Anne of Green Gables — Chapter 10

About This Passage

We chose this passage because it is the chapter's quiet diagnostic moment. Lucy Maud Montgomery has placed Anne, Marilla, and Mrs. Lynde in the same room, and given the narrator a single paragraph in which to explain what each of the three is perceiving — Anne enjoying, Mrs. Lynde forgiving, Marilla dismayed. The biblical phrase 'valley of humiliation' (from Pilgrim's Progress) is dropped without italics or footnote, trusting the reader to hear the literary echo. Copying the passage trains the student to feel how a single sentence can carry both a character's interior state and the narrator's faintly amused appraisal of it.

Narration Prompt

Reconstruct the chapter's three movements: Matthew's clandestine visit to Anne in the east gable; the kneeling apology before Mrs. Rachel Lynde; and the walk home to Green Gables ending with Anne's hand in Marilla's. For each movement, identify the single line you would point to as that movement's hinge.

Discussion Questions

1. Anne refuses for a whole night to apologize when Marilla orders her to, but agrees within minutes when Matthew whispers his request. Construct an argument for what this difference reveals about Anne's understanding of moral obligation — is she yielding to affection rather than authority, or is she making a more subtle distinction between what is owed and what is freely given?
2. Lucy Maud Montgomery writes that Anne's sincerity 'breathed in every tone of her voice' even as Anne was 'revelling in the thoroughness of her abasement.' How can both be true at once? What does the chapter teach about the relationship between authentic feeling and theatrical expression in an imaginative child?

+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide