Originally a comment by Artymorty on This novel should be about something completely different.

Talk about Not Getting it. Here’s yet another example of Canada becoming a global joke because it’s full of goody-two-shoes bureaucratic busybodies. I can’t imagine any other country treating its own literary legacy the way we do. If Lucy Montgomery wrote characters as annoying as Canadians appear to be today, no one would have bothered with the books.

It’s infuriating. Anne of Green Gables is surely Canada’s most famous book, and that’s because because Anne’s story has resonated with girls (and maybe a few boys, ahem) around the world, across cultures. It was never about ethnic or religious cultures, it was about a girl and her life, told colourfully and humanistically.

An Anne anecdote: when I was young, I briefly had a housemate, a seventeen or eighteen year old Japanese girl named Reiko, who had run away from her troubled home in Japan to Prince Edward Island, so obsessed with Anne of Green Gables she had been. A sympathetic retired couple on the island took her into their home for a while — how very Anne of Green Gables-like! But she eventually moved to Toronto, I guess because there’s not much work in PEI besides… I don’t know, lobster fishing, potato farming, and more Japanese Green Gables tourists?

It still amazes me that she travelled all the way across the globe as a sixteen or seventeen year old, all by herself, to PEI, because her love of Anne was so strong.

Reiko’s is a sad story, though: teenage runaways, especially undocumented girls from Asia with no family in the country, don’t tend to thrive. She ended up working in a “parlour” for a while, but me and a couple other housemates got her out of there and away from the sleazy pimp who had convinced her he was her boyfriend, and she eventually went back to Japan to try and work her life out. So… not a very Anne of Green Gables-like story in the end.

But there’s something in this anecdote about the fact that characters like Anne have a lot of meaning and significance to girls going through difficult situations all around the world. Anne of Green Gables ain’t broke. So don’t fix it.