Anne of Green Gables recap

Elderly brother and sister Matthew and Marilla Cuthbert of Green Gables, on Prince Edward Island, send for an orphan boy to help on the farm and are sent eleven-year-old Anne Shirley instead. Marilla means to return her, but relents, and the talkative, imaginative, red-haired child stays. Anne makes a bosom friend of Diana Barry, begins a five-year feud with Gilbert Blythe after he teases her about her hair, and stumbles through a series of scrapes: an accidental dose of currant wine, a dyed-green head, a broken ankle on a dare. She also grows into the village's affection, saving Diana's little sister from croup and winning over her sternest critics. Marilla, who cannot say what she feels, comes to love her; Matthew, who never could say anything, quietly always did. Anne takes the entrance examinations for Queen's Academy, ties with Gilbert for first place, and wins a scholarship. Then Matthew dies and Marilla's sight begins to fail. Anne gives up the scholarship, takes a country school, and stays at Green Gables, making peace with Gilbert at last.

Mrs. Rachel Lynde, who misses nothing that happens on the Avonlea road, is astonished to see her neighbour Matthew Cuthbert drive off in his good clothes on a weekday, and learns from Marilla that the elderly brother and sister have arranged to adopt an orphan boy to help with the farm work at Green Gables. At Bright River station Matthew finds no boy, but a thin, red-haired girl of about eleven sitting on a pile of shingles, entirely certain that she is the one he has come for. She talks the whole way home about the countryside, renaming the places she likes best, and Matthew, who is too shy to explain, cannot bring himself to tell her there has been a mistake. Marilla says flatly that they wanted a boy, and the child is heartbroken. She is put to bed in the east gable, and Marilla determines to return her to the orphan asylum and find out how the error was made.

Anne tells the Cuthberts her history: both parents dead of fever when she was a baby, then years of minding other people's children before the asylum. Marilla drives her to see Mrs. Spencer, who arranged the mix-up, and finds that a hard, worn woman named Mrs. Blewett wants the girl as a drudge. Marilla cannot hand a child over to that, and after a struggle with her own reluctance she decides to keep Anne. Anne's education in Cuthbert respectability begins at once: prayers, catechism, and a hat trimmed with flowers that shocks the congregation. When Mrs. Rachel Lynde calls and remarks on Anne's thinness, freckles, and red hair, Anne turns on her furiously. Marilla insists on an apology; Anne refuses, is confined to her room, then delivers an apology so dramatically penitent that Mrs. Rachel forgives her outright and privately admits she took a liking to the child.

Anne meets Diana Barry of Orchard Slope and the two swear eternal friendship, giving Anne the bosom friend she has always wanted. She joins the Avonlea school, where the master, Mr. Phillips, keeps poor order. On her first day Gilbert Blythe tries to get her attention by calling her Carrots; Anne breaks her slate over his head and swears never to speak to him again, and when she is punished for a lateness that was not her fault she refuses to return to school until she chooses to. Earlier, wanting badly to attend a Sunday-school picnic, she confesses to losing Marilla's amethyst brooch, a confession she invented, only for the brooch to be found caught on Marilla's shawl. Invited to entertain Diana alone, Anne serves her what she believes is raspberry cordial; it is currant wine, Diana goes home unsteady and ill, and Mrs. Barry forbids the friendship, which Anne takes as the ruin of her life.

One winter night Diana runs for Anne because her little sister Minnie May is choking with croup and the parents are away. Anne, who has nursed croupy children before, works over her until the doctor arrives; Mrs. Barry, told that Anne saved the child, apologizes and restores the friendship. Anne's scrapes continue. Staying overnight after a concert, she and Diana leap into a spare-room bed in the dark and land on Diana's formidable great-aunt Josephine, who is so charmed by Anne's honest explanation that she becomes her friend. Anne frightens herself out of the spruce wood she has filled with imaginary ghosts, flavours a cake with liniment for the new minister's wife, Mrs. Allan, and is forgiven. Then, dared by Josie Pye at a party, she walks the ridgepole of a kitchen roof, falls, and breaks her ankle, spending seven weeks laid up and visited by half of Avonlea.

A new teacher, Miss Stacy, comes to Avonlea and transforms the school, taking her pupils out of doors and putting the older ones through preparation for the Queen's Academy entrance examinations. Anne rehearses for a Christmas concert, and Matthew, noticing that her sleeves are not like the other girls', secretly arranges with Mrs. Rachel Lynde for a dress with puffed sleeves. Anne and her friends form a story club. Vanity brings its own punishment: a pedlar sells Anne a dye promised to turn her hair a raven black, it turns green instead, and the hair has to be cut off. Playing the drowned Elaine in a flat-bottomed dory, Anne is left clinging to a bridge pile when the boat leaks and sinks, and is rescued by Gilbert Blythe, whose offer of friendship she refuses on the spot and privately regrets. In the autumn she visits Miss Barry in Charlottetown for the Exhibition.

Miss Stacy forms a Queen's class of the older pupils, and Anne studies for it with a will, chiefly because Gilbert Blythe is in it and she means not to be beaten. Diana, who is not preparing for the examinations, is left out, and the two friends feel the first change in their lives. Anne is fifteen and growing tall and quiet; Marilla, watching her, admits to herself how much the house would lack without her. In June the whole class travels to Charlottetown for the entrance examinations, and Anne waits in an agony of suspense until the pass list is printed: she and Gilbert are tied for first place out of the whole Island. Matthew and Marilla are openly proud. That summer Anne recites at a concert in the White Sands hotel among wealthy guests, comes home to Green Gables, and tells Diana she would rather be herself in Avonlea than any of them.

Anne boards in Charlottetown for the Queen's year, homesick at first, then absorbed in work, and takes the two-year course in one. At the close she wins the Avery scholarship in English, which would pay for four years at Redmond College; Gilbert takes the gold medal. She comes home to a joyful Green Gables, but Matthew looks ill and Marilla admits her eyes are failing. Days later Matthew collapses and dies of heart failure after reading that the bank holding the Cuthberts' money has failed. Marilla, grieving and half blind, says she will have to sell Green Gables, since she cannot manage the farm alone. Anne gives up the scholarship and her place at Redmond, arranges to teach and board at home, and refuses to be argued out of it. When the Avonlea school is offered to her she learns that Gilbert has stepped aside and taken White Sands instead so that she could stay with Marilla. Anne stops him at the gate and ends the long quarrel; they part as friends, and she looks at the narrowed road ahead of her without regret.

Anne finishes her year at Queen's Academy in a single year instead of two, wins the Avery scholarship for English, and comes home to Green Gables expecting to go on to Redmond College in the autumn. Gilbert Blythe takes the gold medal. That summer Matthew, whose heart has been failing, dies suddenly after learning that the bank holding the Cuthberts' savings has failed. Marilla is left alone with a farm she cannot work and eyes that are failing her; the doctor warns that she will lose her sight altogether unless she gives up close work and worry, and she speaks of selling Green Gables. Anne gives up the scholarship and Redmond, arranges to board at home, and takes a teaching post so that she and Marilla can keep the farm. When she finds that the Avonlea school has been promised to her, she learns that Gilbert has withdrawn his own application and taken the school at White Sands so that she could stay near Marilla. Meeting him at the gate, Anne finally puts an end to the quarrel she has kept up for five years, and the two part as friends with plans to study together. Anne sets out on a narrower road than the one she had imagined, and finds she is content with it.