Chronicles of Avonlea

Twelve stories out of the same island village: a courtship that has dawdled for fifteen years until Anne takes a hand, an old maid's one journey, a quarrel kept up for fifteen years, a child given away and asked for back. Montgomery wrote them for magazines around the Anne novels and reworked them for this collection with Anne herself moved to the edge of the frame. The comedy is broad and the grief underneath it is exact. Forty-nine plates of village life by painters including George Clausen and George Inness, from winter roads to church spires, give these island stories their visual weather.