This new edition of Rilla of Ingleside includes the tag “A new, unabridged and fully restored edition” on the cover. What does this mean?
In the 1970s, a reprint edition of Rilla of Ingleside silently cut 4,500 words, or 4% of the original text (to put it another way, that’s 14 pages of text that are missing). That edition was reprinted by Bantam-Seal in the 1980s and remains in print today. This new edition restores the full text of the original edition, published in 1921.
What types of material were cut?
There doesn’t seem to be a clear pattern of deletions: some pertain simply to adverbs that are no longer in general use (verily, ignominiously), whereas others involve entire scenes that have been excised. Most of the cuts occur in the first half of the book, which indicates that the abridgment was done primarily for length. Most of the cuts seem fairly arbitrary, and they don’t point to a decision to eliminate “adult” or controversial material that someone would deem unsuitable for children (not that Montgomery is a children’s writer per se). One example would be the scene in which Anne finds her first grey hair. Omitted from the Seal edition are several paragraphs in which Anne reminisces about the episode in which she bought a bottle of hair dye from a “German Jew pedlar,” followed by Susan’s anti-German (but not anti-Semitic) response.
What else is included in this new edition?
We include a bonus section called “Canadian Women’s Poetry of the First World War,” which contains the full text of two rarely seen poems that, like the novel, focus on the women at home who watched husbands, sons, brothers, friends, and neighbours go off to fight overseas. L.M. Montgomery’s poem “Our Women” was first published in an anthology of poems called Canadian Poems of the Great War (1918). Also in this book is a poem called “The Young Knights” by Montgomery’s Ontario contemporary, Virna Sheard, whose work is virtually unknown today: Montgomery selected the first stanza of Sheard’s poem as her epigraph to Rilla of Ingleside: “Now they remain to us forever young / Who with such splendour gave their youth away.”
Because Montgomery published her novel about the war within three years of the war’s end, she assumes that her 1921 readers will recognize the customs, events, politics, history, people, and locations that she mentions in her book. Because a lot of those details are less known to readers today, we provide some of this background information both before and after the text of the novel. Our introduction discusses Montgomery’s own experience in the First World War as a minister’s wife in rural Ontario, the ways she attempted to find meaning in the war and the sacrifices that it entailed, and how she used her already popular Anne characters as a platform for her war message. A short section entitled “The Origins of the First World War” provides readers with a snapshot of the complex set of treaties that prompted the assassination of Archduke Franz Ferdinand and his wife into a world war. We also include maps of Europe and of the Western Front so that readers can visualize the locations of events mentioned throughout the novel.
The glossary included at the end of the book includes over 330 entries: literary allusions to the work of nineteenth-century poets and the Judeo-Christian Bible; terms such as “fruitatives,” “ANZACs,” “Banshee,” “battalion runner,” “Black Sunday,” and “cootie sarks”; events such as the Battles of Aisne, Cambrai, Caporetto, Courcelette, Marne, and New Chapelle, and the Canadian election of 1917; and public figures such as Herbert Asquith, Sir Robert Borden, Sir Julian Byng, Constantine of Greece, Nicholas II, Sir Samuel Hughes, and Woodrow Wilson.
Have a question about this edition? Contact the editors.
See also the exclusive interview with Benjamin Lefebvre on the editing of The Blythes Are Quoted, the new edition of Rilla of Ingleside, and his ongoing interest in L.M. Montgomery’s legacy.
