Anne Shirley and Royal Gardner

Anne Shirley’s relationship with Roy Gardner is a courtship shaped by romantic idealization and brought to an abrupt end by recognition. Roy seems to embody the hero Anne has long imagined, and his wealth, beauty, and eloquent attentions make their match appear assured. Yet when he proposes, Anne discovers that the feeling she has mistaken for love cannot carry her into marriage with him.

First Meeting and the Hero of Anne’s Imagination

Anne meets Roy on a windy, rainy day in Kingsport. A gust turns her umbrella inside out on the harbor road, and Roy offers her shelter beneath his own. His appearance and manner strike her with the force of a literary arrival: he is tall, handsome, distinguished-looking, and has dark, melancholy eyes and a sympathetic voice. To Anne, he seems almost precisely made to resemble the hero of her dreams.

They wait out the rain together in a small pavilion on the point. The shower lasts for much of an hour, but the time passes quickly; when the clouds break, they walk back together, and Roy asks permission to call at Patty’s Place. Anne agrees, then enters with flushed cheeks and a heart beating at her fingertips. Her absorption is so complete that Rusty, climbing into her lap to be petted, receives only an absent welcome. The scene establishes how quickly the encounter becomes a romantic story in Anne’s mind: before she knows much about Roy, she is already measuring him against an ideal.

That evening, a dozen long-stemmed roses arrive for Anne. Philippa Gordon recognizes the name on the card and supplies the background that makes Roy’s entrance seem even more consequential. The Gardner family is among the richest and most prominent in Kingsport; Roy is handsome and clever, and had left college two years earlier to travel abroad with his mother after her health failed. His father is dead. Philippa reports that he had accepted the interruption to his studies graciously, while teasing Anne about the prospect of romance. Anne lies awake recalling Roy’s eyes and wondering whether her imagined prince has finally appeared in real life.

Courtship and the Power of the Ideal

Roy’s attentions develop into a courtship that his social circle considers likely to end in an engagement. Anne spends much of her winter with the Gardners, becomes close to Dorothy, and expects Roy to ask her to marry him. Philippa puts the matter plainly, and Anne reluctantly admits that she supposes she is in love with him. The narrator makes clear how much that belief rests on idealization: Roy’s eyes, voice, and romantic manner answer the image Anne has formed of her hero, and his birthday sonnet, sent with violets, thrills her because it is addressed specifically to her.

Anne’s response to the sonnet also reveals the limits of their affinity. She admires its romantic effect, while recognizing that it is merely competent verse rather than poetry of the highest order. More troublingly, she recalls telling Roy a funny story and finding that he failed to see its point. Her shared laughter with Gilbert Blythe returns to her mind, and she wonders whether life with a man who lacked a sense of humor might become dull. She dismisses the worry as unreasonable: in her romantic conception, a melancholy, inscrutable hero need not also be a companion in humor. The relationship thus contains an early warning that the qualities making Roy compelling as a dream figure may not amount to the everyday intimacy Anne would want in a husband.

The Proposal and the Reversal

Roy proposes in the small pavilion on the harbor shore where they had waited through the rain on the day they met. Anne considers his choice of setting romantic, and his proposal is beautifully worded; the scene has the polished completeness of a courtship convention. It is also sincere. Roy means what he says, and nothing in his manner suggests a false performance. The difficulty lies not in his honesty but in Anne’s response.

She thinks she ought to be overcome with excitement, yet feels horribly calm. When Roy pauses, she opens her lips to say yes, then trembles as if recoiling from a precipice and pulls her hand away. In a sudden moment of insight, she understands more than all her previous years of expectation have taught her. Her answer is that she cannot marry him. The reversal is decisive because it separates the romance Anne has imagined from the choice she is actually being asked to make: the flawless setting and sincere proposal cannot produce the feeling she expects herself to have.

Aftermath and Significance

The courtship’s ending clarifies the difference between Roy’s apparent suitability and Anne’s unspoken attachment to other forms of connection. At Convocation, the college community expects an announcement of her engagement to Roy, and Anne expects it too. Yet, before leaving for the ceremony, she sets aside his violets and chooses the lilies of the valley sent by Gilbert. She remembers that she and Gilbert had once imagined graduating together, and his flowers belong to those shared memories and hopes in a way Roy’s do not. On the platform, Roy gives her a puzzled, pained glance as he passes; that look becomes part of the day’s lingering bitterness.

The relationship’s final contrast is embodied in another gift from Gilbert: a small pink enamel heart on a gold chain, which Anne wears to the graduation dance. In the darkness, as she struggles with the implication of her feelings, she twists the chain until it breaks and puts the trinket in her pocket. Later she declines to dance with Gilbert, saying her card is full, and carries on cheerfully with the other girls. The gesture does not undo her refusal of Roy or settle her feelings at once; it registers the strain between outward composure and an inward recognition she is not yet ready to act upon.

Roy’s courtship matters, then, not because he proves insincere or unsuitable by conventional measures, but because he appears so perfectly suited to Anne’s romantic ideal. His wealth, looks, attentiveness, and beautifully staged proposal make him an apparently brilliant match, yet Anne cannot make the expected feeling real by willing herself into it. The relationship ends when she discovers that a convincing romance and a marriage she can choose are not the same thing.