Lindsey Palka’s previous work for The Toast can be found here.
L.M. Montgomery’s novel Rilla of Ingleside, the eighth Anne of Green Gables book, does not receive half the praise it deserves. Published in 1920, it is a contemporary novelized account of the First World War, distinctly different from Montgomery’s other works. Most First World War books focus on the experience of men on the battlefield—no surprise, given the war’s brutality and the many ways in which it changed the concept of war. But there is a dearth of novels focusing on women’s experiences during the First World War, and especially those in which women are full participants in the war effort. Rilla of Ingleside is the only Canadian novel from the period about women’s experiences on the Canadian home front, and it is severely under-read.
Rilla of Ingleside is about Anne (Shirley) Blythe’s youngest daughter, Rilla, a petted and spoiled young teenager. Unlike her college-bound siblings, Rilla’s highest ambition is to have a good time. At the outbreak of the First World War, she sees her small town in Prince Edward Island change drastically, as many men—including her brothers and sweetheart—enlist and leave. The war ultimately changes Rilla as well, and she finds that she is far more capable and practical than she previously believed. Her contributions to the war effort include fostering a war baby for four years, organizing a Junior Red Cross Society for young women in her town, and participating in a variety of fundraisers and patriotic recitals. While there is a love story in the novel, it is far from the focal point of the story; instead the focus remains on Rilla and her family and friends. The First World War, the driving force throughout the book, is almost its own character in the novel.
The female characters in Rilla are, perhaps uniquely for a war novel, fully drawn and realized. Rilla herself transforms from a spoiled, vain girl to a mature and self-possessed woman. Other women—including the Blythe housekeeper, Susan Baker; the neighbour, Mary Vance; the schoolteacher, Gertrude Oliver; and of course Anne herself—are rich, complex characters with both virtues and flaws. While these women love their men and pray for their safe return, they do not spend their time pining after them—they knit socks and roll bandages for soldiers, organize concerts to raise money for refugees, speak at political rallies, and participate fully in the war effort. Rilla even takes a seasonal position as a merchant in a local store to free the male counter clerk for the harvest.
In contrast, the male characters play minor roles in Rilla. Rilla’s brothers all go to war, Gilbert is relegated to the background of the story, and even Rilla’s sweetheart, Ken, is absent for most of the book. In many war novels, men on the battlefield reminisce about their women at home, who are seen only in flashbacks or in relation to the men. In Rilla, the male characters are the supporting cast, more one-dimensional than the female characters, and their personalities rely on stereotypes. Jem, Anne and Gilbert’s eldest son, for example, is the quintessential player of the “Great Game” for whom the war is an exciting adventure, epitomized in Jessie Pope’s popular 1915 poem “Who’s For The Game?”:
Who would much rather come back with a crutch
Than lie low and be out of the fun?
Come along, lads–
But you’ll come on all right–
For there’s only one course to pursue…
Walter, the Blythes’ second son, is a sensitive war poet, modeled on Canadian poet John McCrae. Walter’s fictional poem, “The Piper,” is printed early in the war and earns him fame across Canada, just as McCrae’s “In Flanders Fields” made him a national hero.
It is Walter’s death that irrevocably warps the wartime landscape for the Blythe family and their friends, but the focus is on the impact of his death at home and not on its circumstances. The other men who go to war—including Shirley Blythe and family friends Jerry and Carl Meredith—are mentioned only in passing. A despised neighbour plays the caricatured role of an anti-war pacifist, an antagonist with no redeeming qualities. Even in the case of Rilla’s sweetheart Ken Ford, the reader is told, rather than shown, his sensitivity, bravery, and all-around goodness.
This is not to say that the female characters embody no stereotypes. Susan Baker, the housekeeper who functions as almost a mother figure to Rilla and her siblings, represents the stalwart Canadian housewife who cheerfully acquiesces to the government’s request for rationing. Gertrude Oliver, the schoolteacher and family friend, is given to prophetic dreams—a reminder of the Spiritualism that was widespread during the war, offering hope that the spirit world could offer solace in a time of loss. Yet these characters are given fully developed personalities and individual perspectives; they never seem like cardboard stand-ins for female wartime archetypes.
Is it fair to label Rilla of Ingleside a “war novel”? Yes, for war novels are not limited to tales from the battlefield. Rilla derives its entire plot and structure from the First World War, which makes it a war novel. It is also frequently labeled a love story, and various covers lend credence to that idea. But this is no Nicholas Sparks-style love story that happens to have a wartime background—the romance is a plot point, not the central arc of the story.
The First World War inspired many classics—among them All Quiet on the Western Front, Regeneration, and A Farewell to Arms—but the majority of these works center on men’s experiences. This was due in part to the immense scope of the war, in which an estimated 75 million soldiers fought, as well as the massive social upheaval and worldwide disillusionment following the war, which lent itself to an outpouring of literature. The temptation to label Rilla a love story comes from the tradition of war novels focusing on the male experience, and women in war novels playing secondary roles at best. But Rilla of Ingleside is no less a war novel due to its distance from the battlefield. It discusses the issues that arise in a rural community in wartime, the agony of separation and worry, and the stress that afflicts all families that lose someone precious to them. Despite Montgomery’s love for her country, Rilla is no blindly jingoistic story—the war is portrayed as a brutal, hellish experience, but one that must be undertaken.
