left the reprint and film money with her publisher.

Which newspaper panned Anne of Green Gables in 1908, then admitted in 1996 it may have 'slipped up'?

The New York Times: its reviewer saw 'no real difference between the girl at the end of the story and the one at the beginning', a line the paper reprinted 88 years on under the heading 'Oops!'.

Japan has loved Anne of Green Gables since a 1952 translation, whose title means what in English?

Red-haired Anne: translator Hanako Muraoka was given the novel by a Canadian missionary friend in 1939 and worked on it in secret through the wartime air raids.

Hayao Miyazaki drew layouts for a 1979 anime of Anne of Green Gables, but which Studio Ghibli colleague directed it?

Isao Takahata: he kept the series strictly faithful to the novel, and Miyazaki, who was unimpressed by the book, walked out after fifteen episodes; the two founded Studio Ghibli six years later.

Who plays Anne Shirley in the 1985 CBC miniseries of Anne of Green Gables?

Megan Follows: the director dismissed her after a first audition, but a frantic second reading won her the part.

Who plays Marilla Cuthbert in the 1985 miniseries of Anne of Green Gables?

Colleen Dewhurst: she went on playing Marilla until her death in 1991, and the character's own death was then written into the story without her.

Which spin-off of the 1985 Anne of Green Gables miniseries ran on CBC through the early 1990s without Anne ever appearing?

Road to Avonlea: Anne is missing because its stories come from other Montgomery books, chiefly The Story Girl, with a young Sarah Polley as a Montreal heiress sent to live with her aunts.

Anne with an E (2017–2019) was a CBC co-production with which streaming service?

Netflix: when the partners cancelled it after three seasons in 2019, fans fought back with petitions and a #RenewAnneWithAnE campaign, to no avail.

Who plays Anne Shirley in the television series Anne with an E?

Amybeth McNulty: after some 1,800 girls on three continents auditioned, the part of Canada's best-loved heroine went to a 14-year-old from rural County Donegal in Ireland.

The lost 1919 silent film of Anne of Green Gables enraged Montgomery by moving the story to where?

New England: two touches especially enraged her, the Stars and Stripes flying at Anne's graduation and a skunk she mistakes for a kitten, an animal then unknown on her island.

Anne Shirley gives up her college scholarship when Marilla is warned she may lose what?

Her eyesight: a specialist says Marilla will be blind within six months unless she gives up reading and sewing, and she means to sell Green Gables until Anne refuses to leave her.

Anne of Green Gables: The Musical premiered in 1965 at the festival in which city?

Charlottetown: Don Harron and Norman Campbell had first written it as a CBC television musical in 1956, then expanded it for the stage, where it played every summer for 55 years.

Which 1923 novel by L. M. Montgomery begins a trilogy about an orphan who dreams of becoming a writer?

Emily of New Moon: by 1921, when she began it, Montgomery had tired of Anne and wanted a new heroine, and she gave Emily the ambition that had driven her own life, to write.

Which honour did King George V confer on Montgomery in 1935?

Officer of the Order of the British Empire: the honour came in a bruising year at home, when her husband, worn down by years of mental illness, gave up his parish and retired.

Which of L. M. Montgomery's Anne novels is set during the First World War?

Rilla of Ingleside: Anne's youngest daughter grows up fast while her brothers are at the front, carrying a motherless war-baby home in a soup tureen and losing her brother Walter at Courcelette.

Which authorised novel about Anne's early childhood did Budge Wilson write for the 2008 centenary of Anne of Green Gables?

Before Green Gables: it fills in the bleak early years that Anne only sketches for Marilla, from her parents' deaths to the orphanage, and Japan soon turned it into an anime series.

Anne Shirley comes to Green Gables from an orphan asylum in which province, where she was also born?

Nova Scotia: years later a college friend from her birthplace calls her a Bluenose for it, and Anne retorts that being born in a stable does not make a man a horse, for she is 'Island to the core'.

Prior to Green Gables, Anne looked after three sets of twins in the household of which woman?

Mrs. Hammond: Anne told her firmly that twins three times running was too much, and when the household broke up after Mr. Hammond died nobody would take her, so she went to the asylum.

Where is Montgomery's original handwritten manuscript of Anne of Green Gables preserved?

Confederation Centre, Charlottetown: the pages show how thrifty she was, since the early chapters are written on the backs of her old story and poem manuscripts, and since 2023 every sheet can be read online.

In the BBC's 2003 Big Read, Anne of Green Gables beat which of these?

The Great Gatsby: it came 43rd to Anne's 41st, and British affection goes back a long way, since Prime Minister Stanley Baldwin sent Montgomery a fan letter in 1927.

On her first drive to Green Gables, Anne Shirley renames the road called the Avenue as what?

The White Way of Delight: the apple blossom arching overhead strikes the chatterbox dumb, and she tells Matthew that when she dislikes a name she simply imagines a better one and uses that.

Which 1926 Montgomery novel, inspired by a holiday in Muskoka, is her only one set entirely away from Prince Edward Island?

The Blue Castle: its heroine proposes to a man who has shown no interest in her, and with an unwed mother among its characters the book was banned by some libraries.

Which classmate dares Anne Shirley to walk the ridgepole of a roof, a stunt that leaves her with a broken ankle?

Josie Pye: Anne had just boasted of knowing a girl who walked a ridgepole, so pride left her no way to refuse, and she managed a few steps along the Barrys' kitchen roof before crashing down.

Anne saves Diana's baby sister Minnie May from which illness?

Croup: she had nursed babies through it before, so she dosed Minnie May with ipecac through the night, and a grateful Mrs. Barry lifted her ban on the girls' friendship.

Which woman fetches Anne Shirley from the orphan asylum on the Cuthberts' behalf?

Mrs. Spencer: when Marilla tries to hand the child back, she proposes passing her on to a woman known for her temper as a nursemaid, and it is that prospect that makes Marilla keep Anne.

Anne Shirley bakes a layer cake for the new minister's wife but flavours it by mistake with what?

Liniment: Marilla had poured it into an old vanilla bottle after breaking the original, and Anne, stuffed up with a heavy cold, could not smell the difference, while her guest gamely kept eating.

Anne of Green Gables was first published in 1908 by the L. C. Page Company, based in which American city?

Boston: Page made a fortune from Anne while paying its author small royalties, and Montgomery spent the next decade and more fighting the firm in court over royalties and rights.

A replica of the Green Gables house was built at the Canadian World theme park in which Japanese town?

Ashibetsu, Hokkaido: the former coal-mining town built the park to revive its economy through tourism, but the venture failed, and the replica village was left standing almost deserted.

Anne of Green Gables was first translated in 1909, as 'Anne på Grönkulla', into which language?

Swedish: Sweden had its own Anne only a year after the novel appeared, and that edition then served as the model for the Polish translation that followed in 1911.

Who jointly owns the licensing authority that controls Anne of Green Gables trademarks?

PEI province and Montgomery's heirs: after some embarrassing public disputes the two joined forces soon after the novel's copyright ran out, so that every Anne doll, mug and straw hat still needs their licence.

Anne Shirley is left clinging to a bridge when her boat sinks as she acts out a poem by which writer?

Alfred, Lord Tennyson: she is playing the dead lily maid Elaine, drifting down to Camelot, and the rescuer who rows up is Gilbert, the one boy she has sworn never to forgive.

After marrying in 1911, L. M. Montgomery left Prince Edward Island and spent her last 31 years in which province?

Ontario: she followed her minister husband to parishes at Leaskdale and Norval and died in Toronto, yet she went on setting almost every one of her novels on the island she had left.