[issybird]

Originally Posted by Victoria

Thank you - I’ve been wondering for a while. I haven’t reread it either, for similar reasons.

What you say about the disappointing paths of Anne and Jo, and yet being able to take from them what you needed is so true. Of course, both authors were female and subject to the same social expectations as their characters. And as authors, each had qualms about what they’d written, but financial pressures propelled them to keep writing. So even though Anne hasn’t stood the test of time for many, she was absolutely her own person. There had to be something quite authentic at the core of both books, to have fed so many generations of young women.

I agree entirely. I want to add in this context Anne’s ferocious temper. Just how satisfying was it when she thwacked Gilbert across the head with her slate? The thwack heard round the world, it seems to me; when would there be another literary instance of a girl refusing to be harassed? And really, Gilbert got off lightly; in the context of our own times he comes across as an abuser in training.

Rereading Anne has me wondering about the influence of contemporary boys’ books. Would the adventure stories like Tom Sawyer have inspired young men in similar ways?

I’ve also been thinking about Tom Sawyer in this context (and coincidentally currently listening to a different book by Mark Twain). Tom’s also an orphan who gets into scrapes and struggles with authority, but I don’t get the same sense of a moral judgment attached to his behavior and a need to reform. He’s just a bad boy. Boys will be boys, as with Gilbert teasing the girls. Penrod is another example, although not an orphan. So mostly I see the boys’ books as an encouragement to act out, but girls’ books as an encouragement to be good, unfortunately. Boys’ books had a lot more scope, it seems to me, with the whole adventure genre which was closed to girls and wherein the boys could be noble; girls needed to be noble on the domestic front.