I’ve been a bookworm as long as I could read. When I was a young girl we would visit the library every Saturday and I would borrow another bag of books to read over the next week.
Amongst all the books I read spunky literary heroines were thin on the ground. Enid Blyton’s Faraway Tree lot were nice but insipid, Katie from What Katie Did was admirable but unexciting and three of the four March girls in Louisa M Alcott’s Little Women were largely forgettable.
The girls I loved reading about were the trailblazers, the ones who broke the mould because they didn’t really fit in anywhere. I adored the impulsive and hot tempered writer Jo March in Little Women, the delightfully original Penny Pollard series by Australian author Robyn Klein and Mulan, the real-life Chinese girl who dressed as a man to take her father’s place in the Chinese army. These girls were brave, strong, smart and wholly original. They stepped off the usual paths to make their own and millions of girls like me cheered their every step.
My most beloved literary heroine was Anne of Anne of Green Gables, that red-headed, freckled orphan created by Lucy Maud Montgomery. The plot: Anne goes to live with Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert on Prince Edward Island because of a mixup and winds up changing the lives of everyone she meets. When we first meet Anne she is skinny, awkward and plain. Later, she blossoms into a beautiful, confident woman but throughout it all she remains the same – a spunky, creative and impulsive person who can always see the positive in every situation.
Here’s the movie trailer.
Two words: Gilbert. Blythe. *swoon*
Anne was the person I aspired to be when I grew up. So you can imagine my horror when I saw that an unauthorised publisher had recently created this new cover (on the left) for their edition of Anne of Green Gables.
(Image courtesy Courier Mail)
GAH!!! WHAT HAVE YOU DONE TO OUR ANNE?
Anne is not blonde. She is not curvy. She does not pull her hair seductively off her face. She does not stare at the reader with a come-hither gaze.
Hoik her shirt a little higher and undo a few buttons and she could be an FHM cover girl. This is an appalling lapse of judgement by a new, unsanctioned publisher. Clearly whoever was in charge didn’t even bother reading the book. Heck, he or she didn’t even bother googling ‘Anne of Green Gables’.
FAIL.FAIL.FAIL.
