Mrs. Allan

Mrs. Allan is a warm, sympathetic visitor to Avonlea whose account of her only memory of her mother gives the novel one of its clearest portraits of maternal tenderness. In conversation with Diana Barry about the first memories children carry of their mothers, she recalls being frightened as a little girl and met not with punishment but with loving reassurance.

Return to Avonlea

Mrs. Allan visits Avonlea for the first time since leaving. Her old girl friends welcome her back with delight, and she remains as gay, sweet, and sympathetic as they remember. The contrast with the reigning minister’s wife is quiet but pointed: that woman is estimable, yet not a kindred spirit. Mrs. Allan’s return restores the company of someone whose warmth is valued for its personal affinity as well as her good qualities.

The memory of her mother

In conversation with Diana Barry, who hopes her baby’s first memory of her will be a happy one, Mrs. Allan recalls being five years old. She had been allowed to accompany her two older sisters to school. When school ended, each sister assumed the child had gone home with the other; instead, Mrs. Allan had gone with Phemy Cameron, a little girl she had played with at recess, to make mud pies near the school.

One of her sisters found her and hurried her home, warning that their mother was cross and would whip her. Mrs. Allan had never been whipped, had not understood that going with Phemy was wrong, and spent the walk home in terror. In the kitchen, with her legs trembling, she was taken into her mother’s arms, kissed, and held close. Her mother explained that she had been frightened because she thought the child was lost. She did not scold or reproach her; she only told her not to go away again without permission.

Her mother died very soon afterward, making this the sole memory Mrs. Allan has of her. Its lasting sweetness comes from the reversal between the punishment she feared and the tenderness she received: the child’s mistake is corrected, but her fear is answered first with affection. Mrs. Allan presents the memory as beautiful not because it erases the small rule she broke, but because it preserves her mother’s loving response at the moment she most expected harshness.

Role in Diana’s conversation

Mrs. Allan’s recollection answers Diana’s wish to give her baby a gentler first memory than the one she herself carries. Diana remembers her mother slapping her for something she had done, while also affirming that her mother was good and dearly loved. Mrs. Allan supplies a contrasting example without judging Diana’s experience: in her own childhood memory, fear gives way to an embrace and an explanation of a mother’s concern.

Earlier in the conversation, she lightly observes that Diana would have felt the same tenderness for a daughter as she now feels for her son. Together, her playful reassurance and intimate recollection show how a present conversation about a baby opens onto different histories of motherhood. Mrs. Allan’s brief appearance is therefore defined less by action in the wider plot than by the remembered scene she entrusts to Diana: a small childhood error transformed, in memory, by a mother’s kindness.