Anne's House of Dreams

The First Home

The title of Anne’s House of Dreams is the name Anne gives to the small white house by the sea in Four Winds Harbour where she and Gilbert begin their married life. The house is everything Anne imagined — beautiful, her own, filled with the particular joy of early marriage. Montgomery spent the first chapters in a register of happiness that the earlier books rarely sustained for long before comedy or catastrophe intervened.

But the novel is ultimately Leslie Moore’s story as much as Anne’s. Leslie is the great tragic figure of the series — a woman of intelligence and beauty trapped in a marriage to a man brain-damaged in an accident, obligated by poverty and duty to care for someone she cannot love, unable to build any life of her own. She is a portrait of what Anne’s life might have been had circumstances been different, and her presence gives the novel a weight and seriousness the earlier books did not carry.

Leslie Moore

Montgomery draws Leslie with extraordinary care. She is not simply tragic — she is proud, sometimes cold, resistant to the pity that her situation might invite. Her friendship with Anne is slow to develop, earned rather than assumed, and the warmer for it. The subplot involving her husband’s past and the possibility of his recovery is handled melodramatically by Montgomery’s own standards, but the emotional truth of Leslie’s situation never becomes sentimental.

Captain Jim Boyd, keeper of the Four Winds Lighthouse, provides the novel’s warmth and comedy — a man who has lived a full life and is now contentedly rounding it out in the lighthouse with his stories and his natural wisdom. He is one of Montgomery’s most complete secondary characters, someone who deserves a novel of his own.

A Darker Montgomery

Anne’s House of Dreams is the turning point of the series — the book where Montgomery begins to use Anne’s world to examine what domestic life actually contains: grief, thwarted desire, loss, and the kind of joy that is only possible because it co-exists with the awareness of what others have lost. It is quieter than its predecessors and more honest.

Our rating: 4.2/5 — Montgomery’s most emotionally complex Anne novel, distinguished by Leslie Moore’s tragic presence and the beautiful wildness of the Four Winds setting.