Previously: Anne of Avonlea. She’s in college now. She has weird-ass friends. This post was brought to you by A Misandrist.
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“We are going for a walk in the park. I ought to stay in and finish my blouse. But I couldn’t sew on a day like this. There’s something in the air that gets into my blood and makes a sort of glory in my soul. My fingers would twitch and I’d sew a crooked seam. So it’s ho for the park and the pines.”
*
“You’ll always keep a corner for me, won’t you, Di darling? Not the spare room, of course–old maids can’t aspire to spare rooms, and I shall be as ‘umble as Uriah Heep, and quite content with a little over-the-porch or off-the-parlor cubby hole.”
*
“You remember what a consuming desire I had to sleep in a spare room bed–but not the Green Gables spare room. Oh, no, never there! It would have been too terrible–I couldn’t have slept a wink from awe.”
*
“There was one especially horrifying phantom which we created–the ghost of the murdered child that crept up behind you and laid cold fingers on yours. I confess that, to this day, I cannot help fancying its little, furtive footsteps behind me when I come here after nightfall. I’m not afraid of the White Lady or the headless man or the skeletons, but I wish I had never imagined that baby’s ghost into existence.”
*
”The silence here is like a prayer, isn’t it? How I love the pines! They seem to strike their roots deep into the romance of all the ages. It is so comforting to creep away now and then for a good talk with them. I always feel so happy out here.”
*
“How difficult it is to realize that one we have always known can really be dead. Ruby is the first of our schoolmates to go. One by one, sooner or later, all the rest of us must follow.”
*
“What do you think a mother would feel like if she found her child tattooed over with a baking powder advertisement? I feel just the same.”
*
BONUS ROUND: HER WEIRD FRIEND PHIL, WHO THINKS SHE’S ALL THAT
“Anne, this is certainly your night for looking handsome. Nine nights out of ten I can easily outshine you. The tenth you blossom out suddenly into something that eclipses me altogether. How do you manage it?”
*
Tags: anne of the island, books, buzzfeed, gifs, humor, i love her don’t worry, lm montgomery, oh this is fun
NICOLE THIS IS PERFECT.
THAT COULSON GIF.
I just bought the Coulson bobblehead this weekend and now he is going to be judging me constantly for writing subpar copy.
That “Shining” GIF is killing me!
1. Phil is effing hilarious.
2. Anne’s TRAGIC DESPAIR over her story being printed is was UNGODLY HORRIFYING to me at age 12 or so. Now it is unbelievably hilarious and Phil’s suggestion that they go get drunk is possibly the best part of it all.
My God, HOW are she and Diana best friends? They have literally nothing in common. This incident should have been a huge wake-up call for both of them.
YES. I feel like Diana spent a large part of her teenage years silently rolling her eyes behind her back, and then affectionately-but-exhaustedly telling Fred “you will not believe what Anne wrote me in her last letter.”
I think that’s sort of evident in her college years. Diana’s like that childhood friend who you’re friends with just because you agree to like each other, and then Anne drifts away and finds awesomer people but still has this nostalgic fondness for Diana. In the later books, it’s also REALLY obvious that Diana is just not that bright. She’s sweet, but not bright.
They are still friends like I am with my BFF from HS, who married a Methodist minister, spends her time managing youth groups and teaching Sunday School, and is a scary wholesome sweet nice Midwestern Mom. And, well, I am none of those things. We have zero in common now. But she’s so nice, I couldn’t not Facebook friend her.
it’s cause Diana’s hot
and also too dumb to know that’s why Anne likes her and too sweet to mind
it’s been years since I looked into Montgomery but all I remember of Diana is bosoms bosoms bosoms.
It made sense to me when I was 12, too, but when I started to try and get my own writing published my sympathy drained away.
I don’t care if I’m a sell-out – being a sell-out means you;ve just got something worthy of buying, and I will happily have my writing published anywhere if they give me money.
I honestly spent years of my childhood and adolescence wishing Phil was my best friend. She is all that and a bag of chips. I envision her after marriage, winning over the “slums of Patterson Street” in much the same way that Chummy captured hearts and minds in Poplar.
Even at 12, the Rollings Reliable part of that book made me side-eye my heroine a bit. And now I just skip over that entire chapter because I can’t even.