This is not to say that Montgomery was as comfortable with her war novel as she was with some of her other works. Her later feelings about the book belied her insistence in the text that war is a necessary evil, and that the First World War would “end all wars.” Her portrayal of the Piper, the mythical figure of Walter’s poem and a recurring shadow-character, alternates between a cheerful, beckoning friend and a spectre of horror who lures men from their families to die. Montgomery included a version of “The Piper” in The Blythes are Quoted, her final novel published posthumously in 2010, and the existing drafts of the poem show the range of her feelings about the Piper and, by extension, the war itself. Her conflicting feelings about religion and faith, patriotism and the war effort, duty to country and family bonds all lend to Rilla an overarching theme of struggle—struggle between warring nations, between families, between the author and her own work, and between the reader and the story.
It may not be a love story, but like all of Montgomery’s works, relationships between siblings, friends, and family are at the core of Rilla. Rilla’s relationship with her brother Walter is marked by heartfelt letters, long conversations about the nature of war and Walter’s fear of the battlefield, and their genuine concern when his classmates send him a white feather. (Young men in Britain and Canada who did not enlist when they seemed to be in fine health were often presented with white feathers as a symbol of their cowardice, and urged to don them to announce to the world their lack of patriotism.) Rilla’s relationship with her mother Anne is also explored in depth; at one point, Anne says to Gilbert: “Rilla has grown closer and closer to me. We are chums. I don’t see how I could have got through these terrible years without her, Gilbert.” Despite occasional arguments and growing pains, the friendship between mother and daughter sustains them both.
A comparison of Rilla and Anne shows Rilla to be much more like her father than her mother. While Rilla has her mother’s eye for beauty, she is more mature and practical than Anne at the same age. At fifteen, Anne still thinks of herself at least partially as a schoolgirl, only “grown-uppish.” She thinks of boys only as comrades, and still finds herself in scrapes thanks to her impulsive nature. At fifteen, Rilla is caring for an infant and organizing a Junior Red Cross Society. While Anne helped raise children before coming to Green Gables, she had no choice in the matter, whereas Rilla makes a conscious decision to assist in the war effort. Part of Rilla’s rapid growth is a direct result of the war—as Anne says, hugging her daughter, “The war has made a woman of you too soon.” In the story, Rilla finds in herself an innate practicality and common sense that Anne had not found at her age. Anne’s teen years at Green Gables represented a period of gentle growth and maturity, rather than the trauma and loss of Rilla’s adolescence.
Anne is nearly absent from Rilla, seen as more of a background character and means of support for Rilla. Montgomery was rather tired of writing about Anne, after five books about Anne and her family in a little more than ten years. (The two “outlying” Anne books, Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside, are different and more disjointed than the rest, because they were not published in chronological order. Instead, they were published more than fifteen years later, in the 1930s, after pressure from Montgomery’s publishing house.) Montgomery’s genius was in writing young women and girls, and her most famous characters reflect that: Anne Shirley, Emily Starr, Pat Gardiner, Sara Stanley, and Jane Stuart are all teenaged (or teenage-adjacent). Valancy Stirling is Montgomery’s only adult heroine, and she is treated by her family as a child—her growth pattern echoes that of a teenager growing into womanhood. Rilla fits neatly into this pattern, showcasing Montgomery’s strengths in exploring and portraying female adolescence without ever descending into mawkish sentimentality.
Rilla is more mature than many of Montgomery’s heroines, and notably different in other ways as well. She is not particularly ambitious like Anne, nor is she an avid writer like Emily Starr. She does not have a gift for storytelling or housekeeping; she is a “lily of the field,” as her father calls her. Her growth comes not from an innate desire within herself; instead she is ultimately shaped by the war, which alters her in a fundamental way. At the conclusion of the novel, however, Montgomery loses focus: Ken Ford returns, presumably to marry the spirited Rilla, and she consents by reverting to the lisp that plagued her childhood. From an indomitable spirit to a return to domesticity, Rilla is neatly bookended by this notion of the “proper role” of women. Many readers since have found this frustrating, given Rilla’s growth in spirit and capabilities.
Despite some shortcomings, Rilla of Ingleside is a uniquely Canadian war novel focusing on women’s experiences and a compelling coming-of-age story. So why does it languish in the forgotten stacks? It is the eighth book in a series, which usually means limited readership, and it did not sell well to begin with, at a time when Montgomery was already being pigeon-holed as a youth author. Its various covers do it no favours—the mass-market paperback covers are usually one of two versions of a romance-novel heroine before a starry sky, while other covers portray Rilla in a party dress.
While several of Montgomery’s books are targeted at a young female audience, novels like Anne’s House of Dreams and Rilla of Ingleside touch on darker and more mature subjects. Rilla’s place, solidly locked into the young-female target zone of historical series fiction, makes it challenging to resurrect for new audiences. Books about teenaged girls can be a difficult sell, no matter how deftly the author places her heroine in the context of a greater world conflict. Other modern readers might feel the novel glorifies war or promotes an anachronistic view of the role of women.
Rilla of Ingleside is a war novel at times masquerading as a young adult historical romance. But it is far more than that; it is a detailed study of rural Canadian life during the First World War, written by a woman who lived through it and distilled it all with her trademark restrained emotion into a gem of a novel. Republished in 2011 in an unabridged version, including 4,500 words cut from the initial publication and contextual notes for the modern reader, Rilla is due to be rediscovered as a classic. With the centennial of the First World War upon us, Canadians and readers worldwide deserve to rediscover narratives that make women’s voices an equal and vibrant part of the cultural history of the war.
There’s an unabridged version?!?! What’s been added?
I read _Rilla_ because I was a completist as a kid. It always makes me cry buckets.
