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"Anne of Avonlea," the second installment in Lucy Maud Montgomery's beloved Green Gables series, continues the enchanting journey of Anne Shirley as she navigates adolescence in the quaint village of Avonlea. Capturing the essence of early 20th-century rural life, the narrative seamlessly blends humor, whimsy, and profound epiphanies, showcasing Montgomery's characteristic lyrical prose. The novel explores themes of growing up, community, and the transformative power of imagination, reflecting the intricacies of human relationships and the challenges of maturity while retaining its nostalgic charm. Lucy Maud Montgomery, a pioneering figure in Canadian literature, drew on her own experiences of growing up on Prince Edward Island to bring life to Anne's character. Montgomery's deep appreciation for nature, storytelling, and the complexities of women's lives in her era infused her writing with authenticity and emotional depth. Her portrayal of the struggles and joys of young adulthood is deeply personal, rooted in her own encounters with societal expectations and creative expression. "Anne of Avonlea" is a timeless testament to the resilience of the human spirit. Readers of all ages are invited to embark on this heartwarming journey, reveling in Anne's delightful adventures while discovering the profound insights that accompany the process of growing up. Montgomery's work remains an essential read for those seeking both entertainment and thoughtful reflections on life. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A succinct Introduction situates the work's timeless appeal and themes. - The Synopsis outlines the central plot, highlighting key developments without spoiling critical twists. - A detailed Historical Context immerses you in the era's events and influences that shaped the writing. - An Author Biography reveals milestones in the author's life, illuminating the personal insights behind the text. - A thorough Analysis dissects symbols, motifs, and character arcs to unearth underlying meanings. - Reflection questions prompt you to engage personally with the work's messages, connecting them to modern life. - Hand‐picked Memorable Quotes shine a spotlight on moments of literary brilliance. - Interactive footnotes clarify unusual references, historical allusions, and archaic phrases for an effortless, more informed read.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2023
A young teacher tests her shining ideals against the knotted realities of a small, beloved village. Anne of Avonlea ushers readers into the delicate, exhilarating borderland between girlhood and adulthood, where imagination must learn to share space with duty. The novel dramatizes the stubbornness of habit, the promise of change, and the ways a spirited mind can enrich—yet complicate—the daily fabric of community life. Through mishaps that blossom into growth and projects that reveal character, it shows how becoming useful does not mean becoming dull, and how vision, tempered by humility, can still brighten every lane and window in Avonlea.
Lucy Maud Montgomery’s sequel returns to Prince Edward Island to follow Anne Shirley as she begins her first years of teaching in the schoolroom she once occupied as a pupil. The story takes up a familiar setting while introducing new responsibilities, neighbors, and civic ambitions. Anne’s world opens outward and inward at once: outward into committees, classrooms, and village schemes; inward into the steadier cadence of self-knowledge. Without revisiting the triumphs and trials of her earlier childhood in detail, this book situates Anne at the point where affection for home and hunger for purpose must learn to coexist, and sometimes collide.
Its classic status rests on the rare equilibrium it achieves between comedy and conscience. Montgomery refines the sentimental domestic novel into something lucid and modern, attentive to social texture without losing spontaneity. The work endures because it charts growth not as a single epiphany, but as a pattern of attempts, corrections, and renewed attempts—recognizable, forgiving, and true. Generations have adopted Anne’s capacious way of seeing: the capacity to cherish both beauty and foible. As a cornerstone of early twentieth-century Canadian fiction, it broadened international appreciation for regional literature and demonstrated how a closely observed community can embody universal experience.
Anne of Avonlea has influenced countless later portrayals of youthful vocation, particularly for young women whose ambitions take shape inside local institutions rather than in distant arenas. Its scenes of civic improvement, schoolroom improvisation, and neighborly negotiation have seeded a literary lineage of village chronicles, coming-of-age teacher tales, and gently ironic social comedies. The Green Gables books have also inspired adaptations and retellings across media, helping to keep Anne’s sensibility vividly present in cultural memory. Yet the novel’s influence is most visible in quiet echoes: the humorous committee meeting, the errant plan mended by kindness, the understanding forged between generations.
Written by Canadian author Lucy Maud Montgomery and first published in 1909, the novel belongs to the Edwardian era, when questions about education, civic reform, and women’s roles were gaining renewed attention. Set primarily in the rural community of Avonlea on Prince Edward Island, it continues the Green Gables series with a focus on Anne’s early professional life. Montgomery, whose attachment to island landscapes and village rhythms informs every page, balances affectionate detail with brisk storytelling. The book stands at the intersection of regional realism and romantic optimism, offering a portrait of local life that feels both particular and widely legible.
Montgomery’s intention is not to stage grand upheavals but to illuminate how character matures through ordinary work faithfully undertaken. She explores the education of the educator, allowing Anne to discover that imagination, while necessary, benefits from steady companionship with patience, tact, and accountability. The author also examines the ethics of improvement: what it means to change a place without flattening its idiosyncrasies, and how community projects can reveal both collective hopes and private vanities. Without prescribing rigid lessons, Montgomery invites readers to consider how ideals are translated into practice, and how kindness—practical, resourceful, and alert—can be a form of wisdom.
The book follows Anne as she steps into a village classroom, participates in the Avonlea Village Improvement Society, and navigates the lively push and pull of neighbors with strong opinions. Green Gables itself remains a center of warmth and testing, where hospitality acquires new dimensions and daily routines acquire new stakes. Episodes unfold with a genial pace: small misunderstandings become opportunities for tact, and misdirected energy becomes a spur to better judgment. The narrative respects the scale of village life, where a hedge, a garden path, or a schoolyard can serve as the stage for choices that quietly shape a future.