CAN WE TALK ABOUT HOW PHIL IS ALL “I’VE CHLOROFORMED LOADS OF CATS,” and they’re all “oh, cool, that’s helpful,” instead of “please tell us the circumstances under which you’ve killed all these cats?”
DUDE. This is a serious question: why would Phil being doing that? She is a wealthy girl and theoretically all teh cat-chloroforming on their estate would have been done by, I assume, a hired hand. Why is she chloroforming cats herself unless she…..has some kind of weird fascination with it?
Phil is such a cipher. Because she sounds utterly, utterly unbearable, and also chloroforms cats for funsies, and literally the only reason given for thinking she’s not a monster is that Anne says “I mean, you can’t HELP but love Phil,” and I seriously need more information than that.
I have always envisioned Phil as the type of person who is so effervescent and endlessly cheerful and bubbling over with life that her ridiculous assessment of her self-worth kind of falls by the wayside? I imagine that it’s hard for someone like Anne to dislike someone who is very In Love With Life, which I think Phil has a chronic case of. However, I feel like Stella would have a MUCH DIFFERENT feeling on Phil, ranging from benign enjoyment to “oh my god get the hell out of my house, PHILIPPA,” you know. (Stella 4ever.)
/armchair diagnosis of fictional characters, OUT.
Stella spent more time teaching school in far-flung rural districts of PEI than the other women, so I feel like she’d have a lot less patience for Phil’s bullshit. (I love Stella, too.)
STELLA MAYNARD <3 <3 <3 <3 <3
“Anne is a very fortunate girl,” said Aunt Jamesina.
“I suppose so,” said Stella, shrugging her shoulders. “Roy is a nice fellow and all that. But there’s really nothing in him.”
“That sounds like a very jealous remark, Stella Maynard,” said Aunt Jamesina rebukingly.
“It does–but I am not jealous,” said Stella calmly. “I love Anne and I like Roy. Everybody says she is making a brilliant match, and even Mrs. Gardner thinks her charming now. It all sounds as if it were made in heaven, but I have my doubts. Make the most of that, Aunt Jamesina.”
STELLA KNOWS. Bow down before the omniscient Stella.
STELLAAAAAA
I assume that Phil had heard about the process (maybe from one of those hired hands), and this was her attempt to convince the others she was A Cat Chloroforming Expert. Although her having a weird fascination with it would just make her more interesting…
On the subject of “Averil’s Fucking Whatever Short Story,” can we engage in some real talk about how Anne was almost certainly one of the WORST writers ever to live? It just sounds horrible, every word.
I think she might have been the sort of writer who never used a simple word where a complex one would do, and almost certainly responded to editorial criticism with rants.
She’s most definitely a ‘golden words my stories are my baaaabiiiiieeees’ types, and they are rarely any good.
I love every second of Anne’s gushing about her stories and the Story Club and all that. It is almost certainly UNGODLY AWFUL. I love it. I would legit read Averil’s Atonement and laugh horribly at every single overwrought line.
We should have a contest to see who can do the best fake version of Averil’s Atonement.
JESUS YES
Doooo iiiitttttt. Omigod dooo iiitttt.
YES
I am having paroxysms of giddy delight at this idea.
Came out of lurkdom to say YES, PLEASE, do this thing, because I am brainstorming my draft now.
I don’t know. So much of the “story club” is basically what I did in middle school and high school– smart girls writing ‘Mary Sues’ and having fun. Then you are really self-conscious for a while (I somehow remembered Anne being upset about the baking powder incident because she was embarrassed at the story itself, but I was probably projecting) but by the time you are well into college, you can laugh about it and be like, “wow. That was awful. BUT SO MUCH FUN!” (In general, I do not love the tendency to police the writing fantasies of girls, which is totally a thing in 19th century literature and also totally a thing now.)
Anne would have been killing it on fanfiction.net, is what I’m saying. Killing it.
Yes, yes.
Plus what Anne is writing was a lot of what she probably grew up reading; it is an awful lot like Charlotte Yonge or Rosa Nouchette Carey or other long-forgotten women writers of the 19th century.
Also this, yes!
