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In 'ANNE OF GREEN GABLES - Complete Collection,' Lucy Maud Montgomery weaves an enchanting tapestry filled with the vibrant adventures of Anne Shirley, a spirited orphan whose imagination knows no bounds. Spanning fourteen volumes, Montgomery's enduring series offers rich character development and picturesque descriptions of the Canadian landscape, all rendered in her signature lyrical prose. The stories deftly explore themes of identity, belonging, and the transformative power of love and friendship, set against the backdrop of early 20th-century rural life. Each installment builds upon the last, creating a cohesive narrative that celebrates the resilience of youth and the complexity of human relationships. Lucy Maud Montgomery, born in 1874 in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, drew upon her own experiences as a child and her love for the idyllic landscape of her homeland to create the beloved character of Anne. A trailblazer for women writers of her time, Montgomery's works reflect her keen observations of society and her desire to convey the emotional depth of her characters, revealing the trials and joys of life and the importance of imagination and creativity. This complete collection is a timeless treasure for readers of all ages, inviting both long-time fans and newcomers to revel in Anne's adventures and the richly-drawn world she inhabits. Montgomery's masterful storytelling and profound insights into the human condition make this collection an essential addition to any literary library, ensuring that the magic of Anne Shirley continues to inspire generations. In this enriched edition, we have carefully created added value for your reading experience: - A comprehensive Introduction outlines these selected works' unifying features, themes, or stylistic evolutions. - The Author Biography highlights personal milestones and literary influences that shape the entire body of writing. - A Historical Context section situates the works in their broader era—social currents, cultural trends, and key events that underpin their creation. - A concise Synopsis (Selection) offers an accessible overview of the included texts, helping readers navigate plotlines and main ideas without revealing critical twists. - A unified Analysis examines recurring motifs and stylistic hallmarks across the collection, tying the stories together while spotlighting the different work's strengths. - Reflection questions inspire deeper contemplation of the author's overarching message, inviting readers to draw connections among different texts and relate them to modern contexts. - Lastly, our hand‐picked Memorable Quotes distill pivotal lines and turning points, serving as touchstones for the collection's central themes.
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Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2024
This volume gathers the central imaginative world of Lucy Maud Montgomery into a single, sustained reading experience. It brings together the complete sequence of Anne novels alongside companion fiction, story collections, a poetry volume, and autobiographical writings, offering a panoramic view of an author whose evocation of place and character has shaped readers’ affections for over a century. The purpose is not merely accumulation, but coherence: to present the development of Montgomery’s themes, techniques, and concerns across forms, ages, and moods, so that the reader may trace both the continuity and the variety that make her work enduringly distinctive.
Within these covers are multiple literary modes. The long narrative arc of the Anne novels anchors the collection. Additional novels broaden the compass with fresh casts and complementary locales. Two linked collections of short stories return to familiar communities from new angles. A full book of verse discloses the author’s lyrical sensibility in concentrated form. Autobiographical materials, including a career narrative and letters, illuminate the lived context of the fiction and poetry. Together, these genres—novels, short stories, poems, essays, and correspondence—form a complete, interrelated body of work, each part enriching the reader’s understanding of the others.
A unifying presence throughout is place—especially Prince Edward Island—with its fields, shores, and seasons presented not as backdrop but as participant in human feeling. Montgomery’s prose renders weather, light, and landscape as moral and emotional registers in which ordinary lives gain resonance. Rural communities, with their rhythms and rituals, frame the stories of childhood, friendship, courtship, and family. Even when the stage widens, the sense of locality remains the lens through which meaning is articulated. This constancy of setting binds disparate forms and narratives, allowing them to speak to one another in a shared, recognizably Montgomeryan idiom.
At the heart of the collection stands the life of Anne Shirley, whose arrival in Avonlea begins a journey from spirited girlhood to reflective adulthood. The series traces education, vocation, companionship, and community involvement, not as isolated milestones but as a cumulative shaping of character. The tone blends humor, sentiment, and keen observation, attentive to the small dramas that define belonging. The narrative foregrounds imagination as both solace and spur to action, balanced by a commitment to responsibility. The abiding interest is growth—how a lively mind and generous heart mature without surrendering their brightness.
As the series advances, its forms and hues diversify. Correspondence shapes a significant portion of the storytelling, expanding voice and perspective through letters that make interior life audible. Domestic beginnings become occasions for renewed wonder rather than diminution, and family circles widen to include neighbors, pupils, and friends. Later volumes explore the experiences of children with freshness and humor, while the final installment attends to the home front during the Great War, bringing gravity without abandoning compassion. Across these movements, Montgomery maintains a faith in community and continuity, even as change and loss enter the frame.
The companion novels extend this world beyond Anne’s immediate story while preserving its tonal signature. Tales of childhood and adolescence are refracted through groups of cousins and friends whose days are organized by games, errands, and the slow pageantry of the year, all threaded by the power of storytelling itself. Another romance, rooted in rural life, meditates on speech, music, and the expressive possibilities and limits of human connection. These works affirm that Montgomery’s interests are larger than any single protagonist, yet they harmonize with the main sequence through shared settings, values, and attentiveness to inwardness.
Short fiction gathered in the two Chronicles volumes offers a mosaic of Avonlea and its environs. Here, neighbors and newcomers, spinsters and schoolteachers, children and elders move to the fore, each sketched with economy and warmth. The stories balance comic misadventure with quiet pathos, and their brevity highlights Montgomery’s gift for the telling detail: a turn of phrase, a household custom, a walk down a familiar road. These episodes enrich the social fabric surrounding the longer narratives, showing how the ordinary lives that graze the main plots possess their own shapely arcs and satisfactions.
The poems collected in The Watchman and Other Poems reveal another register of Montgomery’s art. Concentrated lyric attention is given to the seasons, the sea, the consolations of memory, and the questions of faith and purpose that underlie much of the prose. The verse clarifies how cadence, imagery, and landscape in the novels are rooted in a fundamentally poetic sensibility. Read alongside the fiction, the poems echo and deepen recurrent motifs—twilight fields, homestead lights, the hush of snow—while providing stand-alone meditations that invite the reader to pause, contemplate, and return to the narratives with heightened receptivity.
