Demonstration notebook — Anne Shirley

1866–1877 — Before Green Gables

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Born in Nova Scotia to two young teachers who died before she could remember them, Anne spends her first eleven years in other people’s houses — working for her keep, minding their children — and the last months of them in an orphanage.

What I know of before

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I have no memory of my parents. What I have is a handful of facts, told to me by people who did not much care about them, and which I have turned over so often that they have worn smooth.

My father was Walter Shirley. My mother was Bertha. They were both teachers in Bolingbroke, in Nova Scotia, and they were very young, and they were poor, and they lived in a small yellow house that I have furnished in my head a hundred different ways. My mother died of a fever when I was three months old. My father died of the same fever four days later. That is all. For twenty years I believed that nobody had thought to keep a letter, or a photograph, or a book with a name written in it. I was wrong about that, but I did not find out until I was grown.

1877–1882 — Green Gables

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A brother and sister on a farm in Avonlea ask for a boy to help with the work, and are sent a girl by mistake. They keep her. Five years of school, one friendship that lasts a lifetime and one rivalry that turns into something else, and a year at Queen’s in Charlottetown.

The station at Bright River

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

A station on the Island line — Perth, around 1915. Bright River never existed; stations very like it did.

A platform of planks, a stationmaster who wanted to close up and go home to his supper, and a pile of shingles at the end, where I sat because it was out of the way.

It was the beginning of June. I had a carpet bag with everything I owned in it, and a hat that was too small, and a dress made of the wincey the asylum had been given by a merchant. I had been told that someone would come for me. I had decided, if nobody did, to climb into the wild cherry tree at the end of the line and sleep there, under the blossoms, like a girl in a story. I had it planned down to the moonlight.

Diana

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I had wanted a friend for so long, and so badly, that when I finally met one I was afraid to speak in case she vanished.

Diana Barry lived across the brook, at Orchard Slope. She was my age, near enough, with black hair and a way of laughing before you had finished the joke, as if she had seen the end coming and liked it. We met in her mother’s garden and swore to be friends for as long as the sun and moon should endure, and at eleven years old neither of us thought that was an exaggeration.

Queen's

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The year I spent at Queen’s was the first year I lived in a town, and I have never been so homesick or so happy at the same time.

We went in to Charlottetown to study for our teachers’ licences. I had a narrow room in a boarding house with a view of a brick wall, and I wrote home more letters than Marilla could possibly have wanted, and every week the town seemed a little less like a foreign country. The streets were paved in places. There were shop windows with more hats in them than Avonlea had heads.

1882–1884 — The bend in the road

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew dies the summer Anne comes home from Queen’s. She gives up the scholarship that would have taken her to college, stays with Marilla, and teaches in the Avonlea school for two years. Two orphaned twins come to live at Green Gables.

Matthew

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

He died in the doorway of the porch, one morning in early summer, with the newspaper in his hand.

The paper said that the Abbey Bank had failed. Every cent he and Marilla had saved was in it. The doctor said afterwards that it was the shock, and that his heart had been bad for years, which we knew and had been careful never to say in front of him. I was coming in from the garden with my arms full of flowers. I saw him stand there, and I saw his face, and then he fell, and Marilla and I both reached him too late.

Staying

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

After the funeral a doctor told Marilla that she must not read, or sew, or cry, or she would lose her sight altogether. She had no money left. She decided, in her plain way, that Green Gables would have to be sold.

I decided otherwise. I would give up the Avery and not go to Redmond. I would find a school near home, and stay. Marilla argued with me for about a day, which for Marilla was a surrender.

A school of one room

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The school in which a girl of sixteen might find herself teaching, on Prince Edward Island in the 1880s, was usually a single room.

One teacher took every child in the district, from the smallest learning letters on a slate to the oldest, who might be preparing for the entrance examination to the teachers’ college in Charlottetown. Classes were taught in turn while the others worked; the older pupils often heard the younger ones’ lessons. The room was heated by a single stove.

