Anne of Green Gables Trivia
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This Anne of Green Gables trivia quiz has 100 free questions with answers and covers the 1908 novel, its author and everything that grew out of it. The book questions run from the orphanage mix-up and the boy the Cuthberts wanted, through Diana and the currant wine, the slate broken over Gilbert's head, the green hair, the Avery Scholarship and Matthew's death, to the choice Anne makes at the end. There are questions on L. M. Montgomery herself: the magazine photo she used for Anne's face, the window she wrote at in Cavendish, the OBE, and the sequel written from a woman's view of the First World War. The adaptations get their due: the lost 1919 silent film that infuriated Montgomery, the actress who legally renamed herself Anne Shirley, Megan Follows and Colleen Dewhurst in 1985, the Charlottetown musical that has run since 1965, the anime that made Anne an icon in Japan, and Anne with an E on Netflix. There's tourism trivia too, from licence plates to the replica farmhouse in Hokkaido. Every answer has been checked against the Wikipedia pages for the novel, its author and its adaptations, and each explanation adds one detail worth remembering.
30 of 100 questions with answers and explanations. Play the quiz
Q 01Who called Anne the dearest child 'since the immortal Alice'?
Mark Twain
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.
Q 02Anne is sent by mistake to Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had asked the orphanage for what?
A boy to help on the farm
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.
Q 03Shy Matthew Cuthbert gives Anne a Christmas dress with which fashionable feature she had longed for?
Puffed sleeves
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.
Q 04When Marilla first asks her name, Anne begs to be called which 'perfectly elegant' name instead?
Cordelia
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'.
Q 05To be allowed to go to a picnic, Anne falsely confesses to losing which treasure of Marilla's?
An amethyst brooch
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.
Q 06What name does Anne Shirley give to the rare people who truly understand her?
Kindred spirits
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.
Q 07Anne accidentally gets Diana drunk by serving what, believing it to be raspberry cordial?
Currant wine
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.
Q 08What nickname does Gilbert call Anne in class, prompting her to break a slate over his head?
Carrots
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.
Q 09Anne accidentally dyes her hair which colour while trying to make it black?
Green
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.
Q 10Anne wins the Avery Scholarship for the top student in which subject at Queen's Academy?
English
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.
Q 11How does Matthew Cuthbert die late in Anne of Green Gables?
A heart attack after a bank failure
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.
Q 12Which post does Gilbert give up so that Anne can stay near Marilla?
The Avonlea School teaching job
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.
Q 13Which busybody neighbour gets off on the wrong foot with Anne Shirley but later becomes close to her?
Q 21Japan has loved Anne of Green Gables since a 1952 translation, whose title means what in English?
Red-haired Anne
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.
Q 22Hayao Miyazaki drew layouts for a 1979 anime of Anne of Green Gables, but which Studio Ghibli colleague directed it?
Isao Takahata
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.
Q 23Who plays Anne Shirley in the 1985 CBC miniseries of Anne of Green Gables?
Megan Follows
Mrs. Rachel Lynde
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.
Q 14Which teacher replaces the unpopular Mr. Phillips and becomes a mentor to Anne Shirley?
Miss Muriel Stacy
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.
Q 15Anne's late parents Bertha and Walter Shirley worked as what?
School teachers
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.
Q 16Which wealthy relative of Diana's calls Anne 'the Anne-girl' and sends her beaded slippers for Christmas?
Great-aunt Josephine
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.
Q 17Anne Shirley is unhappy with her looks, but which of her features does she call 'a great comfort'?
Her nose
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.
Q 18Montgomery said she wrote the novel at twilight looking over the fields of which real community?
Cavendish
The Green Gables farmhouse there, along with Balsam Hollow and Campbell Pond, became the heart of Prince Edward Island National Park.
Q 19Roughly how many copies has Anne of Green Gables sold worldwide since it first appeared?
50 million
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.
Q 20Which newspaper panned Anne of Green Gables in 1908, then admitted in 1996 it may have 'slipped up'?
The New York Times
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!'.
Megan Follows: the director dismissed her after a first audition, but a frantic second reading won her the part.
Q 24Who plays Marilla Cuthbert in the 1985 miniseries of Anne of Green Gables?
Colleen Dewhurst
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.
Q 25Which spin-off of the 1985 Anne of Green Gables miniseries ran on CBC through the early 1990s without Anne ever appearing?
Road to Avonlea
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.
Q 26Anne with an E (2017–2019) was a CBC co-production with which streaming service?
Netflix
Netflix: when the partners cancelled it after three seasons in 2019, fans fought back with petitions and a #RenewAnneWithAnE campaign, to no avail.
Q 27Who plays Anne Shirley in the television series Anne with an E?
Amybeth McNulty
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.
Q 28The lost 1919 silent film of Anne of Green Gables enraged Montgomery by moving the story to where?
New England
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.
Q 29Anne Shirley gives up her college scholarship when Marilla is warned she may lose what?
Her eyesight
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.
Q 30Anne of Green Gables: The Musical premiered in 1965 at the festival in which city?
Charlottetown
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.