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Copywork
About This Passage
This is the chapter's clearest window into why Anne imagines at all: not idleness but the 'comfort and consolation' of a child with no one to love. Copying Montgomery's long final sentence — 'if I only knew the spell I could open the door and step right into the room' — lets the student feel how syntax can enact longing, the clause reaching toward an escape it admits is make-believe before it lands on the bleak real: 'Mrs. Thomas' shelves of preserves and china.' It rewards the Rhetoric-stage reader who asks what the passage argues about imagination, not merely what it describes.
I used to talk to her by the hour, especially on Sunday, and tell her everything. Katie was the comfort and consolation of my life. We used to pretend that the bookcase was enchanted and that if I onl...
Full copywork activity with handwriting lines available in the complete study guide.
Discussion Questions
Narration Prompt
Give a concise summary of the chapter's events, then name the single sentence or moment you find most important — perhaps Marilla's 'He doesn't mean for us to imagine them away' or Anne's verdict at the mirror — and explain why it matters to the book as a whole and what it shows about Montgomery's larger argument about imagination.
Discussion Questions
- Anne tells Marilla 'how much you miss!' just after Marilla refuses to imagine things 'different from what they really are.' Explain what each of them means by 'reality' here, and how this exchange shapes your reading of their conflict. Point to their exact words on both sides.
- When Marilla finds Anne lost before the picture, the narrator bathes her in a 'half-unearthly radiance,' yet Marilla at once calls it 'mooning' and brands Anne's earlier talk 'irreverent.' Which perspective does the chapter's language ask us to trust more here, if either, and why? Use the specific words on each side.
+ 3 more questions in the complete study guide
Vocabulary Builder
Item 1
Begging earnestly; pleading from deep need.
Item 2
So absorbed in thought or feeling that one loses all awareness of everything else.
Item 3
Magnificent and dignified, as befits a queen.
+ 3 more vocabulary words in the complete study guide
Critical Thinking
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