Audiobook · read by volunteers
Anne of Green Gables
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942)
Read by Betsie Bush, Annie Coleman Rothenberg, Mark Bradford, Kara Shallenberg (1969-2023), Randi Warwick, Geetu Melwani, Sherry Crowther, Marlo Dianne, Diana Kiesners, Susan Hooks · 38 chapters · 10 h 30
About the book
When the Cuthbert family at Green Gables, a farm in Prince Edward Island, asks for a boy to help with the work, a mistake sends them a girl instead. Anne Shirley is eleven, red-haired, freckled, talkative and wildly imaginative, and she has been passed from one home to another all her life. She desperately wants to belong. Whether the quiet brother and sister who have taken her in will keep her is by no means certain.
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s classic children’s novel is the story of an orphan whose optimism and imagination turn almost every setback into an adventure. Over thirty-eight chapters and just over ten hours, this recording follows her mishaps, her apologies, her bosom friend and her classroom rival, and her triumphs, and will make you smile again and again.
Introduction
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) was born on Prince Edward Island, in Canada, and set most of her fiction there. Anne of Green Gables, her first novel, was published in 1908 and was an immediate success. It has been translated into dozens of languages and has been adapted for the stage, television and film many times. A series of sequels followed, starting with Anne of Avonlea.
The story begins with a misunderstanding. An elderly brother and sister, Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, intend to adopt a boy to help with the farm, and Anne arrives instead. Over the course of the book she grows from an eleven-year-old newcomer to a young woman, and her life changes considerably. School, friendships, rivalries and the discovery of her own talents all play a part. Montgomery has a gift for comic scenes, as well as for descriptions of the island landscape in all seasons, and she treats her heroine’s feelings with understanding. Anne’s speech, with its long words and dramatic declarations, is one of the great pleasures of the book.
The novel has also been read as a reflection on what a family can be and on the value of imagination. Some readers will find the moral tone of the period a little firm, but the story’s warmth carries it through.
The recording has 38 sections and lasts about ten and a half hours. It is read by volunteers for LibriVox. Why listen today? Because Anne has earned her place in the affections of readers all over the world. She is funny, stubborn and kind, and her story is as welcoming now as it was more than a century ago. It is a book for children and for the child in every adult.
Public domain
Lucy Maud Montgomery died in 1942: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text