Anne Leaves Green Gables for Good

Before I set out to read Anne’s House of Dreams, the fifth book in the series featuring spunky heroine Anne Shirley – or, barring the first couple chapters of this volume, Anne Blythe – I was warned that it marked a significant change in the series. While Anne is still the main focus, as opposed to later books where her children take the limelight, she is different. More grown up, I guess. For the most part, she seems perfectly refined and mature, and she appears to have left her huge capacity for getting into trouble behind her.

In the introduction to the volume in which my copy of the book is contained – oddly enough containing the first, second and fifth book in the series – Anne’s House of Dreams is described as the most romantic of the books. I’m not sure I agree. Presumably we are speaking of the romance between Anne and Gilbert, though each book contains accounts of the romances of other characters and this is no exception. This particular side story is more drawn-out than most of the others, and long before it begins we see one of the participants, Leslie Moore, longing for what Anne has. But truth be told, we don’t get all that much of Anne and Gilbert together. He’s always off performing his doctorly duties while Anne is busy trying to win Leslie’s friendship, enduring the man-hating diatribes of otherwise friendly Miss Cornelia, or soaking in the general good will of grizzled old Captain Jim.

The house of dreams in question is a quiet little home in Four Winds, a couple miles removed from the town of Glen St. Mary. Aside from Leslie and Captain Jim, it is very isolated, but it is surrounded by trees, which Anne has always considered friends. I was sad in the beginning to see Anne and Gilbert leave Avonlea. I thought they might settle in town and we could be back in Avonlea again after two books’ absence. But after the first few chapters, there’s little mention of Avonlea or the folks left behind. Some of them do visit the Blythe home throughout the course of the novel, but for the most part it seems Avonlea is a part of the past.

I found it odd while reading this that no mention whatsoever was made of any of the friends Anne encountered during her stay at Windy Poplars. I wondered whether the fourth book could have been written out of order, and I soon discovered that it was. Several decades out of order, in fact. Another item of curiosity was the fact that this book had chapter headings, which were absent in the fourth. Apparently Montgomery got tired of naming chapters in her later years.

By the end of the book, Anne is a mother, an aspiration that by this point far exceeds any earlier dreams of writerly success. I was sorry to see Anne give up on the idea of getting published. When she dismisses her own talent, it is rather discouraging to me somehow. If Anne Shirley was not destined to be a writer, how could I be? Another writer joins the cast of characters halfway through. Owen Ford, a descendant of the former owners of Anne and Gilbert’s house, comes to Glen St. Mary hoping to find inspiration. In the end, he finds more than he bargained for.

This is an enjoyable book, though much quieter than most. There aren’t too many side-trips. Notable mishaps are few, and the supporting characters are essentially limited to half a dozen, if that. Leslie is an intriguing wisp of a girl cowed by the tragic deaths of her brother and father and her unwanted marriage to brutish Dick Moore. When Anne meets Dick, he is a much different man, having lost his senses during his travels. After being discovered in a hospital bed by the industrious Captain Jim, he returned to the woman who would have preferred to be a widow. Though she is initially distant, jealous of Anne’s happiness, Leslie eventually opens up and becomes a close friend. Close enough that when Gilbert informs Anne that Dick’s brain damage could be reversed, Anne fights tooth and nail against the idea of her friend’s now-gentle husband turning back into the brute he once was. This dilemma becomes the book’s moral climax.

Miss Cornelia is a pleasant addition for those missing busybody Rachel Lynde. She fills that role nicely with a set of idiosyncrasies all her own. Susan, the woman hired to look after Anne during her first pregnancy, is a doting presence who soon becomes as integral to the family as Alice was to the Brady Bunch. But by far my favorite supplementary character is Captain Jim, the most open and friendly of the Blythe’s new acquaintances. His salty dialect, innate decency and simple manner all brought to my mind Samwise Gamgee, one of my absolute favorite characters in literature. He loves the sea as Sam loves the land, and they both cherish the same dream above all others: that their lives will make their way into one of the Great Stories. Both live to see this dream realized, and what a joy when they do. Interestingly, Captain Jim invokes Tennyson’s Crossing the Bar when speaking of his impending death; the same was used as a model for Bilbo’s Last Song, a poem not included in Lord of the Rings but written on the occasion of Bilbo’s departure from the Grey Havens.

On the whole, this is a more somber book than most. It is slow and quiet, lacking all the frenetic energy of most of the Anne books. But that’s not necessarily a bad thing. It is focused and sedate, a calm transition from the girlhood Anne we’ve grown to love to the mother she will soon become. It’s hard to see her leave childhood behind, but it looks as though she’s on her way to a glowing adulthood.