Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables

by L. M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables

Anne of Green Gables

by L. M. Montgomery

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Overview

The first chapter in the "Anne" saga, "Anne of Green Gables" is the story of its title character, Anne Shirley, an orphan who is adopted by Miss Marilla Cuthbert and Mr. Matthew Cuthbert. The novel begins the story of Anne at age eleven and follows her life and schooling through to age sixteen. "Anne of Green Gables" is the beginning of Lucy M. Montgomery's most popular and well-loved series.

Product Details

ISBN-13: 9781596742000
Publisher: Digireads.com Publishing
Publication date: 01/01/2011
Series: Anne of Green Gables Series
Sold by: Barnes & Noble
Format: eBook
File size: 1 MB
Age Range: 8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Dr. Collett Tracey teaches Canadian literature at Carleton University. She brings her interest in Canadian modernism and women's writing to her introduction.

Lucy Maud Montgomery was born in Clifton (now New London), Prince Edward Island on November 30, 1874. Raised by her maternal grandparents, she attended Prince of Wales College in Charlottetown and obtained her teaching certificate. She later studied literature at Dalhousie University in Halifax. She eventually married Ewan Macdonald, a Presbyterian minister, and had 3 sons with him. She published 12 books in total and died in Toronto in 1942.

Read an Excerpt

Daring was the fashionable amusement among the Avonlea small fry just then. It had begun among the boys, but soon spread to the girls, and all the silly things that were done in Avonlea that summer because the doers thereof were “dared” to do them would fill a book by themselves. . . .

Now, to “walk” board fences requires more skill and steadiness of head and heel than one might suppose who has never tried it. But Josie Pye, if deficient in some qualities that make for popularity, had at least a natural and inborn gift, duly cultivated, for walking board fences. Josie walked the Barry fence with an airy unconcern which seemed to imply that a little thing like that wasn’t worth a “dare.” Reluctant admiration greeted her exploit, for most of the other girls could appreciate it, having suffered many things themselves in their efforts to walk fences. Josie descended from her perch, flushed with victory, and darted a defiant glance at Anne.

Anne tossed her red braids.

“I don’t think it’s such a very wonderful thing to walk a little, low, board fence,” she said. “I knew a girl in Marysville who could walk the ridge-pole of a roof.”

“I don’t believe it,” said Josie flatly. “I don’t believe anybody could walk a ridge-pole. You couldn’t, anyhow.”

“Couldn’t I?” cried Anne rashly.

“Then I dare you to do it,” said Josie defiantly. “I dare you to climb up there and walk the ridge-pole of Mr. Barry’s kitchen roof.”

Anne turned pale, but there was clearly only one thing tobe done. She walked towards the house, where a ladder was leaning against the kitchen roof. All the fifth-class girls said, “Oh!” partly in excitement, partly in dismay.

“Don’t you do it, Anne,” entreated Diana. “You’ll fall off and be killed. Never mind Josie Pye. It isn’t fair to dare anybody to do anything so dangerous.”

“I must do it. My honour is at stake,” said Anne solemnly. “I shall walk that ridge-pole, Diana, or perish in the attempt. If I am killed you are to have my pearl bead ring.”

Anne climbed the ladder amid breathless silence, gained the ridge-pole, balanced herself uprightly on that precarious footing, and started to walk along it, dizzily conscious that she was uncomfortably high up in the world and that walking ridge-poles was not a thing in which your imagination helped you out much. Nevertheless, she managed to take several steps before the catastrophe came. Then she swayed, lost her balance, stumbled, staggered and fell, sliding down over the sun-baked roof and crashing off it through the tangle of Virginia creeper beneath — all before the dismayed circle below could give a simultaneous, terrified shriek.

If Anne had tumbled off the roof on the side up which she ascended Diana would probably have fallen heir to the pearl bead ring then and there. Fortunately she fell on the other side, where the roof extended down over the porch so nearly to the ground that a fall therefrom was a much less serious thing.

Nevertheless, when Diana and the other girls had rushed frantically around the house — except Ruby Gillis, who remained as if rooted to the ground and went into hysterics — they found Anne lying all white and limp among the wreck and ruin of the Virginia creeper.

“Anne, are you killed?” shrieked Diana, throwing herself on her knees beside her friend. “Oh, Anne, dear Anne, speak just one word to me and tell me if you’re killed.”

To the immense relief of all the girls, and especially of Josie Pye, who, in spite of lack of imagination, had been seized with horrible visions of a future branded as the girl who was the cause of Anne Shirley’s early and tragic death, Anne sat dizzily up and answered uncertainly:

“No, Diana, I am not killed, but I think I am rendered unconscious.”

