Anne of Avonlea
L. M. Montgomery (1874–1942), 1909
★ 4.23 from 237.5k ratings on Goodreads
Anne Shirley is seventeen, with a school to teach, twins to raise and a village to improve — and no intention of letting growing up make her sensible. The voice is warm and chatty, with a bright, restless energy and long, old-fashioned sentences that linger over island weather and imagined conversations.
Feels like longing and wonder. About adventure.
Who it’s for
You may like it if you enjoy gentle village comedy, a talkative heroine, and period details about teaching and small-town life. The prose is from 1909, with long descriptive sentences and old-fashioned phrasing that can take some patience.
Why read it
It gives you Anne's imaginative company as she tries to do good in Avonlea, with humor and tenderness rather than a rush to adulthood.
Pages from the book
The conversation in your head is always better than the real one.
But on this particular day it seemed as if December had remembered that it was time for winter and had turned suddenly dull and brooding, with a windless hush predictive of coming snow. Nevertheless, Anne keenly enjoyed her walk through the great gray maze of the beechlands; though alone she never found it lonely; her imagination peopled her path with merry companions, and with these she carried on a gay, pretended conversation that was wittier and more fascinating than conversations are apt to be in real life, where people sometimes fail most lamentably to talk up to the requirements. In a “make believe” assembly of choice spirits everybody says just the thing you want her to say and so gives you the chance to say just what you want to say. A broken heart, honestly filed: less like tragedy, more like toothache.
But I could never care for anybody else and I didn’t want to. I knew I would rather be an old maid for a thousand years than marry anybody who wasn’t Stephen Irving. Well, it all seems like a dream now, of course. How sympathetic you look, Anne … as sympathetic as only seventeen can look. But don’t overdo it. I’m really a very happy, contented little person in spite of my broken heart. My heart did break, if ever a heart did, when I realized that Stephen Irving was not coming back. But, Anne, a broken heart in real life isn’t half as dreadful as it is in books. It’s a good deal like a bad tooth … though you won’t think that a very romantic simile. Some rooms of the mind you can only enter alone.
Anne smothered a little sigh. She loved Diana dearly and they had always been good comrades. But she had long ago learned that when she wandered into the realm of fancy she must go alone. The way to it was by an enchanted path where not even her dearest might follow her. L. M. Montgomery.Like Anne, Montgomery was raised by older relatives — her grandparents, in Cavendish — after her mother died in her infancy, and she taught in island schools before writing paid.
Books that feel like this
Little Women
Louisa May Alcott, 1868
Four sisters, one thin purse and a long war, learning to work, quarrel, write and love in a New England town that feels like your own street.
The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original
Homer, -750
Also adventure and wonder.
More by L. M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables
L. M. Montgomery, 1908
A vibrant, deeply imaginative coming-of-age story woven through the lush landscape of rural Canada.
Emily of New Moon
L. M. Montgomery, 1923
An orphan with a stub of pencil and an unshakeable inner life is sent to live with stern relatives on Prince Edward Island, and starts writing them all down.
Where to get it
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Questions readers ask
- Is Anne of Avonlea for me?
- You may like it if you enjoy gentle village comedy, a talkative heroine, and period details about teaching and small-town life. The prose is from 1909, with long descriptive sentences and old-fashioned phrasing that can take some patience.
- What is Anne of Avonlea like?
- The voice is warm and chatty, with a bright, restless energy and long, old-fashioned sentences that linger over island weather and imagined conversations. Feels like longing and wonder. About adventure.
- What should I read after Anne of Avonlea?
- If you liked Anne of Avonlea, try The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett), The Lord of the Rings (J.R.R. Tolkien) and Little Women (Louisa May Alcott).
A taste of the feed
A story that lets you in, versus one that tells you what to think.
I cordially dislike allegory in all its manifestations, and always have done so since I grew old and wary enough to detect its presence. I much prefer history, true or feigned, with its varied applicability to the thought and experience of readers. I think that many confuse ‘applicability’ with ‘allegory’; but the one resides in the freedom of the reader, and the other in the purposed domination of the author.
The Lord of the Rings · J.R.R. Tolkien
Reaching for someone you love and closing your arms on air.
“Then I tried to find some way of embracing my poor mother’s ghost. Thrice I sprang towards her and tried to clasp her in my arms, but each time she flitted from my embrace as it were a dream or phantom, and being touched to the quick I said to her, ‘Mother, why do you not stay still when I would embrace you? If we could throw our arms around one another we might find sad comfort in the sharing of our sorrows even in the house of Hades; does Proserpine want to lay a still further load of grief upon me by mocking me with a phantom only?’
The Odyssey Rendered into English prose for the use of those who cannot read the original · Homer
The particular loneliness of a room shared with someone you once loved.
They had no conversation together, no intercourse but what the commonest civility required. Once so much to each other! Now nothing! There had been a time, when of all the large party now filling the drawing-room at Uppercross, they would have found it most difficult to cease to speak to one another. With the exception, perhaps, of Admiral and Mrs. Croft, who seemed particularly attached and happy (Anne could allow no other exception even among the married couples), there could have been no two hearts so open, no tastes so similar, no feelings so in unison, no countenances so beloved. Now they were as strangers; nay, worse than strangers, for they could never become acquainted. It was a perpetual estrangement.
Persuasion · Jane Austen
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