All the Anne of Green Gables Books in Order 

The book that started it all, Anne of Green Gables tells of the arrival of the orphaned Anne Shirley to Green Gables farm on Prince Edward Island at the age of 11. Anne is excited to finally have a family of her own when she is adopted by the Cuthbert siblings, only to discover that they got her by mistake when they were expecting a boy. 

Nonetheless, Anne settles into life in her new home, making friends (and enemies) at school, and gradually winning over the hearts of her adoptive family—not to mention readers all over the world.

At sixteen, Anne has taken a position as the only schoolteacher in her small community. Unfortunately, though she has joined the “important” and “grown up” people of Avonlea, helping to start the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, she still seems to get into many of her usual scrapes, including selling a neighbor’s cow when she mistakes it for her own, or getting stuck in the roof of the duck house while trying to peep in a pantry window. 

The first of several sequels to Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea shows the form that the series will take, following Anne’s life (and the lives of those around her) as she grows up.

For the first time since her arrival at Green Gables, Anne has departed Avonlea to attend college in Nova Scotia, which was also where she was born. Discovering that you can’t go home again, however, Anne finds new adventures and old loves while she is away at school, and discovers that her heart belongs to Avonlea, the only place that truly feels like home. 

Though Anne of Green Gables is often seen as a children’s book and is taught in classrooms all over the world, readers are given a chance to grow with Anne, and by the end of this third novel she has graduated from college and gotten engaged.

The fourth Anne of Green Gables book (though the fifth chronologically), Anne’s House of Dreams begins with Anne’s wedding and sees her moving to a new community at Four Winds Point. Here, she meets a new cast of characters and begins a family who will occupy several of the subsequent books in the series. 

After the first few Anne books, Montgomery wrote that she was “flooded with letters” asking for more, though she initially struggled to expand Anne’s story. By 1917, however, this fourth book was published, with four more on the way over the subsequent years.

Between the 1917 publication of Anne’s House of Dreams and the 1919 publication of Rainbow Valley, much has changed within Anne’s world. While the previous novels followed Anne’s growth fairly closely, this one leaps ahead by more than a decade. 

Now in her forties, Anne has been married for 15 years and has six children, who become the main focus of this latest novel. 

Life had changed for Lucy Maud Montgomery, too. In 1911, she had married Ewen Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and had gone to live with him at Leaksdale manse in Ontario, where she wrote most of her books, and which heavily inspired the setting of Rainbow Valley.

Taking place last (chronologically) of all the Green Gables novels, Rilla of Ingleside focuses on Anne’s youngest daughter, Bertha Marilla “Rilla” Blythe, who has just turned 15. 

Unfortunately for her, a life of simple pleasures is about to be thrown into chaos as war has broken out in Europe, and most of the young men in her community are departing for the front lines. Among its various historical notables, Rilla of Ingleside has been hailed as the first Canadian novel written from a woman’s perspective about the First World War, and it was originally published in 1921, while the wounds of the war were still fresh.

Filling in some of the gaps left earlier in the series, Anne of Windy Poplars technically takes place between Anne of the Island and Anne’s House of Dreams, during Anne’s courtship with her future husband while he is attending medical school and she works as the principal of Summerside High. 

Despite this, Anne of Windy Poplars was not published until more than a decade after Rilla of Ingleside. Unlike many of the other books in the series, Anne of Windy Poplars is largely an epistolary novel, composed of letters written by Anne to her fiancé.

The last of the Anne novels published during the author’s lifetime, Anne of Ingleside didn’t see print until 1939, though chronologically it takes place between Anne’s House of Dreams and Rainbow Valley. 

Like the latter novel, it is primarily focused on Anne’s various children, with most of them getting their own “solo” plotlines. It also examines the relationship between Anne and her husband across nearly a decade of marriage. It was the last novel that Lucy Maud Montgomery published, though several other short stories have also involved characters from the Anne novels.