Why the adaptation ‘Anne with an E’ speaks to queers and misfits of all kinds

I always liked the titular main character in Anne of Green Gables. But the CBC’s Anne with an E made me love her. 

As a kid, I watched the mid-’80s screen adaptations, and I’m sure Anne’s creative spirit inspired me to become a writer. I have gleefully visited the real-life Green Gables on Prince Edward Island more than once. I even keep some cherished hardcover versions of the novels, but, I have to admit, I haven’t read them all. Truth be told, growing up, I was more of an Emily of New Moon girlie. After all, as Natasha Lyonne’s character in Russian Doll puts it: “Everybody loves Anne, but I like Emily. She’s dark.”

Though Anne has a tragic backstory just like Emily, the Green Gables main character is keen to find the best in people. She falls deeply in love with just about everything around her: P.E.I’s landscapes, the big words she learns in school and her best friends. I liked Anne, but for the cynical among us, the usual emphasis on her sunny outlook can be a little tedious. So when I heard that Anne with an E, the CBC’s adaptation of the story, did something different, I was intrigued. 

“It’s the only Anne that doesn’t make me roll my eyes,” my friend, playwright and TV writer Chelsea Woolley, told me. It was an afternoon early in the COVID-19 pandemic , and we were walking our dogs in Toronto’s east end. Woolley was describing the gritty, modern sensibility that the show’s creator, former Breaking Bad writer Moira Walley-Beckett, brought to the “romantical” Anne Shirley. Though her approach was divisive among fans, Walley-Beckett’s adaptation brought us the queerest and most relatable version of Anne—and Avonlea—yet. 

Anne with an E premiered in early 2017. Cancelled after three seasons, the show’s final episode aired five years ago, on Nov. 24, 2019. Fans immediately mounted a campaign to revive the show for a fourth season, which is still going strong. 

But the show has its detractors as well—especially diehard fans of the Lucy Maud Montgomery novels. One New Yorker reviewer called the series’ emphasis on the cruelties of Anne’s life an emotional “betrayal,” while a Vanity Fair reviewer chided the “gloomy” adaptation for veering “disastrously” far from the spirit of the original books. Others were slow to warm up to the modern adaptation simply because it defied canon, like Australian professor Jess Carniel, who edited a book about fans’ relationships with Anne of Green Gables.

But in boldly exploring the darker side of Anne’s past and her inner workings, the show made lucid the reasons why queers and misfits of all kinds have identified with the character for over a century. 

Most obviously, Anne resonates with queer and misfit readers because she was unwanted—especially because of her gender. “You don’t want me!” Anne cried upon meeting her would-be adopters, the aging brother-sister duo Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, who had requested that a boy be placed in their care. 

This was just the latest in a series of tragic rejections: Anne was orphaned as a baby when her parents died of typhoid fever, and was then shuttled between brutal foster families and orphanages until finally settling with the Cuthberts. Though Anne was literally orphaned, her story resonates with those who have been otherwise abandoned by their families, communities or society at large. In an essay published in Carniel’s book and titled “Anne as Pagan, Anne as Queer,” Australian writer Dallas John Baker explained how he identified with Anne in this moment because his own non-normative embodiment of boyhood seemed to be problematic for his family growing up, which left him feeling similarly unwanted. Baker went on to publish fanfiction that reimagined Anne as a gender nonconforming changeling, and Gilbert Blythe, Anne’s eventual husband in the original series, as her bisexual lover. 

Of course, the Cuthberts end up keeping—and loving—Anne, but they had originally desired a boy child who, true to gender stereotypes, would have been better able to help around the farm. That was, after all, the hard life that orphans in Canada could expect in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: many note that Anne likely made her way to Canada’s Maritimes as one of more than 100,000 impoverished British children who were sent to Canada during that time to work as indentured farm labourers known as “home children.” 

Home children are one of the many disturbing phenomena that so-called Canada is built upon and, along with residential schools and racial segregation, is one of the nation’s historical blights that gets a closer examination in Anne with an E. The show’s willingness to delve into these complex historical issues may not be canon, as some fans complain, but it earned the franchise a new and diverse generation of fans. 

