Anne Shirley

Anne Shirley was born in the (fictional) town of Bolingbroke, Nova Scotia and spent the earliest years of her childhood there. No specific birthdate is given, but references in later works suggest her date of birth is March 5th, 1865.[1] Anne was orphaned as an infant of three months, when her parents, schoolteachers Walter and Bertha Shirley (née Willis), died of typhoid fever. Without any other relations, Anne was taken in by Mrs. Thomas, who had done housework for the Shirleys. After Mr. Thomas died, Anne went to live with the Hammond family for some years and was treated as little more than a servant until Mr. Hammond died, whereupon Mrs. Hammond divided her children amongst relatives and Anne was sent to the orphanage at Hopetown. She considered herself as "cursed" by twins — Mrs. Hammond had three sets of twins whom Anne helped raise.

At the age of eleven, Anne was taken from the Hopetown orphanage to the neighbouring province of Prince Edward Island, which she regarded as her true home ever after. Unfortunately, she arrived by mistake — her sponsors, the siblings Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert, wanted to adopt a boy to help them on their farm, but the neighbour with whom they had sent the message was certain they had requested a girl instead. Matthew quickly became fascinated by the girl's good-hearted spirit, charming enthusiasm, and lively imagination, and wanted her to stay at Green Gables from the very first. Marilla's reaction was to send her back to the orphanage, but she was eventually won over by Anne's quirky joie de vivre — and by the fact that another woman, much harder than herself, was set to take Anne should Marilla decline to keep her. The American scholar Joseph Brennan noted that for Anne "all things are alive", as she imagines trees by the roadside welcoming her to Green Gables while a leaning plum tree makes her think that it is offering a veil just for her.[2] Anne at one point says "Maples are such social things" and likes Lover's Lane because "... you can think out loud there without people calling you crazy."[3]

Anne has great powers of imagination, fed by books of poetry and romance, and a passion for "romantic" and beautiful names and places. When she sees a road lined with apple trees in bloom, she falls silent for a moment before naming the road the "White Way of Delight"; when spying a pond at the Barry homestead, she christens it the "Lake of Shining Waters."[2] Anne had been starved of love at the orphanages she has lived at, and for her, Green Gables is the only home she has ever known.[2] Anne's imaginative nature matches well with her passionate, warm side, full of bubbly optimism and enthusiasm.[2] Anne has an impulsive nature which leads her into all sorts of "scrapes", and she alternates between being carried away with enthusiasm or being in the "depths of despair".[4] One scholar Elizabeth Watson has observed a recurring theme, noting Anne's observations of sunsets mirror her own development.[3] Under the White Way of Delight, Anne watches the sun set which is to her a glory where "a painted sunset sky shone like a great rose window at the end of a cathedral aisle".[3] By the end of the novel, when Anne watches the sun set, it set across a backdrop of "flowers of quiet happiness", as Anne is slowly falling in love with Gilbert.[5]

Anne initially made a poor impression on the townsfolk of Avonlea with an outburst at the Cuthberts' neighbour, the outspoken gossip Mrs. Rachel Lynde, but this was amended by an equally impassioned apology. Anne soon became 'bosom friends' with a girl from a neighbouring farm, Diana Barry. Together with Matthew, Diana is Anne's "kindred spirit".[6] The friendship was disrupted by the temporary enmity of Diana's mother, after Anne mistakenly made Diana drunk with Marilla's homemade currant wine, mistaking it for raspberry cordial. Anne was soon restored to Mrs. Barry's good graces by saving the life of Diana's little sister, Minnie May. Minnie May had an attack of the croup, which Anne was able to cure with a bottle of ipecac and knowledge acquired while caring for the numerous Hammond twins. Throughout her childhood, Anne continued to find herself in similar "scrapes", often through mistakes and misunderstandings, and no fault of her own. At one point Anne "admires to the point of nuttiness" an amethyst brooch, which she is falsely accused of stealing, a crime she has to confess to in order to attend a picnic.[7] Anne tends to define herself in opposition to older people via humour, and forges a relationship with Marilla Cuthbert via humour.[8] The dreamy and imaginative Anne asks that Marilla call her "Cordelia" and "Geraldine" as Anne likes to imagine herself as somebody that she is not.[8]