Stylistically, Montgomery blends crisp, observant prose with buoyant humor and swift sketches of island weather, seasons, and light. The storytelling is often episodic, yet the arcs of responsibility and self-command bind the chapters into a coherent growth-pattern. Characters are revealed by their habits—how they keep a doorstep, plan a meeting, address a child—and by the surprises that expose hidden generosities. Description always carries moral weight without turning didactic; landscape and interior life mirror each other while maintaining their independence. This craft gives the book a companionable gait, inviting the reader to linger while still nudging the story, and Anne, forward.
Education stands at the heart of the book, not only as a profession but as a way of being in the world. Anne learns that to teach is to study continuously: the temperaments of pupils, the textures of families, the converging paths of tradition and experiment. The novel prizes imagination while testing it against consequences, encouraging curiosity that listens as well as dreams. Themes of responsibility, friendship, forgiveness, and civic-mindedness recur, often twined with scenes of mild chaos. The result is a portrait of growth that affirms imperfection as the natural companion of sincerity and that views progress as patient, collaborative work.
Read within its historical moment, the novel reflects the energies of early twentieth-century reform tempered by rural pragmatism. Improvement societies, public manners, and the ethics of neighborliness receive a close, often amused scrutiny. Montgomery grants particular attention to the ways women contribute to public life through classrooms, committees, and the informal networks that sustain a community. Yet she resists caricature, letting differences of opinion evolve into conversation rather than combat. The book observes how custom can be honored without being idolized and how renewal is most durable when rooted in local memory, shared labor, and the steadying bonds of home.
For contemporary readers, the appeal lies in its blend of warmth and clarity. The novel offers comfort without complacency, recognizing that joy requires effort and that belonging is a practice. Its humor declines cruelty; its sentiment refuses sentimentality. Readers encounter a heroine who delights in beauty yet accepts correction, who dreams expansively yet shows up on time. In an age that prizes speed, the book models attentiveness; in a culture of spectacle, it celebrates service. It becomes, quietly, a guide to sustainable hope: how to keep one’s inner light bright while also lighting the porches and pathways of others.
Anne of Avonlea endures because it affirms that adulthood need not extinguish wonder, and that community—messy, exacting, generous—remains the best school for the heart. Montgomery’s sequel deepens a beloved character while enlarging the moral landscape of her world, presenting themes of vocation, empathy, and shared responsibility with grace and wit. Its pages shimmer with the possibilities that open when imagination cooperates with duty. For new readers and returning admirers alike, the novel offers an invitation to dwell where everyday life becomes luminous through attention, where growth is steady rather than sudden, and where kindness proves the most creative force of all.
Anne of Avonlea, the second book in Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Green Gables series, follows Anne Shirley from sixteen to eighteen as she becomes the teacher of the Avonlea school while continuing to live at Green Gables with Marilla Cuthbert. The novel opens with Anne exchanging her role as student for that of instructor, determined to live up to her ideals and to bring kindness and imagination into the classroom. At the same time, she accepts new domestic responsibilities, marking a transition from youthful dreaming to practical service. The story situates her within a close-knit rural community whose daily rhythms frame her growth.
Early chapters focus on changes at Green Gables. Marilla and Anne take in orphaned twins from a branch of the family, Dora and Davy Keith, whose contrasting temperaments create a lively household. Dora is tidy and dutiful; Davy is impulsive and candid, often causing minor uproar that tests rules and patience. Their presence deepens Anne’s sense of guardianship and expands the home’s dynamics beyond the quiet routine she once knew. A new neighbor, Mr. J. A. Harrison, moves into the nearby farm with a talkative parrot, introducing brusque manners, small misunderstandings, and an eventual acquaintance that draws Anne further into village affairs.
Anne’s first term brings the challenges of discipline, fairness, and consistency. She wants to be a friend to pupils while also commanding respect, and she experiments with methods that emphasize encouragement over punishment. The Avonlea class includes a difficult boy, Anthony Pye, who resists her authority and embodies the tension between principle and practicality. Daily incidents—lost tempers, classroom jokes, and honest mistakes—require measured responses. Through these experiences, the narrative shows the give-and-take of early teaching, the small victories that strengthen her confidence, and the lessons that arise when theories meet the realities of a rural schoolhouse.
A new student, Paul Irving, arrives from away to live with relatives, bringing an imaginative nature that Anne recognizes and nurtures. His fanciful outlook becomes a steady thread in the school story, balancing discipline with creativity. Outside class, Anne and her friend Diana discover Echo Lodge, the secluded home of Miss Lavendar Lewis, an amiable recluse attended by the dutiful Charlotta the Fourth. Afternoons at Echo Lodge offer quiet interludes alongside hints of an old romance that once touched the region. These visits broaden Anne’s understanding of choice, independence, and the way memories can shape present contentment.
Anne and her circle organize the Avonlea Village Improvement Society to beautify their town. With youthful ambition, they propose plantings, paint schemes, and tidy fences, hoping to make Avonlea more orderly and inviting. The society’s projects yield mixed results: some efforts succeed, while others lead to unanticipated complications that amuse the community and temper enthusiasm with pragmatism. Meetings, committees, and fundraising bring neighbors together and reveal differing tastes and tempers. Through the AVIS episodes, the book traces how well-meant plans encounter budgets, weather, and opinion, highlighting the practical side of civic pride and the compromises that sustain cooperation.