The autobiographical writings, particularly the career narrative, supply a measured account of Montgomery’s formation as a writer and the circumstances in which the books came to be. They sketch habits of work, influences, and the practical realities of publishing, thereby offering context for the artistic choices visible across genres. The letters extend this vantage, presenting the voice of the author in direct address. Together, these documents ground the imaginative worlds in lived experience without reducing them to mere transcription, and they invite readers to consider intention, revision, and perseverance as integral parts of the literature they cherish.
Stylistically, these works share hallmarks that become signatures: luminous description anchored in the specifics of light and weather; dialogue alive with local turns of speech; humor that springs from character rather than caricature; and plots that favor the episodic, allowing small revelations to accumulate into larger understandings. Moral feeling is present without stridency; sentiment is balanced by wit; and memory functions not as nostalgia but as ethical attention to what endures. The result is prose that is accessible and musical, domestic in scope yet capacious in implication, hospitable to readers young and old.
Considered together, the collection demonstrates why Montgomery’s writing has maintained its vitality. It offers an appealing vision of individual growth within communal bonds, imagination as a constructive force, and home as a site of meaning and responsibility. The books invite rereading across life stages, yielding new emphases as one moves from identification with children to sympathy for parents, neighbors, and elders. By situating profound themes in everyday settings, the works achieve a durable universality. They show that beauty and moral clarity need not be abstract; they can be found in familiar roads, hard-won friendships, and steadfast care.
Readers may approach this volume in sequence to follow the long arc from early girlhood to complex maturity, or range among the novels, stories, poems, and letters to experience resonances across forms. However one proceeds, the whole is designed to honor variety within unity—the full body of work speaking in a single, inviting chorus. By bringing fiction, verse, and authorial self-disclosure into one place, the collection offers both immersion and perspective, allowing the pleasures of narrative to coexist with insight into their making. It is an open door to a complete, cultivated landscape of feeling and craft.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) was a Canadian author whose fiction helped define the international image of Prince Edward Island and shaped modern children’s and young adult literature. Writing in the early to mid–20th century, she created memorable protagonists whose wit, imagination, and resilience appealed to readers across generations. Her most famous novel, Anne of Green Gables, introduced a setting and voice that resonated far beyond Canada, spawning sequels, translations, and adaptations. Montgomery balanced lyrical descriptions of nature with close attention to social life in small communities, producing novels, short stories, and poems that combined humor and sentiment with psychological insight and a strong sense of place.
Montgomery grew up in a rural community on Prince Edward Island, an environment that later inspired the fictional Avonlea. She attended local schools and continued to Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown for teacher training, afterward taking further courses at Dalhousie University. Alongside teaching in island schools, she wrote steadily for newspapers and magazines, honing her craft in poetry and short fiction. Her voracious reading in Victorian and Romantic literature—along with the oral storytelling and landscape of the Maritimes—shaped her style. From early on she demonstrated exacting work habits, meticulous revision, and a keen interest in the business of authorship, practices that sustained a long professional career.
Her breakthrough came with Anne of Green Gables in the early 20th century, a novel that quickly achieved international popularity. It established her characteristic blend of wit, feeling, and pastoral detail, and affirmed the market for Canadian regional fiction. Montgomery expanded the story in sequels that traced her heroine’s growth, while continuing to publish poems and tales in periodicals. Reviewers praised her humor and eye for character, and readers responded to themes of imagination, belonging, and self-fashioning. The commercial success of the series enabled her to devote sustained time to writing, even as she navigated the demands of teaching, household responsibilities, and editorial deadlines.
Although best known for Anne, Montgomery developed a wide-ranging oeuvre. The Emily of New Moon trilogy follows a young writer’s apprenticeship and is often cited for its portrayal of artistic ambition. Other novels, including Kilmeny of the Orchard, The Story Girl, and the Pat of Silver Bush books, explore friendship, memory, and attachment to home. She also wrote adult fiction such as The Blue Castle and A Tangled Web, which address autonomy, social pressure, and community bonds. Collections like Chronicles of Avonlea gathered her magazine stories into cohesive volumes. Across forms, she returned to motifs of nature, seasonality, moral choice, and the sustaining power of imagination.
Montgomery balanced an exacting publication schedule with life in both Prince Edward Island and, later, Ontario, where she lived in parsonage communities for many years. The First World War and the economic strains that followed left an imprint on her work; Rilla of Ingleside, for example, portrays the home-front experience and is noted for its historical realism within a domestic narrative. She engaged closely with editors and readers, maintained extensive correspondence, and kept careful scrapbooks and records of her submissions. Translations, stage adaptations, and film and television versions began appearing in the early decades of the century and continued thereafter, amplifying her global reputation.
Her writing reflects a moral imagination shaped by Presbyterian culture, the British literary tradition, and a deep attachment to island landscapes. She admired poets and novelists of the Victorian era, and reworked their themes through distinctly local settings and sharp comic observation. Stylistically, she blended third-person narration with letters and diary forms, experimented with frame tales, and paid close attention to seasonal rhythms. Montgomery’s lifelong journals, published posthumously, have illuminated her methods, reading, and views on authorship, allowing scholars to trace how she crafted plots from everyday incidents. Her fiction often champions curiosity, education, and women’s creative agency while acknowledging social limits.
In her later years, Montgomery continued to write and manage a vast backlist, preparing story collections and revisiting earlier characters. She died in the early 1940s and was buried in Prince Edward Island, a testament to her enduring ties to the place that shaped her art. Since then, her legacy has expanded through literary scholarship, heritage tourism, and continual reprintings. Schools, reading groups, and academic courses revisit her work for its nuanced portrayal of community, growth, and the natural world. Contemporary readers find in her novels both comfort and complexity, and her influence persists in narratives of resilient young protagonists across global children’s literature.
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942) authored the novels, stories, poems, and letters collected here, from Anne of Green Gables (1908) through late works like Anne of Windy Poplars (1936) and Anne of Ingleside (1939). Her career bridges the Confederation generation’s rural world and the urbanized, war-shaken Dominion of the early twentieth century. Born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island, and raised in Cavendish, she transformed local memory into the fictional geographies of Avonlea, Glen St. Mary, and beyond. The collection spans domestic fiction, short-story cycles, war chronicle, lyric verse, and autobiographical testimony, revealing the breadth of a writer who situated intimate lives within broad currents of Canadian and imperial history.
