Anne of the Island

Montgomery published Anne of the Island in 1915, and it is in some ways the most grown-up of the early Anne books. Anne has left Avonlea for Redmond College in Kingsport, Nova Scotia, a thinly fictionalized version of Dalhousie University in Halifax, where Montgomery herself studied. She and her friends Priscilla, Stella, and Philippa rent a house called Patty’s Place, and the book covers the four years of her undergraduate degree.

Gilbert Blythe is at the same college. He proposes early in the book. Anne, predictably, says no, then spends most of the rest of the novel realizing she was wrong. There is a more handsome suitor named Roy Gardner who looks perfect on paper and is wrong in every way that matters. There is the famous illness sequence with Gilbert that brings everything to a head. There is the death of Ruby Gillis, which gives Montgomery one of her best chapters about grief. By the end Anne has her degree, her sense of herself as a writer, and her future in clearer focus. The book completes Anne’s coming of age. Read it after Avonlea.