The Books: Rainbow Valley (L.M. Montgomery)

Daily Book Excerpt: YA/children’s books:

516SFWR8E7L._AA240_.jpgNext book on the shelf is Rainbow Valley (Anne of Green Gables, No. 7) by L.M. Montgomery.

Published in 1919 – this is the second book about Anne’s 6 children … and the spectre of World War I slowly approaches. Lucy Maud is writing it during the war – and although the book takes place prior to World War I, the shadow hangs over it. It is as though she realizes (as the whole world realizes) that the old world has died away. Welcome to the 20th century. Modern warfare. A carnage unlike anything humanity had ever experienced. Technology. All that. Rainbow Valley is her last “Anne” book to take place PRIOR to all of that, to the horrible awakening. And Lucy Maud manages to convey the consciousness of that old world, and its fragility, and the fact that it doesn’t have long to live, in her prose. She has a way of letting us know what is coming. Listen to the second to the last paragraph:

He stood up on a hillock, tall and splendid, with his open brow and his fearless eyes. There were thousands like him all over the land of the maple.

There’s the whole thing in the book about responding to the ‘call of the Piper’. In the innocent world of the book, it just means – approaching adulthood, facing the unknown – who is ready to heed the call of the Piper? But Lucy Maud manages to suggest a more ominous meaning. The call of the Piper is actually (although no one knows it yet) war.

Nobody knows that war is coming, that it will wrench their worlds apart, that all the boys who we now know as cute little guys with fishing poles will be going off to Europe to the trenches. That the womenfolk (who are all now still little girls with pinafores) will have thier hearts dragged along behind them, living the war in every agonizing breath. None of that is here yet – but you can feel it. In the way Lucy Maud writes. Somehow, it’s melancholy. Even though the whole book is a funny heartwarming book about a rowdy group of kids playing in their favorite spot, Rainbow Valley … the overall impression left from the book is almost one of a keening sadness. Did anyone else pick up on this? It’s not sentimental, or overt … Lucy Maud is just writing about a world that no longer exists and she is grieving it. Grieving for what this young generation will have to go through. Grieving for the lost innocence of her country. I really feel that in Rainbow Valley.

So we have Anne and Gilbert’s kids – 6 of them. They’re lovely kids, individuals, each distinct and separate from the other. The Blythes live next door to the old dusty manse where the widowed minister lives with HIS brood of kids. The minister (Rev. Meredith) is a lovely man, a wonderful minister, and he LOVES his children – but he kind of sucks as a father. He lets them run wild. He has no idea what they are doing, where they are going. The kids dress themselves (sometimes to disastrous results) – they sit and sing in the graveyard (causing huge scandals in the town) – they run WILD. They are a huge scandal. They are very mch loved by everyone, because they are kind-hearted sweet smart kids – but they are just insanely mischievous. They are always daring each other to do stuff, to disastrous results. Oh – and they are totally aware that their father is basically in a prolonged state of mourning for their mother – and so they are very very sensitive about anything that will hurt him. So if they get in trouble, because someone in the town “told” on them, and their father tells them how disappointed he is in them … then they realize that they must “do penance” and punish themselves for hurting their father yet again. These “penances” usually cause even more trouble than the original mischief.

But you just love these kids. Especially Faith Meredith. Fatih Meredith, the oldest girl in that family, a golden-haired red-cheeked MANIAC, is one of Lucy Maud’s great child creations. I was disappointed to see her fade into the distance in the next book (she goes to Europe with the Red Cross, I believe). I think Faith could have had her own book as an adult – it would have been really interesting to see who she would have become. She’s gorgeous, she’s wild, she has a fiery temper, she has a good sense of right and wrong – but she’s just WILD. There’s one episode where she rides a pig through the middle of the town on a dare – and i swear, every time I read that episode tears of laughter fall down my face. I don’t know why it strikes me so funny – maybe because of Lucy Maud’s description of the terrified pig … of the scandalized townspeople watching Faith gallop by ON A PIG … It’s just hilarious to me.

There are side plots. Mary Vance – the white-haired orphan girl who Miss Cornelia eventually adopts after she is basically camping out at the manse for weeks, after running away. Now SHE is a trouble-maker. Big-time. Also – eventually – Rev. Meredith starts to court someone again (in his own dreamy abstracted way) and the Meredith kids are terrified (even though they love Rosemary) because Mary Vance told them that all stepmothers are evil, even if they started OUT nice.

The excerpt I chose is a small one. It always makes me laugh. It is ridiculous – but it’s an example, i think, of why Mark Twain loved her writing. She gets into childhood like almost no other author (except for maybe Twain himself., And Dickens. But let’s just say: very few authors really GET IT.) She does. This episode is SO FUNNY to read, but so tragic to the little 6 year old girl involved.


Excerpt from Rainbow Valley (Anne of Green Gables, No. 7) by L.M. Montgomery.