Prince Edward Island’s agrarian society, settled largely by Scots and English, underpins the milieus of the Anne series, Chronicles of Avonlea, The Story Girl, and Kilmeny of the Orchard. The island’s nineteenth-century “Land Question,” resolved by the 1875 Land Purchase Act, left cultural traces of tenancy, thrift, and attachment to small freeholds. Shipbuilding’s decline and emigration sharpened local attachment to farms and villages like Cavendish, source for Avonlea. The seasonal round—seedtime, harvest, and fishing—structures narrative time. Confederation-era politics (PEI joined Canada in 1873) and a Protestant ethos set the backdrop for schoolhouses, church socials, and quilting bees that animate multiple works across decades.
Montgomery’s own path through teacher training and classrooms shaped her treatment of education. She earned a First-Class Teacher’s License at Prince of Wales College, Charlottetown (1895), taught in rural schools at Bideford (1895–96) and Lower Bedeque (1897), and took literature courses at Dalhousie University in Halifax in the late 1890s. School reform—standardized readers, inspector visits, trustee politics—threads through Anne’s teaching years and the Avonlea story cycles. The authority and vulnerability of women teachers, their boarding arrangements, and community scrutiny inform both comic episodes and serious conflicts, later refracted in Anne of Windy Poplars, with its letters from Summerside’s principalship and its skirmishes with local elites.
Turn-of-the-century print culture shaped Montgomery’s voice and career. She sold poems and stories to North American magazines from the 1890s, including The Youth’s Companion and Ladies’ and family periodicals that prized wholesome domestic fiction. In 1901–1902 she worked for a Halifax newspaper, acquiring newsroom discipline and editorial instincts. The short-story form—compressed, moral, place-centered—fed directly into Chronicles of Avonlea (1912) and Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920), which gathered earlier magazine tales. The Alpine Path: The Story of My Career appeared in 1917 as a serial in Everywoman’s World, addressing readers of advice and uplift literature who aspired to professional authorship.
Her publishing trajectory reveals early twentieth-century transborder book commerce. Anne of Green Gables was accepted by L. C. Page & Company of Boston in 1908 after other rejections, its success prompting sequels and disputes over royalties and rights. Protracted legal wrangles with Page during the 1910s pushed Montgomery toward Toronto’s McClelland & Stewart and New York partners. The 1891 U.S. International Copyright (Chace) Act and Canada’s 1921 Copyright Act framed her contracts and manufacturing obligations. Variant titling—Anne of Windy Willows in Britain and Anne of Windy Poplars in the United States (1936)—shows publishers’ sensitivity to markets and potential title conflicts.
Presbyterian congregational life grounds much of the social world in these books. Montgomery married the Rev. Ewan Macdonald on 5 July 1911 and moved from Cavendish to Leaskdale, Ontario, later serving parishes at Norval (1926) and living in Toronto (from 1935). Manse dynamics—Ladies’ Aid meetings, Sunday School picnics, presbytery oversight—inform depictions of clergy families and parish children in Rainbow Valley and Rilla of Ingleside. The 1925 Church Union that formed the United Church of Canada from Methodist, Congregationalist, and many Presbyterian congregations created denominational tensions the Macdonalds navigated, shading the moral expectations that also shaped magazine editors’ demands and readers’ judgments.
Montgomery’s heroines inhabit the age of the “New Woman,” as suffrage and higher education advanced. Canadian provinces enfranchised women between 1916 and 1925 (federal suffrage came in 1918 for most women), while normal schools and universities opened doors to professional careers. Anne’s progress from rural schoolteacher to Redmond University graduate symbolizes these opportunities within polite boundaries of respectability. Women’s Institutes, founded at Stoney Creek, Ontario, in 1897 and established on Prince Edward Island by 1911, organized domestic science, public lectures, and charitable work visible in social chapters throughout the oeuvre. Clubwomen’s reformist energy colors town politics in Windy Poplars and the story cycles.
Technological change punctuates the novels. Railways and coastal steamers linked Charlottetown to Halifax, Boston, and Montreal, while the Prince Edward Island Railway (completed in the 1870s) made school, courtship, and publishing travel feasible. Expanding postal services, telephones, and the typewriter inform epistolary structures and letter-driven plots. By the time of Anne of Ingleside, automobiles and gramophones signal middle-class modernity, even as horse-drawn buggies, kerosene lamps, and farm chores persist. Catalogues and mail-order dresses alter etiquette and aspiration, while cameras and amateur photography preserve scenes central to reminiscence across The Story Girl, The Golden Road, and the Avonlea narratives.
The Great War (1914–1918) reoriented Montgomery’s world and fiction. Canada’s mobilization—recruiting for the Canadian Expeditionary Force, patriotic knitting and fundraising through the Red Cross and the IODE, and the 1917 Military Service Act—forms the civic surround of Rainbow Valley and the home-front chronicle Rilla of Ingleside. References to Ypres, the Somme (especially Courcelette, 1916), and Vimy Ridge graze domestic interiors with global grief. The 1918–1919 influenza pandemic, which strained volunteer nursing and local clinics, haunts letters and finds echoes in the later Anne books’ anxieties, joining war memorialization to the intimate cadences of diaries, lullabies, and kitchen-table councils.
Folklore and oral performance irrigate Montgomery’s prose. Scottish-Gaelic proverbs, ghost tales, and ballads—relics of settler oral culture—surface in The Story Girl and The Golden Road, where recitation and communal storytelling structure child society. Chronicles of Avonlea and Further Chronicles adapt legends into village case studies, negotiating between credulity and skepticism. Kilmeny of the Orchard borrows aura from romantic balladry, recalling James Hogg’s “Kilmeny.” Such materials are tempered by Edwardian realism: superstitions yield to schoolroom science and ministerial sermons, yet the imaginative apprenticeship they sponsor remains a wellspring for Anne’s metaphors, the story cycles’ moral fables, and the poetry’s nature mysticism.
Landscape is a historical actor in these books. PEI’s red sandstone soils, spruce and birch windbreaks, and dune-backed beaches carry the memory of mixed farming and shore fisheries, tying character to place. Montgomery’s pastoral does not ignore change: enclosure fences, cleared hedgerows, and out-migration mark the island’s modernization. Tourism, visible by the 1890s and accelerated by interwar leisure travel, reframed Cavendish as a literary destination. In 1937, the Green Gables house entered the new Prince Edward Island National Park, institutionalizing the imaginative geography her fiction had created and shaping how later readers approached Avonlea and its neighboring story-worlds.