1884–1891 — Kingsport, and the long wait

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Four years at Redmond College, across the strait in Kingsport, and a degree. A house shared with three friends, a story sold by accident, a proposal refused and another accepted. Then three years teaching in Summerside while Gilbert finishes medicine.

Crossing the strait

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The S.S. Empress about to leave Summerside for the mainland, around 1910. Anne’s boat sailed from Charlottetown; the crossing was the same.

The boat left Charlottetown harbour in the evening, and I stood at the rail and watched the Island go.

It goes slowly, and then all at once. First the wharves, and the spires, and the red of the cliffs further along. Then only a long low line, darker than the water. Then a notion of a line. Then the sea, which does not care who is on it.

The yellow house

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Philippa Gordon, who shared a house with me in Kingsport and did nothing by halves, turned out to come from Bolingbroke. When she found out that I had been born there, she would not rest until I had come home with her for a visit.

So I walked up a street I had furnished in my head since I was a child, and found the house. It was small and shabby and down a side street, and it was still painted yellow. I cannot tell you how much that mattered.

Averil's Atonement

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I wrote my first real story while I was at Redmond. It was called “Averil’s Atonement,” and it had everything in it: a heroine of surpassing beauty, a misunderstanding, a noble sacrifice, a death, and some very fine descriptions of sunsets. I sent it to a magazine. The magazine sent it back.

I was not as crushed as I pretended. I put it away in a drawer and began another.

Hester Gray's garden

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

There was an old garden in the woods beyond Avonlea, where a young wife called Hester Gray had lived and died long before any of us were born. The house had gone. The garden had not. Narcissus and roses came up every spring for nobody.

That was where he asked me, the second time.

The first time, I had said no, and meant it, and been sorry in a way I did not understand. Then another man, handsome and suitable and exactly like the hero of a story, asked me too, and I heard myself refuse him as well, and understood a little better. One summer in those years, Ruby Gillis died — Ruby, who had been the prettiest girl in our class and had always cared more for beaux than for books, and who told me, near the end, that she was frightened. I sat with her a good deal. It made me think about what I wanted, instead of what I imagined.

1891–1895 — The house of dreams

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Married at Green Gables in September, Anne and Gilbert set up house on the shore of Four Winds Harbour, where he takes over a country practice. A lighthouse keeper, a neighbour with a hidden grief, a first child who lives one day, and a second who lives.

A September wedding

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

I was married at Green Gables at noon on a day in September, in the orchard, under trees that had been planted before I was born. Nobody had ever been married at Green Gables before; in all its years, the house had never had a bride. I came down its old stairs knowing that, and I was absurdly proud of it.

I was twenty-five. I had waited long enough to be sure, and not so long that I had stopped being happy about it. Diana was there with her little daughter, whom she had named after me — and after the grander name I had longed for at eleven, which only she and I understood. Mrs. Lynde had opinions about the cake, the dress and the weather, and all of them were favourable, which unsettled everyone.

Captain Jim's light

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our first house was a little white one on the harbour shore, halfway between the village and the point, and at the end of the point was the lighthouse, and in the lighthouse was Captain Jim.

He was old when we met him, and he had been everywhere: shipwrecked, becalmed, stranded, once very nearly married. He kept the Four Winds light as if the whole coast depended on it, which in a way it did. Every evening, when the lamp was lit and the beam went round, I felt that our house was being looked after.

Joyce

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Our first child was a daughter. We called her Joyce, so that we could call her Joy. She lived for a few hours.

I will not write much about it. I have found, over the years, that the griefs you can write about are not the worst ones. This one I can write about only this far: that I held her, and that she was beautiful, and that for those hours I was happier than I had known it was possible to be. Marilla was there. Leslie had made the little dress she wore.

1895–1914 — Ingleside

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A bigger house in Glen St. Mary, six children, and Susan Baker, who runs it. The longest period in this notebook and the shortest to tell: the years when nothing happens are the ones people remember least, and miss most.

Six children and Susan

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

We moved up to the Glen when the little white house by the harbour could no longer hold us, and in the big house there, among the maples, the children arrived one after another until there were six.

