Story Club

The Story Club was a short-lived but significant creative enterprise founded by Anne Shirley and Diana Barry during their early teens at Avonlea. It began as a private pact between the two friends, who felt their imaginations needed cultivating after Miss Stacy criticized their earlier approach to the Haunted Wood. Soon it expanded to include Jane Andrews, Ruby Gillis, and one or two other girls who shared the same perceived deficiency. No boys were allowed, though Ruby Gillis argued that their admission would make the club more exciting. Each member was required to produce one story per week, which she would read aloud for group discussion. The stories were kept sacredly, intended to be read to their descendants. Each girl wrote under a nom-de-plume; Anne's was Rosamond Montmorency.

Aims and Methods

The club's stated purpose was to practice writing and cultivate imagination, following Miss Stacy's advice that imagination must be taken in the right way. Anne, as the most prolific and inventive member, often supplied story ideas for the others. She insisted that every story contain a clear moral: all good people were rewarded and all bad ones suitably punished. The moral, Anne explained to Marilla, was the great thing, and she read one of her stories to Mr. and Mrs. Allan, who agreed the moral was excellent—though they laughed in the wrong places. Anne preferred it when people cried. Jane and Ruby almost always cried at the pathetic parts. Diana, however, tended to put too many murders into her stories, killing off characters when she did not know what else to do with them. Ruby Gillis was criticized for being too sentimental, putting in too much lovemaking, while Jane's stories were extremely sensible but contained none at all because she felt silly reading them aloud.

Key Activities and Reception

The club's most notable external validation came when Diana wrote to her Aunt Josephine Barry about their enterprise. Miss Josephine Barry wrote back asking to see some of their work, so they copied out four of their very best stories and sent them. The old lady replied that she had never read anything so amusing in her life. This puzzled the girls, since the stories were all very pathetic and almost everybody died. Nevertheless, Anne took it as proof that the club was doing some good in the world, as Mrs. Allan said ought to be their object in everything.

Decline and Significance

The Story Club did not survive the transition to more serious academic work. When the Queen's class was organized and Anne, Diana, and the others faced the demands of studying for the Entrance examination, they simply had no time for it. Anne later admitted to Marilla that they had grown tired of it anyway. She came to see the enterprise as silly—writing about love and murder and elopements and mysteries. Miss Stacy's influence proved decisive: she had the girls write stories only for composition training, forbade anything that could not happen in Avonlea in their own lives, and made them criticize their own work sharply. Anne, who had once crowded her essays with fine big words, learned to write simply and to be her own severest critic. The club thus marked a transitional phase in Anne's literary development, from unrestrained romantic invention toward a more disciplined, realistic approach to writing—a shift that paralleled her broader maturation from a child who lived entirely in imagination to a young woman preparing to take her place in the actual world.