A last bouquet of allusions

From "A Good Imagination Gone Wrong" to "The Bend in the Road."

~ Mr. Phillip's facile "sweets to the sweet" line to Prissy Andrews is straight out of Hamlet...and is spoken at Ophelia's funeral!

~ The Avonlea pupils sing "My Home on the Hill" while walking back to school:

"Oh, it was so thrilling, Marilla. All Mr. Silas Sloane's folks rushed out to see us and everybody we met on the road stopped and stared after us. We made a real sensation."

~ Browning's line again:

For Anne to take things calmly would have been to change her nature. All "spirit and fire and dew," as she was, the pleasures and pains of life came to her with trebled intensity.

~ "The downfall of some dear hope or plan plunged Anne into 'deeps of affliction.'" (It seems that this may have been a phrase used at the time. See also.)

~ Singing the praises of Miss Stacy:

"We had recitations this afternoon. I just wish you could have been there to hear me recite 'Mary, Queen of Scots.' I just put my whole soul into it. Ruby Gillis told me coming home that the way I said the line, 'Now for my father's arm, she said, my woman's heart farewell,' just made her blood run cold."

~ Numbers in the Avonlea concert: "The Society for the Suppression of Gossip", "The Fairy Queen", "Faith, Hope and Charity"

~ "To Anne in particular things seemed fearfully flat, stale, and unprofitable after the goblet of excitement she had been sipping for weeks."

~ Moody Spurgeon MacPherson (What a name to live up to!)

~ When she dyes her hair green:

"They will think I am not respectable. Oh, Marilla, 'what a tangled web we weave when first we practise to deceive.' That is poetry, but it is true."

~ Elaine: "all her bright hair streaming down"

~ Tennyson's poem

~ The battle canto from Sir Walter Scott's "Marmion":

The stubborn spearsmen still made good
Their dark impenetrable wood

~ reading Ben Hur during history

~ "The Lurid Mystery of the Haunted Hall" (possibly not a real title)

~ More scripture:

"But, oh, Marilla, I really felt that I had tasted the bitterness of death, as Mr. Allan said in his sermon last Sunday, when I saw Diana go out alone," she said mournfully that night.

~ "She determined to 'shroud her feelings in deepest oblivion,' and it may be stated here and now that she did it, so successfully that Gilbert, who possibly was not quite so indifferent as he seemed, could not console himself with any belief that Anne felt his retaliatory scorn."

(The editors of The Annotated Anne of Green Gables attribute this quotation to the influence of Mrs. Hemans' "Night Scene in Genoa.")

~ It's amazing how much of what Anne hears and reads seeps its way into her conversation:

"I've had a perfectly beautiful summer, Marilla, and now I'm rejoicing as a strong man to run a race, as Mr. Allan said last Sunday."

(She's really comparing herself to the sun, which makes more than perfect sense...)

~ "Especially did the Queen's class gird up their loins for the fray [...]" seems to reference both Job 38:3 and Luke 12:35.

~ "Hills peeped o'er hill and Alps on Alps arose." (Alexander Pope)

~ "One moonbeam from the forehead to the crown" (Elizabeth Barrett Browning)

~ Anne's recitation piece, "The Maiden's Vow," could be one of two possibilities.

~ Anne with more scripture:

"Look at that sea, girls--all silver and shadow and vision of things not seen. We couldn't enjoy its loveliness any more if we had millions of dollars and ropes of diamonds."

~ "For the Avery scholarship was in English, and Anne felt that here her foot was on her native heath." (Sir Walter Scott)

~ "That may make me feel badly tomorrow, Josie," laughed Anne, "but just now I honestly feel that as long as I know the violets are coming out all purple down in the hollow below Green Gables and that little ferns are poking their heads up in Lovers' Lane, it's not a great deal of difference whether I begin to understand what is meant by the 'joy of the strife.' Next to trying and winning, the best thing is trying and failing."

~ The title of Chapter 36, "The Glory and the Dream," comes from Wordsworth's "Ode: Intimations of Immortality from Recollections of Early Childhood."

~ Marilla to Anne:

"To take First Class License in one year and win the Avery scholarship--well, well, Mrs. Lynde says pride goes before a fall and she doesn't believe in the higher education of women at all; she says it unfits them for woman's true sphere. I don't believe a word of it."

~ Chapter 38's title, "The Reaper Whose Name is Death" is from Longfellow's "The Reaper and the Flowers."

~ "Two days afterwards they carried Matthew Cuthbert over his homestead threshold and away from the fields he had tilled and the orchards he had loved and the trees he had planted; and then Avonlea settled back to its usual placidity and even at Green Gables affairs slipped into their old groove and work was done and duties fulfilled with regularity as before, although always with the aching sense of 'loss in all familiar things.'" (John Greenleaf Whittier)

~ Anne to Mrs. Lynde:

"Oh, I'm not going to overdo things. As 'Josiah Allen's wife' says, I shall be 'mejum.' But I'll have lots of spare time in the long winter evenings, and I've no vocation for fancy work."

(Here's a little more information on this woman whose "popularity rivaled that of Mark Twain".)

~ "When she finally left it and walked down the long hill that sloped to the Lake of Shining Waters it was past sunset and all Avonlea lay before her in a dreamlike afterlight--'a haunt of ancient peace.'" (Tennyson)

~ And the last line of the novel:

"'God's in his heaven, all's right with the world,' whispered Anne softly."

It's interesting that Montgomery both begins and ends her book with Robert Browning.

In an essay in commemoration of the 100th anniversary of Anne, Margaret Atwood explores this,

"God's in his heaven, all's right with the world," Anne whispers in the very last lines of Anne of Green Gables. She's fond of Victorian poetry, so it's appropriate that she ends her story by quoting from a song sung by the optimistic heroine of Robert Browning's dramatic poem "Pippa Passes"; doubly appropriate because Anne Shirley herself acts a kind of Pippa throughout the book. Pippa is a poor Italian orphan girl who slaves away in a silk-spinning mill, yet manages to preserve a pure imagination and a love of nature despite her lowly status. Like Pippa, Anne is an unselfconscious innocent who, unbeknownst to herself, brings joy, imagination and the occasional epiphany to the citizenry of Avonlea, who are inclined to be practical but drear.

It's unlikely that Anne Shirley would have been allowed to read all of "Pippa Passes". Pippa's fellow characters are far from wholesome, and their doings are so sordid and explicitly sexual as to have caused moral outrage when the poem was first published: one of them is a mistress, and another has plans to debauch Pippa and lure her into a life of white slavery. Browning's view is the more realistic: in actual life, an orphaned girl like Anne would have had few prospects. "What a starved, unloved life she had had - a life of drudgery and poverty and neglect," thinks Marilla; and it's this starved, unloved life that Budge Wilson has explored in her "prequel".

It's an excellent essay.

I also discovered this cool little Anne resource site that also collects many of the artistic, musical, and literary references of each of the eight books in the series. Here is their complete list from this first installment.