Diana Barry and Fred Wright

Diana Barry and Fred Wright’s engagement is a turning point in both Diana’s romantic life and Anne Shirley’s understanding of how quickly their close friendship is changing. Their relationship appears first as a scene Anne happens upon, then as a confidence Diana shares with her the following evening. The engagement is joyful, but it unsettles Anne: Diana is moving into a new stage of life, and the future she imagines for herself begins to change in response.

The Discovery in the Barry Garden

One evening, Anne walks from Orchard Slope through the wood cut and emerges into the Barry garden. Beneath a large willow, she sees Diana leaning against the trunk, her face flushed and her lashes lowered, while Fred holds one of her hands and speaks to her earnestly. Their concentration on each other is so complete that neither notices Anne. After one startled glance, she slips away through the spruce wood and returns to her room, where she tries to gather her thoughts. The scene gives Anne direct evidence of a relationship she had only suspected: the two are in love.

The discovery has the force of surprise precisely because Anne has been interpreting Diana’s romantic imagination through what Diana used to say about her ideal. She had suspected that Diana was no longer faithful to the melancholy Byronic hero of her earlier dreams, but seeing her with Fred makes the change undeniable. Anne is happy for her friend, yet a small loneliness accompanies that happiness. She imagines Diana stepping into a new world and closing a gate behind her, leaving Anne on the other side. Her first concern is not simply that Diana is engaged; it is that this new intimacy may alter what the two friends can tell each other. Anne wonders whether Diana might share her secrets with Fred.

A Confidence Between Friends

The next evening, Diana visits Green Gables as a shy and pensive young woman and tells Anne the whole story in the seclusion of the east gable. Their response is affectionate rather than competitive: they cry, kiss, and laugh together. Diana says she is happy, though she finds it almost ridiculous to think of herself as engaged. Anne, curious about the experience, asks what being engaged is like. Diana explains that its character depends on the person involved: engagement to Fred is delightful to her, whereas the same commitment to anyone else would seem dreadful. Anne jokes that this offers little consolation to the rest of the world, since there is only one Fred.

Diana is vexed when Anne initially misunderstands what she means, but she cannot easily explain the distinction. Anne responds by saying that imagination allows a person to look at life through someone else’s eyes. The exchange captures a difference between them without weakening their closeness: Diana speaks from the particularity of her love, while Anne tries to understand it by imaginatively entering her friend’s experience. Diana then asks Anne to promise to be her bridesmaid, wherever Anne may be when the wedding takes place. Anne solemnly promises to come even from the ends of the earth. The request gives their friendship a place in Diana’s future plans rather than treating engagement as a departure from it.

Love and Earlier Ideals

Diana recognizes that Fred differs from the kind of man she once said she would marry: she had imagined someone tall and slender. But she does not wish Fred to have those qualities, because then he would not be Fred. Her answer locates attraction in the particular person rather than in a list of features. At the same time, she jokes ruefully that she and Fred will make a rather pudgy couple. She prefers that shared likeness to the contrast between a short, stout person and a tall, lean one, as in the marriage of Morgan Sloane and his wife—a pairing Rachel Lynde says makes her think of the long and short of it.

This change in Diana’s ideal is important to Anne because it unsettles her own assumptions about romance. She recalls that Diana, too, once insisted she would never become engaged in an ordinary way and that a suitor would have to do something splendid to win her. Now Diana is content with Fred as he is. Anne allows that she herself might change in the same way, though she insists inwardly that she will not. Her response is affectionate and reflective, but also anxious: she finds her intimate friend’s engagement unsettling because it makes change visible before Anne feels ready for it.

A Future Planned in Years

The engagement is not presented as an immediate marriage. Diana is eighteen, and her mother will not allow her to marry before twenty-one, so Diana expects to wait at least three years. There is also a practical condition: Fred’s father intends to buy the Abraham Fletcher farm for him, but requires it to be two-thirds paid for before transferring it into Fred’s name. Diana treats the interval not as empty delay but as preparation for housekeeping. She has not yet made any fancy work and plans to begin crocheting doilies the next day, hoping to reach the thirty-seven that Myra Gillis had accumulated before her marriage. Anne teases her about whether a household could manage with only thirty-six, then quickly assures Diana that she was joking and praises her plans for a future home.

The phrase home of dreams catches Anne’s imagination. As Diana’s domestic future becomes concrete in talk of a farm and doilies, Anne begins imagining a home of her own, inhabited by an idealized, dark, proud, melancholy hero. Yet Gilbert Blythe keeps appearing in that imagined home, helping with pictures and gardens, despite Anne’s attempts to remove him. Diana’s engagement thus prompts Anne’s separate, involuntary daydream, creating a quiet contrast between the friend who has chosen Fred and the friend who is still trying to define what she wants. The relationship’s significance lies not in a wedding shown here, but in the engagement’s immediate consequences: Diana’s former romantic ideal gives way to love for Fred as an individual, while Anne must accommodate both her friend’s new happiness and the unsettling possibility that her own expectations may change.