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

Chapter 10

158
“There, there, get up, child,” she said heartily. “Of course I forgive you. I guess I was a little too hard on you, anyway. But I’m such an outspoken person. You just mustn’t mind me, that’s what. It can’t be denied your hair is terrible red; but I knew a girl once—went to school with her, in fact—whose hair was every mite as red as yours when she was young, but when she grew up it changed darkened to a real handsome auburn. I wouldn’t be a mite surprised if yours did, too—not a mite.”

“Oh, Mrs. Lynde!” Anne drew a long breath as she rose to her feet. “You have given me a hope. I shall


PHOTO ANNOTATION

romantic painting of a woman standing in the tangled threads of a loom, her hair is lifted in a chaotic halo above her head.

"a real handsome auburn": Romantic "handsome auburn" hair clearly had very different connotations to Anne and Montgomery than some other common red colour. This difference was no doubt influenced by the Pre-Raphaelite painters, who painted their red-haired muses into mythical, Arthurian, and romantic stories with meticulous detail. See Dante Gabriel Rossetti's "Prosperpine" (1874), John Everett Millais' "The Knight Errant" (1870), and, pictured here, William Holman Hunt's "The Lady of Shallot" (1905), the subject of which is referenced in a later chapter.