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 15

228

The little girls of Avonlea school always pooled their lunches and to eat three raspberry tats tarts all alone would h or even to share them only with one’s best chum would have forever and ever branded as “awful mean” the girl who did it. And yet, when the tarts were divided among ten girls you just got enough to tantalize you.

The way Anne and Diana went to school was a pretty one. (begin superscript)G8(end superscript) Lovers Lane opened out below the orchard at Green Gables and stretched far up into the woods to the end of the Cuthbert farm. It was the way by which the cows were taken to the back pasture and the wood hauled home in winter. Anne had named it Lovers Lane before she had been a month at Green Gables.

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note G8
Anne thought those walks to and from school with Diana couldn't be improved upon even by imagination. Going around by the main road would have been so unromantic: but to go by Lover's Lane and Willowmere and Violet's Vale and the Birch Path was romantic, if ever anything was.

[The Notes in this chapter range from G8 to O8; on Notes pages 46-47.]


PHOTO ANNOTATION

black and white photo of a wood-lined dirt lane curving off into the distance

"Lovers Lane": As mentioned in the annotation in Chapter 9, Montgomery prized Lover's Lane as one of the most important places in nature for her. She declared "Lover's Lane was of course my Lover's Lane." (Complete Journals, The PEI Years Volume 2, January 27, 1911, p. 354).

Lover's Lane's beauty inspired Montgomery as she walked there, and its solitude allowed her to talk out the details of her stories, rehearsing dialogue and scenes before she wrote them. She took more photographs of Lover's Lane than any other single place and visited the lane whenever she visited the Island. Elizabeth Epperly declares "the images Montgomery preferred from her own reading and seeing, and chose to create anew in the colourful poetic descriptions of her fiction, can be detected in the repeated shapes in her photographs, especially those of Lover's Lane in Cavendish." (Through Lover's Lane: L.M. Montgomery's Photography and Visual Imagination, 2007, p. 7).
Archival & Special Collections, University of Guelph, L.M. Montgomery Collection