Verso Pages
These back-of-page seemingly random, out-of-order scrap pieces are drafts of Montgomery’s early short stories and poems. Some were already published when she drafted Anne in 1905 and 1906, and others were probably typed up and kept elsewhere. Some verso scrap sheets show early experiments: “A Baking of Gingersnaps” (1895) was her first published short story; she tests the pen names Maud Cavendish and Maud Eglinton. After Chapter 15, she started writing Anne front-to-back. Why did she switch from scrap pages to fresh sheets?
View an index of the verso contents here, or explore the full collection of Verso pages below:
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would not “speak” to Anne Shirley all the rest of the winter. With the exception of this these trifling frictions, work in Miss Stacy’s little kingdom went on with regularity and smoothness.
The winter weeks slipped by. It was an unusually warm mild winter, with so little snow that Anne and Diana could go to school nearly every day by way of the Birch Path. On Anne’s birthday they were tripping lightly down it, keeping eyes and ears alert amid all their chatter, for Miss Stacy had told them that they must soon write a composition on “A Winter’s Walk in the Woods” and it behooved them to be observant.
“Just think, Diana. I’m thirteen years old to-day,” remarked Anne in
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uncharitable speech, so I never mention her at all. ^O15 I’m trying to be as much like Mrs. Allan as I possibly can, for I think she’s perfect. Mr. Allan thinks so, too. Mrs. Lynde says he just worships the ground she treads on and she doesn’t really think it right for a minister to set his affections so much on a mortal being. But then, Diana, even ministers are human and have their besetting sins just like everybody else.” P15
“In four more years we’ll be able to put our hair up,” said Diana. “Alice Bell is only sixteen and she is wearing her hair up, but I think that’s ridiculous. I shall wait until I’m seventeen.”
“If I had Alice Bell’s crooked
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in on Monday is terrible. The idea of Miss Stacy telling us to write a story out of our own heads!”
“Why, it’s as easy as wink,” said Anne.
“It’s easy for you because you have an imagination,” retorted Diana, “but what would you do if you had been born without one? I suppose you have your composition all done?”
Anne nodded, trying hard not to look victoriously complacent and failing miserably.
“I wrote it last Monday evening. It’s called ‘The Jealous Rival’ ^or ‘In Death Not Divided’. I read it to Marilla and she said it was stuff and nonsense. Then I read it to Matthew and he said it was fine. It’s a That is the kind of critic I like. It’s a sad, sweet story. about two I hav just cried like a child when I was writing it. It’s about two beau-
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Geraldine?” asked Diana, who was of beginning to feel rather interested in their fate.
“They grew in beauty side by side until they were sixteen. Then Bertram De Vere came to their native village and fell in love with ^the fair Geraldine. He saved her life when her horse ran away with her in a carriage and she fainted in his arms and he carried her home three miles h; I found because, you understand, the carriage was all smashed up. I found it rather hard to imagine the proposal ^because I had no experience to go by. I asked Ruby Gillis if she knew anything about how men proposed because I thought she’d likely be an authority on the subject, having so many sisters married. Ruby told me she was hid in the hall pantry when Malcolm
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tour, for he was immensely wealthy[.] But then, alas, shadows began to darken over their path. Cordelia was ^secretly in love with Bertram herself and when Geraldine told her about the engagement she was simply furious ^Q15 All her affection for Geraldine turned to ^bitter hate and she vowed that she should never marry Bertram. But she pretended to be Geraldine’s friend the same as ever. One evening they were standing on the bridge over a rushing ^turbulent stream and Cordelia, thinking they were alone, pushed Geraldine over the brink ^with a wild mocking ‘ha, ha, ha’! But Bertram saw it all and he at once plunged into the current, exclaiming ‘I will save thee, my peerless Geraldine.’ But alas, he had forgotten he couldn’t swim and they were
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I have a story club all our own and write stories for practice. I’ll help you along until you can do them by yourself. You ought to cultivate your imagination, you know. Miss Stacy says so. Only we must take the right way. I told her about the Haunted Wood, but she said we went the wrong way about it in that.”
This was how the story club came into existence. It was limited to Diana and Anne at first, but soon it was extended to include Jane Andrews and Ruby Gillis and one or two others ^who felt that their imaginations needed cultivating. No boys were allowed in it ^S15 and each member had to produce one story a week.
“It’s extremely interesting,” Anne told Marilla. “Each girl has to read her story out loud and then we
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should be put on your lessons. Reading stories is bad enough but writing them is worse.”
“But we’re so careful to put a moral into them all, Marilla,” explained Anne. “^I insist upon that. All the good people are rewarded and all the bad ones are ^suitably punished. I’m sure that must have a wholesome effect. The moral is the ^great thing. Mr. Allan says so. I read one of my stories to him and Mrs. Allan and they both agreed that the moral was excellent. Diana wrote Only they laughed in the wrong wrong places. I like it better when people cry. Jane and Ruby almost always cry when I come to the sad pathetic parts. Diana wrote her Aunt Josephine about our club and
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“I shouldn’t say there was a great deal,” was Marilla’s encouraging answer. “I’m sure Mrs. Allan was never such a silly forgetful little girl as you are.”
“No; but she wasn’t always as good as she is now,” said Anne seriously. “She told me so herself—that is, she said she was a dreadful mischief when she was a girl and always getting into trouble scrapes. I felt so encouraged when I heard that. Is it very bad wicked of me, Marilla, to feel encouraged when I hear that other people have been bad and mischievous? Mrs. Lynde says it is. Mrs. Lynde says she always feels shocked when she hears of anyone ever having been naughty, no matter how small they were. Mrs. Lynde says she once heard