More Anne, With an E, in Us

My mom is eighty-five. A canceled Canadian show we found on a random Saturday put a talkative orphan girl beside Mozart, Charles Foster Kane, and Babette, for a reason none of them shares.

On the road to Green Gables, Anne crowns the world before it has decided whether to keep her. Image created by Robert Meyers-Lussier with assistance from ChatGPT, 2026.

My mom is eighty-five and long retired. As her primary caretaker, I try to keep her well and entertained, and she loves to watch television. I could just as easily listen to music or read a good book, so my task every evening is to find something good, or at least fun, for us to watch. We get lucky sometimes and find something that entertains us. We rarely find something that transports us. Until last Saturday, when I stumbled onto Anne with an E.

It was not even new. It came out in 2017, ran three seasons, and finished years ago. It was also Canadian, while Mom usually loves her British shows, but this was different almost immediately. *Anne with an E* reached us to the core. A show about a redheaded orphan on a farm in Prince Edward Island somehow had me thinking about everything, about being alive, about a handful of characters across film who have moved me in the same way, and about one thing this show does that none of them quite do. So I do not want to review it, exactly. I want to share what happened to us, and why a show I found almost by accident sent me back through a lifetime of films that helped make me who I am.

There is a moment in *Amadeus when Salieri (the film’s antagonist) describes hearing Mozart’s music for the first time. He is looking at the ink on the page, and what undoes him is that there are no corrections. The music arrived complete. It poured out of the man faster than the world could absorb it, and Salieri, who wanted nothing in life but to make something beautiful, understood in an instant that he was in the presence of a force he would never possess and could never forgive. I think about that scene when I watch Anne with an E*.

The comparison is unconventional, for sure. A wild Salzburg genius and a talkative orphan girl do not, at first glance, belong in the same sentence. But the longer I sit with both of them, the more I am convinced they are the same kind of person wearing different clothes. Not because of what they accomplish, because that would be absurd. Because of how they are alive.

The Coronation

Watch Anne’s first hour on Prince Edward Island, and you will see what I mean. She is an orphan nobody wanted, riding in a buggy beside a silent stranger, toward a home that may yet send her back. She has nothing, no family, no certainty, no claim on the next morning, and what does she do? She renames the world. An avenue of apple blossoms becomes the White Way of Delight. A pond becomes the Lake of Shining Waters. She has every reason to be terrified, and instead she crowns everything she passes, because plain names are not enough for a world this beautiful, and she refuses to pretend otherwise. That is not a coping mechanism. That is a coronation. It remains one of the most alive things I have ever seen a character do on a screen.

The show gives her more moments like that, but they do not feel like repetitions. They feel like evidence. She names the cherry tree outside her window the Snow Queen, as though a tree deserved a title. She befriends a wild fox and stands between it and the hunt, because a living thing is a living thing. She receives a dress with puffed sleeves from Matthew, a man who can barely finish a sentence, and treats it not as fabric but as proof that someone saw what she dreamed of and went and got it. She is grateful for every single thing she is given, the room, the brooch, the second chance, with a wholeheartedness that shames those of us who were given more and noticed less. Her wonder is not reserved for scenery. It is for every living thing, and most of all for the people who love her, whom she loves back with the same extravagance she spends on apple blossoms.

And then there is the locket. She befriends a grifter passing through, someone polite society would still know how to dismiss. No matter, the grifter presents her with some of his wares, for sale, of course. Anne has no money and lets him know. She falls in love with a golden locket, but it’s broken. Where anyone else would see junk, Anne sees treasure, because broken means it is special. Broken means there is a story. He simply hands it to her, a gift from a complete stranger and grifter, no less. Later, she goes to give it to Diana, but as she does, it slips, falls, and breaks in half on the floor. The two of them laugh, and each keeps half. A broken gift, broken again, becomes the truest token of friendship in the whole series. That is Anne entirely. Nothing is ruined if you love it. Everything broken has a story. And the story is better shared.