Rural civic institutions organize conflict and comedy. Township councils argued over roads and bridges; school trustees monitored curricula and teacher conduct; church sessions disciplined morals. Women’s sewing circles, harvest “bees,” and agricultural fairs punctuated the calendar, creating the associational density that Chronicles of Avonlea and the Anne novels mine for plot. The long echo of PEI’s absentee-landlord past—removed by the 1875 Land Purchase Act—encouraged thrift and property pride in older generations portrayed across the oeuvre. Ontario manse settings transpose these structures into presbytery committees, Ladies’ Aid fundraisers, and bazaars that texture Rainbow Valley, Rilla of Ingleside, and late Anne narratives.
Montgomery’s reception was international. Boston editions launched her; British and Canadian houses distributed widely; colonial markets in Australia and New Zealand followed. Silent cinema adapted Anne in 1919 (starring Mary Miles Minter), and a 1934 RKO film, featuring Dawn O’Day—who adopted the screen name Anne Shirley—revived sales. The Great Depression reshaped the book trade: public libraries expanded circulation, readers sought consolatory fiction, and publishers cultivated dependable brands. This climate partly explains the 1930s return to Anne (Windy Poplars, Ingleside) and the continued reissuing of story cycles, even as Montgomery balanced nostalgia with contemporary concerns in form and theme.
Genre experimentation tracks contemporary media. Anne of Windy Poplars adopts the epistolary mode, thriving on cheap stationery, reliable trains, and punctual mail that made letter-writing a daily art. The Watchman and Other Poems (1916) gathers devotional, nature, and war-adjacent verse shaped by hymn meters and sonnet discipline popular in Canadian magazines. The Chronicles volumes exemplify a period practice: binding scattered magazine pieces into cohesive, place-marketed books. The Alpine Path, serialized in Everywoman’s World in 1917, blends career counsel with memoir, modeling upward mobility for women writers navigating editors, agents, and household duties—dynamics legible across novels and short fiction alike.
Autobiography and letters link life to literature. Montgomery’s journals and correspondence, spanning the 1880s to 1942 and edited posthumously by scholars including Mary Rubio and Elizabeth Waterston, document the Cavendish years, the Leaskdale and Norval manses, and the Toronto period. They record editorial disputes, royalty anxieties, and wartime service work; they also preserve the social detail later fictionalized in Avonlea and Glen St. Mary. Exchanges with correspondents such as Ephraim Weber and G. B. MacMillan illuminate how magazine stories were revised into Chronicles, how poems coalesced into The Watchman, and how personal griefs and triumphs inflect episodes throughout the Anne sequence.
Public health and medical modernity traverse these narratives. Typhoid fever, consumption, and scarlet fever shape the risks of childhood; by the early twentieth century, trained nurses, district doctors, and hospital auxiliaries emerge as local institutions. The 1918 influenza pandemic—arriving with troop movements and crowded trains—tests parish networks and women’s volunteerism. Edwardian discourses on heredity, child-rearing, and “nerves” seep into both diaries and fiction, inflecting romances like Kilmeny and the family chronicle in Anne of Ingleside. These currents situate domestic plots within wider anxieties about vitality, morality, and progress shared across Canada’s towns and villages between 1880 and 1930.
Together, the works trace a social arc from post-Confederation Island childhood through higher education and settlement in an Ontario manse to the shocks of world war and the media age. Shifts in copyright regimes (notably Canada’s 1921 Act), the consolidation of national publishers, and title variations such as Anne of Windy Willows/Poplars (1936) register changing literary markets. Montgomery died in Toronto on 24 April 1942 and was buried in Cavendish; yet the preservation of Green Gables and the publication of journals and collected letters have extended her imaginative domain. The collection captures a modernizing Canada seen through local lenses and transnational print circuits.
An imaginative orphan, Anne Shirley, is mistakenly sent to the Cuthberts in Avonlea and gradually finds belonging. The novel follows her early schooling, friendships, and ambitions as she matures.
Now a young teacher, Anne leads the Avonlea school and a village Improvement Society. She balances civic projects, new acquaintances, and responsibilities that test her judgment.
Anne leaves Prince Edward Island to attend Redmond College, embracing independence and study. She navigates deepening friendships and proposals while clarifying her feelings about home and love.
Told largely through letters to Gilbert, Anne’s years in Summerside bring clashes with entrenched local families and encounters with eccentric boarders. She learns to negotiate community politics and small-town expectations.
Anne and Gilbert begin married life in Four Winds, establishing a home by the sea. New friendships and early trials shape their first years together.
Settled at Ingleside, Anne and Gilbert raise their children amid school scrapes, neighborhood conflicts, and social calls. Family vignettes reveal shifting roles, community ties, and enduring affection.
The Blythe and Meredith children form a close cohort whose escapades ripple through Glen St. Mary. Their friendships and missteps illuminate village values and family bonds.
During the First World War, Anne’s youngest daughter Rilla comes of age on the home front. She assumes new duties as the Blythes and their neighbors respond to the war’s demands.
In rural Prince Edward Island, cousins gather around Sara Stanley, a gifted storyteller whose tales frame their daily adventures. The narrative captures childhood, folklore, and community life.
A sequel to The Story Girl, the same group chronicles a final season of childhood through a homemade magazine and shared enterprises. The story looks back on growth and change with quiet nostalgia.
Eric Marshall meets the secluded Kilmeny Gordon in a hidden orchard and is drawn into her silence and past. The romance turns on trust, identity, and obstacles to a shared future.
Linked short stories set in and around Avonlea highlight villagers’ romances, reconciliations, and everyday moral choices. Anne appears occasionally as the broader community takes focus.
A second collection of Avonlea tales extends the village portrait through new characters and situations. Themes of neighborliness, pride, and second chances recur.
A poetry collection reflecting on nature, faith, memory, and Maritime settings. It blends narrative pieces with lyrical meditations.
Selections from personal writings outline Montgomery’s life, work habits, and relationships. Memoir passages and correspondence offer context for her publishing career and creative aims.
Montgomery’s brief autobiography traces her path to authorship, from early submissions to literary success. It emphasizes perseverance, professional milestones, and the origins of Anne.
Spanning decades, Montgomery’s correspondence with family, friends, and editors illuminates her creative process and private concerns. Notes on publishing, place, and daily life situate the fiction in its historical context.
