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 30 - (VERSO)

469 542

Chap. 30.
The Queen’s Class is organized

Marilla laid her knitting on her lap and leaned back in her chair. Her eyes were tired and she thought vaguely that she must see about having her glasses changed the next time she went to town, for her eyes had grown tired very often of late.

It was nearly dark, for the dull November twilight had fallen around Green Gables, and the only light in the kitchen came from the fire dancing red flames in the stove.

Anne was curled up (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)Turk-fashion(end superscript) on the hearth-rug, (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)A17(end superscript) She had been reading, but her book had slipped to the floor, and now she was dreaming, with a smile on her (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)parted(end superscript) lips. Glittering castles in Spain were shaping themselves out of the mists and rainbows of her

 

LMM Notes

LMM Note A17
gazing into that joyous glow where the sunshine of a hundred summers was being distilled from the maple cord-wood.

[Notes in this chapter range from A17-O17;Notes pages 118-121.]


TEXT ANNOTATION

"469 542": Montgomery continues the re-numbering that began in previous chapters.

AUDIO ANNOTATION

REFERENCE
 Benjamin Lefebvre, director of L.M. Montgomery Online and editor of The L.M. Montgomery Reader and The L.M. Montgomery Library series, reads the title of this chapter, "The Queen's Class Is Organized."

PHOTO ANNOTATION

cozy, pastel drawing of Anne curled up near the fireplace, Marilla sits near her, in the Green Gables kitchen

"Turk-fashion": Sitting with knees bent and splayed apart and ankles crossed, in a kind of informal lotus position. Sybil Tawse captured this cozy moment in her 1933 illustration.

TEXT ANNOTATION

"cord-wood" [in A17]: Wood for burning is measured in cords (stacks usually containing 128 cubic feet); Anne is looking into the flames of a maple-wood fire.

TEXT ANNOTATION

"castles in Spain": A popular expression for day-dreaming or imagining that the Annotated Anne (p. 313, n. 3) traces back to the medieval Le Roman de la Rose. Montgomery was fond of the expression and used it in many novels and short stories; she used a shortened form of it in her (1904) poem "Air Castles," published under the name of Joyce Cavendish.

She loved Washington Irving’s (1832) The Alhambra, about Irving’s time in the Moorish castle, and she paid tribute to his influence in her novel, The Blue Castle (1926) (See "'My Castle in Spain': The Blue Castle and the Architecture of Images," in Epperly, Through Lover’s Lane, pp. 145–64).