Anne Shirley leaves Green Gables and Avonlea behind for Redmond College in Kingsport, Nova Scotia, where she reads for a degree alongside her old rival Gilbert Blythe and her Queen's Academy friend Priscilla Grant. At Redmond she acquires a new and very different friend in Philippa Gordon, a beautiful, frivolous girl who cannot choose between her many suitors, and in time the young women set up house together at Patty's Place with Stella Maynard and her sensible Aunt Jamesina.
Four years of lectures, first published stories, homesickness and grief follow, and with them the proposals Anne has been waiting for since girlhood — none of which she can bring herself to accept, not even Gilbert's. When the handsome, melancholy Roy Gardner appears, he seems to be the romantic hero of her daydreams made real. Meanwhile Gilbert is increasingly seen in the company of Christine Stuart, and it takes a crisis to make Anne understand what she actually wants.
The third book in L.M. Montgomery's Anne of Green Gables series, published in 1915, carries Anne from girlhood into womanhood with the same warmth and gentle comedy as its predecessors, and brings her long-running story with Gilbert to its turning point.