L. M. Montgomery · 1908 · coming-of-age

L. M. Montgomery's 1908 novel. Two elderly siblings at a farm called Green Gables send for an orphan boy to help with the work, and are sent an eleven-year-old girl with red hair and a great deal to say. Mark Twain called Anne the dearest child since Alice, and the island she was set on has been visited by her readers ever since.

1. 1
   Bolingbroke

   Anne is born to Walter and Bertha Shirley, both dead of fever before she is four months old - and the town Montgomery invented for it is her own birthplace at New London, which she left at twenty-one months.

2. 2
   Hopetown

   The asylum, and before it the households where a small girl was passed along to mind other people's babies - the past she narrates cheerfully all the way to Avonlea, which is what makes it land as hard as it does.

3. 3
   Bright River

   Matthew Cuthbert drives to the station to collect a boy and finds a girl on the shingles with a carpet bag, who has decided that if nobody came she would sleep in the wild cherry tree - and talks the whole way home.

4. 4
   Green Gables

   The farm at Avonlea, based on a house at Cavendish that is now a national historic site. Marilla means to send her back within the day, and does not - and the gable room becomes the first place Anne has belonged.

5. 5
   The Lake of Shining Waters

   Barry's pond, renamed on sight because the real name would not do - and later the scene of the Lily Maid, with a leaking flat, a bridge piling and a rescue by the one boy she is not speaking to.

6. 6
   White Sands

   The hotel concert where a girl from a farm recites in front of paying guests and is not laughed at - the first evidence that the thing she is good at might be worth something outside Avonlea.

7. 7
   Charlottetown

   Queen's Academy, two years of work done in one, the Avery scholarship and a teacher's licence - and Anne leaves the island's capital with everything she has been aiming at since the day she arrived.

8. 8
   Green Gables

   Matthew dies and Marilla is going blind, so Anne gives up the scholarship, takes the Avonlea school and comes home - and Gilbert gives up his own post so she can have it, which is where the book ends.