14 Books Like Anne of Green Gables You Can Read Free Online
Anne of Green Gables came out in 1908 into a genre that was already flourishing: the orphan-girl novel, in which a sharp-tongued child arrives somewhere she is not wanted and improves it. Montgomery was the best of the writers doing it, but she was far from alone, and because all of them published before 1930, the entire genre is public domain and free to read.
If you have just finished Anne and want the same feeling again, here is what to read, in the order I would read it.
First: finish the Anne series
There are eight Anne books, and the drop-off after the first is much smaller than people assume — Montgomery kept getting better at the quiet stuff even as the plots got busier.
1. Anne of Avonlea — Anne at sixteen, teaching at the school she attended. The Davy chapters are the funniest thing Montgomery wrote. 2. Anne of the Island — university, and the book where the Gilbert question finally gets settled. Most Anne readers name this one as their favourite. 3. Anne's House of Dreams — marriage, and a genuine tonal shift. It contains the series' hardest chapter and does not flinch from it. 4. Rainbow Valley — the next generation, with Anne moved to the edge of her own story. 5. Rilla of Ingleside — Anne's daughter through the First World War, written while it was still recent. It is the best book in the series and almost nobody has read it.
Also set in the same place and worth having: Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea, which are short stories from around the edges of the village.
Then: the rest of Montgomery
Not Anne, but unmistakably the same writer.
- The Story Girl — Montgomery's own favourite of her books. A summer, a group of cousins, and a girl who can hold a room with a story.
- The Golden Road — its sequel, and the better-shaped of the two.
- Kilmeny of the Orchard — a short, strange romance about a girl who cannot speak. Slighter than the rest, and unlike anything else she wrote.
The books Anne was in conversation with
These are the direct genre siblings — some earlier than Anne, some written in her wake, all recognisably the same shelf.
Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm — Kate Douglas Wiggin, 1903, and the closest match on this list. Rebecca predates Anne by five years and Montgomery certainly read her; if you want the exact feeling of Anne again, this is the book. Followed by New Chronicles of Rebecca.
What Katy Did — Susan Coolidge, 1872, and the earliest of the group. Rowdier and less sentimental than its reputation, with a long middle section about illness that is more honest than modern children's fiction usually manages. Continues in What Katy Did at School and What Katy Did Next.
Pollyanna — Eleanor H. Porter, 1913. Its title became an insult, which is unfair to the book: the relentless cheerfulness is a strategy a child uses to survive adults, and the novel knows that even when its imitators did not.
A Little Princess — Frances Hodgson Burnett. Sara Crewe goes from rich to destitute inside one school and holds onto herself, and the attic chapters are as bleak as Victorian children's fiction gets. Burnett also wrote The Secret Garden, which is the better-known book but the colder one.
Mother Carey's Chickens — Wiggin again, a family making a decayed house liveable after a bereavement. Very close in temperature to Anne's House of Dreams.
Louisa May Alcott, if you want more of the family-warmth register
Alcott is upstream of all of this. Little Women needs no introduction, but the ones after it are underread and are where the writing is loosest and best: An Old-Fashioned Girl is the sharpest thing she wrote about class, Eight Cousins and its sequel Rose in Bloom follow one girl and seven boy cousins over years, and Little Men and Jo's Boys carry the March family forward.
Two you would not think to look for
- Homespun Tales — Wiggin's three short New England novels in one volume; the middle one, The Old Peabody Pew, is a small masterpiece about a church congregation.
- The Diary of a Goose Girl — Wiggin doing light comedy about an Englishwoman pretending to be a farm hand. Sixty pages, and funnier than it has any need to be.
All of it is free
Every book above is in the public domain and in the BingeReaders free library, readable in the browser with nothing to install and no account needed to start. For everything by one writer: L. M. Montgomery, Kate Douglas Wiggin, Louisa May Alcott, Susan Coolidge and Frances Hodgson Burnett.
If you would rather browse by feel than by author, there are 39 books about girls and 26 orphan novels in the library, which between them cover most of this genre's territory.