Mr. Harrison’s blunt ways, paired with his parrot’s irrepressible remarks, spark minor frictions that slowly soften into familiarity. An awkward mix-up over a cow entangles Anne in a property misunderstanding, exposing the hazards of quick assumptions and informal arrangements. Village gossip swirls around Mr. Harrison’s past, but the story treats these rumors as background noise to normal neighborliness, errands, and shared work. Such scenes situate Anne within the ordinary give-and-take of rural life, where fences, livestock, and back-lane paths create as many opportunities for error as for goodwill, and where courtesy gradually mends initial rough edges.
As the school year advances, Anne refines her approach, balancing order with imagination. Recitations, exhibitions, and examinations mark progress, while nature walks and compositions invite students to observe closely and describe clearly. Her friendship with Gilbert Blythe, who is also teaching nearby, provides collegial exchange rather than competition, and they occasionally collaborate on community endeavors. The narrative notes incremental gains: shy pupils speak up, diligent ones excel, and the stubborn are met with steady patience. Without dramatizing outcomes, the book emphasizes the routines and modest milestones by which a young teacher becomes competent, responsive, and calmly reliable.
At Green Gables, household seasons turn with the twins’ growth. Davy’s scrapes, questions, and confessions test rules and forgiveness, while Dora’s steadiness anchors chores and schedules. Visits to Echo Lodge continue, deepening the portrait of Miss Lavendar and illuminating how youthful dreams meet adult realities. These domestic and social strands intertwine with community gatherings, harvests, and winter evenings, creating a pattern of belonging. The narrative keeps focus on everyday choices—how to correct, when to indulge, what to overlook—and on Anne’s widening sympathy as she balances duty with empathy, learning to guide others without losing sight of their individual spirit.
In the closing chapters, several threads reach turning points that alter the village’s social map while preserving its familiar character. Anne, having tested herself in work and home life, looks ahead to further study and broader horizons, prepared by the discipline Avonlea has required and the affections it has given. The book ends by reaffirming its central direction: the passage from bright girlhood toward thoughtful young womanhood through service, responsibility, and shared effort. Without lingering on climaxes, it leaves a sense of continuity—what has begun in Avonlea will extend elsewhere—linking this installment to Anne’s continuing journey.
Anne of Avonlea is set in the late nineteenth century in rural Prince Edward Island, a small maritime province on Canada’s Atlantic coast. The fictional village of Avonlea mirrors Cavendish, Montgomery’s childhood home, with red-soil farms, spruce and birch hedgerows, and a coastline shaped by coves and inlets. The period is post-Confederation but pre-automobile, when horse-drawn travel, seasonal rhythms, and one-room schools structured daily life. Charlottetown, the provincial capital, functioned as the nearest urban center for examinations, newspapers, and commerce. The community is homogeneously Anglo-Protestant, reflecting Scottish and English settler heritage, with a pervasive ethic of thrift, piety, and neighborly surveillance.
The social fabric of Avonlea reflects the institutions governing rural Prince Edward Island in the 1880s–1890s: church congregations, school trustees, and road commissioners rather than full municipal councils. Land is divided into modest freehold farms, households are multi-generational, and women’s work, though economically crucial, is framed as domestic and caring. The one-room schoolhouse serves as both classroom and civic hall, anchoring picnics, debates, and recitations. Communication is intimate and local; reputations travel swiftly on visiting rounds. In Anne of Avonlea, a young woman’s entry into teaching and village leadership is credible precisely within this milieu, where respectability, moral oversight, and communal responsibility are closely linked.
Prince Edward Island joined the Canadian Confederation on 1 July 1873, driven by debt from railway construction and the opportunity to resolve the island’s century-long Land Question. Since the 1767 lottery that sectioned the colony into 67 proprietary lots, tenants had faced absentee landlords and rent exactions. The Land Purchase Act of 1875, administered by a Land Commission, used federal funds to buy out estates and sell parcels to occupants. By the 1880s most farmers held secure title. Anne of Avonlea’s world of independent smallholders, hedged lanes, and neighborly disputes assumes this post-Confederation settlement, depicting a community no longer burdened by tenurial insecurity.
Transport and communications in the period hinged on the island railway, completed in 1875, and seasonal steamship routes to mainland ports, including Boston-linked lines in summer. Winters were arduous: mail and passengers sometimes crossed the Northumberland Strait by iceboat between Cape Traverse and Cape Tormentine. Telegraph links existed by the 1870s; telephone service began in the mid-1880s with the Island Telephone Company and spread unevenly into rural districts. Such infrastructure shaped the pace of news and visitation in Anne of Avonlea. The novel’s reliance on letters, occasional visitors, and a heightened sense of locality mirrors the semi-connected world of late nineteenth-century island life.
The agrarian economy of Prince Edward Island centered on mixed farming: potatoes, oats, and hay, with dairy and small-scale livestock. Butter and cheese factories multiplied in the 1880s, while produce moved by rail to Charlottetown wharves and thence to markets in Halifax, Saint John, and Boston. The farmers’ cooperative spirit had earlier foundations in the Farmers’ Bank of Rustico (chartered 1864), which exemplified rural financial ingenuity. Anne of Avonlea’s attention to barns, haying time, and farm chores reflects these seasonal labor patterns. Its emphasis on thrift, home production, and neighborly exchange parallels the island’s cash-poor but network-rich agricultural households.
