Anne of the Island

I came to this one the way a lot of readers do, through the earlier books, and I was a little nervous. Anne of the Island came out in 1915 from L.C. Page and Company, and it is the third book in the Anne of Green Gables series, following Anne of Avonlea. I had lived with Anne as a chattering orphan and then as a young schoolteacher, and I was not sure I wanted to watch her grow up and go away to college. Growing up can flatten a character like her. I am happy to say that did not happen here, though not everything in this book works.

The story is simple on the surface. Anne leaves Avonlea to study at Redmond College in Kingsport, shares a house with friends, studies and writes and gets proposed to, and slowly figures out the difference between being admired and being loved. Gilbert Blythe, her old schoolmate and rival turned friend, is studying medicine nearby. What happens between them takes the whole book to resolve, and Montgomery makes you wait for it. I read the last hundred pages in one sitting, which tells you something, because the middle of this book is genuinely slow in places.

What I love most, looking back, is how much this is a book about female friendship. The romance gets the ending, but the middle belongs to Anne and her circle, to late night talks and shared housekeeping and letters home. If you are reading for that, you will be well fed.

Leaving Avonlea for Redmond

The book opens with leave taking. Anne has finished her time teaching in Avonlea and saved and planned, and now Redmond College waits in Kingsport, a bigger town with wider streets and new people. Marilla is still at Green Gables, older and dear, and the farewell scenes carry real weight because we know what that house means. Anne is not running away. She is doing what bright young women of her time did when they got the chance, going on to higher study, and she feels both thrilled and guilty about it.

She does not go alone. Her friend Priscilla goes with her, and at Redmond they fall in with other young women, including Stella and the lively Philippa, called Phil, who talks about beaux the way Anne talks about books. Gilbert is there too, working through medical school, studying hard, often short on money but long on purpose. The group forms fast, the way college friendships do, over shared classes and boardinghouse meals and walks home in the dark.

Montgomery is good at the small comedy of this stage. Professors with quirks. Landladies with rules. The shock of a bigger library, a bigger classroom, exams that actually matter. Anne, who was always the cleverest person in a small room, has to learn how to be one clever person among many. She does well, but not without effort. There are prizes and disappointments, essays praised and marks that sting. I liked seeing her study rather than simply shine. It makes her talent feel earned.

There is also the matter of what Anne wants to be. She writes. She has stories in her, poems and sketches, and at Redmond she starts to take that ambition more seriously. She sends things out. She gets rejections and small wins. Montgomery, who knew this world herself, writes about the gap between wanting to be a writer and being one with sympathy and without romance. Anne learns that praise from friends is not the same as an editor saying yes.

Patty's Place and a house that feels like home

The heart of the book, for me, is Patty's Place, the small house Anne and her friends rent together after tiring of boardinghouse life. It belongs to an older woman who is away, and it comes with a housekeeper, an older widow, Aunt Jamesina, who looks after the girls with dry humor and deep kindness. The house has a particular feel, a little worn, full of nooks, with a garden and a lane and neighbors who become part of the story.

I could picture every room. The girls each have their habits. One is tidy, one is dreamy, Phil is dramatic about everything from exams to hair ribbons. They divide chores and argue about them. They host teas. They adopt a stray cat and argue about that too. Aunt Jamesina presides over it all, offering advice that sounds old fashioned until you realize it is exactly right. She has lived long enough to know which troubles pass and which ones stay.

Montgomery lets whole chapters live in this house without much plot. Letters go back and forth to Avonlea. Marilla writes with news of neighbors. Diana, married now, writes with a different kind of news. Davy and Dora, the twins Anne once looked after, pop up in anecdotes. I will admit some readers will find this stretch slow. It is episodic, built from terms and holidays and small visits rather than a driving question. Twice I set the book down in the middle and did not rush back the same night.

But I missed Patty's Place when I was away from it. There is something about the way Montgomery writes shared meals and evening talks that feels true to being young and away from home for the first time. The girls test ideas on each other. They read aloud. They come home tired and find someone saved them supper. If you have ever lived with friends at that age, you will recognize the mix of silliness and care. The house itself becomes a character, holding them while they become adults.

