Rilla of Ingleside is L.M. Montgomery’s twelfth book, first published in Fall 1921 by McClelland and Stewart (Toronto) and the Frederick A. Stokes Company (New York). It is the eighth of eleven books to feature Montgomery’s protagonist Anne Shirley Blythe, preceded by Anne of Green Gables (1908), Anne of Avonlea (1909), Chronicles of Avonlea (1912), Anne of the Island (1915), Anne’s House of Dreams (1917), Rainbow Valley (1919), and Further Chronicles of Avonlea (1920). It was followed by the first book about a new protagonist, Emily of New Moon (1923). After completing Rilla of Ingleside Montgomery vowed that this would be the last of the Anne books, but fifteen years later, partly due to the financial success of the 1934 film based on Anne of Green Gables, Montgomery wrote three additional books to fill in gaps in the overall chronology: Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), Anne of Ingleside (1939), and The Blythes Are Quoted (2009).
Rilla of Ingleside is one of the only contemporary fictional accounts of the experiences of women and children at the Canadian home front during the First World War. It was begun within months of the war’s end in November 1918 and the death of Montgomery’s first cousin and closest friend, Frederica Campbell McFarlane, to whose memory the book is dedicated. It reflects the conviction felt by Montgomery and many of her contemporaries that a new, utopian world would emerge out of the ashes of war—a sentiment that Montgomery would revisit in her final book, The Blythes Are Quoted.
A later reprint of Rilla of Ingleside silently abridged the text by 4,500 words, and it is this text that has been available to North American readers since the 1980s. A restored, unabridged, and annotated edition, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre and Andrea McKenzie, was published by Viking Canada in October 2010.
epigraph
“Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendour gave their / youth away.” —Sheard
dedication
“To the memory of Frederica Campbell MacFarlane who went away from me when the dawn broke on January 25th, 1919—a true friend, a rare personality, a loyal and courageous soul”
Contents
1. Glen “Notes” and Other Matters
2. Dew of Morning
3. Moonlit Mirth
4. The Piper Pipes
5. “The Sound of a Going”
6. Susan, Rilla, and Dog Monday Make a Resolution
7. A War-Baby and a Soup Tureen
8. Rilla Decides
9. Doc Has a Misadventure
10. The Troubles of Rilla
11. Dark and Bright
12. In the Days of Langemarck
13. A Slice of Humble Pie
14. The Valley of Decision
15. Until the Day Break
16. Realism and Romance
17. The Weeks Wear By
18. A War-Wedding
19. “They Shall Not Pass”
20. Norman Douglas Speaks Out in Meeting
21. “Love Affairs are Horrible”
22. Little Dog Monday Knows
23. “And So, Goodnight”
24. Mary Is Just in Time
25. Shirley Goes
26. Susan Has a Proposal of Marriage
27. Waiting
28. Black Sunday
29. “Wounded and Missing”
30. The Turning of the Tide
31. Mrs. Matilda Pitman
32. Word from Jem
33. Victory!
34. Mr. Hyde Goes to His Own Place and Susan Takes a Honeymoon
35. “Rilla-my-Rilla!”
Links
L.M. Montgomery’s Personal Scrapbooks and Book Covers: Rilla of Ingleside