Public education reform profoundly shaped island villages. Prince Edward Island’s Free Education Act of 1877 established a non-sectarian, tax-supported system of common schools, governed by elected trustees and supervised by provincial inspectors. School districts were delineated, standard readers adopted, and certification requirements tightened. These reforms produced the one-room schoolhouse culture recognizable in Anne of Avonlea: mixed-age pupils, recitations, and community oversight. Anne’s appointment at sixteen, though youthful, aligns with the era’s licensing options and local autonomy in hiring. The ongoing negotiation between trustees, inspectors, parents, and teachers in the novel mirrors the real tensions built into this late nineteenth-century school governance.
Teacher training and professionalization advanced alongside reform. A Normal School operated in Charlottetown from the mid-1850s and was later associated with the Central Academy and Prince of Wales College in the 1860s. Candidates pursued First- and Second-Class licenses through examinations, with salaries calibrated to certification. By the 1890s women comprised a decisive majority of elementary teachers in Canada (about two-thirds by the 1901 census), a pattern echoed in Prince Edward Island’s rural districts. Anne’s path through a Charlottetown academy toward a First-Class license reflects this pipeline. The respect accorded to female teachers—tempered by low pay and strict moral scrutiny—is accurately rendered in the novel.
Changing pedagogy also marks the period. Inspectors urged orderly classrooms, blackboard work, and graded readers such as the Royal Readers, while North American educators popularized child-centered, Herbartian methods in the 1880s–1890s. Emphasis on object lessons, nature study, and school decoration gained currency. Anne of Avonlea dramatizes these currents when Anne experiments with gentler discipline, imaginative exercises, and beautifying the school grounds. Periodic inspector visits in the story reflect the real system of annual reports and examinations. The contrast between rote learning and nascent progressive practices—debated vigorously in provincial reports—structures several episodes, making educational reform the book’s most immediate social backdrop.
Women’s public roles expanded through reform organizations in the late nineteenth century. The Woman’s Christian Temperance Union took root in Canada in 1874 and in Prince Edward Island by 1884, linking moral suasion with civic projects. The National Council of Women of Canada formed in 1893, while suffrage arrived federally in 1918 and provincially in Prince Edward Island in 1922. In Anne of Avonlea, young women organize, speak publicly, and manage funds through the Village Improvement Society. Their actions mirror contemporary female associational life, where respectable voluntary work served as a bridge from domesticity to civic leadership, anticipating later claims to political rights.
Temperance campaigns reshaped social policy across the Maritimes. The Canada Temperance Act (Scott Act) of 1878 enabled local-option plebiscites to restrict alcohol sales; many counties in the region voted dry in the 1880s–1890s. In Prince Edward Island, sustained activism culminated in island-wide prohibition in 1901, which lasted until 1948. While Anne of Avonlea includes little overt drinking, its moral climate—church teas, fundraising events, an emphasis on self-control—reflects temperance-inflected respectability. Village controversies over respectability and example align with the movement’s fusion of personal reform and community regulation, situating Avonlea within a broader, faith-driven public health impulse.
Civic improvement and the good roads impulse flourished in the 1890s, influenced by North American beautification and sanitation movements. Village Improvement Societies planted trees, built fences, promoted litter control, and advocated for better roads long maintained by statute labor. Although the Canadian Good Roads Association would only form in 1914, bicycling clubs, agricultural societies, and improvement groups pressed earlier for macadamized surfaces and shade-lined lanes. Anne of Avonlea’s Village Improvement Society, with its tree-planting schemes and spirited debates, mirrors this civic trend. The society’s triumphs and missteps dramatize how voluntarism negotiated aesthetics, taxation, and common space in rural settlements.
Child welfare frameworks in Canada evolved amid orphan asylums, private fostering, and transatlantic placements known as British Home Children (circa 1869–1932), which sent roughly 100,000 children to Canadian farms and households. Maritime provinces received a portion of these youths, alongside local poor-relief practices mediated by churches and kin. Anne’s own fictional background as an orphan and the guardianship of Davy and Dora in Anne of Avonlea reflect this landscape of informal and formal care. The novel’s focus on character formation and moral education registers contemporary anxieties about children’s placement, labor expectations, and the capacity of rural homes to provide stability.
Religious life organized social time and moral authority. The Presbyterian Church in Canada formed in 1875 through several unions; Methodists consolidated nationally in 1884, anticipating the United Church union of 1925. Sabbath schools, missionary societies, and church suppers supported both faith and community welfare. Clergy often influenced school affairs and temperance campaigns. In Anne of Avonlea, ministers, Sunday services, and church-based events shape calendars and reputations, even as younger characters test the line between piety and spontaneity. The book’s landscape of sermons, socials, and choirs captures the Protestant civic culture that underwrote public morality and voluntary association in island villages.
Prince Edward Island is part of Epekwitk, homeland of the Mi’kmaq. The Indian Act of 1876 placed Indigenous communities under federal control; Lennox Island was purchased in 1878 for Mi’kmaq use and later formalized as reserve land. Despite this presence, settler narratives of the era frequently erased Indigenous people from everyday depictions of rural life. Anne of Avonlea reproduces this silence, portraying the countryside as exclusively settler. That omission reflects the prevailing colonial framework in which land, labor, and community were imagined, underscoring the historical distance between the book’s pastoral vision and the island’s deeper, contested human geography.