As readers, we only know that Anne came to P.E.I. as an orphan—but through flashbacks, Anne with an E shows more of what life was like for children like Anne. In the first episode, we meet our protagonist on the train ride to P.E.I. and her new home with the Cuthberts. A crying baby on board triggers visceral memories of being slapped hard across the face by her former guardian, Mrs. Hammond, because she had failed to prepare the family’s dinner and milk the cow while managing the household’s eight children. “You’re more trouble than you’re worth,” Mrs. Hammond seethes in Anne’s memory. Anne is jolted back to the present train ride by her adult companion, to whom she turns and speaks one of her iconic lines, “I like imagining better than remembering.” Rendered this way, it’s no wonder she does.

Such experiences are alluded to in the novels, but their exploration in the Walley-Beckett’s adaptation makes Anne a more relatable and sympathetic character. Memories of a traumatic childhood, unfortunately, resonate for many queer adults, and do much to contextualize Anne’s intense attachment to any kind figure in her life and her famously vivid imagination—or what we might reconsider as her impressive dissociative powers. 

Though a lot of readers saw a “kindred spirit” in Anne immediately, without this important context, Anne’s excessively dramatic and romantic notions could come off as, well, annoying, to others. (Or make you roll your eyes, if you’re my friend Chelsea.) Linking Anne’s traumatic past to her current behaviour made her more relatable and loveable, at least in my eyes. It also made me think more deeply about the inner turmoil that could be lurking beneath an almost nauseatingly positive outlook. This lesson is made even more meaningful when we remember that Montgomery, the creator of the beloved Anne and her remarkable inner world, also struggled with lifelong depression and, eventually, died by suicide.

But, more than simply revealing the traumatic truths that are glossed over in Montgomery’s original pages, Anne with an E cracks open these issues to make room for Anne to heal. On her first day of school in Anne with an E, Anne and her friends spy their teacher canoodling with a pupil. Anne explains to her new peers that Mr. Phillips and Prissy are having “intimate relations”—Prissy has certainly touched the “mouse” in Mr. Phillips’s pants, and now they are going to have a baby. The schoolgirls go from giggles to disgust as Anne explains what she knew of “intimate relations” from overhearing Mr. and Mrs. Hammond after the former had downed his daily moonshine. When this story spreads around Avonlea, Marilla is ousted from the Progressive Mothers’ Sewing Circle and Anne is shunned as “dirty trash” and a “trollop.” 

But instead of being angry with Anne for being crassly bawdy—or “disgraceful,” as Marilla put it—Matthew recognizes that Anne was failed by her former guardians who carelessly exposed her to adult acts. While Marilla frets that “that child will send me to an early grave,” Matthew cuts her off: that child is a child. “A girl of her tender age, she oughtn’t to know such things,” he says softly as he stares off, distressed. His intervention sends Marilla stomping back to the Progressive Mothers: “It’s a shame progressive parenting doesn’t include compassion,” she tells them. 

This reframe is particularly modern, as these days the Hammonds’ failures would fall on the spectrum of childhood sexual abuse. But it’s also reparative: the unwanted and neglected child is rewritten as worthy of protection and love. At this point in the series, I paused the episode and fired off a text to Chelsea: “Matthew Cuthbert is healing my childhood trauma.” 

Though that story arc was unique to Anne with an E, Matthew was a quiet champion of Anne’s in the novels too—at least before he was killed off in the first book. The show, blessedly, kept him alive, and brought to life one of his most endearing moments: he pays a visit to a seamstress to have a dress made specially for Anne. “She’s got a longing for a certain type of sleeve. With … um, with air on the sides…” he tells the dressmaker, doing his best to describe Anne’s obsession with “puffed sleeves.” 

The debilitatingly shy farmer may not understand fashion, but the man clearly understands how to love—and how to affirm the hell out of femme gender. As a femme myself, the effort to entertain the idea that there is something vitally important about fashionable whimsy—even when it seems baffling—lives in my heart as a distinctly butch gesture of care. But Matthew showed plainly how simple and meaningful it can be to honour a kid’s gender expression, especially if it is radically different from your own. I wish all queer kids had a Matthew Cuthbert. 