Gilbert comes and goes through these chapters, often as a friend rather than a suitor. He walks Anne home. He teases Phil. He studies through illness and exhaustion. Montgomery keeps him a little in the background on purpose, I think, so that Anne can make her mistakes without him fixing everything. But he is always there at the edge of the page, steady, waiting to see if Anne will ever see him clearly.

Suitors, proposals, and the wrong idea of love

Anne has ideas about love at the start of this book that are half bookish and half proud. She has a picture in her head of the person she will marry, tall and dark and poetic, someone who will sweep her into a grand story. Real boys from Avonlea do not fit the picture, so she dismisses them. This is both funny and frustrating, because the reader can see what Anne cannot.

Charlie Sloane is the first test. He was a schoolmate, earnest and a bit pompous, and he proposes to Anne. She refuses him, kindly but firmly, and the scene is well done. Charlie is not a villain. He is simply wrong for her, and Anne knows it. I liked that Montgomery does not mock him too hard. He represents the safe Avonlea choice, marriage close to home to someone familiar, and Anne turning him down is her first real adult decision about her own future.

Other admirers circle. Phil collects proposals the way other people collect postcards, and her chatter about them provides comedy, but it also shows Anne a mirror. Phil enjoys being adored without taking any of it too seriously. Anne, by contrast, takes everything seriously except her own feelings. She grades suitors like essays, checking them against her ideal, and finds them wanting.

Gilbert tries once in this period, or comes close enough that it counts, and Anne turns him aside. She values his friendship but insists she could never love him that way. The dialogue here is painful in a good way. Gilbert is hurt but does not beg. Anne is certain but does not understand herself. I wanted to shake her. Montgomery wants you to want to shake her. That certainty, that Anne knows her own heart, is the flaw the whole book is built to correct.

What makes this section work is that Montgomery does not present Anne as cold. Anne loves deeply. She loves Marilla and Diana and her friends at Patty's Place with her whole self. She is simply confused about romantic love, mixing it up with admiration and poetry and the thrill of being chosen. She wants to feel like the heroine of a story. Real affection, the kind Gilbert offers, looks too plain to her at first. Too much like everyday life.

Roy Gardner and the season of being admired

Then comes Roy Gardner, and the book shifts into its longest courtship. Roy is handsome, wealthy, well mannered, everything in Anne's old picture of an ideal lover. He meets Anne and pursues her with patience and grace. He sends flowers. He writes letters. He waits through her hesitations. For a long stretch, maybe two years in story time, he is the central man in her life.

I have mixed feelings about Roy, and I think Montgomery does too. On the page he is charming. He says the right things. He fits into Anne's daydreams without effort. Her friends approve. Avonlea hears about him and assumes a wedding is coming. Anne herself is half persuaded. She tells herself this is what she wanted, a grand love with a striking man, and she tries to feel what she thinks she should feel.

But Roy never quite becomes real to me. We learn his manners and his looks and his devotion, but not his flaws or his jokes or the way he acts when tired. Next to Gilbert, who argues and studies and gets sick and keeps going, Roy feels like a portrait rather than a person. That may be deliberate. Montgomery shows Anne falling for an idea, and ideas do not have rough edges. Still, as a reader, I found the long middle of this courtship slow. There are many walks and talks and letters, and they blur together.

To be fair, there are lovely moments inside it. Anne visits Roy's family home and sees the kind of life she could have, beautiful and ordered and rich. She imagines herself in it and feels both drawn and strange. She writes about him to friends with excitement that rings a little hollow on second reading. Those false notes are the point, but they still make for quiet chapters. I kept waiting for Anne to wake up, and Montgomery makes us wait with her.

Phil, meanwhile, surprises everyone by getting engaged to someone unexpected, a poor young minister, choosing character over comfort. Her choice throws Anne's situation into relief without anyone preaching about it. Aunt Jamesina watches all of this with knowing eyes and says little, which is wiser than most advice in the book. The house keeps humming. Exams come and go. Time passes. Roy waits. Anne drifts toward a yes she does not fully mean.

Fever, fear, and the truth about Gilbert

The turn, when it comes, is sharp. Gilbert, worn down by overwork and worry, falls dangerously ill with a fever while away studying and working. Word reaches Anne, first as rumor, then as fact, and the news hits her like cold water. He may die. That is the plain fact she has to sit with. And sitting with it, she finally understands what has been true for years.

