Rilla of Ingleside by L.M.
(Lucy Maud) Montgomery (An Anne of Green Gables novel; first published 1921;
this Aladdin edition 2015)
35
chapters; 440 pages
Subjects:
World War One, Canada, family, women in war, young adult (Year 7-10)
(The cover
of this new edition refers to different elements of the story, like Dog Monday,
knitting socks, wedding cakes, the green hat, trains and letters.)
Synopsis
This is the 8th
of 9 books (chronologically) in the Anne of Green Gables series, although the 6th to be written. I’d
only read the first book in the series before, so I was confused initially as
to who were all these people – but I kept reading and hoped it would come clear
(it mostly did).
The book focuses on Marilla
(“Rilla”) Blythe, Anne and Gilbert’s youngest daughter and the baby of the
family. She is desperate to be seen as old enough to go to parties (and not
treated as a child), but the years of light-hearted fun she dreams of vanish as
World War One gets underway. We see Rilla grow in maturity as she takes on the organisation
of the Junior Red Cross and responsibility for a war baby (carried home in a
soup tureen), watches her brothers and many other friends go off to war and
supports her mother in her grief.
It’s made very clear
the pressure that boys were under to enlist – from themselves, their friends
and society in general. The agony that every family went through with the news
of battles fought, won or lost, is portrayed with complete authenticity, mixed
with some humour to make it bearable. “To
me,” Rilla writes in her diary, “the strangest of all the strange things since
1914 is how we have all learned to accept things we never thought we could – to
go on with life as a matter of course.”
The Canadian
experience of WW1 was in some ways so similar to the NZ experience, but in
other ways quite different, so it’s always interesting to read stories told
from their perspective – for example, the references to the
Gallipoli campaign.
The LM Montgomery Online site says that this is
“one of the only contemporary depictions
in Canadian fiction of women on the home front during the First World War.”
Rilla of
Ingleside is dedicated to the memory of Frederica
Campbell MacFarlane, Maud’s friend and cousin who died in the flu epidemic in
1919.
About the author
Everything
you want to know about Lucy Maud Montgomery, much loved Canadian author (1874-1942)
is here.
Some things I
didn’t know about her:
- her mother died of TB when she was 21 months old
- she grew up with her grandparents
- she was one of the few women of her time to study at university
- when her manuscript of Anne of Green Gables was rejected by several publishers, she put it away in a hat box before trying again in 1907 (when it was accepted, published in 1908 and became an immediate bestseller)
- she was secretly engaged for five years before getting married in 1911
- she had three sons, but one was still-born
- she left Prince Edward Island after her marriage, but nearly all (19 out of 20) of her novels are set there.
I love some
of her very delicious and funny lines:
- “I am done
with crying which is a waste of time and discourages everybody.” (Susan, the
housekeeper)
- (When their
own horses aren’t available, and Rilla has to ride a very old one that keeps
stopping every few yards) “Rilla felt that this, coupled with the fact that the
Germans were only fifty miles from Paris, was hardly to be endured.”
- (Rilla
talking about Fred Arnold, who is a very nice young man and “would be quite
handsome if it were not for his nose”): “When he talks of commonplace things it
does not matter so much, but when he talks of poetry and ideals the contrast
between his nose and his conversation is too much for me and I want to shriek
with laughter.”
Other books you might like:
Uprooted: a Canadian war story by Lynne Reid Banks tells the
story of evacuees in WW2.
Where poppies grow: a World War I companion by Linda
Granfield is a non-fiction book about WW1 from the Canadian perspective.
Have you read it?
Have you
read this book? Let me know what you think!
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