I sometimes wondered if Lucy Maud was secretly being very hard on her younger self, but maybe Anne is the younger self of someone else she knew and just really wanted to PUNCH IN THE FACE for bad writing.
I wonder about this. Anne and Jo March write what’s considered drecky “women’s” fiction–Anne’s are sentimental and Jo does more gothic stuff, probably. And both have men tell them that they should write simpler, more realistic stories (Mr. Harrison and the professor). And they both become “better,” more successful writers eventually. (And their growth mirrors that of their creators.)
Then again, maybe Anne and Jo would’ve gotten super extremely rich and successful and just fulfilled if they’d just continued writing the way they wrote and who cares about the opinions of these harsh men?
But yeah, Averil’s Atonement was probably pretty hard to read.
Jo sounds like she writes fun stuff! I firmly reject Anne’s fiction based only on the names of her characters, if nothing else.
This is what Jo was writing — Victorian sensation fiction!
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/A_Long_Fatal_Love_Ch…
(Alcott couldn’t make a living writing these during her life, which is why she switched to writing Little Women and all the other stuff she got famous for.)
“Suppose I broke away and left you, or made it impossible for you to stay. That I was base and false; in every way unworthy of your love, and it was clearly right for you to go, what would you do then?”
“Go away and–”
He interrupted with a triumphant laugh, “Die as heroines always do, tender slaves as they are.”
“No, live and forget you”, was the unexpected reply.”
Its the motto of the toast!
I also enjoy the tension between Mr. Harrison’s advice for Anne and LMM’s own writing. One of the things he tells Anne to do is cut the description of the sunset, and yet how many super-purple-prose sunset and/or sunrise descriptions are there in Montgomery’s works? SO MANY!
You know, I’ve just finished reading the Pat of Silver Bush books (which are both awesome, by the way), and I was reminded of those purple-prosy landscape descriptions from the Anne books (although LMM tones them down a bit in the Pat books).
And you know what? I love them. They don’t further the plot, but they really highlight LMM’s love for PEI and its natural beauty. They make you realize why Anne loves PEI so much, and how Pat could give up loves and worldly ambitions to stay at home at Silver Bush.
(I’m going back to PEI this August for the first time in 18 years and I am SO PSYCHED.)
Pat! The first book is good, but the second is so disappointing!
Really? I loved the second one – so many twists and turns. Every time I thought I knew what would happen, LMM outsmarted me. The last chapter or two was excruciating after [SPOILER], and then when [SPOILER] while they were at church. And the end was perfect.
I agree with thelaureno. Book two is kind of a letdown. I personally found it rather predictable, but that could be because it was almost the last LMM book I read and she kind of repeats herself …
PHIL 4 LYFE. I like a woman who knows she’s good looking and is willing to use it to nab the minister of her dreams. Also who is melodramatic and funny and goes down on her knees to beg for a spot in Patty’s Place, which is the entirely correct thing to do. She’s also the only one who just tells Anne to her face to get over herself and admit she’s in love with Gilbert, which is apparently not What One Does, but Phil doesn’t care even a little bit, because she does what she likes.
Phil’s a stereotypical popular girl who can hardly be bothered being popular, who thinks it’s way better to get scraps of time from people who bring her real joy. She’s good looking and bright and she doesn’t give a damn – sure, sure, WHATEVER, I want to hang out with these nice girls because they seem like they’re good people – and she’s utterly shameless about pursuing what’s important to her, like twoo wuv and lady-companionship. She’s a rich girl who is willing to throw away all her rich-girl comforts if that means she can be with the people she loves, and I adore her, I don’t care what anyone says.
cat serial killer
no, I actually think you’re basically right, and that Phil is a bit of wish fulfillment for Lucy Maud.
Dude, she says chloroforming a cat is her one talent, describes the process thereof, and then promptly botches it. No mention of the millions of kitties dead in her wake. No numbers. Is it not reasonable to think that she learned how to do it one time and started claiming street cred for it, as rich college girls are wont to do?
I’m sure even Ted Bundy would have been flummoxed if some tiny obvious thing had gone wrong with his plans.
I was worried that Anne would stop saying such batshit stuff over the course of the series, but, NOPE, we’re fine. And I think that our next installment, “Anne of Windy Poplars,” has so much to offer us. So, so much.
