Audiobook · read by volunteers
Anne of Green Gables (version 2)
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942)
Read by rachelellen · 38 chapters · 9 h 34
About the book
When the Cuthberts of Green Gables ask for a boy to help on their farm, the orphanage sends a girl instead: an eleven-year-old redhead who talks without stopping and sees poetry in everything. Anne Shirley has had a hard start in life, but her imagination, her optimism and her flair for disaster soon turn the quiet village of Avonlea upside down. Her friendships, her feuds, her schoolroom triumphs and her attempts to be good are told with humour and tenderness, and under the comedy lies a moving account of a child finding a home. Lucy Maud Montgomery's classic has charmed readers for more than a century. Rachelellen reads all thirty-eight chapters in around nine and a half hours, in a second LibriVox version of the book that new listeners can enjoy from the first page.
Introduction
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874-1942) was a Canadian author from Prince Edward Island, and Anne of Green Gables, published in 1908, was her first novel and the work that made her famous. It tells the story of a red-haired orphan girl whose personality is impossible not to love. Despite her tragical past, as Anne herself would put it, her optimism and imagination help her to see the best in things.
The novel's strength is its mixture of comedy and feeling. Anne's mishaps, from the famous dyeing accident to the hazards of a schoolgirl's pride, are amusing, but the book also gives real weight to her need to belong and to the slow softening of the people who take her in. Montgomery's descriptions of the island landscape, with its orchards, ponds and roads, are part of the book's lasting attraction.
This is the second LibriVox version of the novel; it has 38 chapters and runs about 9.6 hours. It is read by a single volunteer, rachelellen.
Why listen today? Anne of Green Gables is a book about imagination, friendship and growing up that has been loved by generations around the world. It is easy to share across ages, and its chapters, which begin with the surprises of Mrs Rachel Lynde, Matthew and Marilla, offer many natural places to pause. For listeners who have only seen screen versions, the book will be a revelation: it is funnier, more detailed and more tender than most adaptations suggest. The different recordings of the novel offer different voices, and hearing more than one is a way to discover which style of reading brings Anne most vividly to life.
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