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 18

318
indulgently. “Anne Shirley—are you crazy? Come back this instant and put something on you. I might as well call to the wind. She’s gone without a cap or wrap. Look at her tearing through the orchard with her hair streaming. It’ll be a mercy if she doesn’t catch her death of cold.”

Anne came dancing home in the purple winter twilight_^^{across the snowy places.} Afar in the southwest was a great shimmering pearl-like sparkle of an evening star in a sky that was pale golden and ethereal rose _^^{over gleaming white spaces and dark glens of spruce.} The tinkle of sleigh-bells among the snowy hills came like elfin chimes through the frosty air, but their music was not sweeter than the song in Anne’s heart and on her lips.

TEXT ANNOTATION

"purple winter twilight": "Purple" and "twilight" are both favourites of Montgomery. Laughing at herself, Montgomery has the young writer Emily Byrd Starr warned that she is too fond of the colour purple. Twilight was Montgomery's favourite time of day. There are some 11 sunset or just post-sunset descriptions in Anne of Green Gables, and each vivid description marks some growth or change in Anne. (See Elizabeth R. Epperly, The Fragrance of Sweet-Grass, pp. 32–33.)

TEXT ANNOTATION

"pale golden and ethereal rose": Montgomery was passionate about colour. She also liked to use flowers and precious stones (and pearls and amber) in descriptions. The "purple," "golden," and "rose" here bring to mind the vivid colours Montgomery used in the description of Anne's ride to Green Gables in the second chapter of the book, with its "mists of pearl and purple," "purple twilight," "rose window," and the Lake of Shining Water's "spiritual shadings of crocus and rose and ethereal green."