Mrs. Rachel Lynde lived just where the Avonlea main road dipped down into a little hollow, fringed with alders and ladies’ eardrops and traversed by a brook that had its source away back in the woods of the old Cuthbert place; it was reputed to be an intricate, headlong brook in its earlier course through those woods, with dark secrets of pool and cascade; but by the time it reached Lynde’s Hollow it was a quiet, well-conducted little stream, for not even a brook could run past Mrs. Rachel Lynde’s door without due regard for decency and decorum; it probably was conscious that Mrs. Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed, from brooks and children up, and that if she noticed anything odd or out of place she would never rest until she had ferreted out the whys and wherefores thereof.
There are plenty of people in Avonlea and out of it, who can attend closely to their neighbor’s business by dint of neglecting their own; but Mrs. Rachel Lynde was one of those capable creatures who can manage their own concerns and those of other folks into the bargain. She was a notable housewife; her work was always done and well done; she “ran” the Sewing Circle, helped run the Sunday-school, and was the strongest prop of the Church Aid Society and Foreign Missions Auxiliary. Yet with all this Mrs. Rachel found abundant time to sit for hours at her kitchen window, knitting “cotton warp” quilts — she had knitted sixteen of them, as Avonlea housekeepers were wont to tell in awed voices — and keeping a sharp eye on the main road that crossed the hollow and wound up the steep red hill beyond. Since Avonlea occupied a little triangular peninsula jutting out into the Gulf of St. Lawrence with water on two sides of it, anybody who went out of it or into it had to pass over that hill road and so run the unseen gauntlet of Mrs. Rachel’s all-seeing eye.
She was sitting there one afternoon in early June. The sun was coming in at the window warm and bright; the orchard on the slope below the house was in a bridal flush of pinky-white bloom, hummed over by a myriad of bees. Thomas Lynde — a meek little man whom Avonlea people called “Rachel Lynde’s husband” — was sowing his late turnip seed on the hill field beyond the barn; and Matthew Cuthbert ought to have been sowing his on the big red brook field away over by Green Gables. Mrs. Rachel knew that he ought because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening before in William J. Blair’s store over at Carmody that he meant to sow his turnip seed the next afternoon. Peter had asked him, of course, for Matthew Cuthbert had never been known to volunteer information about anything in his whole life.
And yet here was Matthew Cuthbert, at halfpast three on the afternoon of a busy day, placidly driving over the hollow and up the hill; moreover, he wore a white collar and his best suit of clothes, which was plain proof that he was going out of Avonlea; and he had the buggy and the sorrel mare, which betokened that he was going a considerable distance. Now, where was Matthew Cuthbert going and why was he going there?
Had it been any other man in Avonlea, Mrs. Rachel, deftly putting this and that together, might have given a pretty good guess as to both questions. But Matthew so rarely went from home that it must be something pressing and unusual which was taking him; he was the shyest man alive and hated to have to go among strangers or to any place where he might have to talk. Matthew, dressed up with a white collar and driving in a buggy, was something that didn’t happen often. Mrs. Rachel, ponder as she might, could make nothing of it and her afternoon’s enjoyment was spoiled.
“I’ll just step over to Green Gables after tea and find out from Marilla where he’s gone and why,” the worthy woman finally concluded. “He doesn’t generally go to town this time of year and he NEVER visits; if he’d run out of turnip seed he wouldn’t dress up and take the buggy to go for more; he wasn’t driving fast enough to be going for a doctor. Yet something must have happened since last night to start him off. I’m clean puzzled, that’s what, and I won’t know a minute’s peace of mind or conscience until I know what has taken Matthew Cuthbert out of Avonlea today.”
Accordingly after tea Mrs. Rachel set out; she had not far to go; the big, rambling, orchard-embowered house where the Cuthberts lived was a scant quarter of a mile up the road from Lynde’s Hollow. To be sure, the long lane made it a good deal further. Matthew Cuthbert’s father, as shy and silent as his son after him, had got as far away as he possibly could from his fellow men without actually retreating into the woods when he founded his homestead. Green Gables was built at the furthest edge of his cleared land and there it was to this day, barely visible from the main road along which all the other Avonlea houses were so sociably situated. Mrs. Rachel Lynde did not call living in such a place LIVING at all.
“It’s just STAYING, that’s what,” she said as she stepped along the deep-rutted, grassy lane bordered with wild rose bushes. “It’s no wonder Matthew and Marilla are both a little odd, living away back here by themselves. Trees aren’t much company, though dear knows if they were there’d be enough of them. I’d ruther look at people. To be sure, they seem contented enough; but then, I suppose, they’re used to it. A body can get used to anything, even to being hanged, as the Irishman said.”
With this Mrs. Rachel stepped out of the lane into the backyard of Green Gables. Very green and neat and precise was that yard, set about on one side with great patriarchal willows and the other with prim Lombardies. Not a stray stick nor stone was to be seen, for Mrs. Rachel would have seen it if there had been. Privately she was of the opinion that Marilla Cuthbert swept that yard over as often as she swept her house. One could have eaten a meal off the ground without overbrimming the proverbial peck of dirt.
Mrs. Rachel rapped smartly at the kitchen door and stepped in when bidden to do so. The kitchen at Green Gables was a cheerful apartment — or would have been cheerful if it had not been so painfully clean as to give it something of the appearance of an unused parlor. Its windows looked east and west; through the west one, looking out on the back yard, came a flood of mellow June sunlight; but the east one, whence you got a glimpse of the bloom white cherry-trees in the left orchard and nodding, slender birches down in the hollow by the brook, was greened over by a tangle of vines. Here sat Marilla Cuthbert, when she sat at all, always slightly distrustful of sunshine, which seemed to her too dancing and irresponsible a thing for a world which was meant to be taken seriously; and here she sat now, knitting, and the table behind her was laid for supper.
Mrs. Rachel, before she had fairly closed the door, had taken a mental note of everything that was on that table. There were three plates laid, so that Marilla must be expecting some one home with Matthew to tea; but the dishes were everyday dishes and there was only crab-apple preserves and one kind of cake, so that the expected company could not be any particular company. Yet what of Matthew’s white collar and the sorrel mare? Mrs. Rachel was getting fairly dizzy with this unusual mystery about quiet, unmysterious Green Gables.
“Good evening, Rachel,” Marilla said briskly. “This is a real fine evening, isn’t it? Won’t you sit down? How are all your folks?”