Anne also formed a complex relationship with Gilbert Blythe, who was two years older than Anne but studying at her level, having had his schooling interrupted when his father became ill. On their first meeting as schoolmates, Gilbert teased Anne with the nickname "Carrots". Anne, perceiving it as a personal insult due to sensitivity over her hair colour, became so angry that she broke her slate over his head.[6] When her teacher punished her by making her stand in front of the class, and then later punishes her for tardiness by making her sit with "the boys", specifically Gilbert Blythe, Anne forms a long-lasting hatred of Gilbert Blythe. Anne tells Diana that "Gilbert Blythe has hurt me excruciatingly".[9] Throughout Anne of Green Gables, Gilbert repeatedly displays admiration for Anne, but she coldly rebuffs him. Her grudge persisted even after he saved her from a near-disastrous reenactment of Tennyson's "Lancelot and Elaine" when her leaky boat sank into the pond. After this almost fatal accident, Gilbert pleaded with Anne to become his friend but she refused, although she soon came to regret it. For the rest of their school years in Avonlea, they competed as intellectual rivals for the top of the class, although the competition was entirely good-natured on Gilbert's side. However, Anne forms the "Story Club" at the age of 13, which she tells the story of two girls named Cordelia and Geraldine (both of which were aliases she had adopted earlier) who both love Bertram - a variant of Gilbert.[5] The story ends with Cordelia pushing Geraldine into a river to drown with Bertram, which suggests subconsciously Anne is attracted to Gilbert.[5] Near the end, Anne and Gilbert walk together to Green Gables, where Gilbert only-jokingly says: "You've thwarted destiny long enough."[10] At the end of Anne of Green Gables, Anne looks out of her window admiring Avonlea as an "ideal world of dreams", through she sees a "bend in the road" thanks to Gilbert.[10] Mrs. Lynde at the beginning of the book was the self-important busybody of Avonlea who dominated the community; at the end, the book hints that Anne will play the same role, but only much better in the years to come.[10]

Immediately after graduating from Avonlea's public school, Anne and Gilbert both went to Queen's Academy in Charlottetown, which trained them for teaching and university studies. They split the most prestigious prizes between themselves, and remained "enemies" all through their studies at Queen's. Anne's grades, especially in English, won her a scholarship to Redmond College, but Matthew's death and Marilla's failing eyesight near the end of Anne of Green Gables led Anne to defer her enrollment at Redmond so that she could stay to help at Green Gables. Gilbert had been appointed as the Avonlea schoolteacher for the following year, but as an act of kindness, he instead took the position at White Sands School and gave the Avonlea position to Anne. She thanked him for the sacrifice and they made amends, becoming friends at last after five years of intense rivalry. Anne reads some poetry by Virgil, but abandons the book as the beauty of sun-kissed summer day and her coming career as a teacher inspire a sense of happiness and unity with nature.[11]

In Anne of Avonlea, Marilla decided to take in her cousin's twin children, Davy and Dora (continuing Anne's "curse of twins"). However, Anne took to them, especially Davy, immediately. Anne learns to manage the twins via a mixture of good humour and understanding.[12] Besides for teaching, Anne joins the Village Improvement Society that works to demolish ugly abandoned houses, repaint the village and plant a garden at the crossroads.[13] The mean-spirited neighbor Mr. Harrison attacks Anne as a "red-headed snippet" who sits around "reading yellow-covered novels".[11] When a famous author Mrs. Morgan visits Avonlea, Anne greets her with a nose turned red owing to her mistakes in applying the wrong skin lotion as Anne goes to absurd lengths to be prepared to meet the world-famous Mrs. Morgan, which results in chaos, through all works out well in the end.[14] Meeting Mrs. Morgan inspires Anne to try writing, where trapped in an abandoned hen-house, she writes out a dialogue between flowers and the birds in the garden.[14] Another scrape occurs at her school, where Anne forces a student to throw a package into the school stove, unaware that the offending package were firecrackers.[15] The following year, Rachel Lynde's husband Thomas died and Rachel moved in with Marilla at Green Gables, leaving Anne free to continue her education at Redmond College (based on Dalhousie University[16][17]) in Kingsport, Nova Scotia. Anne was pleased because Gilbert would also be going to Redmond the following year. After the wedding of her friend Miss Lavendar, Anne first realized that there was a possibility that Gilbert felt more for her than friendship, and "The page of girlhood had been turned, as by an unseen finger, and the page of womanhood was before her with all its charm and mystery, its pain and gladness." Anne once again walks with Gilbert where the narrator notes: "Behind them the little stone house brooded among the shadows. It was lonely but not forsaken. It had not yet done with dreams and laughter and joy of life".[18]

In Anne of the Island, Anne's academic and social life blossom at Redmond. Anne says at the beginning "I'm going to study and grow and learn about things".[19] Anne visits the house where she was born, in Bolingbroke, and ponders deeply how her mother died young, but at least knew the joys of love.[20] During her time at Redmond, Anne writes two stories, one of which is rejected, but turned by Diana into a successful story, and another which is dismissed because it has no plot.[21] Anne's story "Averil's Atonement" is edited by Diana into a successful story that sells well, but Anne sees the final published version as a travesty that mangles her artistic vision.[19] Seeking poetical inspiration, Anne spends her time alone on Victoria Island (significantly named after the queen-empress whose empire stretched around the world), Anne withdraws into her own world of fantasies amid a landscape "curtained with fine-spun, moonlit gloom, while the water laughed around her in a duet of brook and water".[22]

