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 28 - (VERSO)

~~429~~ 503

yielding reluctantly, for, although she would have been delighted to play the principal character, yet her artistic sense demanded fitness for it and this, she felt, her limitations made impossible. “Ruby, you must be King Arthur and Jane will be Guinevere and Diana must be Lancelot. But first you must be the brothers and the father. _^^F16 We must pall the barge all its length in blackest samite. That old black shawl of your mother’s will be just the thing, Diana.”

The black shawl having been procured, Anne spread it over the flat and then lay down on the bottom, with closed eyes and hands folded over her breast.

“Oh, she does look really dead,” whispered Ruby Gillis nervously, watching

LMM Notes

TEXT ANNOTATION

"blackest samite": In Tennyson’s poem, the expression suggests the richest and heaviest of fabric; samite was woven of silk and often shot through with actual threads of gold or silver. Anne’s imagination can turn a flat-bottomed dory and a black shawl into a funeral barge draped in black silk.

TEXT ANNOTATION

"with closed eyes and hands folded over her breast": Tennyson's interest in the subject matter (publishing two different poems about Elaine), combined with the tragicomic imagery of this chapter, have been translated in many different ways in various adaptations of Anne. Kevin Sullivan's 1985 film uses lines from both "Lancelot and Elaine" and "The Lady of Shalott" in the scene (and the film opens with Anne reciting lines from the latter), cementing the connections between each text to the point that even other images of the Lady of Shalott, like John William Waterhouse's painting, have become associated with this chapter in the minds of many readers.