(And somehow it’s got cross-wired in my head with “Sally MacLennane,” for the “We walked them to the station in the rain” version of the chorus.)
4500 words seems like a lot, but it’s generally sprinkled in here and there throughout the novel–there aren’t whole chapters added, but paragraphs here and there. I think the most notable thing is Anne confessing to Gilbert how she dyed her hair green as a child, and Gilbert asking if that was why she came to school with her hair shingled. Otherwise, it’s mostly additional drips and drabs of stuff about Jims, Miss Cornelia, and a few other characters.
Thanks very much. The original appears to be on Project Gutenberg, so in my infinite free time I’ll give it a read and see what jumps out at me.
Rilla is my second favorite Anne book! I cried when Walter died and rooted for Rilla as she moved from being the spoiled baby of the family to a capable and strong woman. Thanks for this fresh take on it – it hadn’t occurred to me that it belongs alongside novels like All Quiet on the Western Front, but you are totally right!
I remember reading it late into the night as a kid and turning my face into my pillow and WEEPING when Walter died.
Sobs. Buckets of tears. As many as I shed reading AQotWF.
I just read AQotWF and it scarred me. I cry just thinking about it. And now I really want to read Rilla, but I’m just so goddamn emotionally fragile…
OH GOD HOW DID I NOT KNOW THERE WAS AN UNABRIDGED VERSION OF RILLA.
I have a deep and abiding love of all of the Anne books, even Windy Poplars. My family used to travel to South America a lot to visit family, and on one trip I ran out of books, which we all know is a major crisis. Luckily, my dad tracked down an English bookstore and bought me all the Anne books. I’ve been obsessed ever since.
Walter was never my favorite of the Blythe children, but I still cried buckets over his death. God, now I need to go re-read all the Anne books.
on one trip I ran out of books, which we all know is a major crisis.
When I was 11 I was shipped off to the Motherland to spend the summer with my grandparents at their house in the countryside. Which had no indoor plumbing. And a tiny TV with shitty reception that only got 2 channels, one of them a foreign channel in a language I couldn’t understand. I got through all my books within a week and was in pure agony from then on.
My mother arrived a few weeks later with a copy of Prisoner of Azkaban, which had just been published. It felt like the first sip of water after wandering the desert for a month.
On a two-week holiday to France, I brought about 20 books but ran out halfway through the second week. I was having weird fever-dreams about bookshops andlibraries.
I learned SO MUCH about WWI reading this book as a kid- I had to look up “Kaiser” and all the geography about the fronts mentioned (also “croup” and “tureen” were unfamiliar concepts). I absorbed this book and this piece has helped me to recognize the many ways in which “Rilla” has contextualized my experience with every other WWI novel I’ve ever read… Thank you, Lindsay!
Will never forgive LMM for the “Yeth” at the end…Rilla grew up so much over the course of the novel and for THAT to be where it ends – now that Ken has returned to sweep her off her feet she immediately regresses to this speech impediment that’s dogged and embarrassed her since little-girl-hood – bugged me as a child reading the book and bugs me a ton more now that I’m an adult.
Part of it, I believe, is that LMM was reflecting the contemporary attitude that many women truly did not want the freedoms that the war had given them–or saw them as too closely connected with their suffering during the war. Consequently, returning to (for Rilla) childhood meant a return to safety and security in a peacetime environment.
I can almost forgive it if I think about it in that specific context: or saw them as too closely connected with their suffering during the war. I can’t really imagine what living through that war was like, but I can say that in the same way that I re-read the 6 Anne books upon my divorce, I can easily see wanting to regress – for a short time – to the “safety” of the past because the present was too horrible and the future an unknown. Does that make sense?
I always read that as a charitable “even though you grow and change, you are still you.”
And a bit of a joke at “putting love-making into stories.”
Thanks so much for writing this! Rilla might be my favorite after Emily. (I do think Anne was kind of a priss about the green hat.- is she nicer in the unabridged version?) Women’s WWI writing doesn’t get enough loving ink!
Oh my goodness, I was hoping the Toast would post something about Rilla this year. I’m so glad they did.
Excellent piece!
Seeing anything Anne-related on the Toast always makes my heart give a joyful little skip. I haven’t read ‘Rilla’ since I was a child, but I still vividly remember the part about Walter being sent a white feather. And then … yes. We won’t talk about what happens to Walter after that, because he was always my favourite.
Slightly off-topic, but I have always wondered why LMM bothered writing Shirley in as a character and then giving him less page-time than the family dog(s).
I find it really weird that in Anne of Ingleside there’s stuff that focuses on all the other children and shows things from their perspective, but absolutely nothing about Shirley. Is he even in Rainbow Valley? Rilla of Ingleside seems like the only one that has any sort of detail, and even that’s hardly anything.
He’s in Rainbow Valley a little bit. He’s Susan’s favorite because of his ears. That’s literally all I remember about him.
He’s Susan’s favorite because Anne was ill after his birth, so she got to be “Mother Susan.” Jem’s ears were the only ones in the family nice enough to please Susan. 😉
Ah, that was it. Thanks!
Yes Shirley was a plot device to explain/justify Susan
Wouldn’t she have been just as easily justified by the mere fact that Anne and Gilbert wanted a housekeeper/cook/nanny?
Anne mentions that she had a really difficult recovery after his birth and so he bonded with Susan instead of her, but that shouldn’t prevent him from having his own personality and storylines in the books? I think I originally opened Rilla of Ingleside thinking “Maybe Shirley will get to say something in this one!”
