Beyond Selidor

Rilla of Ingleside
The Blythes are Quoted

The first Anne book I ever read was Anne of Ingleside (largely because it was the only one my mother had, although I did also possess an uncanny childish talent for starting at the wrong end of serieses, cf being handed a clutch of five Chalet books including School (#1) and starting instead with Redheads (#52), and although I did eventually go back and read the earlier ones in a more conventional fashion, I read Rilla relatively early and have always found it a favourite. At the beginning Rilla overhears a comment in the beginning about the years between 15 and 19 being the best in a girl’s life - which, as well as being a bit depressing in general, for Rilla, born with the century, means that these are the years of the Great War. Rilla goes through a lot during the book - adopting a war orphan, falling in love, losing a brother - and she does grow up, but Montgomery keeps her recognisable and believable to the last (lisp). But it's not just Rilla - Susan Baker, the Blythe family's housekeeper, has also resolved to be a heroine despite not being young and pretty, and she does achieve this (and gets a more satisfactory romance resolution into the bargain).

Montgomery started writing the book in 1919, and it does an excellent job of taking her established characters through the war, drawing on her own experience but always making it feel distinct to her fictional as well as the historical truths. It is fixed on the Canadian Home Front experience, rather than actually going to the Front (as Bruce and Turner do), and it is dense with detail. It is also dense with patriotism - the sole pacifist character is vilified - but I do think it is a more nuanced and examined treatment than in Bruce. Walter is genuinely reluctant to go to war, and it is not all jovial banter in the trenches (hence Susan needing to add a nit comb to her sewn-up package to Jem) or steadfast heroines at home - it is clear how much those at home cannot ever forget the dangers. Montgomery was a fervent supporter of the war effort in the early years, with her diaries showing how deeply she felt every piece of news, but this shifted - her husband, a Presbyterian minister, actually had a breakdown over having encouraged the young men of his congregation to sign up and die or be horribly scarred.

The Blythes are Quoted was only published in full in 2009, but it was delivered to Montgomery’s publishers on the day of her death (quite likely a suicide) in 1942. It reworks a clutch of short stories published elsewhere in order to add Blythe references, and strings them together with snippets of the family, as well as poems allegedly written by either Anne or Walter and read out lout to everyone. It is bitter and bleak about both wars, the past and the one it’s written during, and Anne ends up saying that she is thankful that Walter did not come back, and that his sacrifice was futile. It features Walter’s war poem, The Piper, (which in addition to being anodyne and simplistic, does not include the “break faith” bits quoted in Rilla), but concludes with a poem apparently written by Walter the night before he died, from the pov of a soldier who has just joyfully killed an enemy “boy”.

Montgomery herself was terrified that her younger son would be conscripted (the older was rejected for poor eyesight) and die in the war; he did serve, in the Navy, but survived. The Blythes are Quoted is an odd book, in both its structure and its preoccupations, but I think it’s interesting that Montgomery returned to her old characters to work though her concerns. She’d published Anne of Ingleside in 1939 - a domestic, cosy book, with a far more secure Anne (and an alive, if foreshadowed, Walter), but one of the things that’s always struck me about that book is an interchange between Anne and one of her young daughters with a new obsessive friendship, who demands whether Anne knows what it’s like to be hungry, really hungry. Anne replies that she was, often, in the orphanage before she came to Green Gables, and that she doesn’t like to think of those days now. But Montgomery hasn’t let Anne - or herself - forget them, and maybe that’s why she tried to use them as a shield or a warning for the war horrors closing around her.