Ruby Gillis's Death

Ruby Gillis’s death ends the life of one of Anne Shirley’s old schoolmates and confronts Anne with the mortality she had only just begun to consider. Ruby dies peacefully in her sleep, but the loss makes the prospect of death immediate: a familiar face is gone, and Anne recognizes that her surviving classmates will also follow, one by one.

The Last Visit and the News

The previous evening, Anne had said good night to Ruby in the garden. Walking home slowly in the moonlight afterward, she felt that the encounter had changed her sense of life. Thinking of Ruby’s fear of death, Anne resolved that she must not reach the end of one life shrinking from what came next; she wanted to seek the highest and begin the life of heaven on earth. That good night proved to be their last: Anne never saw Ruby alive again.

The following evening, while the A.V.I.S. held a farewell party for Jane Andrews before her departure for the West, a death occurred in Avonlea. The news spread from house to house the next morning: Ruby had died in her sleep, painlessly and calmly. The smile on her face seemed to contradict the grisly figure Ruby had feared, making death appear, in the narrator’s description, more like a kindly guide than a phantom.

Funeral and Remembrance

After the funeral, Rachel Lynde remarked emphatically on Ruby’s beauty in death. Ruby lay in white among delicate flowers Anne had placed around her. People in Avonlea remembered and discussed her appearance for years. The narration contrasts this final image with Ruby’s earlier beauty, which it presents as conspicuously physical; death seemed to reveal a purity and delicacy that life, love, sorrow, and the joys of womanhood might otherwise have brought out. Through tears, Anne thought she saw the face Ruby had been meant to have, and that became the image she kept.

Before the funeral procession left the house, Mrs. Gillis drew Anne into a vacant room and gave her a small packet. It held an embroidered centerpiece Ruby had been making, still unfinished. The needle remained where Ruby’s fingers had left it the last time she put the work down, on the afternoon before her death. The object gives the loss a precise, intimate form: Ruby’s work stops at the point where her life stops, and the family’s gift entrusts its memory to Anne.

Anne’s Response and the Meaning of the Loss

Walking home with Diana Barry, Anne said that it was difficult to realize that someone they had always known could truly be dead. Ruby was their first schoolmate to die, and Anne looked beyond this first loss to the deaths she believed would eventually come for the rest of them. Diana was uncomfortable with that thought and would rather have discussed the funeral’s details, including the white velvet casket chosen by Mr. Gillis and the grief of Ruby’s family. Anne would not turn the conversation to those particulars; she remained absorbed in reflection, while Diana felt excluded from it.

The unfinished centerpiece and Anne’s changed outlook connect the private fact of Ruby’s death to the unfinished lives of those who remain. Anne’s reflections began after the garden farewell, before she knew it was final; the news and funeral give those thoughts their lasting weight. Ruby’s death is both a personal bereavement and a turning point in Anne’s awareness of mortality, directing her attention away from life’s lesser comforts toward the purpose she believes should begin in the present.