Jem was the eldest, and the one who took things apart to see how they worked. Walter read poetry under a birch tree the children called the White Lady, and was teased for it at school, and did not stop. Nan and Di were twins who looked nothing alike and were proud of it. Shirley was quiet and brown and belonged, by his own choice and hers, to Susan. Rilla was the baby, and knew it, and made the most of it for years longer than was strictly necessary.

The Piper

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Di told me about it at bedtime, the way children hand you things they have not quite finished with.

They had been down in the valley that evening, all of them and the manse children, talking about stories, and someone had brought up the Pied Piper. And Walter — Walter was eleven — had said that one day the Piper would come down the valley, playing, and he would have to follow him. Down to the shore, and away. Jem would want to go, he said; it would be an adventure. He himself would not want to. But the music would keep calling until he had to. And the girls would stay behind and wait.

1914–1919 — The war years

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Three sons go to the war. One is killed at Courcelette in 1916, one is taken prisoner, one learns to fly. At home, the women of the Glen knit, raise money, read the casualty lists, and wait — and a dog waits at the railway station for more than four years.

Valcartier

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

The news came to the Glen in the first week of August, 1914, on a hot evening, and at first it seemed to belong to other people. England was at war. Canada, therefore, was at war. Susan said that the Kaiser would be sorry, and went on shelling peas.

Within the week Jem had gone into Charlottetown with the minister’s son, and they came back two days later in khaki.

Walter

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

Someone sent him a white feather at Redmond. He never found out who. Not long after, he enlisted.

I will not pretend I was proud. I was proud later, when I had to be, because the alternative was unbearable. At the time I was only afraid, as I had been for Jem, but worse, because Walter had never wanted any of it. He went because he could not live with himself if he did not. He wrote beautiful letters, most of them to Rilla, and a poem that was printed in a London paper and quoted far beyond it, and that I cannot read.

Dog Monday

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Jem left for the war, his dog went with him to the station and would not come home.

He was not a handsome dog. He was small and black and yellow, and named for the day of the week he arrived. He lay down in a shed by the tracks, and every time a train came in he went out to meet it, and looked at every face that got off, and when it was not Jem’s he went back and lay down again.

What the war asked of a village

Wed, 30 Sep 2026 00:00:00 +0000

When Britain declared war on Germany on 4 August 1914, Canada, as part of the British Empire, was at war too. The army it sent was made of volunteers until 1917. The first of them were gathered that August at a camp built in a few weeks at Valcartier, near Quebec City, and some thirty thousand sailed for England at the beginning of October.

For a village on Prince Edward Island, the war was a set of distant names that arrived by telegraph and newspaper, usually days late: Ypres in 1915, where the Canadians met poison gas; Courcelette in September 1916, on the Somme; Vimy Ridge in April 1917. Every one of those names meant a list, printed in the paper, of the men killed, wounded or missing, and a family somewhere reading it before anyone else could reach them.

About

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

This is not a real notebook

It was not written by anyone who lived what it tells. It is a demonstration: an example of what can be made with Vitascriptor, built on a fictional life so that no real family has to lend its own.

The narrator is Anne Shirley, the heroine of L. M. Montgomery’s novels (1874–1942). The six books this notebook draws on — Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919) and Rilla of Ingleside (1921) — are in the public domain in Canada and in the United States.

Anne Shirley

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The narrator of this notebook. Born in Nova Scotia, orphaned at three months, brought up in other people’s houses until, at eleven, she was sent by mistake to a farm in Avonlea that had asked for a boy. Teacher, then writer, then doctor’s wife and the mother of seven children, one of whom lived only a day.

Avonlea

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A farming village on Prince Edward Island, near the Gulf shore, invented by Montgomery. It has no pin on the map: it resembles several real places and is none of them.

Being an orphan

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

What it is to belong to nobody in particular, and what it takes, much later, to find out where you came from.

Bertha Shirley

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Bright River

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The railway station eight miles from Green Gables where Anne waited to be collected. Invented, like Avonlea.

Captain Jim

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Keeper of the Four Winds light when Anne and Gilbert came to the harbour; an old sailor with a lifetime of stories and no gift, he said, for writing them down. The first person Anne’s son was named for.

