Anne of Green Gables

Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote eight novels and several short story collections in the Anne of Green Gables sequence between 1908 and her death in 1942. The series follows Anne Shirley from her arrival at Green Gables on Prince Edward Island as an eleven-year-old orphan, through her schooling, college years, marriage to Gilbert Blythe, and life raising her own children in the village of Glen St. Mary. The reading order can be the order in which Montgomery wrote them or the chronological order of Anne's life. The two are not the same because the later books fill in earlier periods. The publication-order list runs: Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne's House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), Rilla of Ingleside (1921), Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), Anne of Ingleside (1939). The Blythes Are Quoted, written in 1942 and finally published unabridged in 2009, is a strange dark coda. The Road to Yesterday is a 1974 posthumous short story collection drawn from the same late manuscript. Together the series spans Anne's life from childhood through her own children's young adulthood across two world wars.