In fact, the only time I remember Anne having any interaction with Shirley is toward the end of Anne of Ingleside, when she yells at him for getting jam on a magazine 🙁 Irrational sympathy for fictional characters: I have it.
From RoI chapter 25: Shirley said nothing more. He was not a lad of many words.
no shit LMM, that’s because you wouldn’t be bothered to write any dialogue for him.
I always wondered what possessed Anne to give her son her maiden name as his first name.
Weirdly, I’ve heard that’s common “traditionally” in the Southern US, so you would end up with girls called “Bradley” or “Madison” or “Parker” as first names or middle names.
But a better question is: Anne, you have six children, why do you get to name ALL of them after your family and friends? Gilbert has a family, too! A family whom Nan, specifically, is said to resemble! But no–James Matthew, Walter Cuthbert, Diana and Ann (a twofer!), Shirley (again!) and Bertha Marilla (mom AND adoptive mom). Why, Anne???
Yup. Not even a John for his father. Gilbert essentially doesn’t have family.
The closest she came to ever fleshing then out was the Anne of Ingleside story where Nan thought she was that other girl.
It was traditional for the time in a lot of places (not just the South) for a son (usually the first) to get the mother’s maiden name as his given name. A Victorian thing, mebbe?
Shirley was traditionally a masculine name.
I know that. I still think it’s a bit weird to give your child your surname as their first name.
Thank you, Lindsey! Rilla was always one of my favorite of the Anne series and the one I returned to most frequently after Anne of the Island.
I’m glad you included a mention of Whiskers-on-the-Moon as the vilified pacifist. That was always the part of the book that “stuck in my craw” the most–especially as he’s one of only two religious leaders in the book, the other of whom had one bad evening of it when his son enlisted, but then was fully on board the war train. It’s interesting to hear that LMM became a little more circumspect about the the war later on–of course, that attitude shift makes perfect sense as the inevitability of World War II loomed…
Yesss! This is way late but Anne of the Island and Rilla are my favourites too.
God I love all the covers. People don’t understand why I own so many copies of so many books. Look at the different covers!
So interesting that Walter’s The Piper was a stand-in for In Flanders Fields. I had always thought (hoped) The Piper had a little Dulce Et Decorum Est in it. Sounds like LM Montgomery really struggled with that – as I’m sure many did in the aftermath of that war.
MY PEOPLE. My people who love Rilla. I love Rilla.
My very literary novelist friend who is a much more critical and voracious reader than me recently rather sniffed at Rilla and I was secretly a bit crushed.
Tell your very literary novelist friend that he/she is following a long and ignoble tradition of sniffing at LM Montgomery…and then tell him/her where he/she can stick those sniffs. *humph*
Haha well my dear friend is a HUGE LMM fan, but seems to think Rilla a lesser novel (shmaltzy, perhaps? Surely not). RILLA FOREVER.
You can argue against the schmaltz using the same arguments here! Because LMM was no stranger to pouring on the treacle when it was necessary, but there’s quite a lot less of it here than in some other novels and stories. (I’m looking at you, Magic For Marigold.)
Rilla is my favorite LMM character, critics be damned. Love the Toast so much for this.
Remember the foreshadowing in Anne of Ingleside, the windowpane making the cross shadow above Walter’s head on the wall as he slept? HEARTBREAKING IN RETROSPECT.
So chilling. And vaguely spoilerish on LMM’s part, for those who read Anne in strictly book-chronological order. But then again, perhaps it was kind to give readers as much time as possible to prepare for The Tragedy.
Except when I read Anne of Ingleside, at 11, I had no idea what “Courcelette” was and had somehow messed up the chronology in my head. I had the idea that Anne of Ingleside took place in the 30s (perhaps because that was the copyright?) so when I read Rilla it took a while to re-orient back to WWI. So my cluelessness avoided spoilers, I guess, which is good?
I read Ingleside first (got the whole series boxed set and read it in order when I was ten) and I’d never heard of Courcelette either- it’s not one of the more talked-about battles in comparison to Vimy Ridge, Ypres, etc- but I recognized “somewhere in France” as basically indicating that Walter was a goner.
Yes! and I stopped reading the series after that book because of it. It wasn’t even really foreshadowing; she’s pretty clear that he’s going to die in WWI. Ruined that series for me going forward, though I still reread the others many times.
This is great. Thank you. I read this book repeatedly and it was wonderful to be reminded of it, and to learn about the unabridged version! Also, I write about how war affects women. And it had never occurred to me until right this minute that reading Rilla might have had something to do with that.
Not to get all conspiracy-theory, but there’s a lot of Rilla that reads like Gone With The Wind: the young woman fussing over party dresses, the war being announced at a party, the “surprise! you’re a mom now!” piece (that Rilla handles much better than Scarlett) and, of course, the GREEN VELVET HAT.
GWTW was written a decade after Rilla, so… CONSPIRACY THEORY!
I love this.
I re-read “Rilla” more often than any other book in the Anne series excepting “Anne of the Island.” I learned so much about WWI from it, though the strained patriotism and vilifying of Whiskers-on-the-Moon seemed ludicrous to me even as a child.
I think the most heartbreaking part might be when Dog Monday and Jem are reunited. Oh, and poor Una Meredith!
I think I cried more at Dog Monday and Jem than Walter (sorry Walter).
I absolutely did – I’ve been reading this whole post and the comments, thinking… “Walter died? I thought there was something sad about Jem. Wasn’t it Jem? I think I cried about Jem…” and then I got to this comment and realized what I’d been thinking about.
Walter, shmalter. Jem and Dog Monday was the saddest thing ever!
AND BRUCE DROWNING HIS KITTEN.