The Maritime economy underwent structural strain after Confederation. The National Policy of 1879 favored central Canadian industry with protective tariffs, while wooden shipbuilding—once a regional mainstay—declined in the 1880s. PEI’s population peaked at roughly 109,000 in the 1891 census, then stagnated and fell as thousands migrated to New England mills and western frontiers between 1881 and 1911. Farm prices fluctuated with external markets, binding households to cautious spending and diversified production. In Anne of Avonlea, ambitions are anchored locally, and horizons feel modest; that tone reflects a world where opportunity often meant leaving, and staying implied deep investment in land and community.
Anne of Avonlea functions as social critique through its treatment of schooling, authority, and civic aspiration. By contrasting rigid trustees and formal discipline with Anne’s humane pedagogy, Montgomery questions punitive norms and advocates child-centered teaching aligned with contemporary reform. The Village Improvement Society sequences lampoon status-seeking and aesthetic dogmatism, urging cooperative stewardship over vanity projects. The book exposes the pressures of respectability politics—how gossip polices women and the poor—while dignifying unpaid care work. Its portrayal of a young woman exercising administrative judgment, fundraising acumen, and rhetorical skill offers a quietly political argument for women’s expanded agency in public life.
The novel also interrogates inclusion and belonging in a stratified rural order. Through orphan guardianship and the taming of unruly Davy, it critiques conditional charity and transactional notions of worth. Depictions of smallholders emphasize independence, yet reveal vulnerability to collective censure and economic fragility. While largely silent on Indigenous dispossession, the text’s pastoral ideal invites readers to consider what and whom such idylls omit. Its satire of petty authority and its celebration of mutual aid align with late nineteenth-century reformist ethics, challenging class pretensions and narrow moralism while imagining a participatory, improvement-minded community accountable to its children and common spaces.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) was a Canadian novelist, short‑story writer, and diarist whose depictions of Prince Edward Island helped shape modern popular and children’s literature. Best known for Anne of Green Gables, she combined regional detail, humor, and lyrical nature writing to examine imagination, belonging, community, and women’s aspirations. Writing from the early 1900s through the interwar years, she reached a global readership through translations and adaptations while keeping a distinctly Maritime sensibility. Her oeuvre extends beyond the Anne series to poetry, adult novels, and numerous story collections, and it continues to anchor discussions of Canadian literary identity and transnational readerships.
Montgomery’s upbringing on Prince Edward Island provided the landscapes and village life that became her signature settings. She obtained a teacher’s license at Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and later undertook literature courses at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She taught in Island schools and worked briefly at a Halifax newspaper, experiences that exposed her to classrooms, newsrooms, and the rhythms of small communities. Her journals and early publications reveal deep engagement with Romantic and Victorian literature, along with Scottish and Maritime oral traditions. The Island’s seasons, shorelines, and church‑centered social life would remain central influences on her themes and imagery.
Montgomery began selling poems and short stories to periodicals in the 1890s, honing a professional routine of steady submission and revision. Anne of Green Gables appeared in 1908 and became an immediate bestseller, welcomed for its spirited heroine, comedy, and sense of place. Montgomery followed with sequels that traced education, work, and family life, building a readership spanning children and adults. While some early critics categorized the books as light or juvenile, reviewers also praised their vitality and description. Commercial success enabled her to write full‑time, and she continued to place stories widely, consolidating her reputation on both sides of the Atlantic.
Beyond the Anne sequence, Montgomery produced varied fiction. The Emily of New Moon trilogy (1923–1927) offers a Künstlerroman focused on a young writer’s apprenticeship. The Story Girl and its companion, The Golden Road, explore storytelling and memory in rural communities. Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles of Avonlea gather linked tales from the Anne world. Her standalone novels include The Blue Castle, an adult romance set in Ontario; A Tangled Web, a multi‑generational comedy‑drama; and the Pat of Silver Bush books. Throughout, she cultivated humor, local color, and a nuanced balance of sentiment and realism that appealed to cross‑generational audiences.
Montgomery was a meticulous professional who navigated transatlantic publishing markets, negotiated serial and book rights, and contended with changing audiences. She kept extensive journals that document her reading, methods, and the practical demands of authorship. Her career also brought challenges, including a protracted contractual and royalty dispute with an early publisher, emblematic of the limited leverage many women writers faced. After relocating from Prince Edward Island to communities in Ontario, she continued to write while managing public expectations surrounding fame. Mid‑century academic criticism sometimes undervalued her popular appeal, yet her books maintained steady sales and a devoted, multi‑generational readership.
Her fiction reflects a consistent set of concerns. Nature appears as moral and aesthetic touchstone; humor offsets loss; and imaginative play enables self‑fashioning, especially for girls. Rilla of Ingleside, a later Anne novel, is widely noted for its depiction of the First World War home front in Canada, giving domestic life a historical dimension. The Emily books probe artistic vocation, while The Blue Castle examines social constraint and personal autonomy in adulthood. Stylistically, she braided episodic plots with vivid description, dialogue, and letter or journal forms, producing narratives that are accessible to young readers yet layered enough to reward adult interpretation.
Montgomery remained productive through the 1930s, even as her journals record periods of ill health and depression. She completed additional Anne volumes and standalone works, and she assembled a late manuscript cycle about the Blythe family that circulated posthumously in fuller form as The Blythes Are Quoted. She died in 1942. Since then, her private journals have been published, and scholarship has broadened appreciation of her craft, regionalism, and gender politics. Anne of Green Gables and related works continue to inspire adaptations for stage and screen, fuel literary tourism on Prince Edward Island, and sustain an enduring global readership.