At the beginning of the novel, Anne and Gilbert, looking forward to a "splendid four years at Redmond" wander around to the Haunted Wood, to taste the "delicious apples" where "under tawny skin was white, white flesh, faintly veined with red; and besides their own proper apple taste, they had a certain wild, delightful tang".[23] The Canadian scholar Elizabeth Waterson noted the "erotic" overtones to the scene of the apple tasting in the Haunted Wood, as sign of Anne's attraction to Gilbert of which she herself is not entirely aware.[23] Anne's favorite hangout is Patty's Place, where she and her three best friends spent their evenings by a fireplace, three cats, two china dogs and a pot full of chrysanthemums that light up "through the golden gloom like creamy moons".[24]

Gilbert, who has always loved Anne, proposes to her, but she rejects him; at that time, Anne's vision of love is rooted deeply in sentimental fantasies and she does not recognize her closeness to Gilbert as love. Anne's calls Gilbert's marriage proposal "grotesque or-horrible".[23] She believes that she will fall in love with her prince who would fit her childhood ideal of "tall, dark, and handsome". Feeling deeply disappointed, Gilbert distances himself from Anne. Anne refuses "haughtily" to Charlie Sloane's offer of marriage.[23] Anne later welcomes the courtship of the darkly handsome Roy Gardner whom she meets one rainy afternoon in the November of her junior year.[24] After about a year and a half of courtship, he proposes in the park where they met, but Anne ends their relationship instead, realizing that she does not truly love him and he does not belong in her life. Anne reacts "wildly", "miserably" and "desperately" to his proposal.[23] Anne quotes from a poem by Tennyson: "Love in sequel works with Fate, and draws the veil from hidden worth".[25]

After graduating from Redmond College with a B.A., Anne, now 22, returns to Avonlea and finds that life has moved on—her childhood friend Jane marries a millionaire, and her best friend Diana Barry (now Diana Wright) has given birth to her firstborn. Anne still does not believe she is in love with Gilbert, but she is disappointed at the end of their friendship, and confused over her reaction to gossip that he is in love with Christine Stuart, a fellow Redmond student.

Upon her return to Avonlea after staying with her friends Paul, Stephen, and Lavendar Irving at Echo Lodge, Anne learns that Gilbert is deathly ill with typhoid fever. Anne holds vigil in her room at Green Gables the night Gilbert's fever breaks, realizing then that she had always loved him, only when faced with the prospect of losing him. Once Gilbert recovers from his illness, he proposes again to Anne, and she accepts. Gilbert offers her an autumnal fantasy "of a home with a hearth-fire in it, a cat and a dog, the footsteps of friends -- and you!".[24] It is explained that Christine had been engaged to someone else all along and Gilbert was only being friendly, having been asked by Christine's brother to watch over her. Anne's friend Phil Blake had written Gilbert, telling him to "try again", and he rapidly recovered after that, and took her advice. Anne and Gilbert once again walk in the "haunted meadows" as "king and queen in the bridal realm of love".[23]

Their engagement lasts for three years. Her engagement ring is noted to be a circlet of pearls rather than a diamond, a stone which Anne said always disappointed her because it wasn't the lovely purple she had dreamed of. Anne takes a job as a principal Island's second-largest town, Summerside, while Gilbert completes his three-year medical school course. During this time, Anne interacts with various eccentrics at both work and around the town.[26] Significantly, Anne rises up to become the principal of the Summerside school, making her an equal with Gilbert.[27] As both principal and a teacher, Anne has to deal with the difficult vice-principal Katherine Brooke, who goes out of her way to be rude to her.[28] Brooke openly envies Anne's ability to have a jolie vie, and tries to drag her down at every chance.[29] A mature Anne has now risen above her youthful "scrapes" and is motivated by a desire to help others, realizing that Brooke's nastiness is due to her own low self-esteem, and helps find a job that better suits her than teaching.[29]

Anne and Gilbert finally marry at Green Gables, the house Anne grew up in, and move to the village of Four Winds, P.E.I. There, they take up residence in a small house Anne dubs the "House of Dreams", and Gilbert takes over his uncle's medical practice in the nearby town of Glen St. Mary. Anne praises her "house of dreams" as "like a creamy seashell stranded on the harbor shore", which is surrounded by fir trees "enfolding secrets" while the lane leading to the house is full of blossoming trees.[30] The house looks up to a harbor on one side and a shining brook in the valley below.[30] Anne's major problem at the House of Dreams is helping her neighbor Leslie Moore, whose husband was left with brain damage after an accident, and who is as emotionally damaged as her husband is brain-damaged.[31]

