Another ending

Finishing Anne of the Island

Kindred Spirits, we have once again reached an ending!

Anne spent July and August away from Green Gables, and was a substitute teacher for those months in Valley Road. Here, Anne stayed at the boardinghouse of Miss Janet Sweet, and we met other new characters from this community, including Janet’s beau, Mr Douglas and his mother. 

I was disappointed to see Anne leave Green Gables, rather than enjoying a summer there with all of our old friends. There were a few interesting moments at Valley Road, but I was wanting to return to the familiar faces of Anne’s world.

We return to the final year of Redmond and it’s kicked off with Anne’s first real publication! The girls celebrate having an author at Patty’s Place and Phil suggests they go into town and get drunk (I gasped, forgetting that Anne is an adult and might sometimes act accordingly).

The girls are all experiencing senioritis and feeling an endless brain fog from all their studying. Stella puts to words a feeling I related to in moments of overwhelm.

“My thoughts are very old. I’ve thought them all before”.

If you write or journal, you may be quite acquainted with this concept. Whenever I read through my journals I am shocked by the repetitiveness of all of my scribbled down thoughts and ideas!

Anne meets Roy’s mother and sisters for the first time, quite a big deal signifying the importance of this relationship. But still something doesn’t feel right. And come graduation day, Anne is touched by the absence of her friend Gilbert.

Graduation is ripe with emotions, as it tends to be. The girls cannot believe that 4 years have gone by, each with a new bend in the road.  Phil reflects “that a room where one dreams and grieves and rejoices and lives becomes inseparably connected with those processes and acquires a personality of its own”.

I feel this deeply about every place I have lived before. Call it sentimentality, but I think Phil is onto something with her reflection. The places we have touched are affected by us, which also means the spaces we enter into hold the memories of those before us. My husband and I bought our first house this year and it was owned previously by a couple who had lived there for 30 years. The husband died several years earlier and we feel his presence in the details of the house. We know he was a tinkerer and his notes around house projects are scribbled onto the garage walls in pencil, along with the brewery stickers because he was also in a homebrewing club. He was a gardener and this being our first spring living here, we are seeing the flowers from his gardens from years ago still blooming. It is quite beautiful to think of the whispers of a person left behind and leaves me wondering what  traces of myself are in left behind places. 

Do you feel this type of attachment to the places you have spent time in? Do you feel the presence of others in the space you currently dwell?

A big shock (to the characters, perhaps not for the reader) occurs when Anne rejects Roy’s proposal. This is the 5th proposal she has received and declined. Roy’s tomboy sister, Dorothy promises to remain friends with Anne, and also confesses that she has seen Roy through 2 broken hearts before this and that he will be okay. She also validates Anne’s decision, saying that though she loves her brother, he would bore Anne to death were she to marry him. This new information of Roy’s love affairs pre-dating Anne gives her both relief and resentment. Rumors are also spreading that Gilbert is to be engaged to Christine. 

Each moment of adult reality breaks down the shimmer of Anne’s imagined romanticism, and when she returns to Green Gables she is in a much less dreamy state than the summer before. She is surrounded by others moving on, her college days have ended, friends are getting married, and Diana has had a baby boy. 

Anne is very lonely and when it seems like things can’t get darker, she learns that Gilbert is very ill with typhoid fever, giving her the possibly too late realization that she indeed does love him and always has. 

But it is not too late, and in what is truly the romance of Anne’s life is when Gilbert asks for Anne to marry him once again, two years later, confessing that Phil urged him to try again and to which he credits his recovery. Anne, finally realizing her truth, says yes! It will be three years before they marry, as Gilbert will be in medical school, but Anne’s path forward now alongside her ambition and brains, includes love. And it's the love we have all been waiting for! 

I really enjoyed reading Anne of the Island, it felt much more like the energy of the first Anne of Green Gables. I hope you have enjoyed it too and will be joining me next month to read Anne of Windy Poplars! How do you feel now that we have reached another end? Are you happy with the conclusion of Anne and Gilbert? What do you think we will experience alongside Anne next?

Thank you for reading

Thank you for reading and joining me on this read-along of Anne of Green Gables! 

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Your bosom friend,

Bri