It’s completely possible to read the Cuthberts as more than queer allies, but a queer family in their own right: Matthew and Marilla are unmarried, non-reproductive siblings approaching their twilight years—and each filled with their own private yearning—who form a non-romantic couple to support each other and to provide a home for Anne. Even disregarding their sexual or romantic orientations, their atypical household reimagines what family can look like—a very queer act indeed. 

And theirs is just one of several platonic intimacies that animate the fictional landscape of Avonlea, which helps make it a desirable fantasy world for queers. One of the queerest things about Anne is her relationship with her “bosom friend,” Diana Barry—a relationship that has drawn queer audiences to her story for decades. 

The 2000s were a particularly gay time for Anne. While academics have ruminated on the possibility of queer love between Anne and Diana since at least the late 1980s, Laura Robinson’s presentation on the subject in 2000 at Canada’s academic super-conference (colloquially known by the mononym “Congress”) generated enough controversy to be dubbed “the Bosom Friends affair” and earn its own Wikipedia entry. Later that decade, the country celebrated Anne of Green Gables’ centennial—including queer playwrights Rosemary Rowe and Moynan King, who staged the sexy cabaret Anne Made Me Gay in Toronto. 

“Anne was a role model to me. She was unapologetically intelligent, an ambitious scholar, a loyal friend, and a scrappy fighter.… Also, she REALLY loved Diana and I totally, totally understood,” Rowe wrote in a 2012 article about the cabaret. 

And it’s true that Anne and Diana have a very romantic friendship: they regularly profess their love for each other and exchange vows of eternal friendship. When threatened with a punishing separation, they tearfully trade locks of hair to remember each other by. And while Anne with an E let the original lines play without intervention—neither downplaying nor making overt their queerness—the show also gave us explicitly queer characters: Diana’s great-aunt Josephine and Avonlea’s local art boy, Cole Mackenzie. 

Anne first meets Aunt Josephine while she stays in Avonlea to mourn the loss of her “companion,” Gertrude. Anne and Josephine connect over their admiration for each other’s independence and willingness to go against the grain. Offering advice about Anne’s future, Josephine confides that she actually did not forgo romance and marriage as it seems outwardly, but had it on her own terms with her beloved Gertrude. Her advice to Anne in this regard is to live without regret. 

In Season 2, Anne, Cole and Diana attend a fabulous party at Aunt Josephine’s home in Charlottetown that boasts a guest list full of women who smoke cigarettes, who have art careers and who idolize the love between Josephine and Gertrude. Aunt Josephine introduces Diana to an accomplished pianist to encourage her to think about a life beyond marriage; a top-hatted queer sculptor urges Cole not to give up his art and the ever-inspired Anne considers the possibility of wearing puffed sleeves and a top hat simultaneously. 

Moved by the evening, Cole comes out to Aunt Josephine the next morning. Anne with an E gave us a version of Jospehine that bestows the elder queer wisdom that many young queers still need to hear: “You have a life of such joy before you,” she tells him. As I play back the scenes of the party (and yes, crying a little)—showing a room full of interesting, admiring friends with a ceiling dripping with dense flower garlands—it seems she could be exactly right. Anne with an E shows that queer joy is possible—and was, even in early 20th-century Canada.

Later, back home in Avonlea, Anne describes the party to Marilla: “It felt as though you could be any way in the world, and there might be a place for you.” Such is the world Walley-Beckett created with Anne with an E. By defying canon and daring to delve into dark feelings and darker histories, this modern adaptation made overt what queers and misfits have looked for, and often found, in the pages of Anne of Green Gables—reflections of their own lives. In this version of Avonlea, queerness was not absent, trauma was not ignored, history was not whitewashed and even bigotry was not denied. Instead, viewers watched the emotional, traumatized, gender nonconforming Anne and her misfit cast of friends find a community willing to witness their pain and help them heal through love.

For some, telling the story this way was unpleasantly “gloomy,” but I think that, for many who see themselves reflected in these storylines, it rather instilled hope—hope that our own painful pasts might be recognized, hope that we might heal and hope that we, too, might find kindred spirits. Just like Anne.