Rating: 4/5
Anne Shirley, an orphan adopted by elderly Marilla and late Matthew Cuthbert, is now seventeen years old. With no Matthew to help out around the farm, Green Gables, Anne is unable to attend college, her lifelong dream. Marilla’s eyesight is failing and she can do neither farm work nor womanly practices. Determined to help out, Anne stays at home teaching at the school in Avonlea and assisting Marilla around the house and farm.
Mrs Rachel Lynde is Anne and Marilla’s neighbour. Her husband, Thomas, dies of an illness and although she can ‘do’ the womanly chores perfectly, her farm is slowly falling apart.
Then Marilla has an idea – how about Rachel might live with her at Green Gables, help about the farm and housework, and enable Anne to go to college with her friend Gilbert Blythe? So the next autumn, Rachel moves in at Green Gables, and Anne and Gilbert go off to college.
In the holidays, when Anne comes home, she chances across a sweet, lovely, imaginative spinster called Miss Lavendar Lewis. She finds out that one of her dear little pupils Paul Irving’s father used to be an old ‘beau’ of hers. They became engaged; had a silly dissension at which Stephen Irving left Miss Lavendar; and the latter cried and cried at two ideas: losing her fiancé, and becoming an ‘old maid’. Those ideas struck her, and she took them to heart; but there and then, she decided she would never marry again.
It so happens that Paul’s mother died a year or so before the little boy came to Avonlea with his grandmother. Then Stephen comes over to see his ‘lad’, and finds out about Miss Lewis. After a little while together, he proposes to her. She consents immediately, and little Paul is:- ‘Isstremely happy ‘bout the match, Miss Teacher, ‘cos I loves Miss Lewis with all my heart, Miss Teacher. Oh you do know, teacher.’
With the world in a respectful, ‘blissy’ state of mind, according to Anne, she goes back to college and feels at peace with her ‘dear Canada’.