People laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas, you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?

L.M.Montgomery Anne of Green Gables

If you’re into that kind of thing you won’t have missed the fact that a new film adaptation of Little Women has just been released. This most recent in a long line has been written and directed by Greta Gerwig and for the critics, and the viewing masses, appears to hit all the bases. 

I always feel leery about film adaptions of anything I have read first and loved. Call it snobbishness if you want but I’ve noticed the penchant held by those in the movie biz to take everything that is beautiful then to carefully and deliberately mangle it, crushing the life out of it until blood runs out of its ears, assemble the broken and betrayed pieces, paint them with gloss and glitter, tie them together with a big bow and then back over them with the car for good measure. So perhaps it’s not snobbishness so much as an aversion to the experience of having my thoughts and dreams annihilated without mercy so that someone in LA with a taste for chia seeds and a non-ironic liking for bandanas can build an extension onto their infinity pool. 

There are many notable exceptions of course. I went to see the first Paddington movie literally sick to my stomach praying that they would not maim the wise and guileless, funny and venturesome character who lived and breathed in my imagination, captivating me from the very first moment I read of his rescue from a train station in a mystical place called “London” (wherever that was). I needn’t have feared. They took liberties of course. As is their wont. But the liberties were easily forgiven. It was joyous. There was my friend, fifteen feet tall and resplendent, warm limpid eyes glistening, fur shimmering in the breeze. He was as lovely as always. I felt like I was meeting him for the very first time and the calypso music being played on the corner of 32 Windsor Gardens seemed to reflect the party in my heart.  

Little Women the novel is, of course, an absolute gem, rightly laying claim to the accolade “classic” that is too often bandied about though not always deserved. I read all three books featuring the March girls in my early adolescence and liked them very much. Certainly any woman who has ever attempted to make sense of their inward noise by putting pen to paper will find that Jo’s experience, drawn out in particular relief by the new adaption, resonates. Writing is a bewildering, intoxicating and mysterious act of wilful rebellion against all the inner voices that are constantly urging their progenitor to keep quiet. Jo has to fight those voices just the same. When she is safe in the happy bubble of her artsy, romantic family all is well and accepted and easy. But in order to be fully at peace with herself, she must inevitably face the unromantic stare of Mr Dashwood across his desk and bear the pain of his editorial pen. I know this feeling all too well.

The film is beautifully lit, switching between rosy golden-toned remembered moments in the March family home and cooler scenes played out against the backdrop of unspoiled snow or windswept beach.  It is hard to imagine how anything in which Saoirse Ronan is the principle could ever fail and in this she doesn’t disappoint. She always finds the perfect, seemingly unstudied, balance between hesitant vulnerability and fiery conviction and therefore makes an excellent Jo. 

It is easy for Little Women to accidentally tip into twee. At its heart it is a morality tale and can therefore appear overly worthy. But the deconstructed timeline manages to bring something new to the story. The constant movement goes some way to preventing the more emotionally heavy scenes from becoming laboured and mawkish. 

But I went to see Little Women without fear. I was able to view it with the cool interested detachment of someone who likes the story but has never quite loved it. For the fact remains, it has never reached my heart in the way another book written a mere 40 years later has always done – the L.M.Montgomery-penned Anne of Green Gables. 

In the great pattern book of protagonists Anne and Jo are cut from the same cloth, being similarly scatterbrained, wilful and creative. Both have intelligence and imagination, interests and preoccupations which set them apart from their peers. Both have fiery tempers and warm hearts. 

But I have always been drawn to Anne, who seems to take so much longer to grow than Jo. Her mistakes make her all the more endearing and certainly all the more accessible. Jo chopped her hair off in an act of supreme sacrifice in order to make money to send her mother off to visit her sick Father who is acting as a chaplain for the Union Army during the American Civil War. So far, so saintly. Anne’s mane on the other hand must be shorn as she buys hair dye from a door-to-door pedlar who promises Anne it will colour the red hair she loathes a rich raven black. Predictably, for a girl who seems to exist perpetually mid-scrape, her hair turns an unsalvageable shade of green instead and must be cut off. For Anne this becomes the first of many lessons in the folly of indulging her own vanity. 

