Audiobook · read by volunteers
Anne's House of Dreams
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874–1942)
Read by JemmaBlythe, Mary Anderson, Sarah Jennings, Sibella Denton, Lucy Burgoyne (1950-2014), Randi Warwick, Danielle Buttrey, Kirsten Ferreri, Betsie Bush · 40 chapters · 8 h 06
About the book
Anne Shirley has grown up, and her story now turns to the first years of married life. In Anne's House of Dreams, she and Gilbert Blythe, the sweetheart of her school days, leave Green Gables to begin a household of their own beside the sea. The book follows Anne as she settles in, makes friends with new neighbors and learns that happiness and sorrow can arrive in the same season. The warmth, humor and love of landscape that have charmed readers of the earlier books are all here, and so is a deeper, quieter note. Forty chapters of about eight hours, read by LibriVox volunteers, offer a comforting listen for anyone who has followed Anne from the beginning. The pleasure here lies in the details of an ordinary life, lovingly observed, and in the sense of coming home to a world already known.
Introduction
Lucy Maud Montgomery (1874 to 1942) was a Canadian author from Prince Edward Island, and the creator of Anne Shirley, one of the best loved heroines in children's literature. Anne of Green Gables, the first book, appeared in 1908 and was followed by a long series. Anne's House of Dreams, published in 1917, is the fifth in the series, according to the usual order of Anne's life, and it takes the heroine from the world of girlhood into marriage and early adulthood.
If you have read the first books, you will meet familiar voices and enjoy returning to them. If you have not, the story can still be followed with pleasure, since Montgomery explains what you need to know. Her prose is sensitive to light, weather and the seasons, and she is as fond of a good conversation as of a good view. She is also unafraid of grief, and this volume contains some of her most moving passages.
The recording divides the novel into forty chapters, with a running time of just over eight hours. It is the kind of book for a quiet week, to be heard a little at a time, or for a long journey. Many listeners return to Anne at different stages of their own lives and find something new, whether the humor of a young bride or the tenderness of the later chapters. This reading gives that experience in a clear and pleasant way. The long recording gives plenty of time to spend in her company.
Public domain
Lucy Maud Montgomery died in 1942: the work is in the public domain in Switzerland, more than 70 years after the author’s death.
The LibriVox volunteers dedicated this recording to the public domain.
Sources : LibriVox page · Files at the Internet Archive · Original text