An elderly brother and sister at Green Gables send for a boy to help on the farm and are delivered a talkative red-haired girl instead. Montgomery had the manuscript back from five publishers before one took it; she set Avonlea in the Cavendish she grew up in, and never quite escaped the character afterwards. Anne's scrapes are the comedy; the real subject is two shut-in people discovering, slowly and without ever saying so, that they cannot give her back. Fifty-four paintings from 1832 to 1923, among them works by Mary Cassatt and George Inness, picture farm children, winter roads, and quiet domestic tasks that echo Anne's world.
