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 26

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both drowned, clasped in each other’s hands arms. Their bodies were washed ashore soon afterwards. They were buried in one grave and their funeral was most imposing, Diana. (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)R15(end superscript) As for Cordelia, she went insane from remorse and was shut up in a lunatic asylum. I thought that was a poetical retribution for her crime.”

“How perfectly lovely!” sighed Diana, who belonged to Matthew’s school of critics. “I don’t see how you can make up such thrilling things out of your own head, Anne. I wish my imagination was as good as yours.”

“It would be if you’d only cultivate it,” said Anne cheeringly. “I’ve just thought of a plan, Diana. Let you and

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note R15
It's so much more romantic to end a story up with a funeral than a wedding.


TEXT ANNOTATION

"to end . . . with a funeral" [in R15]: A laughing aside concerning her own writing preference for cheering stories of human interest rather than melancholy or morbid tales. Of the almost 200 short stories Montgomery published before Anne of Green Gables, only one stands out for its tragic suicide: "The Waking of Helen," published in Waverley Magazine in 1901 and republished in Rea Wilmshurst’s 1989 Montgomery collection Along the Shore, pp. 243–53.