I am becoming known at work by my books. We get a half
hour break during our shifts. The first day I had one it felt so
long I instantly decided to start bringing a book to work. This has
sparked a number of interesting conversations with my co-workers.
One of them, now that she knows I like reading, will talk to me about
what she is reading and about books in general. When I brought in
Anne of Green Gables the other day she asked me how many times I had
read it before... the best answer I was able to come up with was “a
lot”, and she replied that I seemed like the type of person who
would have read it at least two or three times. Well, she's right!
Another co-worker told me how excited she was to find me reading
“old” literature, like Ivanhoe and Anne of Green Gables. She
also was excited that I was doing it on my own, not for a class.
Apparently she asked another co-worker the other day whether I was
doing it for a class and was told no.
But
anyway-- lately I have been re-reading the Anne of Green Gables
series. Currently I am about halfway through Anne of Avonlea, the
sequel to Anne o Green Gables. For the first time I have noticed
something interesting. I have always noticed that LM Montgomery made
a lot of mistakes in her writing-- but have excused them because she
was so good at telling a story. What I have noticed lately is that her first
book in the series-- the original Anne of Green Gables, it is very
polished and edited and well-written. However, as soon as I started
reading Anne of Avonlea I started noticing the mistakes-- things like
using lots of ellipses, and run-on sentences. I picked up Anne of
Green Gables and glanced through it and I could find barely any
ellipses. Just flipping through any other book in the series and
they jump off the page because there are so many of them.
The
other books in the series are not nearly so polished or edited as the
first one. Why is that? There are several reasons, I believe,
deducing from what I now know from reading the biography of LM Montgomery. Anne of
Green Gables was an outgrowth of LM Montgomery's imagination and
creative impulse; she thoroughly enjoyed writing it and poured a
great deal of love into the story. Thereafter she faced many
rejections as she sent it out to various publishers, until finally
she found a publisher who was willing to take the manuscript, but
with conditions. One of those conditions was that she write
sequels-- something LM Montgomery wasn't particularly anxious to do,
since, as she later wrote, “writing about Anne as an adult wasn't nearly as fun as writing about her as a child.” That's understandable,
from reading the first book and Anne's many and varied adventures.
The first book was probably first polished well by LM Montgomery
herself, so that she could try and find a publisher for it-- but
after the sequels were guaranteed, they didn't need to undergo such a
rigorous editing process. The publisher, also, probably subjected it
to some editing before sending it to press, but after Anne had
achieved popularity their main objective was probably just to pump
books out.
I
think that's kind of sad-- the sequels definitely are not as well
done as the first book, probably for these very reasons-- wanting to
just get them out, and perhaps not caring as much for the sequels as
the original. It reminds me of the Harry Potter books, where
something similar happened. The later books are not all as polished
or well done as the first, because of the deadline that JK Rowling
had to meet and the haste with which the publishers wanted to get
them out. It's too bad. It gives me mixed feelings about sequels.
As much as I love the Anne of Green Gables series, and wouldn't be
without any of the books for a great deal, I wouldn't want to write
any book, or any sequel, if my heart wasn't really in it. At present
all of the ideas I have are stand-alone books, I don't have any
sequels in mind... so we'll see what happens in the future.