Nothing is ruined if you love it. Everything broken has a story. And the story is better shared.

A Constellation of the Fully Alive

Once I saw her beside Mozart, I started seeing her everywhere. Miss Jean Brodie in her prime, in *The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie. Archie Hamilton running toward the guns at the Nek in [Gallipoli](https://www.netflix.com/title/531893). The whole tribe of [Hair](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/hair), singing the sun into a city that wanted them in uniform. Even Charles Foster Kane of [Citizen Kane](https://www.justwatch.com/us/movie/citizen-kane), before the marble closed over him. These films sit among the loves of my moviegoing life, and I do not mean that casually. Every one of them was a substantial impetus in my life. Gallipoli moved me so deeply that it helped send me into the Army. Hair* shaped what I chose to publish for the two years I edited my high school’s literary magazine. I am a teacher, and Brodie touched my raison d’être itself. And yet a television show about an orphan girl keeps standing beside them. Not as a precise match. More like the center of a constellation, where each star catches a different facet of the same light. Anne tells me something about all of them, and they tell me something about her.

The Gift and the Offense

Mozart cannot stop the music. Anne cannot stop the words. He giggles in the wrong rooms, says the unsayable thing to the wrong patron, and refuses to perform the modesty his world demands of him. She talks too much, feels too loudly, imagines too hard, and will not shrink any of it to make the matrons of Avonlea comfortable. In both of them, the magnificent thing and the socially offensive thing are not two traits. They are one trait. You cannot separate Mozart’s brilliance from his refusal to behave. You cannot separate Anne’s radiance from her refusal to be smaller.

This is what the ‘polite’ world never understands. It wants the gift without the inconvenience. It wants the music without the laugh, the imagination without the chatter, the wonder without the disruption. But the overflow is the gift. The inability to ration yourself is the gift. The moment you teach a person to hold it back, you have not refined them. You have dimmed them.

The overflow is the gift. The inability to ration yourself is the gift. The moment you teach a person to hold it back, you have not refined them. You have dimmed them.

How the Fire Goes Out

That same intensity moves differently through the others. Salieri recognizes Mozart’s genius better than anyone alive, and that recognition destroys him, because he sees what he will never possess and cannot forgive its existence. Mozart is admired, used, praised, envied, and finally abandoned, but he is rarely loved simply as a person.

Archie Hamilton carries it differently, a champion sprinter whose running in Gallipoli feels almost like flight. He enlists not out of bloodlust but out of overflowing vitality, the belief that the world is large and that he belongs out in it. He runs toward war the way Anne runs toward an ordinary Tuesday, with his whole heart, and the machine takes him. At the Nek, in the machinery of the First World War, he is frozen mid-stride, arms wide, killed while he is still running. There is no villain large enough to hold the blame. Just the gray administrative machinery of empire, too vast to notice what it is burning.

Miss Jean Brodie is the fire curdled outward. “I am in my prime,” she insists, pouring her intensity into her girls like a transfusion, wanting to enlarge them. That much is pure Anne. But her vividness curdles into a vanity that cannot distinguish between inspiring a young person and remaking one in her own image. The force that should have set her girls free becomes a way of owning them.

Hair is the only exception in this constellation, the one moment where the intensity is not carried alone. The whole tribe chooses exuberance, sensuality, and freedom as a stance against a culture that wants them marching in formation. “Let the sunshine in” is “scope for imagination” scaled to a generation, and the world answers their joy with a draft notice, because a person who lives at full volume cannot easily be conscripted into a small life, and a tribe of them threatens the machine itself.

And then there is Charles Foster Kane, the darkest reading of all, because the world does not kill him. It gives him everything. The young Kane taking over the Inquirer is pure abundance, exuberant and principled and overflowing, writing his Declaration of Principles, certain he can fill the world with himself and make it better. Then the world rewards him with fortune, newspapers, power, palaces, and, finally, isolation. The force that should have been a gift becomes hunger. Love is no longer something he gives. It becomes something he demands. He builds Xanadu around himself like a tomb and ends alone in an empty castle, whispering the name of the one moment when he was loved without owning anything. Rosebud. The sled. The self he had before the world gave him everything and took the only thing that mattered.