Anne does not come from a loving cosy artsy home. She is an orphan and before she reaches Green Gables her childhood is one of loneliness and penury. Her salvation is brought about by a pair of the most unlikely of saviours. Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert are an ageing brother and sister who both have remained unmarried and have continued to farm the land around Green Gables upon on the death of their own parents. But even her very adoption happens by quirk rather than by design. They had in fact intended to give a home to an orphan boy who could help out on the farm and end up with Anne through administrative error. 

Matthew, normally a shy and quiet man, makes an uncharacteristic intervention and causes Marilla to think twice about rectifying the mistake. Thus Anne stays at Green Gables and the story of her redemption begins to unfold. And it is a redemption that does not happen through one cathartic event, nor several, but rather is played out over a lifetime, and is all the more authentic for it.

The death of Matthew at the end of the first book is tragic but does not seem forced. Further, the story does not rely on it for its pathos but focusses instead on the little family of two who are left behind. Matthew was the bridge they reached each other by. But now he is gone and the woman who has come so late to motherhood and the girl who has no idea what it means to be a daughter, must begin to learn the ropes of this most profound of relationships without him.

Anne is a character full of contradiction. She can be humble to a fault one moment and vain and proud the next. She is practical and capable of almost anything up until the moment that she is distracted by her own muse at which point her daydreaming renders her useless and prone to disaster. She an orphan girl, on a small Island at the turn of the 20th Century whose prospects should not have been very lofty indeed, but who earns her Bachelor of Arts at Redmond College at the top of her class. She is dreamy, she is odd, she is smart and most of all, she is funny. Or perhaps more accurately, L.M.Montgomery is funny. She writes Anne with such relish. She loves the disruption and healing that Anne brings in her wake. She loves the little ironies of mundane domestic life. She loves stories. She loves people.  

As a young reader the humour and wry wit with which all the Anne books were written was what drew me in. It filled Anne’s world with warmth and prevented the tale from becoming sanctimonious. Little Women is not totally devoid of humour but there is not as much space for it when everyone is concentrating so incredibly hard on being benevolent to the poor, not complaining that Father is off being virtuous somewhere else leaving everyone else at home in genteel poverty, and other more general acts of sainthood. 

I have always felt that, but not quite understood why, Anne of Green Gables and its sequels have been considered classics but never quite literary classics. That while Little Women has transcended the genre it originated in, being acceptably enjoyed by all ages rather than the tweens it was written for, Anne remains a children’s book. I on the other hand have read it more often as an adult than as a child. Consuming it and most of its sequels more or less every year for the last thirty years. I have never failed to find solace there. Some of the most resonant snippets of wisdom, funniest vignettes, most beautifully written flights of fancy and breathlessly romantic moments I have ever read were contained within. 

As I have grown older I have become less and less apologetic about my own dreamy perspective on life, my sometimes hopeless distractedness, my love of nature and staring at clouds. I always used to curse my propensity to daydream. My need to escape into my own internal world. But now I know that that is the very thing that makes me, me. I have come to realise that that is due in no small part to my early exposure to a character whose bravery at being herself I never quite forgot. 

Anne is not perfect and she doesn’t preach. She is homely, overly verbose, has a bad temper and a tendency to be pompous. But she also passionate and kind. Though she aspires to neither, she has moments of wisdom and even beauty. And most importantly of all for this reader, she gave a similarly awkward, verbose, vague, and more than slightly odd, country girl permission to dream. That is why she has become the yardstick by which every heroine since has been measured. It has to be said that so far no-one else has even come close. 

So in conclusion, you can keep the rest of them. I’ll take the red-headed snippet every time.