Oh, goddess, yes. Bruce and the kitten.
THE WORST.
THAT WAS SO FUCKING WEIRD. It wigs me out that it’s depicted as a ~ noble sacrifice~ because… obviously Bruce meant well, but it was still a majorly fucked-up thing to do and I hope that his minister dad took some time to explain to him that God does not work that way and please stop murdering your pets.
It’s treated in a really creepy way! Seriously, tell your children not to kill their pets.
I came here to post about drowning the kitten. I’ve wondered if it can be read as a metaphor for the pointless sacrifices everyone made for the (pointless) war – especially the death of Walter and all the other young men – but I don’t have the heart to reread it.
In my version, Una Meredith goes off to Kingsport to study Household Science and meets and marries a young man there at Redmond. She doesn’t love him as much as she loved Walter, but they have a long and happy marriage nonetheless.
(Yes, I am one of Those Who Think the Blythes are Real People.)
(Edited – for some reason I thought she’d gone to Montreal to study nursing, but I just checked my book and I must have gotten her mixed up with someone else. Time to re-read everything!)
Nan and Di went off to study nursing, iirc- Una stayed home to help out with her parents.
Yes, and then at the end of the book, “Una Meredith has decided, I think, to take a course in Household Science at Kingsport…”
I definitely prefer your version–Una deserved some happiness!
Just an fyi: Simon and Schuster’s Aladdin imprint has been reprinting gorgeous new editions of LMM’s Anne series (other than AofWP and AofI because of the later publication dates), with papercut design covers. Rilla is scheduled to come out some time in 2015.
OOH
I read all of the Anne books for the first time this year and Rilla of Ingleside is absolutely a top two or three, and certainly a favorite book on its own. I’m so glad to see this here!
Have I asked this before on The Toast? Who else headcanons Di Blythe as a lesbian? She spends the entirety of Anne of Ingleside crushing on girls, she’s never seen fussing over boys like Nan, Rilla, Una, Gertrude, etc., she’s the only Blythe child not paired off at the end of the story, and she has that special bond with Walter, who is written as a canon gay character. She and Walter literally go to Rainbow Valley to talk over things that they never tell anyone else about.
Wait, is Walter a canon gay character? I think there’s a lot that supports the reading, but I hadn’t realised it was explicit.
I don’t believe it’s canon–I’ve never read anything to that effect declaring it quite so explicitly.
You’re right; it’s in the scholarship but not directly stated in the books. I’ll edit my comment. (Edit: I guess I can’t edit the original but you are reading it now so that’s okay?)
I am! Thanks for the clarification. I should have a look at the scholarship.
Start with Walter’s Closet: http://www.academia.edu/744712/Walters_Closet
Oh that was a fascinating read – thank you! And I think you may be on to something with Di Blythe.
Thanks for this link!
Shirley Blythe is not paired off at the end of the story either, but I prefer to think he was a confirmed bachelor-for-life kind of guy.
Doesn’t he have his eye on some girl? Or do the characters just say “well, Shirley’s going to have his eye on some girl soon.” I must re-read EVERYTHING.
I was just thinking about that earlier! Her friendships (er, “friendships”) in Anne of Ingleside are basically really intense crushes followed by even more intense breakups. At one point, doesn’t she kiss one of them? And LMM makes a specific mention of boys whooping at them when they do it?
“You’ll never have to say that after this, Delilah. I will always love you.”
“World without end?”
“World without end,” answered Diana. They kissed each other, as in a rite. Two boys on the fence whooped derisively, but who cared?
It was common for female friends to kiss. LMM writes in her diaries about kissing her female friends. She also writes about her mingled disgust and sympathy for a lesbian fan. It seems unlikely that she would deliberately write a lesbian character.
I don’t think her disgust with that fan meant that she wouldn’t hint at lesbianism in a character. That fan threatened suicide and had clear boundary issues, Maud’s frustration with her wasn’t necessarily an indictment of all lesbians. Maud was pretty cosmopolitan and enjoyed being active in the literary scene where she must have run into some queer folks. And Maud processed a lot of what was going on in her life through her writing so who knows (though I’m not positive on the timeline of writing Rilla and that fan interaction)?
Lesbian Nan and gay Walter discussing queerness in Rainbow Valley: Headcannon accepted!
Walter called it Rainbow Valley for a reason!
Maybe Di could get together with the elusive Persis Ford? Just to make the incestuousness of the Blythe/Meredith/Ford clans complete!
YES YES YES YES YES I want this fiction and could not find it online… yet
I AM HOPELESSLY LATE TO THE GAME ON THIS CONVERSATION BUT I HAVE BEEN WRITING THIS FIC IN MY HEAD FOR A YEAR. I don’t know how to feel about the fact that once again the internet has proved that there is no such thing as a truly original idea. I’m going with delighted because clearly you are my people.
I would definitely see that.
Although, I think LMM did not know what to do with Di (or Nan for that matter). I was always frustrated that we got no reaction from Di over Walter’s enlistment or death… The whole non-existent relationship between Rilla and her sisters is odd…
I love Rilla of Ingleside, but am always a bit taken aback by the declaration that Walter had written “the one great poem of the war”. Um, Siegfried Sassoon and Wilfred Owens want a word.
Especially since The Piper as it appears in The Blythes are Quoted is just… not a very good poem.
I haven’t read it. I’m not sure I dare.
It’s not even as if there weren’t many possible “great poems” to choose from! WW1 poetry is often a whole module in itself in English Literature. Calling The Piper the one great poem is discounting an awful lot of stuff.