Kane is the warning the others cannot give. The fire can destroy itself. Aliveness, unmoored from love, does not only get crushed from outside. It can collapse inward into a black hole that swallows the one who carries it.

Surrounded

Here is the thread I almost missed, and it is the only one that matters. Every one of those figures is, finally, alone. Mozart has admirers, but almost no one who first loves him as a person and asks nothing in return. Archie has mates, but the world that owns him feels nothing for him. Brodie has girls she wants to possess, not people she lets be free. Kane buys a world and cannot purchase a single soul who loves him for himself. The fire burns in solitude and goes out in solitude. What kills them is not only envy or war or vanity or appetite. Underneath all of it, no one was there who simply loved them, as a person, first and always.

Anne is different. She is not protected, exactly. She is surrounded. And the show keeps widening that circle on purpose, in every storyline. Marilla and Matthew, fumbling and unprepared, choose her anyway. Diana crosses the line of class and expectation to love her. Cole, who is gay in a town with no language for him, finds in Anne and Aunt Josephine a place to simply exist. Bash and Mary are made central, made family, refused the margins. Aunt Josephine lives openly in the memory of the woman she loved. The Indigenous children the story will not let us forget were stolen and remain a wound in the landscape, and the show insists that the line we draw around “people like us” is a lie. The show keeps returning to the same truth from different directions: before category, before class, before usefulness, before fear, there is the person. Always the person.

That is what separates Anne from all the others. It is not a small distinction. It is the entire moral architecture. The tragedies show us what happens to the fire when the human community fails it. Anne shows us what happens when the community holds it. She survives because the people around her come to believe, fumblingly, imperfectly, but truly, that a person is owed love and belonging as a birthright, not as a reward for being acceptable. The others die, or harden, or hollow out, because no one around them knew how to love the fire without using it, fearing it, shaping it, or trying to own it.

A person is owed love and belonging as a birthright, not as a reward for being acceptable.

The Wattage While the Life Runs

I do not want to compare how their stories end. That is the wrong question. Endings belong to fate, and fate is not the subject here. The subject is intensity. The subject is the wattage while the life runs. None of them rations. None of them holds anything back for safety or for later. Mozart composes as if the music is pouring through him faster than his hand can catch it. Archie runs as though the finish line were the only fact in the world. Brodie spends herself on her girls without measure. The tribe gives everything to the moment because the moment is all they trust. Kane, before power hollows him out, throws himself at the world with almost terrifying abundance. And Anne meets an ordinary Tuesday on Prince Edward Island as though it were worthy of her whole heart.

That is the shared thing. Not genius, which is unevenly distributed and mostly beside the point. Not innocence, because several of them are not innocent at all. Not even goodness. The shared thing is their conviction that being alive is something you do, deliberately and abundantly, not something that merely happens to you while you wait. “Scope for imagination,” Anne calls it. Mozart would have called it music. It is the same gesture. A person insisting that the world is more than the world admits, and refusing to live as though it were less.

Babette’s Table

There is one more film in my stack of life-changing art, and it does not belong to the constellation. It belongs beside Anne herself. *Babette’s Feast* is not about the fire at all, not the way the others are. It is about what the fire does to people who bolt the door against it. A French refugee washes up in a gray village on the Danish coast and spends fourteen years cooking plain food for two pious sisters and a congregation that has renounced pleasure as a matter of principle. These are people who have organized their entire lives around not changing. Then Babette wins the lottery, and instead of buying her way home to Paris, she spends every franc on a single feast, for people who resolve in advance not to enjoy it, not even to speak of the food. And the meal transforms them anyway. Old grudges dissolve between courses. A love abandoned thirty years earlier is finally spoken aloud. Grace arrives at a table full of people who locked the door against it, because the gift was too complete to refuse.

