The stifled passions of Anne Shirley

Lucy Maud Montgomery's "Anne's House of Dreams" (1917)

Jul 06, 2026

*Two Human Beings (The Lonely Ones)*. Edvard Munch, 1906-1908. Photo taken at the Harvard Art Museum.

Anne’s House of Dreams is the fifth book in Lucy Maude Montgomery’s Anne of Green Gables series and arguably its biggest disappointment.

A departure from what made the earlier books in the series so enjoyable, Anne’s House of Dreams is ponderously boring and freighted with endless, meandering nattering, as the newly married Anne settles into her role as a wife to the paper-thin Gilbert Blythe and befriends two ornery and very repetitive elderly neighbors (more caricatures than characters) who overrun nearly every scene with their folksy prattling. It’s a bit of a shock after the youthful repartee and collegiate sociability depicted in Anne of the Island (1915) to find Anne now ensconced among irritating people who are mostly on death’s door.

But what really makes Annes’s House of Dreams so disappointing is that it so clearly wants to be something other than it is. Because beneath the book’s tepid surface lies a much richer story, a story of unrequited desire and thwarted ambition, of sublimated passions that manifest themselves in strange, almost genre-bending ways. Montgomery tries to hide this behind the book’s quaint, domestic foreground—or perhaps she herself wasn’t fully conscious of where her interests as an author lay—but she couldn’t help but keep coming back to it.

Remember where we are in the larger story: Anne has finally married Gilbert Blythe, having become engaged at the end of Anne of the Island. After a long separation (depicted in retrospect in 1937’s excellently weird and surprisingly Gothic Anne of Windy Willows), they are finally together. You would expect Gilbert to play a large role in Anne’s House of Dreams, but he’s barely present. We see very little of interest going on between Anne and Gilbert at all. Their marriage is hardly of consequence to the story.

Moving to the town of Four Winds and the titular “House of Dreams,” the couple begins trying to have a child. Anne’s first pregnancy ends in tragedy, a stillbirth. Surely, this should be the book’s emotional center, the fulcrum around which Anne’s development and maturation as a character swings. But no—while the scenes dealing with Anne’s desire for motherhood are tender and sad, they still feel incidental. The weight of it is never truly felt.

Perhaps this is because Anne’s ambition throughout the series was never actually to be a wife or a mother? So much of the preceding books are focused on her development of close female friendships, her aspirations to succeed academically and go to college, and her wish to become a well-known writer of stories. For all that she’s a capital-R Romantic, she’s mostly ambivalent about (small R) romance and not especially concerned with the men in her life. One feels that her acquiescence to Gilbert’s proposal was merely a practical consideration. As a pair, they are compatible. They are partners. But they rarely seem like anything more.

For example, does Anne, at any point in the series, ever regard Gilbert with anything approaching the fervent ardor expressed in these following lines?

Anne saw a girl who was driving a flock of snow-white geese along the crest of a velvety green hill on the right…
The girl was tall and wore a dress of pale blue print. She walked with a certain springiness of step and erectness of bearing…
She stood with her hand on the fastening of the gate, and looked steadily at them, with an expression that hardly attained to interest but did not descend to curiosity. It seemed to Anne, for a fleeting moment, that there was even a veiled hint of hostility in it. But it was the girl’s beauty which made Anne give a little gasp—a beauty so marked that it must have attracted attention anywhere. She was hatless, but heavy braids of burnished hue, the hue of ripe wheat, were twisted about her head like a coronet; her eyes were blue and star-like; her figure, in its plain print gown, was magnificent; and her lips were as crimson as the bunch of blood-red poppies she wore at her belt.
“Gilbert, who is the girl we have just passed?” asked Anne, in a low voice.
“I didn’t notice any girl,” said Gilbert, who had eyes only for his bride…
“She was standing by that gate—no, don’t look back. She is still watching us. I never saw such a beautiful face… I never saw a face except in pictures. And her hair! It made me think of Browning’s ‘cord of gold’ and ‘gorgeous snake’!”1

Anne’s rapture is broken only when Gilbert directs her attention to their new home, which lays up ahead. It’s as if Montgomery is trying to remind herself that this story is supposed to be about Anne’s domesticity, her life with Gilbert. But she can hardly draw her eyes away from the wild woman on the hill, Leslie Moore.

