Anne of Avonlea

Anne at Sixteen

When Anne of Avonlea opens, Anne Shirley has left girlhood behind — just. She is sixteen, newly appointed as teacher at the Avonlea school, and still very much the same person who arrived at Green Gables five years earlier: red-haired, imaginative, verbal, prone to disasters arising from inattention. What has changed is her position. She is now partly responsible for the children of the community she once disrupted as one of their number.

Montgomery published the sequel in 1909, the year after Anne of Green Gables became a runaway success. The pressure to produce a follow-up quickly shows in the novel’s structure, which is more episodic than its predecessor — a series of vignettes about Anne’s first years of teaching, the adventures of the Improvement Society she helps found, and the expanding cast of Avonlea characters. But Montgomery’s prose remains as sure and specific as ever, and Avonlea in autumn and spring is as beautifully rendered as anything in the first book.

New Faces

The novel’s best new addition is Paul Irving, a sensitive, imaginative boy in Anne’s class whose inner world mirrors Anne’s own. Their relationship — teacher recognising in pupil the child she herself was — is one of Montgomery’s warmest and most unforced inventions. The curmudgeonly Mr. Harrison, whose parrot causes repeated comic havoc, is a classic Montgomery creation: difficult, specific, and ultimately redeemed by the attentions of the right person.

Anne’s relationships with Marilla and with the twin orphans Davy and Dora, who join the Green Gables household, provide the emotional anchor. Davy in particular — mischievous, honest to the point of rudeness, irrepressible — is the novel’s comic engine, a younger-generation version of what Anne herself might have been had she been less verbally gifted and more physically reckless.

Our rating: 4.3/5 — A gentle, warm, and thoroughly pleasing continuation of Anne’s story, most rewarding for readers already devoted to Avonlea.

Writing Under Pressure

Anne of Avonlea appeared in 1909, only a year after Anne of Green Gables had become an international sensation, and the speed of its composition is detectable in its shape. Montgomery faced the classic problem of the sequel: how to continue a story whose central engine — an unwanted orphan winning her way into a family and community — had already reached its natural resolution. Her solution was to loosen the structure into a series of vignettes built around Anne’s new role and her new neighbours, and while this episodic looseness costs the book some of its predecessor’s narrative momentum, it allows Montgomery to deepen and widen the world of Avonlea rather than simply repeat the first novel’s arc.

The Teacher and Her Pupils

The novel’s central situation — Anne, who not long ago disrupted the Avonlea school as a pupil, now standing at the front of it as a teacher — gives the book its quiet thematic coherence. Montgomery is interested in teaching as a form of imaginative generosity, and Anne’s gift for it lies precisely in her ability to recognize the inner life of children like Paul Irving, in whom she sees a version of her own younger self. The theme connects directly to Montgomery’s deeper conviction, threaded through all the Anne books, that growing up need not mean surrendering the imaginative habits of childhood — that maturity, properly understood, can carry those gifts forward into adult responsibility.

The World Widens

Much of the pleasure of Anne of Avonlea lies in its expanding cast. The irascible Mr. Harrison and his foul-mouthed parrot, the orphan twins Davy and Dora who join the Green Gables household, and the various members of the village improvement society Anne helps to found all enlarge the social comedy of the series. Davy in particular — mischievous, brutally honest, irrepressible — supplies much of the book’s energy. None of this matches the concentrated emotional power of Anne of Green Gables, and the novel is most rewarding for readers already devoted to Avonlea, but as a gentle, warm continuation it delivers exactly the renewed acquaintance with that world its admirers came for.

A Place in the Series

Anne of Avonlea occupies a transitional place in Montgomery’s long chronicle of Anne Shirley, bridging the orphan’s arrival in Anne of Green Gables and her departure for college in Anne of the Island. It is the book in which Anne moves from being the community’s project to being one of its responsible members, and Montgomery uses these years to consolidate the world of Avonlea rather than to advance Anne’s own story dramatically. Her relationship with Marilla matures into something closer to partnership, the romantic thread with Gilbert Blythe is kept deliberately and almost teasingly muted, and the focus shifts outward to the children Anne teaches and the neighbours she befriends. Readers seeking the concentrated emotional force of the first novel will find this one gentler and more diffuse, but those who have come to love Avonlea for its own sake will find the return entirely welcome — a comfortable, affectionate sojourn in a world rendered with all of Montgomery’s characteristic luminous specificity.

Community and Continuity

If Anne of Avonlea has a governing subject, it is the quiet work of building and sustaining a community. The Avonlea Village Improvement Society that Anne helps found, her patient cultivation of difficult neighbours like Mr. Harrison, the care she extends to the orphan twins and to her pupils — all of these dramatize Montgomery’s conviction that community is made not through grand gestures but through small acts of loyalty, tact, and neighbourly effort. Anne, once the disruptive newcomer, has become one of the threads holding Avonlea together. The novel’s looser, episodic shape suits this theme, since the texture of communal life is itself a matter of accumulated small incidents rather than a single dramatic arc, and Montgomery renders that texture with affection and an unfailing eye for the comedy of ordinary human stubbornness.