Gilbert Blythe’s first move, famously, is to pull Anne’s red hair and call her ‘Carrots’ — and Anne, who has spent her whole short life being unwanted, responds by refusing to speak to him for years, over a single public embarrassment. It’s a small scene that Montgomery uses to define both characters at once: his careless teasing, her fierce, wounded pride.
What makes the slow-burn romance work, across an entire series, is that Montgomery refuses to rescue it with a grand gesture. Gilbert earns Anne’s respect the unglamorous way — by matching her academically, by quietly giving up a coveted teaching post so she can stay near her ailing guardian, by simply being patient for the better part of a decade. It’s one of the least melodramatic courtships in nineteenth-century fiction, which is exactly why it still works.
It’s a very different education in love than Jo March gets a few years earlier and an ocean away — one where the girl’s ambition is never the thing the romance has to overcome.
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