Wordsworth Collector's Editions are now offered in a set of timeless classics with strong female lead characters. Anne of Green Gables, Little Women, and The Secret Garden all center around beloved female characters that have influenced readers for many years. This collection makes a perfect gift for any reader.
 
Anne of Green Gables:
Anne Shirley is an eleven-year-old orphan who has hung on determinedly to an optimistic spirit and a wildly creative imagination through her early deprivations. She erupts into the lives of aging brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, a girl instead of the boy they had sent for. Thus begins a story of transformation for all three; indeed the whole rural community of Avonlea comes under Anne’s influence in some way. We see her grow from a girl to a young woman of sixteen, making her mistakes, and not always learning from them. Intelligent, hot-headed as her own red hair, unwilling to take a moral truth as read until she works it out for herself, she must also face grief and loss and learn the true meaning of love. Part Tom Sawyer, part Jane Eyre, by the end of Anne of Green Gables, Anne has become the heroine of her own story.
 
Little Women:
Little Women is one of the best-loved children’s stories of all time, based on the author’s own youthful experiences. It describes the family of the four March sisters living in a small New England community. Meg, the eldest, is pretty and wishes to be a lady; Jo, at fifteen is ungainly and unconventional with an ambition to be an author; Beth is a delicate child of thirteen with a taste for music and Amy is a blonde beauty of twelve. The story of their domestic adventures, their attempts to increase the family income, their friendship with the neighboring Laurence family, and their later love affairs remains as fresh and beguiling as ever. Soon after the success of Little Women, Louis May Alcott wrote a sequel called Good Wives. In the U.K. and around most of the world, this has continued to be published as a separate book, but many American editions have incorporated both books under the title of Little Women. Readers should note that our editions do not contain material from Good Wives unless specifically stated.
 
The Secret Garden:
The Secret Garden by Frances Burnett is one of the best-loved stories of all time. Mary Lennox was horrid. Selfish and spoilt, she was sent to stay with her hunchback uncle in Yorkshire. She hated it. But when she finds the way into a secret garden and begins to tend to it, a change comes over her and her life. She meets and befriends a local boy, the talented Dickon, and comes across her sickly cousin Colin who had been kept hidden from her. Between them, the three children work astonishing magic in themselves and those around them.