"Averil's Atonement" wins the baking powder ad story contest

The Averil’s Atonement prize episode makes an unexpected literary success feel, to Anne Shirley, like a breach of authorship rather than a triumph. Diana Barry secretly submits Anne’s story to a baking-powder advertising competition and alters it to meet the sponsor’s condition. When the story wins twenty-five dollars, Anne must confront the gap between the work she believes she wrote and the commercial work the judges rewarded. The result is both a comic reversal and a serious test of her ideals about writing.

The prize and the concealed submission

Before the award is known, Mr. Harrison asks Anne whether she has been writing more stories. He relays a rumor from Mrs. Hiram Sloane: a large envelope addressed to the Rollings Reliable Baking Powder Company of Montreal had appeared in the post-office box, and its sender might have been seeking the company’s story prize. Anne denies competing. She has seen the offer, she says, but considers writing an advertisement for baking powder disgraceful. Her confident dismissal establishes the standard against which the eventual news will strike: she regards commercial purpose as a degradation of literary work.

That very evening, Diana arrives carrying a letter. Its formal notice, addressed to Green Gables in Avonlea, announces that Anne’s story has won the twenty-five-dollar prize. The company says it intends to publish the story in several prominent Canadian newspapers and print it as a pamphlet for distribution to its patrons. These are plans, not confirmation that publication has taken place, but they immediately enlarge the consequences of the competition: a story Anne thought of as her own private effort is now poised to circulate as part of a commercial enterprise.

Diana explains that she sent the story without asking Anne. She had considered seeking permission, but feared Anne would refuse because she had lost confidence in the work. Since unsuccessful entries would not be returned, Diana reasoned that silence would spare Anne disappointment if it failed and give her a surprise if it won. Her choice is presented as an affectionate attempt to encourage her friend, but it also means Anne had no say in entering the contest or adapting the story. The episode’s central reversal therefore depends on a divided intention: Diana means to give Anne pleasure, while Anne experiences the result as a violation of the purpose with which she wrote.

How the story becomes an advertisement

The winning story is not, in its original form, the advertisement the competition requires. Diana supplies the missing product references herself. Drawing on her experience in the old Story Club, she inserts Rollings Reliable into the scene in which Averil makes a cake, making the cake’s success depend on the branded baking powder. She also alters the story’s romantic ending, adding the product name to the lovers’ promise about their imagined home. The transformation is specific and consequential: the prize-winning version contains language Anne did not write, even though it is submitted under her name.

Anne’s first response is blank incomprehension, followed by a strained effort to appear pleased. She says she appreciates Diana’s unselfish motive, yet struggles to understand how baking powder entered a story that had contained no mention of it. Diana, reassured, explains her additions and celebrates the twenty-five-dollar award, comparing it favorably with the five dollars she has heard Canadian Woman pays for a story. The contrast makes the practical attraction of the prize plain, but it does not settle the question that troubles Anne: the monetary reward belongs to a version of her work she did not choose to create.

Anne’s shame and Gilbert’s reply

After Diana leaves, Anne kisses her and tells her she values the motive behind what she has done. Affection and hurt coexist: Anne recognizes Diana’s loyalty without being able to accept the alteration as harmless. She puts the check in her bureau drawer as though it were tainted and weeps over what she sees as a lasting humiliation. The check becomes the episode’s most pointed object: it represents real money, but Anne cannot yet regard it simply as help or reward.

Gilbert Blythe arrives at dusk, having heard the news at Orchard Slope, and expects to congratulate Anne. Her distress changes his response. Anne fears that her story has been reduced to an advertisement and that people at Redmond College will laugh at her. She also invokes the literary ideals Professor Hamilton taught at Queen’s University: a writer should not work from a low or unworthy motive, but should hold to high ideals. Her pain is not merely embarrassment about a contest; it comes from believing that the public will attribute Diana’s commercial additions to Anne’s own artistic intention.

Gilbert offers a practical alternative. Many students, he points out, are short of money, and earning an honest penny to help pay board and tuition is neither degrading nor ridiculous. Masterpieces may be the ideal, but expenses still have to be met. This reasoning eases Anne’s fear of being mocked, though it does not remove her deeper sense that the story’s ideal has been compromised. The exchange thus stops short of a complete reconciliation between art and income: Gilbert answers her anxiety about how others will judge her, while the hurt attached to the altered story remains.

Significance of the episode

The episode distinguishes the act of writing from the act of making a work profitable. Anne’s story wins because Diana gives it the sponsor’s required advertising content, not because Anne deliberately set out to promote a product. That distinction complicates the meaning of the award: it is at once evidence that the story could succeed in a competition and a recognition of a version whose crucial commercial language Anne did not author. Diana’s loving motive does not erase that difference, just as Anne’s distress does not erase the genuine financial value of the prize.

The narrative turns on mismatched expectations. Anne rejects the possibility of entering the contest; Diana anticipates that Anne would refuse and acts without her knowledge; the judges reward the altered story; and Gilbert sees an ordinary, respectable way to earn money where Anne sees an assault on literary ideals. The same twenty-five dollars can therefore appear as an unexpected opportunity to one character and as something close to blood-money to another. The ending preserves both readings: Anne is less afraid of ridicule, but the deeper wound to her ideal of authorship has not been declared healed.