Book Review: Anne of the Island

“I like her, too,” said Priscilla, decidedly. “She talks as much about boys as Ruby Gillis does. But it always enrages or sickens me to hear Ruby, whereas I just wanted to laugh good-naturedly at Phil. Now, what is the why of that?”

“There is a difference,” said Anne meditatively. “I think it’s because Ruby is really so conscious of boys. She plays at love and love-making. Besides, you feel, when she is boasting of her beaux that she is doing it to rub it well into you that you haven’t half so many. Now, when Phil talks of her beaux it sounds as if she was just speaking of chums. She really looks upon boys as good comrades, and she is pleased when she has dozens of them tagging round, simply because she likes to be popular and to be thought popular…”

Lo these many years ago, when I was writing my college thesis The New Girl: Reconciling Femininity and Independence in American Girls' Fiction, 1895-1915, I got to Anne of the Island and stopped abruptly short thereafter, as Anne of the Island was published in 1915 and I wished to keep strictly within the temporal bounds of my project.

“But Aster,” you object, “didn’t you go beyond your geographical bounds by including Canadian author L. M. Montgomery?” Yes, and also hush. I cut out Frances Hodgson Burnett for geographical reasons and learned years later that she moved to the US as a teenager and spent her entire adult life in the US, and therefore IS an American author, even if her most famous children’s books take place in England.

Anyway! Although undoubtedly I could and indeed perhaps should have done the project without Montgomery, I found Anne of the Island extremely useful, specifically for the passage that I quote above, because it engages explicitly with the question of “What’s the difference between a girl who is popular with boys (which is good) and a flirt (which is bad)?”, which is a problem point in this genre. Readers and publishers demand the heroine must have a love interest, and they like it if she’s popular with boys - but, all the same, she can’t be too interested in boys; and where exactly do you cross the line into “too interested”?

Well, here Anne helpfully spells it out. A flirt is conscious not just of boys (and, by implication, sex and sexuality), but of the power that her power over boys gives her over girls, too. She boasts of her conquests just to watch other girls squirm, maybe even steals other girls’ beaux just for the fun of the thing.

A girl who is simply popular, meanwhile, has just as many girl friends as beaux, because she sees them in much the same light. Like girls, boys are comrades or chums to her - until of course she meets Him, the one boy of all the boys in the world for her.

Unless the girl in question is Anne Shirley, who is so sure that Gilbert is a comrade and nothing but that she spends two years caught up in a whirlwind romance with Roy Gardner, who looks every inch the part of the tall, dark, and handsome hero Anne has always imagined… until he asks her to marry him, and Anne in an awful rush of self-knowledge realizes that she just can’t.

I’ve always loved this plotline because it’s such human, un-heroine-like behavior. Here’s Anne, our heroine, leading Roy on like the veriest flirt in Christendom! But it’s not because she’s heartless or fickle. She’s just convinced that she’s met Him, or at least working very hard to convince herself that she’s met Him. Sometimes, Montgomery suggests, a flirt is not a flirt at all, but just very humanly confused.