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 31 - (VERSO)

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I sometimes think she’d have more of an influence for good, (begin subscript)^(end subscript)(begin superscript)as you say yourself,(end superscript) if she didn’t keep nagging people to do right. There should have been a special commandment against nagging. But there, I shouldn’t talk so. Rachel is a good Christian woman and she means well. There isn’t a kinder soul in Avonlea(begin strikethrough).”(end strikethrough) and she never shirks her share of work[.]”

“I’m very glad you feel the same,” said Anne decidedly. “It’s so encouraging. I shan’t worry so much over that after this. But I daresay there’ll be other things to worry me. They keep coming up new all the time—things to perplex you, you know. You settle one question and there’s another right after. There are so many things to be thought over and decided when you’re beginning to grow up. It’s a It keeps me busy all the time thinking


TEXT ANNOTATION

Anne's proto-feminist comments about women being ministers are undercut somewhat by her using Rachel Lynde, the persistent nag, as an example. Mary Rubio described, in a speech in Salamanca, Spain, in 1989, eight strategies she suggests Montgomery used to express controversial opinions acceptably, one of which was to seem to offset an idea that could be considered controversial by connecting it with or attributing it to someone who is usually comic. In this case, Anne’s remark about female ministers is rendered "harmless" if the model for a female minister is Rachel Lynde. Rubio's talk was revised and republished in 1992 as "Subverting the Trite: L.M. Montgomery's 'Room of her own,'" in Canadian Children's Literature / Littérature canadienne pour la jeunesse, vol. 65.