fairy

Fairies occupy a curious, liminal space in the world of Anne of Green Gables. They are never seen, never proven to exist, and are explicitly dismissed by the practical adults of Avonlea. Yet they are powerfully present—as figures of speech, as imaginative playmates, and as a measure of the distance between Anne Shirley's inner world and the one she must learn to live in. For Anne, fairies are not a superstition to be believed or disbelieved; they are a mode of perception, a way of investing the ordinary with wonder, and a tool for survival in a world that has often been unkind.

Fairies as Imaginative Companions and Play

From her earliest days at Green Gables, Anne peoples her world with fairy figures. She imagines that the fairies lost a piece of a broken hanging lamp during a ball, and she and Diana Barry christen the fragment the "fairy glass," treasuring it in their playhouse Idlewild. This act of naming and storytelling transforms a discarded object into a token of enchantment. Fairies also inhabit the natural landscape of Anne's imagination. She wonders if a dryad—"sort of a grown-up fairy"—sits by the Dryad's Bubble, combing her hair with the spring for a mirror, and she looks for the dryad's footprints in the morning dew. These fancies are shared with Diana, who, after her mother's disapproval of the Haunted Wood game, becomes reluctant to indulge in such beliefs. Anne pleads with her, "Oh, Diana, don't give up your faith in the dryad!" For Anne, the willingness to imagine fairies is a kind of loyalty to the romance of the world.

Fairies as a Measure of Imagination and Romance

Anne's fairy imaginings are a direct expression of her defining trait: her "scope for imagination." When she first arrives at Green Gables, she tells Marilla Cuthbert that in the asylum there was "so little scope for the imagination," contrasting it with the rich possibilities of her new home. Fairies are part of that scope. They are woven into her most ecstatic responses to beauty, as when she renames the Avenue the "White Way of Delight" and the pond the "Lake of Shining Waters," names that feel to her like incantations. The fairy realm also represents a romantic ideal that Anne consciously aspires to. When the Avonlea school prepares a concert, Anne is thrilled to be cast as a fairy queen's maid of honor in the tableau "The Fairy Queen." She insists that fairy queens must be slender, not fat like Josie Pye, and that fairies require slippers, not boots with copper toes. This attention to fairy propriety shows how seriously Anne takes the aesthetic and romantic dimensions of her imaginative life. Yet she also recognizes the limits of this romance. After the near-disaster of the Elaine incident on the pond, she tells Marilla she has learned that "it is no use trying to be romantic in Avonlea," implying that the world of towered Camelot and fairy queens belongs to a different order of reality.

The Tension Between Fairy Imagination and Adult Reality

The fairy world Anne creates is constantly in tension with the practical, moral world of Avonlea's adults. Marilla, Mrs. Rachel Lynde, and even Diana's mother view such fancies with suspicion, seeing them as nonsense, vanity, or even wickedness. When Anne's imagination runs to darker places—as in the Haunted Wood, where she and Diana invent ghosts and headless specters—Marilla forces her to walk through the grove at night as a cure, declaring, "There are no such things as ghosts." The same logic applies to fairies: they are not real, and indulging in them is a dangerous departure from duty and truth. Anne internalizes this tension. She knows that believing in fairies is something she must outgrow. On the eve of her last summer before entering the Queen's class, she tells Marilla that when she puts on longer skirts she will "feel that I have to live up to them and be very dignified. It won't even do to believe in fairies then, I'm afraid; so I'm going to believe in them with all my whole heart this summer." This is a poignant acknowledgment that fairy-belief is a privilege of childhood, one she must soon relinquish as she steps into the responsibilities of young womanhood.

Fairies as a Symbol of Lost Childhood and the Bend in the Road

Anne's relationship with fairies thus traces the arc of her growth. In her early days at Green Gables, fairies are a natural part of her imaginative landscape, as real to her as the brook and the cherry trees. As she matures, they become a conscious choice, a deliberate indulgence before the onset of adult seriousness. By the end of the novel, after Matthew Cuthbert's death and her decision to stay at Green Gables to teach, Anne no longer speaks of fairies. Her imagination has not vanished, but it has been redirected. She still finds "scope for imagination" in her plans for study and in the bend in the road ahead. The fairies have receded, replaced by a more mature but still hopeful vision of life. Their disappearance marks the passage from childhood to young adulthood, a loss that is both sad and necessary. Yet the memory of them—the fairy glass, the dryad's spring, the White Way of Delight—remains as a testament to the power of a mind that refused to let the world be merely commonplace.