I found these chapters the strongest in the book. Montgomery strips away the comedy and the housekeeping and the letters, and leaves Anne alone with her fear. Anne replays every conversation, every time Gilbert walked her home, every time she told herself he was only a friend. She sees, suddenly and completely, that her picture of love was wrong. It was never about dark eyes and poetry. It was about the person who knew her when she was awkward and sharp tongued and ambitious, and who liked her anyway. It was Gilbert.

The illness scenes themselves are kept general, as illness often is in books of this period. There are anxious days, bulletins, prayers, friends trying to be hopeful. Anne cannot go to him at first. She waits in Kingsport and at home, writing, pacing, remembering. Montgomery does not dwell on medical detail. She dwells on what the waiting does to Anne, how it burns off pretense. By the time word comes that Gilbert will live, Anne has already changed. She knows she loves him. The only question left is whether she will be brave enough to say so.

Roy gets his answer in the aftermath. Anne refuses him, as kindly as she can, and the scene is sadder than Charlie's refusal because Roy has done nothing wrong. He was patient and sincere. He simply loved a version of Anne that was never quite real, and Anne finally stops pretending she can live inside that version. I respected Montgomery for not making Roy cruel to ease the breakup. He leaves with dignity, and Anne is left with the knowledge that she hurt a good person by being unsure of herself for too long.

Gilbert recovers slowly. Their reconciliation is quiet, almost shy, which fits two people who have known each other since childhood. There are no grand speeches. There is a walk, a conversation, an understanding. Anne accepts that her future may be smaller and poorer than Roy's money promised, and larger in every way that matters. I closed those pages feeling wrung out in the best sense. Montgomery earns the ending by making Anne suffer for her confusion rather than simply rewarding her with both men to choose from.

What still charms and what drags

Looking at the whole book, there is a lot to admire. The friendship writing is warm without being sweet. Patty's Place feels lived in. Aunt Jamesina is one of Montgomery's best older characters, funny and blunt and tender by turns. Anne's growth feels real because it is slow and uneven. She does not wake up wise. She makes the same mistake for two hundred pages and then learns all at once, the way people sometimes do.

The letters home are another strength. Montgomery uses them to keep Avonlea alive without dragging the plot back there. Marilla aging, Diana in her new marriage, neighbors marrying and quarreling and dying, all of it reaches Anne in short bursts that remind us what she left and what she will return to. Green Gables is quieter now, but it holds. That steadiness gives Anne room to wander.

Now the fair criticism, because this book needs it. The middle is episodic to a fault. Terms begin and end, holidays come, minor characters appear for a chapter and vanish. If you want a tight plot, the stretch between Anne's arrival at Redmond and Roy's serious courtship will feel loose. I enjoyed the texture, but I also skimmed a few pages of college social life that added little.

Roy, as I said, stays thin. For someone who occupies so much of the book, he never quite becomes a person. We are told he is handsome and devoted, and we see him be handsome and devoted, but we rarely see him surprised or wrong or funny. That makes Anne's long hesitation harder to believe at times. If he were more vivid, her temptation would feel stronger and her final choice braver. As written, the reader picks Gilbert long before Anne does, and then has to wait for her to catch up.

The pace around the proposals also repeats. Charlie, then others, then Roy at length, then the final turn. The shape is clear, but the repetition can tire. Montgomery varies the scenes well, yet the underlying beat, man asks, Anne hesitates, Anne refuses or delays, plays several times. By the third pass I wanted the book to move on.

Still, I recommend this to anyone who loved the first two books and wants the full story. It is gentler than the Glass Hotel generation of novels, kinder to its characters, more patient with happiness. Anne at twenty is recognizably Anne at eleven, quicker to laugh, slower to judge, still prone to big speeches and bigger feelings, but steadier. Watching her trade the idea of love for the reality of it felt like watching a friend grow up. The slow middle is worth it for the last act, and Patty's Place alone, with its teas and talks and cat asleep on the windowsill, would be reason enough to visit. If you read it, give yourself time. This is not a book to rush. It rewards the reader who settles in like a houseguest and stays a while.