Anne of Avonlea

Anne Shirley, now sixteen and staying at Green Gables to help Marilla while attending to her studies by correspondence, takes up a post teaching at the Avonlea school. Balancing a classroom of restless children with her own idealism, she also helps found the Avonlea Village Improvement Society with Gilbert Blythe and their friends.

Domestic life brings its own complications when Marilla takes in Davy and Dora, a pair of orphaned twins — one full of mischief, the other almost too well-behaved. Anne also befriends the imaginative student Paul Irving and, in one of the book's warmest threads, plays matchmaker between the reclusive Miss Lavendar Lewis and a man from her past.

Published in 1909 as the second book in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, Anne of Avonlea trades the first novel's arrival story for a quieter chronicle of early adulthood, community, and the small rewards of growing up.