Anne of Avonlea characters

Appears from the start

Sixteen and a half, and about to begin her first term as teacher of the Avonlea school, where several of her own former schoolmates' younger brothers and sisters will be her pupils. She has stayed at Green Gables to keep house with Marilla rather than go on to college, and means to teach without ever resorting to the strap. Still quick to imagine and quick to speak, she is more careful of both than she used to be, and she has plans for improving Avonlea that the village does not entirely share.

Appears from the start

The mistress of Green Gables, older now and with weak eyes, sharp in speech and softer in fact than she was when Anne first came to her. She keeps the farm going with hired help and lets Anne have her way rather more often than she admits.

Appears from the start

The Cuthberts' neighbour and Avonlea's chief commentator, energetic, charitable in deed and blunt in word, who has an opinion ready on every scheme the young people of the village put forward and is generally consulted whether or not she is asked.

Appears from the start

Anne's bosom friend since childhood, now grown up, comfortable and sensible, and keeping company with Fred Wright. She joins Anne's village schemes with more good nature than enthusiasm and is the one person to whom Anne tells everything.

First appears in chapter 2

Anne's old schoolfellow and rival, now teaching at the White Sands school and studying at home for the college course he still intends to take. The long quarrel between them is over, and they work together easily on village affairs.

Appears from the start

The new owner of the farm next to Green Gables, a short, stout, irritable bachelor from New Brunswick with a bristling temper, an untidy house, and a parrot named Ginger with a scandalous vocabulary. He has strong views on trespassing cattle and expresses them at once and at length, but proves more reasonable than his opening quarrel with Anne suggests.

First appears in chapter 8

A six-year-old orphan, the son of Marilla's cousin Mary Keith, taken in at Green Gables with his twin sister. Cheerful, restless, and entirely without caution, he wants to try everything he is told not to and asks unanswerable questions about religion, death, and why girls are dull.

First appears in chapter 8

Davy's twin sister, a neat, quiet, obedient child who gives no trouble at all, sits where she is put, and is so uniformly good that nobody at Green Gables finds much to say about her.

First appears in chapter 5

A ten-year-old pupil at the Avonlea school, born in the United States and living with his grandmother while his widowed father works abroad. Gentle, beautifully mannered, and full of a dreaming imagination much like Anne's own, he tells her about the rock people he meets on the shore, and becomes her favourite scholar.

First appears in chapter 5

A sullen, handsome boy of the Pye family and the one pupil Anne cannot win, openly contemptuous of a girl teacher and determined to make that plain in front of the whole school.

First appears in chapter 21

A small, sweet-faced woman of about forty-five who lives alone at Echo Lodge, a stone house hidden up a lane beyond Grafton, and keeps her girlhood alive by giving imaginary parties and refusing to be sensible. She takes to Anne and Diana at once when they lose their way and knock at her door.

First appears in chapter 21

Miss Lavendar's small maid at Echo Lodge, the fourth of a family of sisters who have each served there in turn and each taken the same name in service. Devoted, literal-minded, and given to enormous blue hair-bows, she considers her mistress the finest lady in the world.

First appears in chapter 28

Paul Irving's father, a widowed businessman who has made his fortune in the United States and grew up in Avonlea. He returns to the Island to see his son and to look again at a place he knew in his youth.

First appears in chapter 5

Paul's grandmother, who keeps house for him with severe tidiness and disapproves of imagination, storytelling, and most other forms of nonsense, though she is careful of the boy's comfort.