Female Ambition in Montgomery's Books

I am planning a reread of the Emily series soon. The last time I read them, I started the first book in the late afternoon and stayed up to an ungodly hour reading to the last one — which was marvelous as an experience, but which has also left me with something of a blurry picture of the story itself.

One thing I do think I remember, however, was that Emily's ambitions are fulfilled before she is married... while Anne's aspirations don't ever seem to be completely fulfilled. Anne goes to college, teaches, and then marries Gilbert and they start having children. Doesn't Emily reach her dreams before getting married?

I don't consider myself a feminist, at least not in the modern usage of the term, and I'm not trying to be subversive and snarky about Montgomery's books at all (perish the thought!). I'm just rather curious about how Montgomery's fans feel about the presence of female ambition in the stories and if you feel there is too much/not enough of it.

I guess my question is, which heroine do you prefer? Did Anne ever have specific goals she wanted to accomplish? Which of the two, Emily and Anne, do you think Montgomery herself would have preferred to be? Which would you prefer to be... and why?

It's been such a long time since I've read the Emily books that frankly, I don't remember what her ambitions were. And, I have a tendency to get the Emily books mixed up with the Pat books.

I always thought that Anne's main goal was to be part of a loving family although having a good education was also important to her. She accomplished both. She expressed that she wanted to be a writer and she did get her book published. I don't recall her expressing any other goals so please correct me if I missed something. The fact that she didn't seem to pursue her writing after her marriage doesn't necessarily mean that she left her goals unfulfilled. It could mean that she changed her goals. Writing may no longer have been important to her.

I guess I identify with Anne more in that aspect. I once thought I wanted to be a writer but as I got older, it no longer appealed to me. I've never been career-oriented. Just work to pay the bills. :p

I believe that Montgomery identified more with Emily as I always did when younger, although my life turned out more like Anne's. I think Maud had tremendous ambition, but it was smothered by gloomy, demanding grandparents, and then a bi-polar husband whose illness she worked very hard to keep hidden from the congregation. She led a very unhappy life and it's always impressed me no end that she managed a household, was a successful minister's wife (an mentally ill minister), a mother as well as being a successful author in a time when having an outside career was not exactly applauded. She certainly had backbone!

Newsweek recently published an article about Montgomery's work that discusses a bit of feminism in Anne... check it out here... http://www.newsweek.com/id/147758. Hopefully the link will work. If it doesn't, the article is called "It's Still Not Easy Being Green" by Ramin Setoodeh.

Here's a highlight from it:

For those of you who've been too busy with "Harry Potter" to bother with "Anne," a primer: "Anne of Green Gables" opens with the Cuthberts, Marilla and Matthew, elderly siblings who want to take in a boy to help with the farm work. But the orphanage sends Anne by mistake. Marilla reluctantly adopts her anyway, and the novel is a wholesome parable about how girls are not only as good as boys, they're better, at least when it comes to wit and intelligence. Lucy Maud Montgomery wrote eight Anne books—the last was published in 1939, but the pigtailed farm girl still seems modern. She's witty and intelligent, like a Jane Austen protagonist. She turns down several marriage proposals and won't settle when it comes to love (like Carrie Bradshaw); she's stubbornly optimistic (Hillary Clinton) and unapologetically fashionable (Audrey Hepburn). And she's funny. She accidentally dyes her hair green—a move straight from the Lucille Ball handbook—and also sneaks into a neighbor's house, only to get stuck falling through the roof. That gag was recycled by Teri Hatcher on "Desperate Housewives."