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSxi
I THIS DARK WORLD3
II PRETTY PLAYS OF CHILDHOOD6
III ST ANTHONY'S PIGS17
IV COUGH NOT, NOR SPIT29
V SET ON HIS BOOK38
VI DUTY IS THE LOVE OF LAW53
VII MOST HOLY FATHER65
VIII WE TALK OF LETTERS71
IX IF YOU WANT TO LAUGH87
X THE WINE OF ANGELS96
XI HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!112
XII CRAFT OF THE CITY118
XIII MILK AND HONEY129
XIV A JOLLY MASTER-WOMAN141
XV KINGS' GAMES151
XVI THE BEST CONDITION OF A SOCIETY165
XVII WHOLLY A COURTIER180
XVIII HE SAT UPON A THRONE OF GOLD194
XIX MY POOR MIND203
XX EQUES AURATUS214
XXI I AM LIKE RIPE SHIT224
XXII LONG PERSUADING AND PRIVY LABOURING235
XXIII THY FOOLISH FACE251
XXIV YOU ARE BUT ONE MAN263
XXV FOOLISH FRANTIC BOOKS276
XXVI WE POOR WORLDLY MEN OF MIDDLE EARTH287
XXVII INFINITE CLAMOUR313
XXVIII ALL THE BEASTS OF THE WOODS330
XXIX THE WRATH OF THE KING MEANS DEATH347
XXX THE WEEPING TIME359
XXXI PECK OF TROUBLES384
XXXII CALL FORTH SIR THOMAS MORE393
XXXIII THE KING IS GOOD UNTO ME399
SOURCE NOTES407
INDEX435

What People are Saying About This

Alfred Breit

Lawrence was concerned with one end: to reveal how love, how a relationship between a man and a woman can be most touching and beautiful, but only if it is unihibited and total.

Mark Twain

The dearest and most lovable child in fiction.

Reading Group Guide

1.  The critic Julian Moynahan argues that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover dramatizes two opposed orientations toward life, two distinct modes of human awareness, the one abstract, cerebral, and unvital; the other concrete, physical, and organic.” Discuss.

2.  What is the role of the manor house, the industrial village, and the wood in the novel?

3.  Many critics have argued that while Lady Chatterley’s Lover represents a daring treatment of sexuality, it is an inferior work of art, though other critics have called it a novel of the first rank. (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ” F. R. Leavis writes, “is a bad novel, ” while Anaïs Nin, on the other hand, describes it as “artistically . . . [Lawrence’s] best novel.”) What do you think?

4.  In “Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (a defense of the book that he published in 1930), Lawrence wrote that “the greatest need of man is the renewal forever of the complete rhythm of life and death, the rhythm of the sun’s year, the body’s year of a lifetime, and the greater year of the stars, the soul’s year of immortality.” How is the theme of resurrection played out in the novel?

5.  From the time it was banned from unexpurgated publication in the United States and Britain until the trials in the late 1950s and early 1960s that resulted in the lifting of the ban, and even more recently, critics have argued over whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover is obscene and vulgar. Lawrence argues in “Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”that “we shall never free the phallic reality [i. e., sex] . . . till we give it its own phallic language and use the obscene words”; his goal was to purify these words. Critics have disagreed as to whether he succeeded in this goal; Richard Aldington notes, for example, that the words are “incrusted with nastiness” and “cannot regain their purity” and Graham Hough argues that “the fact remains that the connotations of the obscene physical words are either facetious or vulgar.” Do you think the novel is obscene or vulgar, or do you think Lawrence succeeds in his mission?

6.  “The essential function of art is moral, ” Lawrence once wrote. “Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral.” Do you think this proposition informs the shape, structure, and meaning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and if so, how?

7.  Critics have often complained that one of Lawrence’s weaknesses as a novelist is his characterization. So John Middleton Murry writes of Sons and Lovers that “we can discern no individuality whatever in the denizens of Mr. Lawrence’s world. We should have thought that we should have been able to distinguish between male and female at least. But no! Remove the names, remove the sedulous catalogues of unnecessary clothing . . . and man and woman are as indistinguishable as octopods in an aquarium tank.” And Edwin Muir comments generally that “we remember the scenes in his novels; we forget the names of his men and women. We should not know any of them if we met them in the street.” Do you think this applies in the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover? If so, do you think it is a fault or a virtue?

8.  How does nature imagery function in the novel?

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