Leslie becomes one of Anne’s projects in book. (The other is her wish to see the “life book,” that is, the autobiography of her new friend, Capital Jim Boyd, published.) Wed to a cruel older man at the age of 16 by her mercenary mother, Leslie is a tragic figure, condemned to spend her days caring for her husband, who has been rendered mentally incapable by a mysterious accident. This plotline is very silly, and its resolution especially absurd; it mainly serves to give Anne a reason to pursue the otherwise aloof and standoffish Leslie.

When they finally meet, Anne is once again astonished by Leslie’s appearance.

The girl of the golden hair and sea-blue eyes was sitting on a boulder of the headland, half-hidden by a jutting rock… She was bareheaded, and her splendid hair, more than ever like Browning’s “gorgeous snake,” was bound about her head with a crimson ribbon. She wore a dress of some dark material, very plainly made; but swathed about her waist, outlining its fine curves, was a vivid girdle of red silk. Her hands, clasped over her knee, were brown and somewhat work-hardened; but the skin of her throat and cheeks was as white as cream. A flying gleam of sunset broke through a low-lying western cloud and fell across her hair. For a moment, she seemed the spirt of the sea personified—all its mystery, all its passion, all its elusive charm….
[T]here was something in her eyes—eager yet shy, defiant yet pleading—which turned Anne from her purpose…

No kidding. Montgomery repeatedly presents Leslie and Anne’s House of Dreams as competing for Anne’s attention. Leslie’s magnetism continually draws Anne away from her proper place, her home, which is often placed precisely opposite Leslie.

Anne watched [Leslie] until she was lost in the shadows of the chill and misty night. Then she turned slowly back to the glow of her own radiant hearthstone.

*New England Interior.* Edmund Charles Tarbell, 1906. Photo taken at the Museum of Fine Arts, Boston.

Anne is completely smitten with Leslie, often gushing to Gilbert about how lovely she is. Leslie, for her part, keeps Anne at arm’s length; Anne senses her unease, and understands that there is something getting in the way of their friendship. But what it is she cannot articulate. (“I like her so much—I admire her so much—I want to take her right into my heart and creep right into hers. But I can never get across the barrier.") When Anne falls pregnant, Leslie pulls away. But after Anne’s difficult delivery, the loss of the child, and her own near death, the tension between them boils over in a row reminiscent of Gilbert’s frank treatment of Anne when she rejects his first proposal in Anne of the Island. Leslie erupts:

“I hated you because I envied you—
You had a dear little home—and love—and happiness—and glad dreams—everything I wanted—and never had—and never could have…
…I loved you so then. Anne, Anne… [I]t’s so dreadful to have nothing to love—life is so empty—and there’s nothing worse than emptiness—and I might have loved you so much…”
Leslie was trembling and growing almost incoherent with the violence of her emotion.
“Don’t, Leslie,” implored Anne, “oh, don’t. I understand—don’t talk of it any more.”

But she does, and is relieved in doing so.

Talking it out seems to have done away with it somehow. It’s very strange—it’s like opening the door of a dark room to show some hideous creature you’ve believed to be there—and when the light streams in, your monster turns out to have been just a shadow, vanishing when the light comes.

Here, their friendship is established on firmer ground. But it seems glaringly obvious that Anne and Leslie are meant to be more than friends. They are passionately in love with one another, but lack the ability to articulate it to one another because they are trapped in story ostensibly written for children in 1917. Their courtship can go no further and their obvious desire for one another must remain unconsummated.