A tall, slim girl, “halfpast sixteen,” with serious gray eyes and hair which her friends called auburn, had sat down on the broad red sandstone doorstep of a Prince Edward Island farmhouse one ripe afternoon in August, firmly resolved to construe so many lines of Virgil.
But an August afternoon, with blue hazes scarfing the harvest slopes, little winds whispering elfishly in the poplars, and a dancing slendor of red poppies outflaming against the dark coppice of young firs in a corner of the cherry orchard, was fitter for dreams than dead languages. The Virgil soon slipped unheeded to the ground, and Anne, her chin propped on her clasped hands, and her eyes on the splendid mass of fluffy clouds that were heaping up just over Mr. J. A. Harrison’s house like a great white mountain, was far away in a delicious world where a certain schoolteacher was doing a wonderful work, shaping the destinies of future statesmen, and inspiring youthful minds and hearts with high and lofty ambitions.
To be sure, if you came down to harsh facts … which, it must be confessed, Anne seldom did until she had to … it did not seem likely that there was much promising material for celebrities in Avonlea school; but you could never tell what might happen if a teacher used her influence for good. Anne had certain rose-tinted ideals of what a teacher might accomplish if she only went the right way about it; and she was in the midst of a delightful scene, forty years hence, with a famous personage … just exactly what he was to be famous for was left in convenient haziness, but Anne thought it would be rather nice to have him a college president or a Canadian premier … bowing low over her wrinkled hand and assuring her that it was she who had first kindled his ambition, and that all his success in life was due to the lessons she had instilled so long ago in Avonlea school. This pleasant vision was shattered by a most unpleasant interruption.
A demure little Jersey cow[1] came scuttling down the lane and five seconds later Mr. Harrison arrived … if “arrived” be not too mild a term to describe the manner of his irruption into the yard.
He bounced over the fence without waiting to open the gate, and angrily confronted astonished Anne, who had risen to her feet and stood looking at him in some bewilderment. Mr. Harrison was their new righthand neighbor and she had never met him before, although she had seen him once or twice.
In early April, before Anne had come home from Queen’s, Mr. Robert Bell, whose farm adjoined the Cuthbert place on the west, had sold out and moved to Charlottetown. His farm had been bought by a certain Mr. J. A. Harrison, whose name, and the fact that he was a New Brunswick man, were all that was known about him. But before he had been a month in Avonlea he had won the reputation of being an odd person … “a crank[2],” Mrs. Rachel Lynde said. Mrs. Rachel was an outspoken lady, as those of you who may have already made her acquaintance will remember. Mr. Harrison was certainly different from other people … and that is the essential characteristic of a crank, as everybody knows.
In the first place he kept house for himself and had publicly stated that he wanted no fools of women around his diggings. Feminine Avonlea took its revenge by the gruesome tales it related about his housekeeping and cooking. He had hired little John Henry Carter of White Sands and John Henry started the stories. For one thing, there was never any stated time for meals in the Harrison establishment. Mr. Harrison “got a bite” when he felt hungry, and if John Henry were around at the time, he came in for a share, but if he were not, he had to wait until Mr. Harrison’s next hungry spell. John Henry mournfully averred that he would have starved to death if it wasn’t that he got home on Sundays and got a good filling up, and that his mother always gave him a basket of “grub” to take back with him on Monday mornings.
As for washing dishes, Mr. Harrison never made any pretence of doing it unless a rainy Sunday came. Then he went to work and washed them all at once in the rainwater hogshead, and left them to drain dry.
Again, Mr. Harrison was “close.” When he was asked to subscribe to the Rev. Mr. Allan’s salary he said he’d wait and see how many dollars’ worth of good he got out of his preaching first … he didn’t believe in buying a pig in a poke. And when Mrs. Lynde went to ask for a contribution to missions … and incidentally to see the inside of the house … he told her there were more heathens among the old woman gossips in Avonlea than anywhere else he knew of, and he’d cheerfully contribute to a mission for Christianizing them if she’d undertake it. Mrs. Rachel got herself away and said it was a mercy poor Mrs. Robert Bell was safe in her grave, for it would have broken her heart to see the state of her house in which she used to take so much pride.
“Why, she scrubbed the kitchen floor every second day,” Mrs. Lynde told Marilla Cuthbert indignantly, “and if you could see it now! I had to hold up my skirts as I walked across it.”
Finally, Mr. Harrison kept a parrot called Ginger. Nobody in Avonlea had ever kept a parrot before; consequently that proceeding was considered barely respectable. And such a parrot! If you took John Henry Carter’s word for it, never was such an unholy bird. It swore terribly. Mrs. Carter would have taken John Henry away at once if she had been sure she could get another place for him. Besides, Ginger had bitten a piece right out of the back of John Henry’s neck one day when he had stooped down too near the cage. Mrs. Carter showed everybody the mark when the luckless John Henry went home on Sundays.
All these things flashed through Anne’s mind as Mr. Harrison stood, quite speechless with wrath apparently, before her. In his most amiable mood Mr. Harrison could not have been considered a handsome man; he was short and fat and bald; and now, with his round face purple with rage and his prominent blue eyes almost sticking out of his head, Anne thought he was really the ugliest person she had ever seen.
All at once Mr. Harrison found his voice.
