"There’s another way of reading Anne of Green Gables, and that’s to assume that the true central character is not Anne, but Marilla Cuthbert. Anne herself doesn’t really change throughout the book. She grows taller, her hair turns from ‘carrots’ to ‘a handsome auburn’, her clothes get much prettier, due to the spirit of clothes competition she awakens in Marilla, she talks less, though more thoughtfully, but that’s about it. As she herself says, she’s still the same girl inside. Similarly, Matthew remains Matthew, and Anne’s best chum Diana is equally static. Only Marilla unfolds into something unimaginable to us at the beginning of the book. Her growing love for Anne, and her growing ability to express that love - not Anne’s duckling-to-swan act - is the real magic transformation. Anne is the catalyst who allows the crisp, rigid Marilla to finally express her long-buried softer human emotions. At the beginning of the book, it’s Anne who does all the crying; by the end of it, much of this task has been transferred to Marilla. As Mrs Rachel Lynde says, ‘Marilla Cuthbert has got mellow. That’s what.’"

"Spring had come once more to Green Gables - the beautiful, capricious, reluctant Canadian spring lingering along through April and May in a succession of sweet, fresh, chilly days, with pink sunsets and miracles of resurrection and growth. The maples in Lovers’ Lane were red-budded and little curly ferns pushed up around Dryad’s Bubble. Away up in the barrens, behind Mr Silas Sloane’s place, the Mayflowers blossomed out, pink and white stars of sweetness under their brown leaves. All the schoolgirls and boys had one golden afternoon gathering them, coming home in the clear, echoing twilight with arms and baskets full of flowery spoil."