You know, before we get into the UTTER INSANITY OF ANNE’S HOUSE OF DREAMS.
Anne’s House of Dreams is the weirdest book in the whole damn series, I swear to God. I have STRONG FEELINGS about this series obviously, but HoD is….different.
Windy Poplars is like a fucking fever dream.
Yep. So far, it’s been all “oh noes, I put too much sugar in the peas!” “I dyed my hair!” and suddenly it’s dead babies and women married to brutes who turn out to be dead.
Shit Gets Real. HoD is the only one that I don’t often reread because the whole Leslie arc just creeps me out.
So much of the Leslie storyline went soaring over my head as a tween reading these books and then I went back to them as an adult and went “WHAT THE ENTIRE CHRIST, LMM.”
Not to mention: happy happy happy BOOM DEAD BABY happy happy happy woo. Knowing what we know about LMM’s personal life, HoD often feels like she was struggling to write wish-fulfillment, but her lived experience kept creeping in.
HoD was obviously written by a time travelling Mallory
HoD’s saving grace is Miss Cornelia, though. Miss Cornelia, the misandrist!
The “inveterate man-hater!” (I want “inveterate man-hater” on my tombstone, or maybe in the first line of my CV.)
HoD gets really, really Christian. SO much God-talk. And also we learn that The Husband Is Always Right, Because He Follows His Manly Morals and Not Stupid Womanly Feelings, which is a fine lesson for any little girls to learn.
I didn’t really get that so much? I mean, a lot of it is very Christian in the sense that they are Christian characters dealing with immense troubles in a time and place in which church and religion is the only real way to emotionally process such things. And also I generally strongly like to avoid judging books published in the 1920s and 1930s against our current standards.
The whole series is Christian in that way, for sure. I found HoD to be full of things like making decisions based on what God’s Requirements for People are, and judging people based on their doctrine, and being guided by God in all things, and . . . I don’t know, I just felt like it got pretty heavy-handed in that book.
Well, LMM was married to a minister and was a very devout Presbyterian all her life, so it’s not surprising that her plots (and her characters) would be imbued with religiosity.
I don’t know about that. While LMM had faith in God, she also seems to have had serious doubts about organized religion, minister’s wife or no. In many ways being a minister’s life made her life and her writing more difficult– she often felt constrained in what she could write, given her role in her community.
And her marriage to a minister was NOT happy and if anything, fueled some of her religious misgivings. There’s a recurring minor character in some of her works, a minister with “religious melancholia.” That’s her husband. He suffered debilitating depression from the literal belief that he was going to hell.
Aggghhhh, I read HoD for the first time a few months ago and I haaaaaated all the instances of “The Man Is The Rational One (And Of Course Is Always Right) While Anne Is Steered Off Course By Her Womanly Emotions”. It’s not only Gilbert, either — Captain Jim has a whole little speech on how women are “illogical”, too! (I wrote so many rage notes on my Kindle while I was reading that book.)
Also, all the Holy Passion of Motherhood stuff was uncomfortable to read. I don’t have children and am not so crazy about the idea of having any, so maybe I don’t understand how it feels, but in this book LMM got really into the idea that motherhood is both the most important and the only thing of value a woman can have in her life. I understand that was the prevalent way of thinking at the time, but… just… brrrr.
Aw… that poor little kitty. My cat loves GIFs. She hissed at the frightened kitty. But somehow *I* feel like an asshole about it.
So this is the part of the book I remember best:
Mrs. Rachel Lynde said emphatically after the funeral that Ruby Gillis was the handsomest corpse she ever laid eyes on. Her loveliness, as she lay, white-clad, among the delicate flowers that Anne had placed about her, was remembered and talked of for years in Avonlea. Ruby had always been beautiful; but her beauty had been of the earth, earthy; it had had a certain insolent quality in it, as if it flaunted itself in the beholder’s eye; spirit had never shone through it, intellect had never refined it. But death had touched it and consecrated it, bringing out delicate modelings and purity of outline never seen before — doing what life and love and great sorrow and deep womanhood joys might have done for Ruby. Anne, looking down through a mist of tears, at her old playfellow, thought she saw the face God had meant Ruby to have, and remembered it so always.