My favourite of all L.M. Montgomery’s books! Happy to see so many others loved it, too.
Same!! My understanding of WWI is so deeply indebted to “Rilla.” I remember reading the scene where they talk about Daylight Savings Time, and realizing for the first time that Daylight Savings Time was something someone had invented, for a purpose.
Rilla was one of my favorites of the Anne books, although it was also the one where I realized that my politics and Anne’s were quite different, and that I might likely be a villain in an Anne book, much as I had loved her. The stock character of the pacifist is a fascinating historical artifact, as is the war reporting – a lot of the “facts” that Rilla and Susan and Anne rely on are simply inaccurate or untrue, and a lot of propaganda makes its way through unchallenged. I end up in a love/hate relationship with Rilla, but honestly, those books are the most fun to analyze and consider anyway.
Can we talk about women’s war books? Because Not so Quiet… by Helen Zenna Smith (about women ambulance drivers in France during WWI) is one of the best war books I’ve ever read, and it’s appalling that it is so hard to find and isn’t read alongside men’s war books.
Hello, hi, yes, I would like to discuss this too. I’ve added Not so Quiet… to my goodreads list, hopefully I can track down a copy.
I am always on the lookout for books about women pilots working during WWII like Gone to Soldiers by Marge Piercy or Code Name Verity and Rose Under Fire by Elizabeth Wein. There’s a pretty good book about a woman working in a bomb factory in Ontario called The Factory Voice by Jeanette Lynes. And one of my faves, Blackout and All Clear from Connie Willis. If women’s war books are a genre, it’s my favorite and I would like moar, please.
I just checked out Blackout a few days ago from the library, heard a lot of good things about it. Haven’t heard of the Piercy or Lyons books, will look into those. Try also Flygirl by Sherri L. Smith about an African-American woman who passes as white to become a pilot in WWII, and Mare’s War by Tanita Davis about women in the African-American contingent of the WAC. Both are young adult. There’s also The War-Workers by E.M. Delafield, about volunteers in the war office/canteens during WWI (I think one of her Diary of a Provincial Lady books is set in WWII).
Maybe too obvious – but Rebecca West’s Return of the Soldier is an absolute classic.
Not fiction, but Vera Brittain’s Testament of Youth is a must-read.
Thank you for writing this! Rilla was always my favourite of the Anne books and I’m always so sad that it’s basically unknown.
I’ve always had a very love/hate relationship with Canadian war literature (or at least, the Canadian war literature that’s still being given to children) because it’s so very “rah rah” about the whole thing- from Rilla to In Flanders Fields, there’s this persistent thread of “the greater good” and “the glorious dead” in the way the war’s taught to Canadian children, even know when we know that it was a huge bungled mess from beginning to end and didn’t actually accomplish anything except setting the stage for WWII. But for all that, Rilla is an extremely valuable book, if for nothing else than seeing the war through the eyes of women on the home front. I remember when I was a kid and read all the Anne books so much they fell apart, I didn’t go back to Rilla as much- not because I didn’t like it, but because reading it left me feeling so weary.
(THE FUCKING KITTEN THOUGH.)
DAMMIT. That is exactly the reason that I have trouble going back to Rilla, even though I could even tell as a kid that it was one of the best ones. What was LMM thinking??? I wondered at the time if she was just tired or something and not realizing how sick of a plot part that was.
ETA: I know, she grew up with barn cats, and even though she was a cat lover people had different relationships to their cats back then, but OUCH.
In one of LMM’s journals, she writes about hearing an unearthly shrieking noise, and later her younger son comes in and tells her that a boy in their neighbourhood sawed the head off his kitten just for kicks. And she was totally obsessed with one of her own cats (Lucky?) so yeah, the whole kitten-drowning thing is extremely weird.
I don’t know – apparently something like 80-90% of cats have to be neutered for the population to remain stable, so presumably cat overpopulation was a pretty major issue. You might have one or two cats you were sentimental about, but they’d have to be the exception, the same way people might have one pet pig or hen or something but still accept that the rest are going to be killed and eaten.
She also did drown kittens herself…
This is a great essay, but I can’t focus on it because WALTER. All the tears forever.
Yessssssss I have been making this argument for years! It’s so crazy — this novel about the Canadian home front just hiding at the end of the Anne series, being awesome. Also, the kitten, and Walter, and JEM’S DOG. And the baby in the soup tureen. This book, man.
Okay I love Rilla and her whole story arc but can I just put in a word for Susan, who is, as Gilbert says, “a brick.”
I love her. She is unflaggable. She refuses to admit that bad news is really bad news, amplifies good news a thousandfold, and chases Whiskers-on-the-Moon with a boiling hot pot of dye. She stands up in church and rallies everyone to give money with her impassioned speechifying. She gives up her status as Best Cook Ever because war rationing, and is still Best Cook Ever. She has that glorious scene when the war is over when she salutes the flag and is a symbol of all the untiring women who held down the fort at home. She isn’t even the stereotype of the woman who gave everything and never complained – she complains, she has feelings just like anyone, her heart is broken when Walter dies and Shirley signs up – but she keeps on, and makes another cake without sugar or eggs, and never stops being Susan bloody Baker.
Susan forever.
And she goes on a honeymoon of her own, because why should she be denied the joys of a honeymoon?
Oh my god I forgot about the honeymoon. That was the best. “Take a fortnight, Susan. That is the proper length for a honeymoon.” “A week will be quite sufficient.”
AMEN. I named my backup harddrives after Susan for years.
Late reply to this but SUSAN!
