Chronicles of Avonlea

The first thing every listener will want to know is whether Anne Shirley appears in these stories of Avonlea and Spencervale. She certainly does. As a matter of fact, chapter one starts off in this manner: "Anne Shirley was curled up on the window seat of Theodora Dix's sitting-room one Saturday evening, looking dreamily afar at some fair starland beyond the hills of sunset. Anne was visiting for a fortnight of her vacation...." However, most of the people who appear in this audiobook are new to listeners of the Anne books. There are Ludovic and Theodora, "Old Lady Lloyd" and Sylvia Gray, Felix Moore and his grandfather, Little Jocelyn and Aunty Nan, Lucinda Penhallow, Old Man Shaw's Blossom, Olivia Sterling, and many, many others. The charm of Anne of Green Gables is to be found in every chapter of this gently sentimental and enjoyably humorous audiobook. Lucy Maud Mongtomery (1874-1942) was born in Clifton, Prince Edward Island (P.E.I.), Canada. Although she lived at a time when few women received a higher education, Lucy attended Prince Wales College in Charlottestown, P.E.I., and Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia. At seventeen she went to Halifax to write for its two newspapers, but she returned to live with her grandmother in Cavendish, P.E.I., where she taught and contributed stories to magazines and found the basis for her "Anne" books. Anne of Green Gables (1908) brought her overnight success and international recognition. She and her husband, the Reverend Ewen MacDonald, eventually moved to Ontario. She died in Toronto in 1942.