Warning: If you have a visual impairment, use the manuscript transcript version including the Lucy Maud Montgomery’s foot notes and contextual annotation references.

L.M. Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables Manuscript Scan

Chapter 1

sides of it, anybody who went out of it or into it had to pass over the hill road and so run the unseen gauntlet of Mrs. Rachel’s all-seeing eyes.

She was sitting there one afternoon in _^^earlyJune. The sun was coming in at the window bright and warm _^^{Note D.} Thomas Lynde _^^{Note E.} was sowing his late turnip seed on the hill field beyond the barn; and Matthew Cuthbert ought to be sowing his on the big _^^redbrook field away ove[r] by Green Gables. Mrs. Rachel knew that he ought because she had heard him tell Peter Morrison the evening before in William_^^J. Blair’s store over at Carmody that he meant to sow his turnip seed the next afternoon. Peter had asked him of course for Matthew Cuthbert had never been known to volunteer information about anything in his whole life

LMM Notes

TEXT ANNOTATION

"Green Gables": A gable is the upper, triangle-topped portion of a building wall where the roof sides meet. Montgomery's cousins, David and Margaret Macneill, and later their niece Myrtle Macneill and her husband Ernest Webb, lived in the farmhouse that was the model for Anne's home. After the success of the book and with Montgomery's permission, the Webbs changed the name of their farm to "Green Gables." Montgomery visited there often after she moved to Ontario in 1911. The Macneill/Webb farmhouse was always whitewashed or painted white; Parks Canada added green shutters and green to the gable ends when the house became part of the National Park in 1937. In the novels, Montgomery did not mention the actual colour of Green Gables house until the fourth Anne novel, Anne's House of Dreams (1917), when she described the "old gray-green house" (Chapter IV).