Anne Shirley and Josephine Barry's Friendship

The friendship between Anne Shirley and Miss Josephine Barry begins with a disastrous misunderstanding and develops into one of the most unexpectedly warm bonds in Anne's life. Miss Barry, a thin, prim, and rigid old lady with snapping black eyes and gold-rimmed glasses, arrives at Orchard Slope for a month-long visit expecting quiet respectability. Instead, on her very first night, Anne and Diana, returning late from the Debating Club concert, race each other into the spare-room bed and land squarely on top of the sleeping Miss Barry. The old lady's muffled cry of "Merciful goodness!" is followed by a fury that seems to Anne and Diana to threaten permanent estrangement. Miss Barry declares she will leave the next day, Sunday or not, and cancels her promised payment for Diana's music lessons. Anne, however, refuses to let the breach stand. She marches alone into the sitting room, white-faced and trembling, and confesses that the idea of jumping into the bed was entirely her own. "I've been so used in my early days to having people cross at me that I can endure it much better than Diana can," she tells Miss Barry, clasping her hands in her characteristic gesture. The old lady's anger dissolves into amused interest. She laughs—a sound that brings Diana gasping with relief in the kitchen—and agrees to stay if Anne will come over and talk to her occasionally. That evening Miss Barry gives Diana a silver bangle bracelet and tells the family she has unpacked her valise. "I've made up my mind to stay simply for the sake of getting better acquainted with that Anne-girl," she says frankly. "She amuses me, and at my time of life an amusing person is a rarity." Miss Barry stays her full month and more, and she and Anne become firm friends. Anne recognizes in the old lady a kindred spirit, though one not immediately apparent. "You wouldn't think so to look at her, but she is," Anne confides to Marilla. "You don't find it right out at first, as in Matthew's case, but after a while you come to see it." The friendship deepens through gifts and gestures. When Miss Barry sends a Christmas box to the Barry household, it includes a pair of dainty kid slippers with beaded toes and satin bows for Anne, with a card inscribed "For the Anne-girl and Merry Christmas." Anne, who had been planning to borrow Ruby Gillis's too-large slippers for the Christmas concert, calls the gift providential. The following autumn, Miss Barry invites Anne and Diana to stay with her at Beechwood in Charlottetown for the Exhibition. She meets them at the door with a twinkle in her sharp black eyes and declares that Anne has grown taller and better looking. Her house, furnished with great magnificence—velvet carpet, silk curtains—overawes the two country girls, but Miss Barry proves a generous hostess. She takes them to the Exhibition grounds, the horse races, and a concert at the Academy of Music where a noted prima donna sings. Anne, overwhelmed by the evening, tells Miss Barry she does not see how she can ever return to common life. Miss Barry suggests ice cream at a restaurant across the street, and Anne finds the prosaic remedy surprisingly effective. When Anne decides to stay at Green Gables and teach instead of taking up the Avery scholarship at Redmond College, Miss Barry's approval is implicit in her continued affection. The old lady, who had once thought Marilla Cuthbert an old fool for adopting an orphan, comes to see the decision differently. "If I'd a child like Anne in the house all the time I'd be a better and happier woman," she admits to herself after Anne's visit. Anne, for her part, throws her arms impulsively around Miss Barry's neck and kisses her wrinkled cheek when they part—a freedom that shocks Diana but pleases the old lady deeply. Miss Barry stands on her veranda watching the buggy out of sight, feeling the loneliness of her big house lacking those fresh young lives. She values people only as they serve or amuse her, and Anne has amused her; but she finds herself thinking less about Anne's quaint speeches than of her fresh enthusiasms, her transparent emotions, her little winning ways, and the sweetness of her eyes and lips. The friendship endures through Anne's year at Queen's, where she spends many spare hours at Beechwood and generally eats her Sunday dinners there, going to church with Miss Barry. The old lady, growing old but with undimmed black eyes and unabated tongue, never sharpens the latter on Anne. "That Anne-girl improves all the time," she says. "Anne has as many shades as a rainbow and every shade is the prettiest while it lasts. I don't know that she is as amusing as she was when she was a child, but she makes me love her and I like people who make me love them. It saves me so much trouble in making myself love them." At Anne's commencement, when Anne reads the best essay and is pointed out as the Avery winner, Miss Barry leans forward from her seat behind Marilla and pokes her with her parasol. "Aren't you proud of that Anne-girl? I am," she says. The friendship between the orphan girl and the sharp-tongued old lady stands as one of the novel's most unexpected and enduring bonds—a testament to Anne's power to win even the most unlikely hearts.