A lovely follow-up to a great classic that stays true to the characters and doesn’t manufacture drama to keep their lives interesting – preferring to develop new characters for that purpose. Don’t miss it.

Title: Anne of Avonlea (Anne Novels #2)
Author: L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942)
Original Publication Date: 1909
Edition: Bantam Books (1998), 276 pages
Genre: Coming-of-Age.
Ages: 10-16
First Line: A tall, slim girl, “half-past 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.

The immediate success of Anne of Green Gables inspired L.M. Montgomery to the swift production of a sequel, published the following year, and taking up almost immediately where the previous installment ended. Anne Shirley, having given up on college to help Marilla, finds joy and purpose in her newly public role in Avonlea, both as the new schoolteacher and as head of the Avonlea Village Improvement Society. Two new orphans are brought to Green Gables, she befriends Avonlea’s most reclusive spinster and, still being Anne, gets into a new series of absurd predicaments as she matures and finds that her path not taken may yet meet up on the road ahead. Yet again, the pacing is episodic and I must warn you that readers holding out for the famed Anne/Gilbert romance will find L.M. Montgomery cruelly indifferent to their wishes, for that major subplot from volume one is almost wholly absent here.

Anne of Avonlea is a slow, comfortable book. Odd as it is to associate Anne of Green Gables with drama and uncertainty, in hindsight this was certainly the case. Anne as a newcomer was never wholly secure and questions, such as whether Marilla would let her stay or whether the Barrys would allow her and Diana to remain friends, gave the novel some stake. In the sequel Anne knows her place and has a teenager’s insufferable certainty of right and wrong. She takes up teaching with ease and she sails into whatever task is at hand full of fresh theories and ideals. This self-confidence becomes something of a plot point in itself, for in the first hundred pages Anne almost loses herself in her new calling as Avonlea’s saintly beautician.

Luckily, Montgomery was not blind to her heroine’s foibles and set her a losing battle with human nature in her efforts to win over sullen student Anthony Pye with a simpering “kill him with kindness” approach. The resolution to their battle of wills could not be rendered today with our changed views on corporal punishment but the messy human dynamic is inspired, as Anne betrays her ideals in a fit of pique while the boy responds respectfully to a display of power – because that is what he understands and respects, not an artificial kindness. The next morning finds Anne heartily ashamed of herself, when she runs into Anthony, who to her bewilderment tips his hat and carries her books to school. Anthony walked on in silence to the school, but when Anne took her books she smiled down at him … not the stereotyped “kind” smile she had so persistently assumed for his benefit but a sudden outflashing of good comradeship. Anthony smiled … no, if the truth must be told, Anthony grinned back. A grin is not generally supposed to be a respectful thing; yet Anne suddenly felt that if she had not yet won Anthony’s liking, she had, somehow or other, won his respect.

Elsewhere, Marilla’s decision to adopt a local pair orphan leads to the saga of Davy and Dora, six year old twins who luckily don’t upstage Marilla – she is given plenty of opportunities to be her wonderfully pessimistic self, perhaps even more so than in the first volume owing to Anne having rendered her virtually shock-proof. With Anne despondent after a hoped-for guest fails to appear, Marilla’s response is perfectly in keeping: “You’ll probably have a good many more and worse disappointments than that before you get through life,” said Marilla, who honestly thought she was making a comforting speech. The twins provide fresh havoc for Green Gables as Marilla quickly discovers that a six year old boy is a wholly different creature from an eleven year old girl – Dora, a prim, quiet child, ends up being little heeded while Davy monopolizes the attention of the women, and they play favorites to an extent that actually made me feel bad for Dora.

“Marilla, it may be a dreadful thing to say, but honestly, I like Davy better than Dora, for all she’s so good.”
“I don’t know but that I do, myself,” confessed Marilla, “and it isn’t fair, for Dora isn’t a bit of trouble. There couldn’t be a better child and you’d hardly know she was in the house.”
“Dora is too good,” said Anne. “She’d behave just as well if there wasn’t a soul to tell her what to do. She was born already brought up, so she doesn’t need us; and I think,” concluded Anne, hitting on a very vital truth, “that we always love best the people who need us. Davy needs us badly.”

Later on, Davy does improve, though he always reads like a cross between Tom Sawyer and that blonde boy from The Family Circus. First he steals from the jam jar and then, after learning it’s wrong to steal jam, he claims that there will at least be plenty of jam in heaven by quoting the catechism. “Why should we love God? It says, ‘Because he makes preserves and redeems us.’ You either find him adorably funny or you don’t. I vacillated on the question of Davy but I have to admit his request for a bedtime story made me laugh:

“I don’t want a fairy story. They’re all right for girls, I s’pose, but I want something exciting … lots of killing and shooting in it, and a house on fire, and in’trusting things like that.
Fortunately for Anne, Marilla called out at this moment from her room.

