Anne Shirley and Ruby Gillis’s Friendship Through Illness

Anne Shirley and Ruby Gillis’s friendship is a late renewal of an old school intimacy, transformed when Ruby becomes gravely ill. Anne cannot change the outcome, but her steady visits make room for Ruby to speak honestly about death, love, and the ordinary future she had expected; the friendship also leaves Anne with a changed understanding of how life should be lived.

An old friendship renewed

Anne and Ruby had once been school chums, though in later years they had grown apart. Their histories still mattered: when Anne learns that Ruby is seriously ill, the news reaches her through the old bond, which makes the possibility of Ruby’s death suddenly personal. Ruby, meanwhile, greets her with warmth and invites her to visit, eager to hear about Anne’s life at Redmond. Anne accepts, and Diana Barry offers to accompany her.

Ruby initially meets Anne in the familiar register of her social life. She talks about the young men pursuing her, her latest romantic interest, and her intention to teach at White Sands. She discusses dresses and hats and assumes that she and Anne can return to the easy confidences of their school days. But the brightness of this conversation sits uneasily beside her illness. Anne notices how thin Ruby has become and how conspicuously brilliant her eyes and cheeks look; Diana says Ruby can hardly speak without coughing, even while she insists that nothing is wrong. The difference between Ruby’s cheerful manner and her declining health shadows their reunion.

Companionship under strain

Anne continues visiting through the summer, choosing time with Ruby even when it means giving up other plans, including a moonlight drive to White Sands beach. The visits are not easy for her. Ruby often talks as before about parties, dresses, and beaux, while Anne feels that the conversation cannot acknowledge what is happening. She worries that Ruby needs help but cannot provide the help she needs, and she returns home exhausted by the sense that Ruby is struggling against an unseen adversary.

The strain does not make Anne withdraw. Ruby repeatedly asks her to come again, and Anne keeps her promise. This persistence distinguishes their renewed friendship from a simple recollection of childhood: Anne is not merely remembering who Ruby was, but accompanying her in the circumstances she now faces. Her presence does not remove the illness or persuade Ruby to abandon her familiar habits. It does, however, offer a trusted listener whom Ruby eventually chooses for the thoughts she has been unable to voice.

The confidence in the garden

One summer evening, Anne sits with Ruby in the Gillis garden after giving up the outing to the beach. The visit differs from many earlier ones. Ruby is quiet, resting in a hammock with her work untouched and a shawl around her shoulders. Looking toward the nearby churchyard, she at last acknowledges that she expects to die soon. Anne confirms gently that she knows, and Ruby admits that she is afraid.

Ruby’s fear is not described as a rejection of heaven. Rather, she is frightened by the thought of leaving the life and familiar attachments she knows. She wants to keep living, and tells Anne that she had hoped to marry and have children. She also confides that Herb Spencer is the suitor she truly loves; the other young men she had spoken about meant little to her by comparison. This disclosure gives new depth to Ruby’s earlier chatter about courtship. Her talk of beaux and plans had not revealed the private hopes she was carrying, and she says she could tell this only to Anne because she believes Anne understands.

Anne tries to comfort her by sharing her own developing belief that the life to come may not make people strangers to themselves: goodness and the highest aspirations of earthly life may continue, without the hindrances and perplexities that obscure them. She cannot offer certainty, and Ruby remains distressed at the thought of losing the life she wants. Yet being able to speak openly brings Ruby some relief. She says she has wanted to tell Anne these things all summer, but feared that naming death would make it more certain. Anne’s listening, and her refusal to answer with an easy falsehood, become the substance of the comfort she can offer.

Reconciliation and lasting effect

In the same conversation, Ruby recalls a former school friendship with Em White that ended in a quarrel. The two women have recently made peace, Ruby explains, after years in which each assumed the other would not make the first move. With death close, the old estrangement seems needlessly prolonged. Ruby’s reflection brings the friendship between her and Anne into focus as well: she tells Anne that she has always liked her best among their schoolmates, in part because Anne was not jealous or unkind. Ruby’s confidence is therefore not only a final disclosure about fear and love; it is also an expression of affection and trust renewed after years of distance.

Anne leaves the garden understanding that the visit has changed her. Ruby’s illness has made the prospect of death more than an abstraction, and Anne resolves that her own life must not be so ordered around passing pleasures that the transition to another life would feel wholly alien. She concludes that the life of heaven must be begun on earth, in the values and aspirations a person follows now. The encounter thus alters Anne’s sense of purpose, even though she cannot alter Ruby’s fate.

That evening proves to be Anne’s last with Ruby while Ruby is alive. The next morning, Ruby’s death is reported as having come peacefully in her sleep. At the funeral, Anne places delicate flowers around her old friend. She remembers Ruby’s beauty as changed by death, and the face she sees becomes the image she keeps. The ending confirms the limits of Anne’s care—her visits could accompany Ruby but could not save her—while giving their friendship a final shape: Ruby was able, at last, to share what she feared and loved with the friend she trusted most.