Something that for lack of any other name might be called friendship existed and always had existed between Marilla Cuthbert and Mrs. Rachel, in spite of — or perhaps because of — their dissimilarity.
Marilla was a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves; her dark hair showed some gray streaks and was always twisted up in a hard little knot behind with two wire hairpins stuck aggressively through it. She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humor.
“We’re all pretty well,” said Mrs. Rachel. “I was kind of afraid YOU weren’t, though, when I saw Matthew starting off today. I thought maybe he was going to the doctor’s.”
Marilla’s lips twitched understandingly. She had expected Mrs. Rachel up; she had known that the sight of Matthew jaunting off so unaccountably would be too much for her neighbor’s curiosity.
“Oh, no, I’m quite well although I had a bad headache yesterday,” she said. “Matthew went to Bright River. We’re getting a little boy from an orphan asylum in Nova Scotia and he’s coming on the train tonight.”
If Marilla had said that Matthew had gone to Bright River to meet a kangaroo from Australia Mrs. Rachel could not have been more astonished. She was actually stricken dumb for five seconds. It was unsupposable that Marilla was making fun of her, but Mrs. Rachel was almost forced to suppose it.
“Are you in earnest, Marilla?” she demanded when voice returned to her.
“Yes, of course,” said Marilla, as if getting boys from orphan asylums in Nova Scotia were part of the usual spring work on any well-regulated Avonlea farm instead of being an unheard of innovation.
Mrs. Rachel felt that she had received a severe mental jolt. She thought in exclamation points. A boy! Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert of all people adopting a boy! From an orphan asylum! Well, the world was certainly turning upside down! She would be surprised at nothing after this! Nothing!
“What on earth put such a notion into your head?” she demanded disapprovingly.
This had been done without her advice being asked, and must perforce be disapproved.
“Well, we’ve been thinking about it for some time — all winter in fact,” returned Marilla. “Mrs. Alexander Spencer was up here one day before Christmas and she said she was going to get a little girl from the asylum over in Hopeton in the spring. Her cousin lives there and Mrs. Spencer has visited here and knows all about it. So Matthew and I have talked it over off and on ever since. We thought we’d get a boy. Matthew is getting up in years, you know — he’s sixty — and he isn’t so spry as he once was. His heart troubles him a good deal. And you know how desperate hard it’s got to be to get hired help. There’s never anybody to be had but those stupid, half-grown little French boys; and as soon as you do get one broke into your ways and taught something he’s up and off to the lobster canneries or the States. At first Matthew suggested getting a Home boy. But I said ‘no’ flat to that. ‘They may be all right — I’m not saying they’re not — but no London street Arabs for me,’ I said. ‘Give me a native born at least. There’ll be a risk, no matter who we get. But I’ll feel easier in my mind and sleep sounder at nights if we get a born Canadian.’ So in the end we decided to ask Mrs. Spencer to pick us out one when she went over to get her little girl. We heard last week she was going, so we sent her word by Richard Spencer’s folks at Carmody to bring us a smart, likely boy of about ten or eleven. We decided that would be the best age — old enough to be of some use in doing chores right off and young enough to be trained up proper. We mean to give him a good home and schooling. We had a telegram from Mrs. Alexander Spencer today — the mailman brought it from the station — saying they were coming on the five-thirty train tonight. So Matthew went to Bright River to meet him. Mrs. Spencer will drop him off there. Of course she goes on to White Sands station herself.”
Mrs. Rachel prided herself on always speaking her mind; she proceeded to speak it now, having adjusted her mental attitude to this amazing piece of news.
“Well, Marilla, I’ll just tell you plain that I think you’re doing a mighty foolish thing — a risky thing, that’s what. You don’t know what you’re getting. You’re bringing a strange child into your house and home and you don’t know a single thing about him nor what his disposition is like nor what sort of parents he had nor how he’s likely to turn out. Why, it was only last week I read in the paper how a man and his wife up west of the Island took a boy out of an orphan asylum and he set fire to the house at night — set it ON PURPOSE, Marilla — and nearly burnt them to a crisp in their beds. And I know another case where an adopted boy used to suck the eggs — they couldn’t break him of it. If you had asked my advice in the matter — which you didn’t do, Marilla — I’d have said for mercy’s sake not to think of such a thing, that’s what.”
This Job’s comforting seemed neither to offend nor to alarm Marilla. She knitted steadily on.
“I don’t deny there’s something in what you say, Rachel. I’ve had some qualms myself. But Matthew was terrible set on it. I could see that, so I gave in. It’s so seldom Matthew sets his mind on anything that when he does I always feel it’s my duty to give in. And as for the risk, there’s risks in pretty near everything a body does in this world. There’s risks in people’s having children of their own if it comes to that — they don’t always turn out well. And then Nova Scotia is right close to the Island. It isn’t as if we were getting him from England or the States. He can’t be much different from ourselves.”
“Well, I hope it will turn out all right,” said Mrs. Rachel in a tone that plainly indicated her painful doubts. “Only don’t say I didn’t warn you if he burns Green Gables down or puts strychnine in the well — I heard of a case over in New Brunswick where an orphan asylum child did that and the whole family died in fearful agonies. Only, it was a girl in that instance.”
“Well, we’re not getting a girl,” said Marilla, as if poisoning wells were a purely feminine accomplishment and not to be dreaded in the case of a boy. “I’d never dream of taking a girl to bring up. I wonder at Mrs. Alexander Spencer for doing it. But there, SHE wouldn’t shrink from adopting a whole orphan asylum if she took it into her head.”
Mrs. Rachel would have liked to stay until Matthew came home with his imported orphan. But reflecting that it would be a good two hours at least before his arrival she concluded to go up the road to Robert Bell’s and tell the news. It would certainly make a sensation second to none, and Mrs. Rachel dearly loved to make a sensation. So she took herself away, somewhat to Marilla’s relief, for the latter felt her doubts and fears reviving under the influence of Mrs. Rachel’s pessimism.
“Well, of all things that ever were or will be!” ejaculated Mrs. Rachel when she was safely out in the lane. “It does really seem as if I must be dreaming. Well, I’m sorry for that poor young one and no mistake. Matthew and Marilla don’t know anything about children and they’ll expect him to be wiser and steadier that his own grandfather, if so be’s he ever had a grandfather, which is doubtful. It seems uncanny to think of a child at Green Gables somehow; there’s never been one there, for Matthew and Marilla were grown up when the new house was built — if they ever WERE children, which is hard to believe when one looks at them. I wouldn’t be in that orphan’s shoes for anything. My, but I pity him, that’s what.”