Otherwise, there are comedic interludes every bit as good as those found in the first volume, with the saga of Mr. Harrison’s cow particularly funny – and of course, no matter what calamities befall her, Anne always makes friends and mends fences. Even Avonlea’s answer to Miss Havisham, complete with a strange little girl always in tow, turns out to be sweet Miss Lavendar, an eccentric old dear who prefers to playact the life that passed her by than to groom little Charlotta the Fourth to avenge herself upon the male sex. After an episodic structure, Miss Lavendar’s story takes up much of the final third, and Montgomery delivers a much purer happy ending than she did in the previous volume.

There is an infectious warmth to her writing that is transmitted, however briefly, to the modern reader and renders the world brighter and more poetic for a time. Seen through Anne’s eyes, the mundane becomes wondrous. I remember the balm that Elizabeth Goudge brought me as a troubled 17 year old and the same traits are found in Montgomery’s world. Avonlea is too good to be true but it is a sustaining myth for the world that we have to live in, right at the age when children are beginning to realize what hardship that world entails. Anne has an instinctive sense for what is noble and good, even in the midst of the most frivolous debate:

“I think her parents gave her the only right and fitting name that could possibly be given her,” said Anne. “If they had been so blind as to name her Elizabeth or Nellie or Muriel she must have been called Lavendar just the same, I think. It’s so suggestive of sweetness and old-fashioned graces and ‘silk attire.’ Now, my name just smacks of bread and butter, patchwork and chores.”
“Oh, I don’t think so,” said Diana. “Anne seems to me real stately and like a queen. But I’d like Kerrenhappuch if it happened to be your name. I think people make their names nice or ugly just by what they are themselves. I can’t bear Josie or Gertie for names now but before I knew the Pye girls I thought them real pretty.”
“That’s a lovely idea, Diana,” said Anne enthusiastically. “Living so that you beautify your name, even if it wasn’t beautiful to begin with … making it stand in people’s thoughts for something so lovely and pleasant that they never think of it by itself. Thank you, Diana.”

Anne of Avonlea is a sweet and worthy sequel, growing its heroine and the landscape of Avonlea. It is lighter and more leisurely, yet the charms of the original remain and if you and your children loved Anne of Green Gables you needn’t fear disappointment here. Some children’s classics are followed by deeply inferior products but for her first sequel L.M. Montgomery had no need to manufacture scenarios, as Anne grows into her adopted community and approaches the bend in the road that will take her from girl to young woman with customary optimism. We can only follow after in similar spirit to volume three.

Parental Guide.

Violence: Anne whips and wins her most rebellious student. There’s a violent hailstorm with stones, the smallest of which was as big as a hen’s egg. A neighbour’s parrot dies during the storm and there’s a short scene of the man sitting sorrowfully by his lost companion.

Davy locks Dora in a neighbour’s tool shed for hours to give the women a scare and receives a pitifully slight punishment in response. Anne is actually far more upset that Davy lied about not knowing his sister’s whereabouts than she is that he locked her up to torment them all in the first place.

Values: Contentedness. None of that ‘Road Not Taken’ torment for Anne Shirley. She finds meaning in her relationships and her humble role as village schoolmistress, rather than constantly fretting over what could have been.

Anne and her friends fight staunchly to keep their town lovely, and while some efforts backfire, they do encourage a general move toward landscaping and keep the dread pharmaceutical advertisements off of their roads.

Disapproval is registered toward girls too obsessed with beaus – Anne and Diana fall out with a friend over her immodest and gloating behaviour. Anne, who is completely oblivious to love, is allowed to remain so, and people actually take care not to push the subject – even though most of Avonlea expects her to marry Gilbert Blythe when she does wise up. Mrs. Allan the minister’s wife stops short when about to prod Anne on the topic of Gilbert. In the delicate, whitebrowed face beside her, with its candid eyes and mobile features, there was still far more of the child than of the woman. Anne’s heart so far harbored only dreams of friendship and ambition, and Mrs. Allan did not wish to brush the bloom from her sweet unconsciousness. So she left her sentence for the future years to finish. Innocence respected, not trampled on from every angle.

Role Models: Anne remains a lovely example, of course, and as a completed young person there is less emphasis on her learning from others than before. Gilbert meanwhile decides to become a doctor: “The folks who lived before me have done so much for me that I want to show my gratitude by doing something for the folks who will live after me. It seems to me that is the only way a fellow can get square with his obligations to the race.”

Diana is a loyal friend. Anne is a red-hot Conservative, out of loyalty to Matthew’s memory and Diana’s father was a Liberal, for which reason she and Anne never discussed politics. In fact, all their differences in outlook and imagination do nothing to impede their loyalty to one another.

Educational Properties: Because Anne of Avonlea is a somewhat more prosaic work than the first, it would feels less like a killjoy for a parent to make use of it in exploring early 20th Century Canadian society of the science of storm systems. However, it still makes the most sense as sheer entertainment.

End of Guide.

I’ll be moving on to volume three, where Anne moves away to attend college, in a month or so. In the meantime…

Up Next: Getting started on the enormous bibliography of Lloyd Alexander with an early standalone novel.