Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables Series #1)

Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables Series #1)

by L. M. Montgomery
Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables Series #1)

Anne of Green Gables (Anne of Green Gables Series #1)

by L. M. Montgomery

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Overview

Get ready for the new Anne of Green Gables Netflix series!

Marilla and Mathew Cuthbert had planned to adopt a boy to help out around Green Gables farm. But waiting for Mathew at the train station is freckle-faced, red-headed Anne Shirley—a talkative eleven-year-old orphan with a heart full of dreams and a desperate longing for a home.

From the minute Anne sets foot in Mathew's buggy, Green Gables will never be the same.


Product Details

ISBN-13: 9780062023339
Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
Publication date: 06/08/2010
Series: Anne of Green Gables Series
Sold by: HARPERCOLLINS
Format: eBook
Pages: 100
Sales rank: 132,195
File size: 529 KB
Age Range: 8 - 12 Years

About the Author

Lucy Maude Montgomery (1874-1942) was born on Prince Edward Island, Canada, the setting for Anne of Green Gables. She left to attend college, but returned to Prince Edward Island to teach. In 1911, she married the Reverend Ewan MacDonald. Anne of Green Gables, the first in a series of "Anne" books by Montgomery, was published in 1908 to immediate success and continues to be a perennial favorite.

Read an Excerpt

This Dark World

The infant was taken, within a week of its birth, to the precincts of the church; the child of wrath must be reformed into the image of God, 'the servant of the fiend' made into 'a son of joy'. At the church-door the priest asked the midwife if the child were male or female, and then made a sign of the cross on the infant's forehead, breast and right hand. He placed some salt in the baby's mouth according to custom; then the priest exorcised the devil from its body with a number of prayers, and pronounced baptism as the sole means 'to obtain eternal grace by spiritual regeneration'. The priest spat in his left hand and touched the ears and nose of the child with his saliva. Let the nose be open to the odour of sweetness. It was time to enter the church itself, the priest taking the right hand of the new-born child who had with the salt and saliva been granted the station of a catechumen.

The litanies of the saints were pronounced over the baptismal font; the priest then divided the water with his right hand and cast it in the four directions of the cross. He breathed three rimes upon it and then spilled wax in a cruciform pattern. He divided the holy water with a candle, before returning the taper to the cleric beside him. Oil and chrism were added, with a long rod or spoon, and the child could now be baptised. Thomas More, what seekest thou? The sponsors replied for the infant, Baptism. Dost thou wish to be baptised? I wish. The child was given to the priest, who immersed him three times in the water. He was then anointed with chrism and wrapped in a chrismal robe. Thomas More, receive a white robe, holy and unstained, which thou must bring beforethe tribunal of Our Lord Jesus Christ, that thou mayest have eternal life and live for ever and ever. The candle was lit and placed in the child's right hand, thus inaugurating a journey through this dark world which ended when, during the last rites, a candle was placed in the right hand of the dying man with the prayer, 'The Lord is my Light and my Salvation, whom shall I fear?' Whom shall this particular child fear, when it was believed by the Church that the whole truth and meaning of baptism was achieved in the act of martyrdom? 'Baptism and suffering for the sake of Christ', according to a second-century bishop, are the two acts which bring full 'remission of sins'.

It was considered best to baptise the child on the same day as its birth, if such haste were practicable, since an infant unbaptised would be consigned to limbo after its death. To leave this world in a state of original sin was to take a course to that eternal dwelling, Limbus puerorum, suspended between heaven, hell and purgatory. There the little unbaptised souls would dwell in happy ignorance beside the more formidable and haunting Limbus patrum, which contained the souls of Noah, Moses and Isaiah together with (in Dante's epic) Virgil, Aristotle, Socrates and all the good men who lived on earth before the birth, death and resurrection of Jesus. Adam had already been dragged from this place at the time of Christ's crucifixion, but there was continual debate within the Church about the consequences of denying new-born children the eternal comfort of paradise. Could a child be saved by the desire, the votum, of its parents? Thomas More himself would eventually concede only that 'those infantes be dampned onely to the payne of losse of heauen'.

In various late medieval pictures of baptism, in manuscripts and devotional manuals, the priest stands with his surplice and stole beside the font. Sometimes he seems to be balancing the infant in the palm of his hand, yet the child is so unnaturally large and alert for such an early stage in its life that we can only assume it acquired mental consciousness with its spiritual renovation. A clerk with a surplice stands behind the priest, while two sponsors and the child's father are generally seen beside the font. In some depictions of this first of the seven sacraments, an image of the dying Christ hangs behind the human scene. But the mother was rarely, if ever, present.

In the more pious households, she would have worn a girdle made out of manuscript prayer rolls in the last stages of her pregnancy, and it was customary in labour to invoke the name of St Margaret as well as the Blessed Virgin. She remained secluded after giving birth, and two or three weeks later was led out to be 'churched' or purified. When she was taken to the church, her head was covered by a handkerchief, as a veil, and she was advised not to look up at the sun or the sky. She knelt in the church while the priest blessed her and assured her, in the words of Psalm 121, that 'the sun shall not burn her by day, nor the moon by night. It was a ceremony both to celebrate the birth of the child and to give thanks for the survival of the mother. This is the late fifteenth-century world into which Thomas More was baptised.