Anne's first two children (one of whom dies in infancy) are born in the House of Dreams, before Anne and Gilbert and their growing family reluctantly move to larger quarters. In a moment of theological reflection, Anne questions if the death of her child is the "will of God", using phrases exploring the theodical question of death and pain in a universe presided by a just God that are identical to those Montgomery used in her diary after her second son was stillborn.[32] After Anne's loss, she and Leslie bond as the two women share their stories of pain as they "talk it out", leading them to hold hands and declare: "We are both women-and friends forever".[33] Anne and Gilbert live the rest of their lives in Glen St. Mary, in a large house they name Ingleside. They have a total of seven children between approximately 1895-1900: Joyce (or "Joy") (who dies very soon after her birth at the House of Dreams), James Matthew ("Jem"), Walter Cuthbert, twin girls Diana ("Di") and Anne ("Nan"), Shirley (the youngest son), and Bertha Marilla ("Rilla"). Anne is quite ill after the births of both Joyce and Shirley, but recovers both times. A major problem for Anne merges when Gilbert's obnoxious Aunt Mary Maria visits and refuses to leave, tormenting Anne in various ways.[34]

Anne's children enjoy a happy, even idyllic childhood, spending much of their time playing and adventuring in a nearby hollow they name Rainbow Valley. Anne is a permissive mother who is never harsh on her children and does not object when they play hide-and-seek with the new minister's children in the cemetery.[35] When a friend objects, Anne replies: "Why did they ever build that manse beside the graveyard in the first place?".[36] Anne's children are often bullied by nasty children, requiring their mother to provide with much consolation.[37] When Shirley reads about the theory of a Jocasta complex in one of her husband's medical journals together with a warning about mothers kissing their children, she says: "A man of course! No woman would ever write anything so silly and wicked".[38] At one point, Anne tries to resume her writing career, publishing very poetical obituary for a neighbor that is mocked as an "obitchery" by an ignorant, rude newspaper editor, though it is well received by everyone else.[39] Anne herself has a comfortable life, with a live-in maid (Susan Baker) who effectively runs the household and is also Shirley's primary caregiver after Anne falls ill giving birth to him. Upon recovering, Anne says: "I find I go on living".[33] After Anne recovers, she is involved in various ladies' committees in town, and travels to Europe with Gilbert for an extended tour of the continent at one point, circa 1906.

But the spectre of World War I changes things, and all three Blythe boys (as well as the fiancés of Nan and Rilla) eventually volunteer to fight in the war. The Blythe family, which follows the war closely, soon becomes familiar with far-away places such as Calais, Mons, Lodz, Ypres, Belgrade, Amiens, Prezemysl, Gallipoli, Antwerp and Kut al Amara.[40] The sensitive and poetic Walter, the second of Anne's sons to volunteer, is killed at Courcelette in 1916. Jem is listed as missing at the war's conclusion, but after an agonizing five months, eventually emerges alive, having escaped from a POW camp. Montgomery knew John McCrae, the author of the poem In Flanders Fields, and she modeled Walter partly on him.[41]

Anne's final appearance occurs in the collection The Blythes Are Quoted. In this work, which is somewhat darker in tone than the previous Anne books, we see brief glimpses of Anne in a number of short stories that are primarily about other inhabitants of Glen St. Mary, and are set from the pre-World War I era through to the beginning of World War II. The book also features a number of poems, which are separately credited to Anne and her son Walter (plus one that was started by Walter and completed by Anne after his death).

We last see an older and wiser Anne, now in her mid-seventies, in the early days of World War II. "Mrs. Dr. Blythe", as she is often referred to, is a well-known, oft-discussed figure in Glen St. Mary, who is loved by some, though other residents express small-minded jealousy or envy of both Anne and her family. While Anne has mellowed from the days of her youth, she and Gilbert still engage in sly, good-natured teasing of each other. She has continued to indulge in her love of matchmaking, and also writes poetry. She is still married to Gilbert and is now a grandmother to at least five, three of whom are old enough to be enlist to fight in the war: Jem's sons Jem, Jr. and Walter, and Rilla's son Gilbert. Also mentioned are Nan's daughter Di, and a granddaughter named "Anne Blythe", who might be either Jem or Shirley's child

Though Anne gives up writing short stories shortly after becoming a mother, she continues to write poems throughout her life. These poems are regularly shared with the rest of the family, who offer comments, criticism and encouragement. Anne's later work expressed deep difficulties with coming to terms with Walter's demise, and with the idea of war; several characters comment that neither Anne nor Gilbert were ever quite the same after Walter's death. Still, the couple are utterly devoted to each other and their family, and as the saga concludes, circa 1940, the Blythes remain pillars of their community who have enjoyed a 50-year marriage.