So said Mrs. Rachel to the wild rose bushes out of the fulness of her heart; but if she could have seen the child who was waiting patiently at the Bright River station at that very moment her pity would have been still deeper and more profound.
Matthew Cuthbert and the sorrel mare jogged comfortably over the eight miles to Bright River. It was a pretty road, running along between snug farmsteads, with now and again a bit of balsamy fir wood to drive through or a hollow where wild plums hung out their filmy bloom. The air was sweet with the breath of many apple orchards and the meadows sloped away in the distance to horizon mists of pearl and purple; while
“The little birds sang as if it were
The one day of summer in all the year.”
Matthew enjoyed the drive after his own fashion, except during the moments when he met women and had to nod to them — for in Prince Edward island you are supposed to nod to all and sundry you meet on the road whether you know them or not.
Matthew dreaded all women except Marilla and Mrs. Rachel; he had an uncomfortable feeling that the mysterious creatures were secretly laughing at him. He may have been quite right in thinking so, for he was an odd-looking personage, with an ungainly figure and long iron-gray hair that touched his stooping shoulders, and a full, soft brown beard which he had worn ever since he was twenty. In fact, he had looked at twenty very much as he looked at sixty, lacking a little of the grayness.
When he reached Bright River there was no sign of any train; he thought he was too early, so he tied his horse in the yard of the small Bright River hotel and went over to the station house. The long platform was almost deserted; the only living creature in sight being a girl who was sitting on a pile of shingles at the extreme end. Matthew, barely noting that it WAS a girl, sidled past her as quickly as possible without looking at her. Had he looked he could hardly have failed to notice the tense rigidity and expectation of her attitude and expression. She was sitting there waiting for something or somebody and, since sitting and waiting was the only thing to do just then, she sat and waited with all her might and main.
Matthew encountered the stationmaster locking up the ticket office preparatory to going home for supper, and asked him if the five-thirty train would soon be along.
“The five-thirty train has been in and gone half an hour ago,” answered that brisk official. “But there was a passenger dropped off for you — a little girl. She’s sitting out there on the shingles. I asked her to go into the ladies’ waiting room, but she informed me gravely that she preferred to stay outside. ‘There was more scope for imagination,’ she said. She’s a case, I should say.”
“I’m not expecting a girl,” said Matthew blankly. “It’s a boy I’ve come for. He should be here. Mrs. Alexander Spencer was to bring him over from Nova Scotia for me.”
The stationmaster whistled.
“Guess there’s some mistake,” he said. “Mrs. Spencer came off the train with that girl and gave her into my charge. Said you and your sister were adopting her from an orphan asylum and that you would be along for her presently. That’s all I know about it — and I haven’t got any more orphans concealed hereabouts.”
“I don’t understand,” said Matthew helplessly, wishing that Marilla was at hand to cope with the situation.
“Well, you’d better question the girl,” said the stationmaster carelessly. “I dare say she’ll be able to explain — she’s got a tongue of her own, that’s certain. Maybe they were out of boys of the brand you wanted.”
He walked jauntily away, being hungry, and the unfortunate Matthew was left to do that which was harder for him than bearding a lion in its den — walk up to a girl — a strange girl — an orphan girl — and demand of her why she wasn’t a boy. Matthew groaned in spirit as he turned about and shuffled gently down the platform towards her.
She had been watching him ever since he had passed her and she had her eyes on him now. Matthew was not looking at her and would not have seen what she was really like if he had been, but an ordinary observer would have seen this: A child of about eleven, garbed in a very short, very tight, very ugly dress of yellowish-gray wincey. She wore a faded brown sailor hat and beneath the hat, extending down her back, were two braids of very thick, decidedly red hair. Her face was small, white and thin, also much freckled; her mouth was large and so were her eyes, which looked green in some lights and moods and gray in others.
So far, the ordinary observer; an extraordinary observer might have seen that the chin was very pointed and pronounced; that the big eyes were full of spirit and vivacity; that the mouth was sweet-lipped and expressive; that the forehead was broad and full; in short, our discerning extraordinary observer might have concluded that no commonplace soul inhabited the body of this stray woman-child of whom shy Matthew Cuthbert was so ludicrously afraid.
Matthew, however, was spared the ordeal of speaking first, for as soon as she concluded that he was coming to her she stood up, grasping with one thin brown hand the handle of a shabby, old-fashioned carpet-bag; the other she held out to him.
“I suppose you are Mr. Matthew Cuthbert of Green Gables?” she said in a peculiarly clear, sweet voice. “I’m very glad to see you. I was beginning to be afraid you weren’t coming for me and I was imagining all the things that might have happened to prevent you. I had made up my mind that if you didn’t come for me tonight I’d go down the track to that big wild cherry-tree at the bend, and climb up into it to stay all night. I wouldn’t be a bit afraid, and it would be lovely to sleep in a wild cherry-tree all white with bloom in the moonshine, don’t you think? You could imagine you were dwelling in marble halls, couldn’t you? And I was quite sure you would come for me in the morning, if you didn’t tonight.”
Matthew had taken the scrawny little hand awkwardly in his; then and there he decided what to do. He could not tell this child with the glowing eyes that there had been a mistake; he would take her home and let Marilla do that. She couldn’t be left at Bright River anyhow, no matter what mistake had been made, so all questions and explanations might as well be deferred until he was safely back at Green Gables.
“I’m sorry I was late,” he said shyly. “Come along. The horse is over in the yard. Give me your bag.”
