Diana Barry’s first child is born during Anne Shirley’s return to Avonlea, a joyful arrival that also sharpens Anne’s sense of standing outside the changes of adult life. The birth transforms her childhood friend into a mother and gives their friendship a new setting: Diana’s attention is now fixed on the baby beside her.

The Birth and Its Immediate Scene

Diana is described as a pale young mother with rapture in her eyes, her firstborn laid beside her. Anne regards her with an awe she had never felt before. The woman before her seems difficult to reconcile with the little girl she once knew: the change makes Anne feel strangely desolate, as though she belongs only to their vanished schooldays and has no place in the present.

Diana proudly asks whether the baby is beautiful. He is a round, red little boy who looks remarkably like Fred Wright. Anne cannot honestly call him beautiful, but finds him sweet, kissable, and altogether delightful. Her affectionate response lets her welcome the baby without pretending to share Diana’s exact judgment of his appearance.

Diana’s Hopes for Her Child

Before the birth, Diana had wanted a girl and planned to name her Anne. Once her son arrives, however, she says she would not exchange him for a million girls: he could not have been anything other than his own precious self. Her earlier wish gives way to attachment to the particular child she has, rather than to the imagined daughter she had anticipated.

Diana is eager for the baby to grow old enough to speak and longs to hear him call her mother. She is also determined that his first memory of her will be a pleasant one. That resolve comes from her own earliest memory of her mother: being slapped for something she had done. Diana says she deserved the punishment and that her mother was good and dearly loved, but still wishes the first memory had been kinder. The birth thus draws out not only her delight in her child but her intention to shape his earliest experience differently.

The Birth as a Turning Point for Anne

The scene sets Diana’s new maternal happiness beside Anne’s more complicated response. Anne is glad for her friend, yet the sight of Diana as a mother makes the distance between their present lives and their shared past newly tangible. The baby’s arrival is therefore both a family joy and a marker of time’s passage: Diana has entered a stage Anne has not, and Anne feels the loneliness of being surrounded by a happiness that is not her own.