In both L.M. Montgomery’s 1926 novel and Irving Rapper’s 1942 film, self-knowledge is a powerful diagnostic tool that needs to be harnessed to decision making in order to affect lasting change. Both works subsequently insist on the validity of their heroines’ choices.
The ways in which Anne, the mercurial, earnest girl at the center of the story lived, learned, grew, and blundered her way through life resonated with me, a perennial outsider and dreamer, wounded by things that, like Anne’s cruel treatment at the hands of the Hammonds and the orphanage