FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA ***
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FURTHER CHRONICLES OF AVONLEA
Which have to do with many personalities and events in and about Avonlea, the Home of the Heroine of Green Gables, including tales of Aunt Cynthia, The Materializing of Cecil, David Spencer's Daughter, Jane's Baby, The Failure of Robert Monroe, The Return of Hester, The Little Brown Book of Miss Emily, Sara's Way, The Son of Thyra Carewe, The Education of Betty, The Selflessness of Eunice Carr, The Dream-Child, The Conscience Case of David Bell, Only a Common Fellow, and finally the story of Tannis of the Flats.
All related by L. M. MONTGOMERY
Author of "Anne of Green Gables," "Anne of Avonlea," "Anne of the Island," "Chronicles of Avonlea," "Kilmeny of the Orchard," etc.
INTRODUCTION
It is no exaggeration to say that what Longfellow did for Acadia, Miss Montgomery has done for Prince Edward Island. More than a million readers, young people as well as their parents and uncles and aunts, possess in the picture-galleries of their memories the exquisite landscapes of Avonlea, limned with as poetic a pencil as Longfellow wielded when he told the ever-moving story of Grand Pre.
Only genius of the first water has the ability to conjure up such a character as Anne Shirley, the heroine of Miss Montgomery's first novel, "Anne of Green Gables," and to surround her with people so distinctive, so real, so true to psychology. Anne is as lovable a child as lives in all fiction. Natasha in Count Tolstoi's great novel, "War and Peace," dances into our ken, with something of the same buoyancy and naturalness; but into what a commonplace young woman she develops! Anne, whether as the gay little orphan in her conquest of the master and mistress of Green Gables, or as the maturing and self-forgetful maiden of Avonlea, keeps up to concert-pitch in her charm and her winsomeness. There is nothing in her to disappoint hope or imagination.
Part of the power of Miss Montgomery--and the largest part--is due to her skill in compounding humor and pathos. The humor is honest and golden; it never wearies the reader; the pathos is never sentimentalized, never degenerates into bathos, is never morbid. This combination holds throughout all her works, longer or shorter, and is particularly manifest in the present collection of fifteen short stories, which, together with those in the first volume of the Chronicles of Avonlea, present a series of piquant and fascinating pictures of life in Prince Edward Island.
The humor is shown not only in the presentation of quaint and unique characters, but also in the words which fall from their mouths. Aunt Cynthia "always gave you the impression of a full-rigged ship coming gallantly on before a favorable wind;" no further description is needed--only one such personage could be found in Avonlea. You would recognize her at sight. Ismay Meade's disposition is summed up when we are told that she is "good at having presentiments--after things happen." What cleverer embodiment of innate obstinacy than in Isabella Spencer--"a wisp of a woman who looked as if a breath would sway her but was so set in her ways that a tornado would hardly have caused her to swerve an inch from her chosen path;" or than in Mrs. Eben Andrews (in "Sara's Way") who "looked like a woman whose opinions were always very decided and warranted to wear!"
This gift of characterization in a few words is lavished also on material objects, as, for instance; what more is needed to describe the forlornness of the home from which Anne was rescued than the statement that even the trees around it "looked like orphans"?