Seriously? If you’re popular and vaguely slutty you’re much better off dead?
I don’t think that’s what LMM meant. I actually really like the Ruby’s death arc because it seemed very human: a person who didn’t think much about what she wanted out of her life suddenly realizing she wasn’t going to get to live it. And the face Anne sees is the face Ruby would have had if she had matured and lived into adulthood.
Concur.
I can definitely see that interpretation, but I think when I read it as a child any subtler points of Ruby contemplating mortality were lost on me and I just got weirded out by the idea of death by tuberculosis (which I KNEW was not pretty and involved coughing up blood) being equated with physical beauty and purification.
It is really weird! But there was a long long tradition of TB being the beautiful poetic death.
The Hectic Glow.
Yes! I think LMM is definitely calling on that poetic tradition–Keats especially–to make Ruby into a more interesting character than she previously was. (I mean, pity it took her dying and all…)
And I will freely admit that I cried many tears over the embroidery left half-finished.
The Anne books really brought home to me the threat of illness and death that shadowed everyone’s life before antibiotics and vaccinations. I mean, beyond the TB, people died of flu, pneumonia, measles, croup, the “dipthery croup” (whatever the hell that was), smallpox, etc. etc. You didn’t just ignore a sore throat because the consequences of scarlet fever were so dire.
But you’re right, it was a bit weird to make Ruby’s death from TB so beautiful and romantic.
Ruby was the only character in the books I could stand, so of course ol’ Lucy Maud had to kill her off and then be all weird about it. TEAM RUBY RUBY G. YOU GOT ROBBED
On an only slightly tangential note, partner thinks that “Gilbert” is an excellent name for a boy.
I’ve decided we’re having a girl.
Your partner is absolutely right.
“Priscilla” and “Philippa.” Two characters I could NEVER TELL APART.
buh wha?
*reads comments*
OHHH Phil is a girl. Kinda thought that was a little ahead of its time!
*stores flawless gif for later use*
Anne of the Island is the book where she lives next to the cemetery and goes for rambles among the old gravestones, right? We just rented a duplex for the fall that is RIGHT next to a beautiful cemetery (cemetery to one side and wrapping around behind), and I felt like Anne falling in love with that place. I will try not to be insufferable and keep my romantic musings about the secret lives of the rabbits that live in the park section of the cemetery to myself.
Or, alternately, it could be your publishing breakthrough! Like Anne’s first published story about sweetpeas and garden nymphs talking to each other. Which she wrote on a scrap of birch bark while trapped in a shed roof. In the middle of a rainstorm. Oh LMM….
(It was actually a scrap of wrapping paper, not birch bark.) *scuttles off to hide in corner*
I would totally read the crap out of the secret lives of rabbits in a cemetery.
Was it in Anne of the Island that she works so hard at school that the doctor tells Marilla that Anne’s exhausted and he doesn’t know if she will live through it?
WTF. Thanks, L.M., for making me feel like I was never studying hard enough because I wasn’t putting my life in danger.
Nah, I think that’s Anne of Avonlea…
Nope, but Someone Else barely makes it through all the studying and emotional drama…
I think you’re thinking of when Anne comes home from Queen’s and she looks so rundown that the doctor tells Marilla not to let Anne read and to make her stay outside for 2 weeks. This was toward the end of AGG.
One of the lines I find most jarring in Anne of the Island is her telling Phil before exams: “Jonas likes you better for your big brown eyes and your crooked smile that for all the brains you carry under your curls”. I get that she’s trying to say that Phil doesn’t have to try to make herself into something she’s not to have Jonas love her, but still, I’d rather be loved for my mind than my looks.
(It was actually a scrap of wrapping paper, not birch bark.) *scuttles off to hide in corner*
I would totally read the crap out of the secret lives of rabbits in a cemetery.
Nope, but Someone Else barely makes it through all the studying and emotional drama…
I think you're thinking of when Anne comes home from Queen's and she looks so rundown that the doctor tells Marilla not to let Anne read and to make her stay outside for 2 weeks. This was toward the end of AGG.
Is it just me on the Phil/Stella train then? Phil’s minister was very sweet and all but it has always been clear to me that her and Stella were secretly in love.
These are the posts that know Jacob. If you know what I mean.