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 38

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Chapter 38.
The Bend in the Road.

Marilla went to town the next day and returned in the evening. Anne had gone over to Orchard Slope with Diana and came back to find Marilla in the kitchen, sitting by the table with her head leaning on her hand. Something in her dejected

“Are you very tired, Marilla?”

attitude struck a chill to Anne’s heart. She had never seen Marilla sit limply inert like that.

“Are you very tired, Marilla?”

“Yes—no—I don’t know,” said Marilla wearily, looking up. “I suppose I am tired but I haven’t thought about it. It’s not that.”

“Did you see the oculist? What did he say?” asked Anne anxiously.

“Yes, I saw him. He examined my eyes. He says that if I gave up all reading and sewing entirely and


AUDIO ANNOTATION

REFERENCE
 Elizabeth Epperly, Professor Emerita of English, U.P.E.I., founder of the L.M. Montgomery Institute, and first woman President of U.P.E.I., reads the title of this chapter, "The Bend in the Road."

PHOTO ANNOTATION

detail of the corner of a scrapbook page with a colourful card pasted on. the card shows a path bordered by flowers

"The Bend in the Road": In Montgomery's early scrapbook, she (crookedly) preserved a copy of the poem by Grace Denio Li[t]chfield entitled "The Bend of the Road," published first in Century magazine in 1901. Above it, she pasted in a printed card showing a bend in a road. The 12-line poem begins with this couplet:

"Oh that bend of the road, how it baffles, yet beckons! / What lies there beyond – less or more than heart reckons?" It ends with these two lines: "Though lonely the way, void of song, void of laughter, / -- I must go to the end –I must know what comes after!" The image, if not the poem itself, had strong allure for Montgomery (Red Scrapbook, p. 26; Imagining Anne, 132.). It is unclear whether she saw the poem before or after she had created her own (very different) "Bend in the Road" moment and image in Anne.
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