That is Avonlea. That is Marilla above all, a woman who wanted a boy for farm work, who built her whole life around wanting nothing, around duty as a defense against feeling, and a girl arrives whom she never asked for, and Marilla is loved into a change she had no intention of undergoing. Rachel Lynde. The matrons. The schoolroom. The whole closed town. None of them requested an Anne. None of them wanted to be enlarged. She enlarges them anyway, never by argument, but the way Babette does it, by pouring herself out so completely that refusal becomes impossible. Babette’s medium is the feast. Anne’s is herself, served daily, course after course, to people who keep insisting they are not hungry.

Babette, asked why she spent everything, says that an artist is never poor. Anne would understand that in her bones. Both of them give from an abundance the world cannot find on any ledger, because the abundance is them. The gift costs everything and depletes nothing. And Babette resolves something the constellation could not. The lesson of Anne’s story is that she survives because she is surrounded by love. Babette is the proof of the other half. The surrounded one is also the surrounder. The person being saved by the circle is, at the same time, the feast the circle is being saved by. Marilla shelters Anne. Anne transforms Marilla. It was never one direction.

I owe Babette a debt of my own. The film reached me in 1989, on VHS, while I was a soldier stationed in Augsburg, Germany. Gallipoli had helped send me into the Army; Babette found me there. I watched it and immediately started cooking. Before I left active duty, I had prepared seven multi-course feasts for my barracks mates, each night a different culinary adventure, French one evening, Greek the next, and on through the map. A barracks is not so far from a gray Jutland village, and I understood the film the only way it asks to be understood, by setting a table. I have been cooking for others ever since: through a cookbook, a podcast, and eventually the larger body of food and creative work that grew from both. One film. One woman pouring everything into a meal for people who never asked for it. It rearranged my life. That is what art at this level does. And it is what this show is doing to me now.

The Circle Around the Fire

I watch this show with my eighty-five-year-old mother, who loves it without reservation. I convinced my sister to watch. My sister convinced her husband, who came to it skeptical and stayed for the same reason the rest of us did. Four people, two generations, a reluctant brother-in-law, all pulled into the orbit of one orphan girl. That is not an accident. The show models the very belonging it preaches, and watching it together has become part of what the story means. We are not only watching Anne be loved into herself. We are sitting together while it happens. We are becoming, in a small way, the circle around the fire.

So when I say we all need more Anne in us, I do not mean only that we should burn brighter. I mean something more specific now. I find myself wanting to be the people around Anne. I want to be the love that surrounds the fire and keeps it alive. I want to be the person who does not snatch the gift away, who does not reduce another human being to usefulness, who sees the person before the performance, the wound, the difference, the noise, the inconvenience, the history.

The invitation was never only about intensity. Kane had every advantage and still got it wrong. Anne had almost nothing and got it right, because she never stopped loving more than she wanted to be loved, and because someone, finally, loved her first in a way that gave her room to become herself. Everyone is a fire. Mozart, Archie, Brodie, the tribe, Kane, Anne, all of them, and all of us. And every fire needs people who see the person before they see anything else, who look past every line ever drawn to divide us, and love what they find on the other side.

That is what Green Gables gave Anne that the world gave none of the others. Not shelter. Shelter without love is only a bigger cage, and Kane proved it. What Anne got was to be seen as a person, first and always, and loved into a self. We do not get to live their lives. But we do get to be the surrounding love. We get to be the reason someone’s fire does not go out. That is what this show woke in me, and it is the most generous invitation there is. It does not leave me admiring Anne from a distance. It leaves me wanting to love somebody the way she was loved.

We do not get to live their lives. But we do get to be the surrounding love. We get to be the reason someone’s fire does not go out.

More Anne, with an E, in us. All of us.

© 2026 Robert Meyers-Lussier. All rights reserved.