Anne Shirley

Anne Shirley is a sixteen-year-old with serious gray eyes and auburn hair, an imaginative dreamer whose sense of possibility repeatedly meets the claims of ordinary work. In Avonlea, her first year as a teacher draws her from visions of shaping future leaders into the daily responsibilities of a classroom and a household. By the time she chooses to pursue further education at Redmond College, she has not abandoned her ideals; she has revised them through experience.

Identity and Imagination

At the beginning of the story, Anne sits on a farmhouse doorstep on Prince Edward Island, intending to study Virgil. The August afternoon soon carries her away from the Latin text: watching clouds gather above J. A. Harrison’s house, she imagines a future in which a celebrated former pupil credits his achievements to the teacher who first inspired him at Avonlea school. The imagined pupil’s eventual distinction remains conveniently undefined, but Anne’s hope is precise in one respect: a teacher’s influence might alter the course of a young life.

That imaginative habit is not merely an escape from practical demands. It lets Anne invest routine places and tasks with possibility, and it shapes the standards by which she judges herself. She begins with rose-tinted expectations of teaching, yet remains capable of seeing the gap between what she hoped to accomplish and what she has actually done. Her growth does not require her to become less imaginative; it requires her to bring imagination into contact with the needs of other people.

Teaching and the Education of Ideals

On the eve of her first school term, Anne worries that her former schoolmates will not respect her unless she begins by being severe. She rejects that advice: to her, teaching is a serious responsibility, but crossness is not the only means of exercising it. The contrast with Jane Andrews is clear. Jane intends to maintain order, satisfy the trustees, earn her salary, and win recognition as a teacher; Anne hopes to influence her pupils for good.

Her first morning makes the difference between aspiration and performance immediate. Anne has stayed up until nearly midnight composing and memorizing a carefully revised opening speech about mutual help and earnest effort in learning. Facing the waiting rows of pupils, she cannot remember a word. After a brief, frightening pause, she asks them to take out their Testaments and sits down while they read. The scene punctures her expectation of a polished beginning without cancelling the work that follows: the prepared ideals are present, but the actual classroom requires her to begin with what she can manage.

At the end of the school year, Anne acknowledges to Mrs. Allan that she has fallen short of the ideals with which she began. She has not achieved everything she intended and has had to let go of many teaching theories when practical difficulties tested them. Mrs. Allan’s counsel is not to discard ideals because they cannot be perfectly fulfilled, but to keep aiming high. The exchange marks a change in Anne’s understanding: experience has qualified her theories, while deepening rather than extinguishing her commitment to education.

Care, Responsibility, and Everyday Work

Anne’s concern for the Keith twins grows out of her affection for children and her vivid memory of a neglected childhood. When Marilla hesitates to take them in, Anne appeals to Marilla’s own sense of duty. She argues that the children need good training and that the alternatives could expose them to harmful influences; even their distant relation gives the family a responsibility toward them. Marilla agrees, warning that the decision will mean additional work, particularly sewing and mending, because her eyesight prevents her from doing it herself.

The twins’ future remains uncertain when a letter reports that their relative cannot take them in the spring. He has been ill through much of the winter, his wedding has been postponed, and he asks whether they can stay at Green Gables until the fall. Anne immediately assumes they will keep the children. Marilla, though grim about the arrangement, admits that they are less trouble than before and that Davy has improved. Anne cautiously distinguishes his better manners from any assurance about his morals. Her care is affectionate but observant: she recognizes change without pretending that every difficulty has disappeared.

Anne’s work also involves preserving attachments that might otherwise be overlooked. On the evening she locks the schoolhouse after the term, she has been reengaged for the next year and carries flowers on her weekly visit to Matthew Cuthbert’s grave. Other people in Avonlea may have forgotten the quiet man, but Anne continues to remember him as the first person to give her the sympathy and love her childhood had lacked. Her care thus extends beyond immediate household duties: memory itself becomes a form of loyalty.

Friendship and the Texture of Happiness

Anne’s friendship with Miss Lavendar Lewis develops through repeated visits to Echo Lodge. Anne and Diana Barry sometimes travel there together, by road or through the woods; when Diana cannot go, Anne goes alone. The visits bring the young women’s energy into Miss Lavendar’s secluded life, while Anne finds in the older woman a kindred spirit. Their friendship joins Miss Lavendar’s preserved youthfulness of feeling to Anne’s imaginative insight, and the household’s welcome, including that of Charlotta the Fourth, makes the stone house a place of shared pleasure.

Anne also comes to value happiness that arrives without spectacle. She describes the sweetest days as those in which small pleasures follow one another gently, like pearls slipping off a string. One such day includes rowing with Diana and the delighted twins to a sandshore to gather sweet grass and paddle in the surf, followed by a visit to Paul Irving, whom Anne finds absorbed in a fairy-tale book. These episodes place play, friendship, and ordinary companionship alongside teaching and care. They are not interruptions in Anne’s life of purpose; they are part of what makes that life meaningful.

Education, Departure, and New Awareness

When Marilla asks whether Anne would like to attend Redmond College, Anne says that she would, but assumes it is impossible to leave Marilla alone with the twins. Marilla has already considered how the obstacle might be addressed. Anne has saved enough for one year, and money from the stock can cover another; scholarships may provide further help. More importantly, Marilla proposes inviting Rachel Lynde to live at Green Gables. Rachel’s farm must be sold after years of debt and the expenses of Thomas Lynde’s illness, and Rachel fears leaving Avonlea to live with Eliza. Marilla wants to offer her a home, and Anne agrees that she should ask.

The decision opens a future Anne had thought closed, but it also makes the cost of leaving tangible. In a long meditation at her window, she considers the school and pupils she loves, the simple duties and interests of the previous two years, and even Paul Irving, whose presence makes the prospect of leaving feel less abstract. She imagines that she has put down roots and understands that pulling them up will hurt. Still, she decides that going is right, sends in her resignation the next day, and prepares to set her ambitions in motion again.

Anne’s purpose in attending college has also changed. She may try for honors, but she cares less for distinctions than she once did. She wants to learn how best to live, how to make the most of life, and how to understand and help other people as well as herself. Her ambition has widened from imagining a future celebrity’s gratitude to seeking knowledge that can guide a useful life.

The final glimpse of a new feeling comes as Anne and Gilbert Blythe discuss the reunion of Miss Lavendar Lewis and Stephen Irving after years of separation and misunderstanding. Gilbert wonders whether their story might have been more beautiful without the separation, then meets Anne’s gaze. For a moment she blushes and recognizes feelings she had not previously understood; the recognition fades, but she is no longer quite the same. The shift is quiet, like the romance she begins to perceive: not a dramatic arrival, but something that may unfold naturally from friendship. Anne’s next page is not a completed future but an opening toward adulthood, study, work, and a newly glimpsed possibility of love.