Table of Contents

LIST OF ILLUSTRATIONSix
ACKNOWLEDGEMENTSxi
I THIS DARK WORLD3
II PRETTY PLAYS OF CHILDHOOD6
III ST ANTHONY'S PIGS17
IV COUGH NOT, NOR SPIT29
V SET ON HIS BOOK38
VI DUTY IS THE LOVE OF LAW53
VII MOST HOLY FATHER65
VIII WE TALK OF LETTERS71
IX IF YOU WANT TO LAUGH87
X THE WINE OF ANGELS96
XI HOLY, HOLY, HOLY!112
XII CRAFT OF THE CITY118
XIII MILK AND HONEY129
XIV A JOLLY MASTER-WOMAN141
XV KINGS' GAMES151
XVI THE BEST CONDITION OF A SOCIETY165
XVII WHOLLY A COURTIER180
XVIII HE SAT UPON A THRONE OF GOLD194
XIX MY POOR MIND203
XX EQUES AURATUS214
XXI I AM LIKE RIPE SHIT224
XXII LONG PERSUADING AND PRIVY LABOURING235
XXIII THY FOOLISH FACE251
XXIV YOU ARE BUT ONE MAN263
XXV FOOLISH FRANTIC BOOKS276
XXVI WE POOR WORLDLY MEN OF MIDDLE EARTH287
XXVII INFINITE CLAMOUR313
XXVIII ALL THE BEASTS OF THE WOODS330
XXIX THE WRATH OF THE KING MEANS DEATH347
XXX THE WEEPING TIME359
XXXI PECK OF TROUBLES384
XXXII CALL FORTH SIR THOMAS MORE393
XXXIII THE KING IS GOOD UNTO ME399
SOURCE NOTES407
INDEX435

What People are Saying About This

From the Publisher

"Aficionados of the auburn-tressed waif will find Anne of Green Gables lavishly illustrated."
Smithsonian Magazine

Alfred Breit

Lawrence was concerned with one end: to reveal how love, how a relationship between a man and a woman can be most touching and beautiful, but only if it is unihibited and total.

Mark Twain

The dearest and most lovable child in fiction.

Reading Group Guide

1.  The critic Julian Moynahan argues that “Lady Chatterley’s Lover dramatizes two opposed orientations toward life, two distinct modes of human awareness, the one abstract, cerebral, and unvital; the other concrete, physical, and organic.” Discuss.

2.  What is the role of the manor house, the industrial village, and the wood in the novel?

3.  Many critics have argued that while Lady Chatterley’s Lover represents a daring treatment of sexuality, it is an inferior work of art, though other critics have called it a novel of the first rank. (“Lady Chatterley’s Lover, ” F. R. Leavis writes, “is a bad novel, ” while Anaïs Nin, on the other hand, describes it as “artistically . . . [Lawrence’s] best novel.”) What do you think?

4.  In “Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover” (a defense of the book that he published in 1930), Lawrence wrote that “the greatest need of man is the renewal forever of the complete rhythm of life and death, the rhythm of the sun’s year, the body’s year of a lifetime, and the greater year of the stars, the soul’s year of immortality.” How is the theme of resurrection played out in the novel?

5.  From the time it was banned from unexpurgated publication in the United States and Britain until the trials in the late 1950s and early 1960s that resulted in the lifting of the ban, and even more recently, critics have argued over whether Lady Chatterley’s Lover is obscene and vulgar. Lawrence argues in “Apropos of Lady Chatterley’s Lover”that “we shall never free the phallic reality [i. e., sex] . . . till we give it its own phallic language and use the obscene words”; his goal was to purify these words. Critics have disagreed as to whether he succeeded in this goal; Richard Aldington notes, for example, that the words are “incrusted with nastiness” and “cannot regain their purity” and Graham Hough argues that “the fact remains that the connotations of the obscene physical words are either facetious or vulgar.” Do you think the novel is obscene or vulgar, or do you think Lawrence succeeds in his mission?

6.  “The essential function of art is moral, ” Lawrence once wrote. “Not aesthetic, not decorative, not pastime and recreation. But moral.” Do you think this proposition informs the shape, structure, and meaning of Lady Chatterley’s Lover, and if so, how?

7.  Critics have often complained that one of Lawrence’s weaknesses as a novelist is his characterization. So John Middleton Murry writes of Sons and Lovers that “we can discern no individuality whatever in the denizens of Mr. Lawrence’s world. We should have thought that we should have been able to distinguish between male and female at least. But no! Remove the names, remove the sedulous catalogues of unnecessary clothing . . . and man and woman are as indistinguishable as octopods in an aquarium tank.” And Edwin Muir comments generally that “we remember the scenes in his novels; we forget the names of his men and women. We should not know any of them if we met them in the street.” Do you think this applies in the case of Lady Chatterley’s Lover? If so, do you think it is a fault or a virtue?

8.  How does nature imagery function in the novel?

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