Charlottetown

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Island’s capital, where Anne spent her year at Queen’s, and from whose harbour she sailed for the mainland.

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A complete table of contents: periods, stories and other fragments.

Cornelia Bryant

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Courcelette

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A village on the Somme, in France, taken by the Canadians in September 1916. Walter Blythe was killed there.

Davy Keith

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Di Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Diana Barry

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Anne’s friend from the farm across the brook, from the age of eleven to the end. Not a reader, not a dreamer, and the most loyal person Anne ever knew.

Dora Keith

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Family

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Four Winds Harbour

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The harbour on the Gulf shore where Anne and Gilbert set up their first house, within sight of Captain Jim’s light.

Friendship

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Gilbert Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

A boy from Avonlea school who made the mistake of calling Anne “Carrots”, and spent five years being ignored for it. Later her husband, a country doctor at Four Winds and then Glen St. Mary, and the father of her children.

Glen St. Mary

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The village at the head of Four Winds Harbour where the Blythes lived at Ingleside for more than twenty years, and where a dog waited at the station through the whole of the war.

Grief

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Three deaths in this notebook matter more than the others: the man who had been a father to her, fallen in a doorway; a daughter who lived a day; a son at Courcelette.

Jem Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Joyce Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Kingsport

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The Nova Scotia city where Anne went to college at Redmond. Invented; it has often been compared to Halifax, and is not Halifax.

Leslie Moore

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Letters

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Marilla Cuthbert

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Matthew’s sister, who ran Green Gables and brought Anne up — strictly, fairly, and with more love than she ever found comfortable to show. Later she took in the Keith twins, and lived to see Anne’s children.

Matthew Cuthbert

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Marilla’s brother, a farmer at Green Gables, shy of almost everyone except Anne. It was his idea to keep her. He died in 1882, the summer she came home from Queen’s.

Mrs. Hammond

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Mrs. Thomas

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Nan Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Philippa Gordon

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rachel Lynde

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Rilla Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Ruby Gillis

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Shirley Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Susan Baker

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Housekeeper at Ingleside for as long as the children could remember, and the one who really ran it. Called Anne “Mrs. Dr. dear” to the end.

Teaching

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

The war

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

1914 to 1919, seen from a village on Prince Edward Island: who went, who came back, and who waited.

Walter Blythe

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Anne’s second son, and the poet of the family. Afraid of the war and honest about it, he enlisted in 1915 and was killed at Courcelette in September 1916.

Walter Shirley

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Writing

Mon, 01 Jan 0001 00:00:00 +0000

Stories written, rejected, sold by accident, and finally kept. The narrator of this notebook wrote all her life; so did her son Walter.

Demonstration notebook — Anne Shirley

1866–1877 — Before Green Gables

What I know of before

1877–1882 — Green Gables

The station at Bright River

Diana

Queen's

1882–1884 — The bend in the road

Matthew

Staying

A school of one room

1884–1891 — Kingsport, and the long wait

Crossing the strait

The yellow house

Averil's Atonement

Hester Gray's garden

1891–1895 — The house of dreams

A September wedding

Captain Jim's light

Joyce

1895–1914 — Ingleside

Six children and Susan

The Piper

1914–1919 — The war years

Valcartier

Walter

Dog Monday

What the war asked of a village

About

This is not a real notebook

Anne Shirley

Avonlea

Being an orphan

Bertha Shirley

Bright River

Captain Jim

Charlottetown

Contents

Cornelia Bryant

Courcelette

Davy Keith

Di Blythe

Diana Barry

Dora Keith

Family

Four Winds Harbour

Friendship

Gilbert Blythe

Glen St. Mary

Grief

Jem Blythe

Joyce Blythe

Kingsport

Leslie Moore

Letters

Marilla Cuthbert

Matthew Cuthbert

Mrs. Hammond

Mrs. Thomas

Nan Blythe

Philippa Gordon

Rachel Lynde

Rilla Blythe

Ruby Gillis

Shirley Blythe

Susan Baker

Teaching

The war

Walter Blythe

Walter Shirley

Writing