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:
—————– ——————–
Chap 34 A Queen’s Girl
The next three weeks were busy ones at Green Gables, for Anne was getting ready to go to Queen’s and there was much sewing sewing to be done and many things to be talked over and arranged. Anne’s outfit was ample and pretty, for Matthew saw to that and Marilla for once made no objections whatever to anything he purchased558 632
away.”
The green dress was made up with as many tucks and frills and shirrings as Emily’s taste permitted. Anne put it on one evening for Matthew and Marilla’s benefit and recited “The Maiden’s Vow” for them in the kitchen. As Marilla watched the bright animated face and graceful motions her thoughts went back to Anne’s arrival the evening Anne had arrived at Green Gables, and memory recalled a vv vivid picture of the odd, frightened child in her ^preposterous yellowish-brown wincey dress, ^the heartbreak looking out of her tearful eyes. Something in the memory brought tears to Marilla’s ^own eyes.
“I declare, my recitation has made you cry, Marilla,” said Anne gaily, stooping over Marilla’s chair
560 634
^gingham lap, took Marilla’s ^lined face between her hands, and looked gravely and tenderly into Marilla’s eyes.
“I’m not a bit changed – not really. I’m only just pruned down and branched out. The real me—back here—is just the same. It won’t make a bit of difference where I go or how much I change outwardly; at heart I shall always be your little Anne who will love you and Matthew and dear Green Gables more and better every day of her life[.]”
Anne laid her fresh young cheek against Marilla’s faded one, and reached out a hand to pat Matthew’s shoulder. Marilla would have given much just then
562 636
better than all the rest. She’s been a blessing to us, and there never was a luckier mistake than what Mrs. Spencer made.” M18
The day finally came when Anne must go to town. She and Matthew drove in one fine September morning, after a tearful parting with Diana and an untearful practical one – on Marilla’s side at least – with Marilla. But when Anne had gone Diana dried her tears and went to a beach picnic at White Sands with some of her Carmody cousins, where she contrived to enjoy herself tolerably well; while Marilla plunged fiercely int into unnecessary work and kept at it all day long with the bitterest kind of a heartache—the ache that burns
564 638
meeting all the new students, learning to know the professors by sight and being assorted and organized into classes. Anne intended taking up the Second Year work, being advised to do so by Miss Stacy; Gilbert Blythe elected to do the same. This meant getting a First Class teacher’s license in one year instead of two, if they were successful. Jane, Ruby, Josie, Charlie, and Moody Spurgeon, not being troubled with the stirrings of ambition, were content to take up the Second Class work. Anne was conscious of a pang of loneliness when she found herself in a room with fifty other students, not one of whom she knew, except the
[This page is blank.]
567 641
I don’t know them and they don’t know me, Oh and probably don’t want to know me particularly. Oh, it’s lonesome!”
It was lonesomer still when Anne found herself alone in her bedroom that night at twilight. She was not to board with the other girls, who all had relatives in town to take pity on them. Miss Josephine Barry would have liked to board her but Beechwood was so far from the Academy that it was out of the question; so Miss Barry hunted up a boarding house, assuring Matthew and Marilla that it was the very place for Anne.
“The lady who keeps it is a reduced gentlewoman,” explained Miss Barry.
569 643
green ^still outdoors, of sweet peas growing in the garden, and moonlight falling on the orchard ^O18 and the light from Diana’s window shining out through a gap in the trees. Here there was nothing of this. Anne knew that outside of her window was a hard street, with a network of telephone wires shutting out the sky, ^the tramp of alien feet, and a thousand lights gleaming on stranger faces. She knew that she was going to cry, and fought against it.
“I won’t cry. It’s silly—and weak—there’s the third tear splashing down by my nose. There are more coming. I must think of something funny to stop them. But there’s nothing funny except what belongs to is connected with Avonlea and that
571 645
“You’ve been crying,” remarked Josie, ^with aggravating pity. “I suppose you’re homesick— I’ve no some people have so little self-control in that respect. I’ve no intention of being homesick I can tell you. Town’s too jolly after that poky old Avonlea. I wonder how I ever existed there so long. You shouldn’t cry, Anne; it isn’t becoming for your nose and eyes get red, and then you seem all red. ^P18 Have you anything eatable around, Anne? I’m literally starving. Ah, I guessed likely Marilla Marilla’d load up you up with cake. That’s why I called round. Otherwise I’d have gone to the park ^to hear the band play with Frank Stockley. He boards the same place I do and he’s a sport. He noticed you in class to-day and asked me who the red-headed girl was. I told him you were an orphan
4573 647
tears freely before Ruby came along. Q18 Cake! You’ll give me a teeny piece, won’t you? Thank you. It has the real Avonlea flavour.”
Ruby, perceiving the Queen’s calendar lying on the table wanted to know if Anne meant to try for the gold medal.
Anne blushed and admitted she was thinking of it.
“Oh, that reminds me,” said Josie. “Queen’s is to get one of the Avery scholarships after all. The word came to-day. Frank Stockley told me—his uncle is one of the board of goven governor’s, you know. It will be announced in the Academy to-morrow.”
An Avery scholarship! Anne felt her heart beat more quickly, and the horizons of her ambition shifted and broadened as if by magic. Before Josie
4575 649
one would be allotted to Queen’s, but the matter was settled at last, and at the end of the year the graduate who made the highest mark in English and English Literature would win the scholarship—two hundred and fifty dollars a year for four years at Redmond College. No wonder that Anne went to bed that night with tingling cheeks!
“I’ll win that scholarship if hard work can do it,” she resolved. “Wouldn’t Matthew be proud if I got to be a B.A.? Oh, it’s lovely delightful to have ambitions. I’m so glad I have such a lot. And there never seems to be any end to them ^ —that’s the best of it. Just as soon as you attain to one ambition you see another one ^glittering higher up still. It does make life so interesting.
————————–