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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went to bed last night.”
The Old Lady turned and went into the house abruptly. This was dreadful. Sylvia must go to that party – she must. But how was it to be managed? Through the Old Lady’s brain passed wild thoughts of her mother’s silk dresses. But none of them would be suitable, even if there were time to make one over. Never had the Old Lady so bitterly regretted her vanished wealth.
“I’ve only two dollars in the house,” she said, “and I’ve got to live on that till the next day the egg pedlar comes round. Is there anything I can sell – anything? Yes, yes, the grape jug!”
Up to this time the Old Lady would as son soon have thought of trying to sell her head as the
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attire.
Janet Moore and Sylvia Gray walked home from church together.
“Did you see Old Lady Lloyd out to-day?” asked Janet. “I was amazed when she walked in. She has never been to church in my recollection. What a quaint old figure she is! She’s very rich, you know, but she wears her mother’s old clothes and never gets a new thing. Some people think she is mean; but,” concluded Janet charitably, “I believe it is simply eccentricity.”
“I felt that was Miss Lloyd as soon as I saw her, although I had never seen her before,” said Sylvia dreamily. “I have been wishing to see her for a certain reason. She has a
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fellow and he honestly thought it was the fame of his preaching that had brought Old Lady Lloyd out to church. It di
When the service was over all the Old Lady’s neighbors came to speak to her, with kindly smile and handshake. They thought they ought to encourage her, now that she had made a start in that direction; the Old Lady liked their cordiality, and liked it none the less because she detected in it the same unconscious respect and deference she had been wont to receive in the old days – a respect and deference which her personality compelled from all who approached her. The Old Lady was surprised to find that she could command it still, in defiance of unfashionable bonnet and ancient
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smiling ^rather triumphantly, thinking rightly that she had come off best in that unwelcome encounter. She, at any rate, had not faltered and colored, and lost her presence of mind.
“It is little wonder he did,” thought the Old Lady vindictively. It pleased her that Andrew Cameron should lose, before her, the front of adamant he presented to the world. He was her cousin and the only living creature ^Old Lady Lloyd hated; and she hated and despised him with all the intensity of her intense nature. She and hers had sustained grievous wrong at his hands, and the Old Lady was convinced that she would rather die than take any notice of his existence.
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bland face flushed crimson; he lifted his hat and bowed confusedly. But the Old Lady looked through him as if he wasn’t there, and passed on with not a sign of recognition about her. He took one step after her, then stopped and turned away, with a rather disagreeable smile and a shrug of his shoulders.
Nobody would have guessed, as the Old Lady swept out, how her heart was seething with abhorrence and scorn. She would not have had the courage to come to town, even for Sylvia’s sake, if she had thought she would meet Andrew Cameron. The mere sight of him opened up anew a sealed fountain of bitterness in her soul; but the thought of Sylvia somehow stemmed the torrent, and presently the Old Lady was
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The Old Lady was on the point of refusing rather haughtily. Not that she was opposed to missions – or sewing circles either – quite the contrary; but she knew that each member of the Circle was expected to pay ten cents a week for the purpose of procuring sewing materials; and the poor Old Lady did really did not see how she could afford it. But a sudden thought checked her refusal before it reached her lips.
“I suppose some of the young girls go to the Circle?” she said craftily.
“Oh, they all go,” said the minister’s wife. “Janet Moore and Miss Gray are our most industrious enthusiastic members. It is very lovely of Miss
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Gray to give her Saturday afternoons – the only ones ones she has free from pupils – to our work. But she really has the sweetest disposition.”
“I’ll join your Circle,” sad the Old Lady promptly. She was determined she would do it, if she had to live on two meals a day to save the necessary fee.
She went to the Sewing Circle at James Martin’s the next Saturday, and did the most beautiful hand sewing for them. She was so expert at it that she didn’t need to think about it at all, which was rather fortunate, for all her thoughts were taken up with Sylvia, who sat in the opposite corner with Janet
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Moore, her graceful hands busy with a little boy’s coarse gingham shirt. Nobody thought of introducing Sylvia to Old Lady Lloyd, and the Old Lady was glad of it. She sewed finely finely away, and listened with all her ears to the girlish chatter which went on in the opposite corner. One thing she found out – Sylvia’s birthday was the twentieth of August. And the Old Lady was straightway fired with a consuming wish to give Sylvia a birthday present. She lay awake most of the night wondering if she could do it, and most sorrowfully concluded that it was utterly out of the question, no matter how
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in through the maples before the front door.
They were talking of their favorite poets. Janet, it appeared, adored Byron and Scott. Sylvia leaned to Tennyson and Browning.
“Do you know; said Sylvia softly, “my father was a poet? He published a little volume of verse once; and, Janet, I’ve never seen a copy of it, and oh, how I would love to! It was published when he was at college – just a small, private edition to give his friends. That was nearly thirty years ago. He never published any more – poor father! I think life disappointed him. But I have such a longing to see that
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little book of his verse. I haven’t a scrap of his writings. If I had it would seem as if I possessed something of him – of his heart, his soul, his inner life. He would be something more than a mere name to me.”
“Didn’t he have a copy of his own – didn’t your mother have one?” asked Janet.
“Mother hadn’t. She died when I was born, you know, but Aunty says there was no copy of father’s poems among mother’s books. Mother didn’t care for poetry, Aunty says – Aunty doesn’t either. Father went to Europe after mother died, and he died there the next year. Nothing that he had with him was ever sent
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home to us. He had sold most of his books before he went, but he gave a few of his favorite ones to Aunty to keep for me. His book wasn’t among them. I don’t suppose I shall ever find a copy; but I should be so delighted if I only could.”
When the Old Lady got home she took from her top bureau drawer an inlaid box of sandalwood. It held a little, slim, limp volume, wrapped in tissue paper – the Old Lady’s most treasured possession. On the fly-leaf was written, “To Margaret, with the author’s love.”
The Old Lady turned the yellowed leaves with trembling fingers and through eyes brimming with tears read the verses, although she had known them all by
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talked to her on Circle afternoons now, and the Old Lady treasured every word she said in her heart and repeated them over and over to her lonely self in the watches of the night. Sylvia never
Sylvia never talked of herself or her plans, unless asked about them; and the Old Lady’s self-consciousness prevented her from asking any personal questions; so their conversation kept to the surface of things, and it was not from Sylvia, but from the minister’s wife that the Old Lady finally discovered what her darling’s dearest ambition was.
The minister’s wife had dropped in at the Old Lloyd place one evening late in September, when a chilly
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gifts from romantic, aspiring young pols poets?
———— ——————
The September Chapter.
In September the Old Lady looked back on the summer and owned to herself that it had been a strangely happy one, with Sundays and Sewing Circle days standing out like golden punctuation marks in a poem of life. She felt like an utterly different woman; and other people thought her different also. The Sewing Circle women found her so pleasant, and even friendly, that they began to think they had misjudged her, and that perhaps it was eccentricity after all, and not meanness, which accounted for her peculiar mo mode of living. Sylvia Gray always came and