Doesn’t Susan also admit she needs reading glasses because of the war? I loved the scenes where she is Monday morning quarterbacking all the generals as she reads the paper. She (like so many women) had her world opened to politics, foreshadowing suffrage expansion.
Talking about how war novels are generally about men reminds me of Virginia Woolf’s quote in A Room of One’s Own:
“And since a novel has this correspondence to real life, its values are
to some extent those of real life. But it is obvious that the values of
women differ very often from the values which have been made by the
other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that
prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the
worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values
are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important
book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an
insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a
drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene
in a shop–everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value
persists.”
I’ve never read Rilla, but now I am excited to check it out. It would be nice if more books about war, but not necessarily the battlefield, were considered more important.
Yes to all of this. I came here for Dog Monday – just thinking about his daily train greetings and then the reunion has me in tears. IN TEARS.
I read all the Anne of Green Gables books as a child but somehow missed Rilla. I must rectify that immediately. Maybe I avoided it because of that foreshadowing of Walter’s death in (I think) Anne of Ingleside.
This is SO SO GOOD, sorry I’m just getting here now. I’ve never read Rilla so this is intriguing!
Also, betraying my America-centric ignorance: I hadn’t ever thought about WWI and WWII without the context of the draft. Really interesting about how non-enlisters were treated–definitely something I hadn’t considered before.
If anyone else would like to read more about the draft in Canada during the WWI, it was called the “Conscription Crisis” and you can read a decent intro to it on Wiki! http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Conscription_Crisis_…
I love this series so much! My mum read them as a girl, and passed them down; I didn’t care that they smelled musty or were raggedy, they were great stories. Reading this, I suppose its a weird series for an Australian to read, and Ill have to dig them up again to see just how much they influenced my view of history. Thanks for the reminder!
“Rilla of Ingleside is the only Canadian novel from the period about women’s experiences on the Canadian home front”
This seems completely ridiculous to me! Really?
Really! The Canadian home front is severely neglected in media (as is the home front for just about every country in World War One–it’s all about the battlefields), and women’s experiences even more so. There have been a few novels published since then, but Rilla is the only one that actually was written during the period.
Seeing a post about Rilla on the Toast was shocking. The secret world of my childhood and one of my favourite websites colliding together, ahhh! I LOVED this book as a child and reread it countless times, probably more than any of the other Anne books (challenged only by The Blue Castle as my favourite LMM novel). Other childhood favourites, like Harriet the Spy or The Mixed-Up Files of Mrs. Basil E. Frankweiler, are in the zeitgeist more, but I have never seen Rilla referenced in the internet circles I visit (or in real life for that matter). I’m sort of blown away that other humans know about it and that it doesn’t just exist in my own head. Like robotneedslove said, MY PEOPLE.
I agree entirely. Every LMM post on here makes me happy. As to your reference to Mixed Up Files, did you ever want to hide in the museum too?
Wait–there are people who -didn’t- want to hide in the museum? Bizarre.
Only those who haven’t read it, I assume.
That was exactly how I felt too! Even among other Anne-ophiles, Rilla never comes up.
Did anyone else get really deep into the LMM catalogue and read all those short story collections edited by Rea Wilmshurst? LMM repurposed a lot of her short stories as chapters in her novels, or vice versa, and I remember encountering that A LOT in Rilla. As I child I was annoyed that I’d already read these stories but also a bit fascinated by the differences between the two. Seeing different published versions of the same story felt like I was seeing something I wasn’t supposed to, that I was getting to peak under the hood of a story and the editing/writing choices that were made.
Reading the short stories was so strange but fascinating as a kid! So many of them got recycled elsewhere that I felt “cheated” somehow, and as I got older I was surprised by the casual racism that popped up much more frequently than in her novels. (Which I wonder if it came down to stricter editing controls in the end.)
This is why I love The Toast. What other website would write in-depth about the 8th book in a series? Rilla was the book in the Anne series that I returned to again and again. Growing up in the US, we never learned anything about the WWI Canadian homefront. I found it utterly fascinating. Thank you for this post!
I didn’t like “Rilla” much when I read the books as a kid, but I think it’s because of what you’re saying, that it was darker, and a war novel, and that was not what I wanted from those books then. I think I’m due for a re-read.
I’VE BEEN WAITING SO LONG FOR THIS TO BE POSTED
This was my favourite book in the series (and I’m a Maritimer so it’s like, my patriotic duty to be obsessed with this series). I still remember my mom reading me the book and crying so hard when Walter died that I had to read it to her instead.
I stopped reading Rilla and cried all night when Walter died, partly for him and partly for poor Una. I then proceeded to write in my head an epilogue in which Walter arrived at the train station one day, it was all a mistake, there was a Walter Blake who got confused for him, poor Walter Blake. And he and Una were happy and everything was cool THE END.
I was eleven and it was 1988, far too early for internet fanfiction. Last year I thought about Walter for the first time in a while and immediately spent the evening reading fanfics in which hey! he comes home and it’s all cool! and oh my god it was so satisfying.
I once stumbled upon a fanfic in which Walter meets a vampire at the front (the father of Edward from Twilight); the vampire turns him and Walter comes back from the war after all, just… a bit different.
Thanks for this! I’ve been fascinated by Montgomery’s depiction of the homefront as well. I did a presentation at a military history conference several years ago on her incorporation of the war into her post-war work, specifically returning soldiers and war widows, and how it was a reflection of her own life experience.
I read and re-read a lot of LMM books as a kid, but somehow never Rilla (probably my library didn’t have it). Adding it to my list!