This is not a novel interpretation of Anne and Leslie’s relationship. Back in the year 2000, Laura Robinson wrote a paper titled “Bosom Friends: Lesbian Desire in L. M. Montgomery's Anne Books,” which talks extensively about Anne’s House of Dreams. At the time, the paper was controversial, I suspect because most people never get past reading the comparatively tame Anne of Green Gables (or watching it’s movie) and thought that Robinson was making a big deal out of nothing. Certainly, I think a lot of the elements of the first book that read as potentially queer are really just meant to demonstrate that Anne is a flighty Romantic in a community of sober salts of the earth. But by House of Dreams (and also Windy Willows, where Anne has another tough talk with a women clearly in love with her, who she threatens to spank2—she also almost gets entangled in a threesome), it’s a lot harder to deny.

In any case, though the story of Anne’s House of Dreams seems to naturally want to proceed in the direction of further developing Anne and Leslie’s love for one another, it cannot. This presents a challenge for the book. Where can it possibly go from here? The answer lies in the other of Anne’s projects, which is yet another example of her stifled passion.

Capital Jim Boyd is a stereotypical old salt and one of Anne’s new companions in her new community. He has a tragic love story himself—the woman he loved fell asleep in a dinghy and was swept out to sea, never to be seen again. For many years, he has chronicled his adventures as a sailor in his “life book,” a folksy diary-cum-autobiography that he shares with his close friends. Anne is given the opportunity to read it and is charmed.

Anne thought what a treasure trove it would be to a writer. Every sentence was a nugget. In itself the book had no literary merit; Captain Jim’s charm of storytelling failed him when he came to pen and ink; he could only jot roughly down the outline of his famous tales, and both spelling and grammar were sadly askew. But Anne felt that if anyone possessed of the gift could take that simple record of a brave, adventurous life, reading between the bald lines the tales of dangers staunchly faced and duty manfully done, a wonderful story might be made from it.

Gilbert, upon hearing Anne say as much, encourages her to give it a shot. She is a writer after all. But Anne lacks the confidence to do so.

Anne shook her head.
“No. I only wish I could. But it’s not in the power of my gift. You know what my forte is, Gilbert—the fanciful, the fairylike, the pretty. To write Captain Jim’s life-book as it should be written one should be a master of vigorous yet subtle style, a keen psychologist, a born humorist and a born tragedian. A rare combination of gifts is needed.

This is the curious thing about Anne’s House of Dreams. The two main threads, the projects that Anne is meant to take on and solve—Leslie’s domestic confinement and the writing of Captain Jim’s life book—are depicted as beyond her capabilities. (Contrast this with Anne of Windy Willows, where she is enlisted over and over again by the residents of Summerside to solve all manner of problems and does so with aplomb.) In the face of these challenges, she is helpless. Not just helpless, but resigned to that helplessness. This is not like the Anne we’ve come to know.

Once again, the path forward seems obvious. She should write the book! That would be the natural conclusion given Anne’s development through the series so far, which has seen her slowly but surely develop her skills as a writer. It would be a great ending for this chapter in her life, a real triumph. But for whatever reason, Montgomery can’t go through with it. In the face of the book’s two major conflicts, Anne is rendered utterly inert.

The story has nowhere to go. And yet, it does. How Montgomery resolves this impasse is fascinating and bizarre.

She does it by creating a masculine proxy for Anne, a Tyler-Durden figure named Owen Ford who comes to town and rents a room from Leslie. The book only makes sense from this point on if you imagine Owen as Anne’s inner monologue, and their conversations as Anne’s own internal deliberations over how to deal with her feelings for Leslie and what she should do about her own professional ambitions. Or perhaps as a fantasy version of herself—Anne imagining what she would do in this situation if she were a man, with all the confidence and freedom to act that that entails.

Like Anne, he is a writer, but a professional writer.

Captain Jim was still more excited when he discovered that Owen Ford was what he called a “real writing man.” He gazed at him as at a superior being. Captain Jim knew that Anne wrote, but he had never taken that fact very seriously. Captain Jim thought women were delightful creatures, who ought to have the vote, and everything else they wanted, bless their hearts; but he did not believe they could write.

And he shares Anne’s admiration for Leslie’s beauty. He confesses his love for her to Anne, in words that come just as easily sprung from Anne’s lips.

