I PANICKED – MY HAIR WAS THINNING!
Maya was shocked by the change in her hair. Fullness and volume were replaced by thinness and lifeless hair. She had to do something.
The “hair I found in my brush, in the shower and on my cardigan was unfamiliar to me. It was thinning like never before. How could this be happening?
I HAD TO DO SOMETHING
I found out my mother experienced the same problems when she was younger, and she accepted her fate. But much of my personality is in my hair, and I did not want to have the same problems. I read about the importance of hair nutrients, so I went looking for a good supplement.
MY HAIR NOW FEELS FULLER
I was recommended a natural product from Sweden called Hair Volume™, which contained a special apple extract. I have now used this supplement for 2 months and I am really satisfied. My hair feels full and healthy and even my nails feel stronger. The best part is that the shedding has almost stopped. This is proof to me that proper nutrition on the inside helps you look your best on the outside.
I highly recommend Hair Volume to women who want to promote full and beautiful hair.”
at that time,” de Pencier says. And while the books were the main source of inspiration, the two also talked a lot about how her challenges are relevant today and fleshed out peripheral characters to broaden the scope. Walley-Beckett thinks Anne’s issues “are contemporary issues: feminism, prejudice, bullying and a desire to belong. The stakes are high, and her emotional journey is tumultuous.” If the result isn’t exactly Walter White’s world, it’s definitely not your grandmother’s cosy Avonlea either.
I dipped into a few of the drier academic texts like The Annotated Anne but found the most inspiration in a book the L.M. Montgomery Institute at UPEI published on her centenary: an annotated folio reproduction of Montgomery’s fragile personal scrapbooks. Beginning in her girlhood, Montgomery added to them on the Island later as she was writing the books, and they contain pressed flowers, bits of ribbon and the latest fashion plates glued in alongside poems, dance cards, news clippings and matriculation results. There are also images of mischievous Titian-haired model Evelyn Nesbit, the model for the Gibson girl and later the focus of a scandalous New York murder trial, who shaped Montgomery’s image of Anne (the Nesbit portrait by illustrator George Gibbs adorns the 1908 first edition).
In the wake of pundits on CNN and Fox being dismissive of Teen Vogue’s astute, pointed and, frankly, often bolder political commentary and openly sneering at its source, Montgomery’s equal interests in education, poetry, flowers and fashion refreshingly reinforces how girls contain multitudes. Actually, never mind girls – so do women. From
The Good Wife to discussion of former U.S. first lady Michelle Obama, the prevailing bias today is still that any interest in beauty and style is incompatible with seriousness of purpose, and Anne’s appreciation of beauty in the natural world, her excellence at school and her longing for puffed sleeves are the rebuttal.
So is her tenacity in the ambition to become a female intellectual, written by Montgomery at a time before women’s right to vote. It’s just one of the many permissions Anne bestows by example. Chief among these is an important and, I think, formative detail whose full force only strikes me decades after my initial reading. While Anne is (as Mark Twain famously called her) a “most lovable heroine,” she is not always a likeable one. It’s Anne who comes to mind now when I see complicated charac- ters, like the one in Claire Messud’s book The Woman Upstairs. (When it was published, the author had to swat down the suggestion that readers should want to be friends with literary protagonists.) Or as American feminist Roxane Gay writes in her novel An Untamed State: “I am not easy to love but I am well loved.”
Back on the Anne set, it’s not lost on me that a troika of women is in charge of this project and that episode directors include Patricia Rozema and Helen Shaver. I later commiserate with the Anne pilot’s director Niki Caro about how relatively few female heroines there are of a certain age. Caro has an affinity with girl characters and their spiritedness – the filmmaker’s own Whale Rider is in the same vein, about a Maori girl challenging a patrilineal society. Caro had no cultural baggage about the character because, growing up in New Zealand, she had not been aware of the books. “What resonates for me as an adult female is that desire for a home,” Caro says, “the desire to be loved, to be seen, to be heard. The right to be educated and to have a voice.” She’s speaking generally because while preparing her film The Zookeeper’s Wife, the true story of the Polish zookeepers’ role in sheltering Jews during the Holocaust, Caro was surprised to discover Anne was also an inspiring text for the Warsaw Uprising.
These aren’t the sorts of connections about Anne’s appeal that children necessarily make at the time, but they jump out when I revisit the proto-feminist Miss Anne Shirley now. She gives a voice to what others think but daren’t say out loud, balances a desire to fit in even as she yearns for independence, and sees the beauty and possibility in people and in the world. Were she on Twitter today, the headstrong, dissonant girl of that first book who challenges norms and assumptions might hashtag herself a #nastywoman. And she’d wear it as a badge of honour.