“I’m not going to put up with this,” he spluttered, “not a day longer, do you hear, miss. Bless my soul, this is the third time, miss … the third time! Patience has ceased to be a virtue, miss. I warned your aunt the last time not to let it occur again … and she’s let it … she’s done it … what does she mean by it, that is what I want to know. That is what I’m here about, miss.”
“Will you explain what the trouble is?” asked Anne, in her most dignified manner. She had been practicing it considerably of late to have it in good working order when school began; but it had no apparent effect on the irate J. A. Harrison.
“Trouble, is it? Bless my soul, trouble enough, I should think. The trouble is, miss, that I found that Jersey cow of your aunt’s in my oats again, not half an hour ago. The third time, mark you. I found her in last Tuesday and I found her in yesterday. I came here and told your aunt not to let it occur again. She has let it occur again. Where’s your aunt, miss? I just want to see her for a minute and give her a piece of my mind … a piece of J. A. Harrison’s mind, miss.”
“If you mean Miss Marilla Cuthbert, she is not my aunt, and she has gone down to East Grafton to see a distant relative of hers who is very ill,” said Anne, with due increase of dignity at every word. “I am very sorry that my cow should have broken into your oats … she is my cow and not Miss Cuthbert’s … Matthew gave her to me three years ago when she was a little calf and he bought her from Mr. Bell.”
“Sorry, miss! Sorry isn’t going to help matters any. You’d better go and look at the havoc that animal has made in my oats … trampled them from center to circumference, miss.”
“I am very sorry,” repeated Anne firmly, “but perhaps if you kept your fences in better repair Dolly might not have broken in. It is your part of the line fence that separates your oatfield from our pasture and I noticed the other day that it was not in very good condition.”
“My fence is all right,” snapped Mr. Harrison, angrier than ever at this carrying of the war into the enemy’s country. “The jail fence couldn’t keep a demon of a cow like that out. And I can tell you, you redheaded snippet, that if the cow is yours, as you say, you’d be better employed in watching her out of other people’s grain than in sitting round reading yellow-covered novels,” … with a scathing glance at the innocent tan-colored Virgil by Anne’s feet.
Something at that moment was red besides Anne’s hair … which had always been a tender point with her.
“I’d rather have red hair than none at all, except a little fringe round my ears,” she flashed.
The shot told, for Mr. Harrison was really very sensitive about his bald head. His anger choked him up again and he could only glare speechlessly at Anne, who recovered her temper and followed up her advantage.
“I can make allowance for you, Mr. Harrison, because I have an imagination.[1q] I can easily imagine how very trying it must be to find a cow in your oats and I shall not cherish any hard feelings against you for the things you’ve said. I promise you that Dolly shall never break into your oats again. I give you my word of honor on THAT point.”
“Well, mind you she doesn’t,” muttered Mr. Harrison in a somewhat subdued tone; but he stamped off angrily enough and Anne heard him growling to himself until he was out of earshot.
Grievously disturbed in mind, Anne marched across the yard and shut the naughty Jersey up in the milking pen.
“She can’t possibly get out of that unless she tears the fence down,” she reflected. “She looks pretty quiet now. I daresay she has sickened herself on those oats. I wish I’d sold her to Mr. Shearer when he wanted her last week, but I thought it was just as well to wait until we had the auction of the stock and let them all go together. I believe it is true about Mr. Harrison being a crank. Certainly there’s nothing of the kindred spirit about HIM.”
Anne had always a weather eye open for kindred spirits.
Marilla Cuthbert was driving into the yard as Anne returned from the house, and the latter flew to get tea ready. They discussed the matter at the tea table.
“I’ll be glad when the auction is over,” said Marilla. “It is too much responsibility having so much stock about the place and nobody but that unreliable Martin to look after them. He has never come back yet and he promised that he would certainly be back last night if I’d give him the day off to go to his aunt’s funeral. I don’t know how many aunts he has got, I am sure. That’s the fourth that’s died since he hired here a year ago. I’ll be more than thankful when the crop is in and Mr. Barry takes over the farm. We’ll have to keep Dolly shut up in the pen till Martin comes, for she must be put in the back pasture and the fences there have to be fixed. I declare, it is a world of trouble, as Rachel says. Here’s poor Mary Keith dying and what is to become of those two children of hers is more than I know. She has a brother in British Columbia and she has written to him about them, but she hasn’t heard from him yet.”
“What are the children like? How old are they?”
“Six past … they’re twins.”
“Oh, I’ve always been especially interested in twins ever since Mrs. Hammond had so many,” said Anne eagerly. “Are they pretty?”
“Goodness, you couldn’t tell … they were too dirty. Davy had been out making mud pies and Dora went out to call him in. Davy pushed her headfirst into the biggest pie and then, because she cried, he got into it himself and wallowed in it to show her it was nothing to cry about. Mary said Dora was really a very good child but that Davy was full of mischief. He has never had any bringing up you might say. His father died when he was a baby and Mary has been sick almost ever since.”
“I’m always sorry for children that have no bringing up,” said Anne soberly. “You know I hadn’t any till you took me in hand. I hope their uncle will look after them. Just what relation is Mrs. Keith to you?”
“Mary? None in the world. It was her husband … he was our third cousin. There’s Mrs. Lynde coming through the yard. I thought she’d be up to hear about Mary.”
“Don’t tell her about Mr. Harrison and the cow,” implored Anne.
Marilla promised; but the promise was quite unnecessary, for Mrs. Lynde was no sooner fairly seated than she said,
“I saw Mr. Harrison chasing your Jersey out of his oats today when I was coming home from Carmody. I thought he looked pretty mad. Did he make much of a rumpus?”