“I’m rather glad [Gilbert] is away,” said Owen slowly. “I wanted to see you alone, Mrs. Blythe. There is something I must tell somebody, or I think it will drive me mad. I’ve been trying for a week to look it in the face—and I can’t. I know I can trust you—and, besides, you will understand… Mrs. Blythe, I love Leslie. LOVE her! That seems too weak a word!”

He knows she will understand because he’s is merely a masculine stand in for her. Owen is Anne’s other self. He writes Captain Jim’s book, and he wins the hand of Leslie Moore. He resolves the major plotlines of the book—Anne’s book!—while she watches from the sidelines. What sense does it make for Anne to be sidelined in her own book? None at all. Owen and Anne are one and the same. His character is merely a device through which Montgomery can resolve the unresolvable, a vehicle for Anne to fulfill her unreachable desires.

As we get to know Owen, we see that he and Anne perceive the world in much the same way. They even speak to one another, elliptically, about their dual nature:

Silence and twilight fell over the garden. Far away the sea was lapping gently and monotonously on the bar. The wind of evening in the poplars sounded like some sad, weird, old rune—some broken dream of old memories. A slender shapely young aspen rose up before them against the fine maize and emerald and paling rose of the western sky, which brought out every leaf and twig in dark, tremulous, elfin loveliness.
“Isn’t that beautiful?” said Owen, pointing to it with the air of a man who puts a certain conversation behind him.
“It’s so beautiful that it hurts me,” said Anne softly. “Perfect things like that always did hurt me—I remember I called it ‘the queer ache’ when I was a child. What is the reason that pain like this seems inseparable from perfection? Is it the pain of finality—when we realize that there can be nothing beyond but retrogression?”
“Perhaps,” said Owen dreamily, “it is the prisoned infinite in us calling out to its kindred infinite as expressed in that visible perfection.”

What better description of Owen and Anne could their be? Anne, the prisoned infinite, a bursting, creative soul yearning to express itself yet trapped in the prison of her marriage and her sex; Owen, her kindred infinite—unlimited, unbounded, unfettered by gender or convention.

In the books final pages, Anne, through Owen, finally finds real happiness with Leslie.

When their work was done and Gilbert was out of the way, they gave themselves over to shameless orgies of love-making and ecstasies of adoration, such as that in which Owen Ford had surprised them.
…
Leslie’s lips were trembling and her whole form was tense with emotion [from learning that Owen desires her].
But Anne laughed heartlessly. She bent over and kissed Leslie’s upturned reproachful face.

(Notice how important it is that Gilbert is not around for these moments?)

But her joy is short-lived. In the last chapter of the book, Gilbert breaks it to Anne—they are moving from Four Winds and leaving the House of Dreams (and Leslie) behind. Anne is bereft, but again resigned to her fate. There’s nothing she can do. Everyone tries to tell her it’s the right thing for her growing family. Well, almost everybody.

Leslie was the only one who sympathized understandingly with Anne. She had a good cry, too, when she heard the news. Then they both dried their tears and went to work at the preparations for moving.

But later, Leslie reveals that Anne’s alter ego Owen has bought the House of Dreams and that she and Owen will live there together. “It’s almost too good to be true,” Anne says. In these final pages, we see a vision of what might of been, of where the story might have gone had it been written by a different person or in a different time: Anne and Leslie living together and loving one another in the House of Dreams. Instead, we get this strangely bifurcated ending. Owen, having written the book Anne was meant to write and having gotten the girl that Anne was so entranced by, gets to live happily ever after in the house of Anne’s dreams. Anne, however, is left to trudge along into an unwanted reality about which she seems downright miserable.

“We have been very happy here, haven’t we, Anne-girl?” said Gilbert, his voice full of feeling.
Anne choked, unable to answer.

Anne’s House of Dreams—on the whole, a dreadful book. But only because it couldn’t be honest with itself and with its readers. Underneath all the dissembling, however, is a powerful story of identity and passion that burns too brightly to be completely obscured.