A cultural biography of an internationally beloved character as seen through two dozen screen adaptations.

What happens when a fictional character — one who is fiercely beloved by people all over the world — exists in multiple story worlds at once? What happens when there are so many versions of the same story out there that determining which one is the “original” is up for debate? And in the case of Anne Shirley, the title character in L.M. Montgomery’s perennially bestselling novel Anne of Green Gables, what happens when the existence of so many screen adaptations means that viewers everywhere have their own fixed idea of who the “real” Anne is?

In Reimagining Anne: A Century of L.M. Montgomery’s Literary Icon on Screen, long-time Montgomery scholar Benjamin Lefebvre traces the ways in which Anne Shirley has appeared in two dozen adaptations for film, television, and the web released between 1919 and 2019. Involving creative partners in Canada, USA, UK, and Japan, these adaptations all tell — to a point — the same story of a young red-headed orphan who is sent by mistake to aging Prince Edward Island farmer siblings who wanted to adopt a boy. But in terms of what they prune and how they branch out from the source material, these productions tell us something different about the endless story possibilities for this character and about shifting notions of who their viewers are and what they want, expect, and need from this story.