Anne of Green Gables Books in Order

Below is the complete list of Anne of Green Gables books in order of publication. This is the recommended reading sequence for the series by L.M. Montgomery.

Anne Shirley Series

1. Anne of Green Gables (1908)
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2. Anne of Avonlea (1909)
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3. Anne of the Island (1915)
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4. Anne’s House of Dreams (1917)
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5. Rainbow Valley (1919)
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6. Rilla of Ingleside (1921)
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7. Anne of Windy Poplars / Anne of Windy Willows (1936)
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8. Anne of Ingleside (1939)
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9. Before Green Gables (2008)
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About Anne of Green Gables Series

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne books are often spoken of as though they were one continuous childhood story, but the series is much richer and more varied than that reputation suggests. What begins in Anne of Green Gables as the story of an imaginative orphan arriving at Green Gables grows into a long, gently shifting portrait of adulthood, vocation, marriage, motherhood, loss, and memory. Publication order matters because the books do not simply repeat Anne’s charm in different settings. They allow her life to move forward, and the real pleasure of the series lies in watching that movement happen naturally.

The first novel remains the emotional key to everything that follows. Anne Shirley’s arrival at Green Gables is one of the most memorable entrances in children’s literature because Montgomery gives her such vivid imaginative force from the start. Anne is impulsive, talkative, romantic, proud, easily wounded, and utterly incapable of making herself ordinary. But the book lasts not just because Anne is lovable. It lasts because Montgomery understands what Anne’s imagination means. It is not a decorative quirk. It is Anne’s way of transforming loneliness, embarrassment, and uncertainty into something survivable. Green Gables becomes home not only because Anne is welcomed there, but because she remakes it through feeling and language.

That first book can make the series look lighter and more static than it really is. In fact, the Anne sequence grows steadily broader. Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island move her from adolescence into teaching and then into young adulthood, while later books such as Anne’s House of Dreams and Anne of Ingleside shift the center from personal coming-of-age to marriage, home-making, and family life. Read in order, the books reveal that Montgomery was not merely preserving Anne as a girl readers would always want to keep young. She was allowing her to age. That choice gives the series much of its quiet power.

Another reason publication order matters is that the books deepen Prince Edward Island from a picturesque setting into a lived world. Avonlea, Kingsport, Four Winds, Ingleside, and the wider communities around Anne become more emotionally textured over time. Montgomery is exceptionally good at making place feel intimate without making it small. Her landscapes are full of beauty, but they are also full of gossip, memory, grief, domestic routine, and social expectation. The series is often remembered for its brightness, and that brightness is real, but it sits alongside disappointment, illness, separation, and the simple sadness of time passing.

Gilbert Blythe is also a major reason the books reward being read in sequence. In the earliest Anne novel, he begins almost as comic irritation and slow-burning possibility. Later, he becomes part of the deeper emotional structure of the series. Their relationship works because Montgomery lets it mature gradually. It is not imposed too early or too neatly. The later books gain much of their warmth from the fact that readers have already watched these two characters move from rivalry into companionship and then into a shared life.

One important point of clarity is that the Anne series is not limited only to Anne herself. By the later books, the center of gravity widens, especially toward her children and the younger generation. That is not a weakening of the series but part of its design. Montgomery is turning Anne’s story into a family world, and the emotional effect depends on having followed Anne from the beginning. Even books that place less emphasis on Anne’s direct point of view still feel shaped by her presence and by the life she has built.

For readers who already have the list above, the best way to think about the Anne books is as a true life-sequence rather than a set of loosely related children’s classics. Read in publication order, they become more than the story of one irresistible girl. They form a long, graceful portrait of how imagination survives contact with adulthood, and how the qualities that make Anne unforgettable as a child become something deeper, sadder, and in many ways more beautiful as she grows older.