“Oh, I can carry it,” the child responded cheerfully. “It isn’t heavy. I’ve got all my worldly goods in it, but it isn’t heavy. And if it isn’t carried in just a certain way the handle pulls out — so I’d better keep it because I know the exact knack of it. It’s an extremely old carpet-bag. Oh, I’m very glad you’ve come, even if it would have been nice to sleep in a wild cherry-tree. We’ve got to drive a long piece, haven’t we? Mrs. Spencer said it was eight miles. I’m glad because I love driving. Oh, it seems so wonderful that I’m going to live with you and belong to you. I’ve never belonged to anybody — not really. But the asylum was the worst. I’ve only been in it four months, but that was enough. I don’t suppose you ever were an orphan in an asylum, so you can’t possibly understand what it is like. It’s worse than anything you could imagine. Mrs. Spencer said it was wicked of me to talk like that, but I didn’t mean to be wicked. It’s so easy to be wicked without knowing it, isn’t it? They were good, you know — the asylum people. But there is so little scope for the imagination in an asylum — only just in the other orphans. It was pretty interesting to imagine things about them — to imagine that perhaps the girl who sat next to you was really the daughter of a belted earl, who had been stolen away from her parents in her infancy by a cruel nurse who died before she could confess. I used to lie awake at nights and imagine things like that, because I didn’t have time in the day. I guess that’s why I’m so thin — I AM dreadful thin, ain’t I? There isn’t a pick on my bones. I do love to imagine I’m nice and plump, with dimples in my elbows.”
With this Matthew’s companion stopped talking, partly because she was out of breath and partly because they had reached the buggy. Not another word did she say until they had left the village and were driving down a steep little hill, the road part of which had been cut so deeply into the soft soil, that the banks, fringed with blooming wild cherry-trees and slim white birches, were several feet above their heads.
The child put out her hand and broke off a branch of wild plum that brushed against the side of the buggy.
“Isn’t that beautiful? What did that tree, leaning out from the bank, all white and lacy, make you think of?” she asked.
“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.
“Why, a bride, of course — a bride all in white with a lovely misty veil. I’ve never seen one, but I can imagine what she would look like. I don’t ever expect to be a bride myself. I’m so homely nobody will ever want to marry me — unless it might be a foreign missionary. I suppose a foreign missionary mightn’t be very particular. But I do hope that some day I shall have a white dress. That is my highest ideal of earthly bliss. I just love pretty clothes. And I’ve never had a pretty dress in my life that I can remember — but of course it’s all the more to look forward to, isn’t it? And then I can imagine that I’m dressed gorgeously. This morning when I left the asylum I felt so ashamed because I had to wear this horrid old wincey dress. All the orphans had to wear them, you know. A merchant in Hopeton last winter donated three hundred yards of wincey to the asylum. Some people said it was because he couldn’t sell it, but I’d rather believe that it was out of the kindness of his heart, wouldn’t you? When we got on the train I felt as if everybody must be looking at me and pitying me. But I just went to work and imagined that I had on the most beautiful pale blue silk dress — because when you ARE imagining you might as well imagine something worth while — and a big hat all flowers and nodding plumes, and a gold watch, and kid gloves and boots. I felt cheered up right away and I enjoyed my trip to the Island with all my might. I wasn’t a bit sick coming over in the boat. Neither was Mrs. Spencer although she generally is. She said she hadn’t time to get sick, watching to see that I didn’t fall overboard. She said she never saw the beat of me for prowling about. But if it kept her from being seasick it’s a mercy I did prowl, isn’t it? And I wanted to see everything that was to be seen on that boat, because I didn’t know whether I’d ever have another opportunity. Oh, there are a lot more cherry-trees all in bloom! This Island is the bloomiest place. I just love it already, and I’m so glad I’m going to live here. I’ve always heard that Prince Edward Island was the prettiest place in the world, and I used to imagine I was living here, but I never really expected I would. It’s delightful when your imaginations come true, isn’t it? But those red roads are so funny. When we got into the train at Charlottetown and the red roads began to flash past I asked Mrs. Spencer what made them red and she said she didn’t know and for pity’s sake not to ask her any more questions. She said I must have asked her a thousand already. I suppose I had, too, but how you going to find out about things if you don’t ask questions? And what DOES make the roads red?”
“Well now, I dunno,” said Matthew.
“Well, that is one of the things to find out sometime. Isn’t it splendid to think of all the things there are to find out about? It just makes me feel glad to be alive — it’s such an interesting world. It wouldn’t be half so interesting if we know all about everything, would it? There’d be no scope for imagination then, would there? But am I talking too much? People are always telling me I do. Would you rather I didn’t talk? If you say so I’ll stop. I can STOP when I make up my mind to it, although it’s difficult.”
Matthew, much to his own surprise, was enjoying himself. Like most quiet folks he liked talkative people when they were willing to do the talking themselves and did not expect him to keep up his end of it. But he had never expected to enjoy the society of a little girl. Women were bad enough in all conscience, but little girls were worse. He detested the way they had of sidling past him timidly, with sidewise glances, as if they expected him to gobble them up at a mouthful if they ventured to say a word. That was the Avonlea type of well-bred little girl. But this freckled witch was very different, and although he found it rather difficult for his slower intelligence to keep up with her brisk mental processes he thought that he “kind of liked her chatter.” So he said as shyly as usual:
“Oh, you can talk as much as you like. I don’t mind.”
“Oh, I’m so glad. I know you and I are going to get along together fine. It’s such a relief to talk when one wants to and not be told that children should be seen and not heard. I’ve had that said to me a million times if I have once. And people laugh at me because I use big words. But if you have big ideas you have to use big words to express them, haven’t you?”
“Well now, that seems reasonable,” said Matthew.
“Mrs. Spencer said that my tongue must be hung in the middle. But it isn’t — it’s firmly fastened at one end. Mrs. Spencer said your place was named Green Gables. I asked her all about it. And she said there were trees all around it. I was gladder than ever. I just love trees. And there weren’t any at all about the asylum, only a few poor weeny-teeny things out in front with little whitewashed cagey things about them. They just looked like orphans themselves, those trees did. It used to make me want to cry to look at them. I used to say to them, ‘Oh, you POOR little things! If you were out in a great big woods with other trees all around you and little mosses and Junebells growing over your roots and a brook not far away and birds singing in you branches, you could grow, couldn’t you? But you can’t where you are. I know just exactly how you feel, little trees.’ I felt sorry to leave them behind this morning. You do get so attached to things like that, don’t you? Is there a brook anywhere near Green Gables? I forgot to ask Mrs. Spencer that.”
“Well now, yes, there’s one right below the house.”
“Fancy. It’s always been one of my dreams to live near a brook. I never expected I would, though. Dreams don’t often come true, do they? Wouldn’t it be nice if they did? But just now I feel pretty nearly perfectly happy. I can’t feel exactly perfectly happy because — well, what color would you call this?”
She twitched one of her long glossy braids over her thin shoulder and held it up before Matthew’s eyes. Matthew was not used to deciding on the tints of ladies’ tresses, but in this case there couldn’t be much doubt.