Gilbert Blythe suffered from typhoid and recovered

Gilbert Blythe’s typhoid fever brings Anne Shirley’s long-unrecognized love for him to a crisis: when she believes he is dying, the possibility of losing him makes clear what she had mistaken for love of someone else. His sudden improvement the following morning reverses the immediate prospect of loss, but the night’s revelation has already changed Anne’s understanding of their bond.

Illness and Belated News

Gilbert fell ill with typhoid shortly after Anne left for Echo Lodge. The case was severe from the outset, and the doctor said Gilbert had been badly run down. A trained nurse had been engaged and everything possible was being done, yet the people around Anne understood the illness as gravely dangerous. Mr. Harrison had said there was no hope for Gilbert, a report repeated by Davy Keith.

Anne heard none of this while away. On returning to Green Gables after a visit, she greeted the household warmly and spoke of being glad to see her family again. The disclosure came abruptly: Davy, proud that he had grown an inch, told her that Gilbert was dying. Rachel Lynde rebuked him for speaking so suddenly, but the information had already transformed the room. Anne went still and white; when she asked whether it was true, her voice seemed unfamiliar even to her.

Rachel confirmed that Gilbert was very ill, while trying to distinguish grave danger from certainty of death. She urged Anne not to despair and held to the possibility that Gilbert’s strong constitution would help him. The competing reports left Anne suspended between Rachel’s hope and Mr. Harrison’s bleak assessment. Marilla Cuthbert, seeing how deeply the news had struck her, led Davy out of the kitchen; Rachel tried to comfort Anne, but Anne could not remain there.

The Night of Recognition

Anne went upstairs to her old room and knelt at the window, looking out without seeing the storm. Rain beat across the fields, the trees in the Haunted Woods groaned in the wind, and distant breakers sounded through the darkness. The weather gives physical scale to a night in which Anne is inwardly overwhelmed, but the decisive change takes place in her understanding of herself: facing the possibility of Gilbert’s death, she recognizes that she has always loved him.

That recognition arrives, in Anne’s view, too late. She believes she has lost even the chance to be with Gilbert at the end, and imagines that he will die thinking she does not care for him. Her fear turns from his possible death toward the life she expects to face without him, which seems empty and unendurable. For the first time in her cheerful young life, she wishes she could die too. The intensity of this response makes the event more than a report of illness: the threatened loss exposes how completely Gilbert belongs in her imagined future.

Anne also reinterprets her earlier feelings. She concludes that Gilbert never loved Christine Stuart and that her own attraction to Roy Gardner had been a flattered fancy, not love. What she had failed to understand as a bond with Gilbert becomes undeniable under the pressure of possible separation. She describes her past blindness as a folly for which she must pay, giving the crisis the shape of a belated recognition rather than a new attachment. Her certainty comes not from a conversation with Gilbert but from confronting the prospect that there may be no time left for one.

The Turn and the News

As the storm continued, Rachel and Marilla approached Anne’s closed door before going to bed. They heard only silence and left, uncertain how to reach her. The account then moves from the night’s darkness to the morning’s clearing: the storm spent itself, dawn appeared over the eastern hills, and the sky opened. This change in the weather accompanies, but does not cause, the reversal in Gilbert’s condition.

The news came from Pacifique Buote, whom Anne encountered in the morning. He was hurrying through the woods by a shortcut because his father was ill; the previous night’s storm had prevented him from going sooner. Anne urgently asked how Gilbert was. Pacifique told her that Gilbert was better, that he had taken the turn the night before, and that the doctor now expected him to be all right soon. He added that Gilbert had come close to death and attributed his condition to pushing himself too hard at college.

Pacifique’s report directly overturns the hopelessness Anne had carried through the night, though it describes a turn toward recovery rather than a completed convalescence. Anne watches him go with joy displacing the anguish of uncertainty. His ragged appearance contrasts with the importance of what he has brought: she remembers his face warmly because, at the moment she most feared the worst, he gave her the news that Gilbert’s danger had passed its crucial point.

Consequences and Narrative Significance

The illness creates a sharp reversal in both plot and feeling. At first, Anne receives what sounds like a deathbed report and discovers the depth of her love only when she thinks there may be no opportunity to express it. By morning, Gilbert’s condition has improved, and the future she had imagined as empty is no longer foreclosed. The crisis therefore joins an external change in his health to an internal change in Anne’s knowledge, while keeping those changes distinct: recovery relieves the immediate fear, but it does not undo the revelation made during the night.

The timing is central. Anne learns of the illness only after leaving and returning, and the news reaches her through Davy’s impulsive announcement, Rachel’s grave confirmation, and finally Pacifique’s hopeful report. Each account shifts the available understanding: danger is first stated as impending death, then qualified by Rachel’s hope, and finally reversed by word of the turn in Gilbert’s condition. The sequence makes suspense depend on what Anne does not know, and makes the contrast between the two mornings—the storm-dark vigil and the cleared dawn—carry the emotional movement from dread toward relief.

The episode also reorders Anne’s romantic history. Her belief that she loved Roy Gardner is recast as an infatuation, while the bond with Gilbert, which she had not fully named, becomes certain to her. That recognition is prompted not by courtship or a declaration from Gilbert but by the imagined finality of losing him. His illness thus supplies the event that brings Anne’s feelings into focus; his improvement preserves the possibility that this understanding may matter beyond the night in which she reached it.