Rereading this book this summer in light of the 100th anniversary of the commencement of WWI was so totally weird. A spate of nonfiction historical books have recently come out talking about how the people who let WWI happen were idiots, that the war was terrible and the cost too high. After the war, soldiers who were disillusioned and traumatized by their experiences confronted the patriotism of the home front, which Rilla faithfully chronicles, and from this absurdism, dadaism, and surrealism were born. Not to mention violent revolutions whose fallout we are still living with.
It just makes me wonder if LM Montgomery was the only darn person in the 20th century we still read who thought the war was a good idea.
I suppose I shouldn’t complain too much; women’s rights were advanced because of it. But I can’t get the pictures of mutilated men and the poems of Wilfred Owen out of my head.
I read “Rilla” this year for the first time (twice). What struck me as I was reading it was how much things have changed since then, and yet…not. Parts of it frightened me because she painted such a vivid picture of how quickly a mass disruptive event like a world war can happen and how such a thing can have brutal effects on those far from the fighting. It breaks my heart that I can’t get my half-Canadian daughter interested in the series at all because she “doesn’t like old-fashioned things.”
It’s not too late to tack a rant onto this thread, is it? Because HOW AWESOME WOULD IT HAVE BEEN IF THE BLOODY SEQUEL MOVIE HAD USED RILLA AS SOURCE MATERIAL INSTEAD OF KEVIN SULLIVAN’S TRAVESTY OF A PLOT! I can’t even think about the scene where Anne macguyvers her way out of a shed in France while disguised as a nun without wanting to BURN IT ALL DOWN! DAMN YOU, KEVIN!
I can’t even watch that movie! By doing that, he can’t even go back and make a movie for Rilla because he already used the plot for the wrong character. He did a great job until then. Oh well, we all make mistakes!
Yes, I haven’t even been able to reread it more than once because it makes me heave-sob. Especially because my little boy child reminds me so much of a tiny Walter. CAN’T COPE.
Because they’re her career after she gives up writing.
Thanks for this article. I read and loved the whole series when my roommate brought it home for me from the library when I had food poisoning a few years ago. Worth a re-read!
Oh god, I practically started hyperventilating when I saw this. I love love love the whole Anne of Green Gables series so much, but maybe especially Rilla. I was a lucky spoiled child and had two (!!) full sets of the series, which was fortunate because I read my books so much that the covers fell off. I’m so happy to see this on The Toast! I want to go back and reread the series, and I also want to have a child to share these with.
This is amazing. I’m so glad to know there are people besides me who read and re-read books like Rilla as a child. I did not love Anne, though I read those books multiple times too. I loved Rilla. I read ROI, no joke, at least 50 times. At least. I still have that battered paperback (lighthouse cover above). I went through a phase where I collected L.M. Montgomery books. I bought all her novels (20ish) then all the published short story collections at the time (10-12? the ones edited by Rea Wilmhurst mentioned above).
I can’t really explain what it was about Rilla. For years it was basically the only source of what little I knew about WWI. I memorized colorful turns of phrase like “[comment by Susan about Wilson], apostrophizing the unlucky president out of the kitchen window nearest the United States.” I just loved it, irrationally and wholly. I think I’ll have to reread it now.
Later I would realize I preferred the Emily books out of all Montgomery’s work, but Rilla is definitely the one I read the most. As a teenager I read Montgomery’s 3-volume journals (how did I even find those? Interlibrary loan?) and wrote a research paper about how her life affected her writing. There were passages she wrote in her journal that she would later just change slightly and drop into a story or novel. It was so fascinating to me. And her real life was sad and disappointing. It felt like her happy endings were built out of a combination of regret and longing and escapism; I always wondered if there was a childhood sweetheart she wished she had married instead, or maybe just wished had existed.
So, yeah, I think I’ll reread Rilla for the first time in a decade now. Thank you. 🙂
Yup. Not even a John for his father. Gilbert essentially doesn't have family.
The closest she came to ever fleshing then out was the Anne of Ingleside story where Nan thought she was that other girl.
I would definitely see that.
Although, I think LMM did not know what to do with Di (or Nan for that matter). I was always frustrated that we got no reaction from Di over Walter's enlistment or death… The whole non-existent relationship between Rilla and her sisters is odd…
She also did drown kittens herself…
RILLA RILLA RILLA <3
Wait, there’s an UNABRIDGED version? I MUST HAVE IT NOW.
I reread the Anne books at intervals, and Rilla jostles for position as my favorite of the series with Anne of Avonlea.
THE BLUE CASTLE FOREVER
I was so excited about the unabridged version of Rilla that I went directly to amazon…and I can’t figure out which one it is. Help!
This link gives details http://lmmonline.org/rilla-of-ingleside/2010-viki…
Enjoyable post – thank you for it.
Not to be nitpicky, but Rilla is *not* the only Canadian war novel that depicts the home front. Other women – quite a few – wrote about it too. Check out http://ww1.canada.com/home-front/womens-words-of-… for a sampling.
interesting blog on rilla of Ingleside. I enjoyed reading the book, its shows what it was like for women on the home front during WWI.
What I find interesting about rilla of Ingleside is the fact she adopted a war baby considering she didn’t like children, and raised the baby until his father came back. Also I found the dog Monday to be interesting, he waited for his owner to come back home at the railroad station. His waiting paid off for him.
This was my favourite book in the series (and I’m a Maritimer so it’s like, my patriotic duty to be obsessed with this series). I still remember my mom reading me the book and crying so hard when Walter died that I had to read it to her instead.