One to keep. One to gift. We’re giving 15% off when you buy two keepsake editions of Anne of Green Gables.
#mykindredspirit
Meet all of the Anne of Green Gables kindred spirits and explore what each of them teaches us about friendship and kindness.
"Kindred spirits are not so scarce as I used to think. It's splendid to find out there are so many of them in the world."
Anne Shirley calls the people she loves best her kindred spirits. A special relationship that goes deeper than friendship, a kindred spirit is someone in whom you recognise a part of your own soul, someone who sees the world as you see it.
Immortalised in the children’s classic Anne of Green Gables, the phrase has endured more than a century because L. M. Montgomery captured something relatable to each reader. A beautiful connection between two friends has no better description.
One to keep. One to gift. We’re giving 15% off when you buy two keepsake editions of Anne of Green Gables.
#mykindredspirit
"I felt that he was a kindred spirit as soon as ever I saw him."
When Matthew Cuthbert pulls his buggy up to the platform at Bright River station, he is expecting to take home a quiet, biddable boy who will help with the farm work. What he gets instead is a scrawny, red-haired girl sitting on a pile of shingles with a battered carpet bag.
Anne Shirley doesn’t wait to be spoken to, instead, she erupts into a long breathless stream of consciousness. Matthew, who has barely spoken to a woman in sixty years and is afraid of nearly everyone, finds he doesn’t want her to ever stop talking.
Matthew is the person who understands Anne best. He understands her before Marilla does, before Diana does, before Anne herself does. He understands her on the drive home from the station when she is still expecting to be sent back. He goes on to understand her, silently, through every scrape and triumph, and his understanding is what, more than anything else, allows her to become the person she was meant to be. Anne tells Matthew on the drive home that she feels he is a kindred spirit, wearing her heart on her sleeve as a matter of policy.
This is the first friendship we read about in Anne of Green Gables, and it shows the importance of immediately recognising the people who matter, even if they begin as unexpected friends, but soon become a kindred spirit.
"I solemnly swear to be faithful to my bosom friend, Diana Barry, as long as the sun and moon shall endure."
One of Anne’s kindred spirits that anchors the book is the one between Anne and Diana Barry. Diana lives over the field at Orchard Slope. She is everything Anne is not. She’s dark-haired, where Anne is ginger, calm, where Anne is excitable, and conventional, where Anne is dreamy. Within an afternoon of their first meeting, they had sworn a solemn oath of friendship.
Up until this point, Anne has spent her entire life being passed between households as an unpaid helper, with only imaginary friends for company. Now, for the first time, there is a real girl who has agreed to be her friend, and Anne treats it with the gravity it deserves.
What makes Anne and Diana’s friendship work all the way through the book is that Diana never treats Anne’s intensity as ridiculous. She does not always understand it, but she is loyal in the absolute, uncomplicated way that kindred spirits are. And Anne, in return, gives Diana unstinting devotion.
Whether you’re starting your own Anne of Green Gables collection or buying for someone who fell for Anne’s story years ago, explore the complete eight-novel series in beautiful matching editions.
"‘We are going to be the best of friends,’ said Gilbert, jubilantly. ‘We were born to be good friends, Anne. You've thwarted destiny enough.’"
The story of how Anne and Gilbert Blythe became kindred spirits is usually told as a romance (as it develops later in the Anne of Green Gables book series), but it is a romance built almost entirely on the architecture of friendship.
Gilbert and Anne meet in the schoolroom. He holds up her red braid and calls her ‘Carrots’. Anne, mortified by her hair and unable to take a joke about it from a stranger, breaks her slate over his head. She refuses to speak to him for almost the entire book. Gilbert apologises sincerely, but Anne does not budge.
What melts the standoff, eventually, is not romance, but the recognition of a true kindred spirit. Anne and Gilbert both turn out to be the best students in the school. They push each other through every exam, every prize. Gilbert is the only person at Avonlea School who can match Anne’s intelligence, and although she would rather die than admit it, she finds his presence in the classroom necessary. By the time they are sixteen and competing for the same scholarship, the rivalry has become a beautiful companionship.
"Dear old world, you are very lovely, and I am glad to be alive in you."
Perhaps the most important of Anne’s kindred spirits is Avonlea itself. She befriends a spring in the hollow at Green Gables the way another child might befriend a doll. She names her landmarks: the Lake of Shining Waters, the White Way of Delight, the Snow Queen, the Dryad’s Bubble. To Anne, the landscape is not scenery against which her life happens, but a whole cast of friends she greets every morning. She personifies its charming character, and it becomes a constant companion throughout her life.
For most of Anne’s childhood, she felt like she didn’t belong, having lost both parents to fever before she was three months old. She was the unpaid help in two unhappy households and was nearly sent back from Green Gables for the crime of being a girl rather than a boy. Despite all this, when she arrives in Avonlea, she decides that her new surroundings (as well as the whole world) are such wonderful and unwavering friends to her that she can’t help but be grateful to be alive.
"For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All 'spirit and fire and dew,' as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity."
Kindness is a driving virtue within Anne. It is not one she has to practice or a quality she works at. It’s the natural consequence of being intensely grateful for all that’s around her and full-heartedly caring for everyone and everything. The kindred spirits in Anne of Green Gables find each other because Anne is the kind of person who moves easily into friendship. Her energy, her love, and her kindness are contagious.
The reason Anne of Green Gables has endured at the heart of literature’s most treasured classics is not due to nostalgia alone, it is that Montgomery wrote a book whose central argument is one we still need. That the most ordinary kindness, the kind that consists in noticing another person closely, taking them seriously, and refusing to stop caring about them, is the foundation of every relationship worth having.
One to Keep, One to Gift
We’re giving 15% off when you buy two keepsake editions of Anne of Green Gables.
The kindred spirits gift set is an invitation not just to revisit a beloved classic, but to honour a friendship.
