Anne of Hooker Gables

If you and your friends are anything like me and mine, you are probably always having the argument of "Who is the best Canadian Lady (Besides Shania Twain)?"  Of course it always comes down to Margaret Atwood vs. Alice Munro.  Margaret Atwood is notorious for being grumpy and disagreeable, which is why I tend to come out on her side.  My judgment is only reinforced by this great Atwood essay from Saturday's Guardian "celebrating" the hundred-year anniversary of fellow Canadian Anne of Green Gables-- who is herself only disqualified from the great Canadian lady contest by the technicalities of being fictional and growing up to be really boring.

Of course, Margaret Atwood-- being Margaret Atwood-- is less interested in how Anne managed to melt the heart of mean old Marilla and win over Gilbert Blythe and more interested in why Anne was not a slatternly petrie dish for scary Victorian sex diseases:

"In my sourer moments, I confess to having imagined yet another Anne sequel, to be called Anne Goes on the Town. This would be a grim, Zolaesque epic that would chronicle the poor girl's enticement by means of puffed sleeves, then her sexual downfall and her subsequent brutal treatment at the hands of harsh male clients. Then would follow the pilfering of her ill-got though hard-earned gains by an evil madam, her dull despair self-medicated by alcohol and opium-smoking, and her sufferings from the ravages of an incurable STD. The final chapter would contain some Traviata-like coughing, her early and ugly death, and her burial in an unmarked grave, with nothing to mark the passing of this waif with a heart of gold but a volley of coarse jokes from her former customers. However, the presiding genius of Anne is not the gritty grey Angel of Realism, but the rainbow-coloured, dove-winged Godlet of the Heart's Desire."

Happy 100th birthday, Red Hair Anne!

The Guardian via Gwenda Bond.