Anne of Green Gables, Chapters Twenty-Two to Twenty-Four

In which Anne goes to tea with her latest kindred spirit, endangers her life and inflicts physical trauma on herself for inconsequential reasons, and then gets excited over a concert; and in which our narrator is glad that so few of the girls present at the party had speaking lines, for he can only come up with so many distinct little girl voices at one time.



Oh hey, we've come back around to one of the illustrations!

11:28 - "Balanced herself uprightly on that precarious footing."

Here, of course, we see Anne trying to walk across the ridgepole of the Barrys' roof on a dare from that hussy Josie Pyle. Note, of course, that they don't have an illustration showing her broken body amidst the wreckage of the Virginia creeper.

In these chapters, we hear Anne described as being "all spirit and fire and dew," which comes from the poem "Evelyn Hope" by Robert Browning. The whole line is "The good stars met in your horoscope, / Made you of spirit and fire and dew," and is actually on the title page of the book, which I did not notice when I started reading.* I can see how it can apply to Anne here, but you read the whole poem and it appears to be about the 48-year-old Browning hitting on the 16-year-old Evelyn Hope who just died, and it gets just a bit weird. We also hear of Anne reciting "Mary, Queen of Scots" by Henry Glassford Bell, which is much less creepy, being only about a beheading. It... really didn't occur to me that I'd be able to use the "dismemberment" tag in Anne of Green Gables, but I certainly won't turn down the opportunity.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

*I also negelected to read the dedication, which is "To the memory of my Father and Mother."