Anne and Marilla furtively exchanged amused smiles. Few things in Avonlea ever escaped Mrs. Lynde. It was only that morning Anne had said,
“If you went to your own room at midnight, locked the door, pulled down the blind, and SNEEZED, Mrs. Lynde would ask you the next day how your cold was!”
“I believe he did,” admitted Marilla. “I was away. He gave Anne a piece of his mind.”
“I think he is a very disagreeable man,” said Anne, with a resentful toss of her ruddy head.
“You never said a truer word,” said Mrs. Rachel solemnly. “I knew there’d be trouble when Robert Bell sold his place to a New Brunswick man, that’s what. I don’t know what Avonlea is coming to, with so many strange people rushing into it. It’ll soon not be safe to go to sleep in our beds.”
“Why, what other strangers are coming in?” asked Marilla.
“Haven’t you heard? Well, there’s a family of Donnells, for one thing. They’ve rented Peter Sloane’s old house. Peter has hired the man to run his mill. They belong down east and nobody knows anything about them. Then that shiftless Timothy Cotton family are going to move up from White Sands and they’ll simply be a burden on the public. He is in consumption … when he isn’t stealing … and his wife is a slack-twisted creature that can’t turn her hand to a thing. She washes her dishes SITTING DOWN. Mrs. George Pye has taken her husband’s orphan nephew, Anthony Pye. He’ll be going to school to you, Anne, so you may expect trouble, that’s what. And you’ll have another strange pupil, too. Paul Irving is coming from the States to live with his grandmother. You remember his father, Marilla … Stephen Irving, him that jilted Lavendar Lewis over at Grafton?”
“I don’t think he jilted her. There was a quarrel … I suppose there was blame on both sides.”
“Well, anyway, he didn’t marry her, and she’s been as queer as possible ever since, they say … living all by herself in that little stone house she calls Echo Lodge. Stephen went off to the States and went into business with his uncle and married a Yankee. He’s never been home since, though his mother has been up to see him once or twice. His wife died two years ago and he’s sending the boy home to his mother for a spell. He’s ten years old and I don’t know if he’ll be a very desirable pupil. You can never tell about those Yankees.”
Mrs Lynde looked upon all people who had the misfortune to be born or brought up elsewhere than in Prince Edward Island with a decided can-any-good-thing-come-out-of-Nazareth air. They MIGHT be good people, of course; but you were on the safe side in doubting it. She had a special prejudice against “Yankees.” Her husband had been cheated out of ten dollars by an employer for whom he had once worked in Boston and neither angels nor principalities nor powers could have convinced Mrs. Rachel that the whole United States was not responsible for it.
“Avonlea school won’t be the worse for a little new blood,” said Marilla drily, “and if this boy is anything like his father he’ll be all right. Steve Irving was the nicest boy that was ever raised in these parts, though some people did call him proud. I should think Mrs. Irving would be very glad to have the child. She has been very lonesome since her husband died.”
“Oh, the boy may be well enough, but he’ll be different from Avonlea children,” said Mrs. Rachel, as if that clinched the matter. Mrs. Rachel’s opinions concerning any person, place, or thing, were always warranted to wear. “What’s this I hear about your going to start up a Village Improvement Society, Anne?”
“I was just talking it over with some of the girls and boys at the last Debating Club,” said Anne, flushing. “They thought it would be rather nice … and so do Mr. and Mrs. Allan. Lots of villages have them now.”
“Well, you’ll get into no end of hot water if you do. Better leave it alone, Anne, that’s what. People don’t like being improved.”
“Oh, we are not going to try to improve the PEOPLE. It is Avonlea itself. There are lots of things which might be done to make it prettier. For instance, if we could coax Mr. Levi Boulter to pull down that dreadful old house on his upper farm wouldn’t that be an improvement?”
“It certainly would,” admitted Mrs. Rachel. “That old ruin has been an eyesore to the settlement for years. But if you Improvers can coax Levi Boulter to do anything for the public that he isn’t to be paid for doing, may I be there to see and hear the process, that’s what. I don’t want to discourage you, Anne, for there may be something in your idea, though I suppose you did get it out of some rubbishy Yankee magazine; but you’ll have your hands full with your school and I advise you as a friend not to bother with your improvements, that’s what. But there, I know you’ll go ahead with it if you’ve set your mind on it. You were always one to carry a thing through somehow.”
Something about the firm outlines of Anne’s lips told that Mrs. Rachel was not far astray in this estimate. Anne’s heart was bent on forming the Improvement Society. Gilbert Blythe, who was to teach in White Sands but would always be home from Friday night to Monday morning, was enthusiastic about it; and most of the other folks were willing to go in for anything that meant occasional meetings and consequently some “fun.” As for what the “improvements” were to be, nobody had any very clear idea except Anne and Gilbert. They had talked them over and planned them out until an ideal Avonlea existed in their minds, if nowhere else.
Mrs. Rachel had still another item of news.
“They’ve given the Carmody school to a Priscilla Grant. Didn’t you go to Queen’s with a girl of that name, Anne?”
“Yes, indeed. Priscilla to teach at Carmody! How perfectly lovely!” exclaimed Anne, her gray eyes lighting up until they looked like evening stars, causing Mrs. Lynde to wonder anew if she would ever get it settled to her satisfaction whether Anne Shirley were really a pretty girl or not.