Anne with an "e." Anne-girl. Anne Shirley. "Carrots."

Whatever name you heard first, we bet you've heard of Anne of Green Gables…because everyone wants a piece of this fictional redheaded orphan girl. There's an Anne-related wiki. There have been several movie adaptations. There's a musical. People from around the world flock to the island where Anne of Green Gables was set, even though Avonlea was never a real town.

She's a full-fledged, superhero-level celebrity.

…which is funny, because Anne's no superhero. She doesn't save the world, or her home country of Canada, or become famous. She's just an orphan who grows up in a small late 19th Century farm village, and gets into funny "scrapes." So how did this character's story get so famous? And how did that kind of fame last a whole century?

It wasn't as if author L.M. Montgomery was onto something totally new. Leading up to this book's 1908 publication, fictional stories about orphans were common in both novels (David Copperfield, anyone?) and in popular magazines.

But when these orphan stories were about girls, they had a formula:

• A female orphan offers a service to someone lonely—a single person or widow.
• She'll clean for them or watch young children, and she might help them with a problem or save them from illness over the course of the story.
• The grown-up grows to like her, and at the end, decides to keep her. (Check out a book called Looking for Anne of Green Gables: The Story of L.M. Montgomery and her Literary Classic for more on this.)

And one little redhead emerged on the scene to break this formula into smithereens.

Anne's the very opposite of a serviceable child. She daydreams, she messes up the housework, and she has a temper. In other words, she's a kid. When Marilla comments on how it doesn't make sense to keep Anne because she won't be useful, Matthew counters with, "We might be some good to her." (3.62)

While we might say "Right?" now, this was a new idea in 1908. It came during Progressivism, a movement of reformers who believed that children had the right to a childhood with limited labor. The orphan stories that followed Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna in 1913, and Little Orphan Annie in the '20s followed Montgomery's lead. They told stories about children changing the lives of the people around them because of their personalities, not the services they offered.

Anne's a dreamer. She's a smart, imaginative girl in a bad situation, and readers get the satisfaction of watching her grow into a self-assured woman, because Matthew and Marilla gave her that chance. It's a celebration of adoption, and of taking chances on people—the good things that might happen to you if you just let them in.

Hoo boy. Where to start?

You'll probably care a whole lot if you're into literary fame—Anne of Green Gables is one of the reasons that more than 125,000 tourists flock to the tiny Canadian isle of Prince Edward Island each year.

Or you might care that Anne of Green Gables is big in Japan—it spawned a beloved Anne of Green Gables anime series.

But we think all that's secondary to the real reason Anne is so enduring—its heroine's total spunkiness.

Anne Shirley is a girl that comes from nothing. She has no parents. She has no money. She has no skills—she's all of eleven. And she's dropped into a family that has no use for her.

But by the end of the book she has everything she lacked before: she belongs, she's loved, and she's found her identity.

And how does she get there? Not by being a goody-two-shoes, that's for sure. She gets everything she dreams of (with a few misadventures and heartbreaks along the way) by being bigger than life, dreamy, forgetful, chatty, and deeply weird.

In short, she's an inspiration for girls everywhere that have been told that the way to get ahead is to be meek, pretty, and neat.

And she's not just inspiring bookish girls, either. During WWII, copies of Anne of Green Gables were issued to Polish soldiers. No; we're not joking—it was decided that the best companion a Polish soldier could have on the front lines was a literary heroine who spoke her mind and stood up to injustice in a small Canadian town. (Source)

We should also revisit that whole "big in Japan" thing. Because when we say "big," we mean massive:

In Japan, [Anne of Green Gables] remains so popular that some Japanese businessmen recently signed a contract to import more than $1.4 million worth of potatoes from Prince Edward Island upon being told that the potatoes hailed from the same place as Anne. (Source)

Yeah. When a kid's book inspires businessmen to ship $1.4 million (in 1986 dollars) worth of spuds halfway across the world, you know it's a mega-hit. And the reason why Anne's popularity soared was because of Anne's spirit—when Anne of Green Gables hit Japanese bookstores, the country was still reeling from the aftermath of the atomic bombs. The idea of an orphan prevailing through high spirits and optimism was inspiring and comforting. (Source)

So pick up a copy of Anne of Green Gables (just avoid that one weird cover that shows Anne as a sultry blond instead of a waifish carrot-top) and get to reading. When a heroine has inspired Polish soldiers, Japanese businessman and countless generations of normal, everyday girls alike…you know she's got to be worth getting to know.