Rilla Blythe walked proudly, and perhaps a little primly, through the main ‘street’ of the Glen and up the manse hill, carefully carrying a small basketful of early strawberries, which Susan had coaxed into lusciousness in one of the sunny nooks of Ingleside. Susan had charged Rilla to give the basket to nobody except Aunt Martha or Mr. Meredith, and Rilla, very proud of being entrusted with such an errand, was resolved to carry out her instructions to the letter.

Susan had dressed her daintily in a white, starched and embroidered dress, with sash of blue and beaded slippers. Her long ruddy curls were sleek and round, and Susan had let her put on her best hat, out of compliment to the manse. It was a somewhat elaborate affair, wherein Susan’s taste had more to say than Anne’s, and Rilla’s small soul gloried in its splendours of silk and lace and flowers. She was very conscious of her hat, and I am afraid she strutted up the manse hill. The strut, or the hat, or both, got on the nerves of Mary Vance, who was swinging on the lawn gate. Mary’s temper was somewhat ruffled just then, into the bargain. Aunt Martha had refused to let her peel the potatoes and had ordered her out of the kitchen.

“Yah! You’ll bring the potatoes to the table with strips of skin hanging to them and half boiled as usual! My, but it’ll be nice to go to your funeral,” shrieked Mary. She went out of the kitchen, giving the door such a bang that even Aunt Martha heard it, and Mr. Meredith in his study felt the vibration and thought absently that there must have been a slight earthquake shock. Then he went on with his sermon.

Mary slipped from the gate and confronted the spick-and-span damsel of Ingleside.

“What you got there?” she demanded, trying to take the basket.

Rilla resisted. “It’th for Mithter Meredith,” she lisped.

“Give it to me. I’ll give it to him,” said Mary.

“No. Thuthan thaid I wathn’t to give it to anybody but Mithter Mer’dith or Aunt Martha,” insisted Rilla.

Mary eyed her sourly.

“You think you’re something, don’t you, all dressed up like a doll! Look at me. My dress is all rags and I don’t care! I’d rather be ragged than a doll baby. Go home and tell them to put you in a glass case. Look at me — look at me — look at me!”

Mary executed a wild dance around the dismayed and bewildered Rilla, flirting her ragged skirt and vociferating “Look at me — look at me” until poor Rilla was dizzy. But as the latter tried to edge away towards the gate Mary pounced on her again.

“You give me that basket,” she ordered with a grimace. Mary was past mistress in the art of “making faces”. She could give her countenance a most grotesque and unearthly appearacne out of which her strange, brilliant, white eyes gleamed with weird effect.

“I won’t,” gasped Rilla, frightened but staunch. “You let me go, Mary Vanth.”

Mary let go for a minute and looked around her. Just inside the gate was a small “flake”, on which half a dozen large codfish were drying. One of Mr. Meredith’s parishioners had presented him with them one day, perhaps in lieu of the subscription he was supposed to pay to the stipend and never did. Mr. Meredith had thanked him and then forgotten all about the fish, which would have promptly spoiled had not the indefatigable Mary prepared them for drying and rigged up the “flake” herself on which to dry them.

Mary had a diabolocial inspiration. She flew to the “flake” and seized the largest fish there – a huge, flat thing, nearly as big as herself. With a whoop she swooped down on the terrified Rilla, brandishing her weird missile. Rilla’s courage gave way. To be lambasted with a dried codfish was such an unheard-of thing that Rilla could not face it. With a shriek she dropped her basket and fled. The beautiful berries, which Susan had so tenderly selected for the minister, rolled in a rosy torrent over the dusty road and were trodden on by the flying feet of pursuer and pursued. The basket and contents were no longer in Mary’s mind. She thought only of the delight of giving Rilla Blythe the scare of her life. She would teach her to come giving herself airs because of her fine clothes.

Rilla flew down the hill and along the street. Terror lent wings to her feet, and she just managed to keep ahead of Mary, who was somewhat hampered by her own laughter, but who had breath enough to give occasional blood-curdling whoops as she ran, flourishing her codfish in the air. Through the Glen street they swept, while everybody ran to the windows and gates to see them. Mary felt she was making a tremendous sensation and enjoyed it. Rilla, blind with terror and spent of breath, felt that she could run no longer. In another instant that terrible girl would be on her with the codfish. At this point the poor mite stumbled and fell into the mud-puddle at the end of the street just as Miss Cornelia came out of Carter Flagg’s store.

Miss Cornelia took the whole situation in at a glance. So did Mary. The latter stopped short in her mid career and before Miss Cornelia could speak she had whirled around and was running up as fast as she had run down. Miss Cornelia’s lips tightened ominously, but she knew it was no use to think of chasing her. So she picked up poor, sobbing, dishevelled Rilla instead and took her home. Rilla was heart-broken. Her dress and slippers and hat were ruined and her six year old pride had received terrible bruises.

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3 Responses to The Books: Rainbow Valley (L.M. Montgomery)

  1. Elizabeth says:

    How do I hate Rilla, let me count the ways! All through this book and the next one I keep wanting to just smack her.

    Una Meredith was my favorite. I also want to whup Walter upside the head – why doesn’t he see how wonderful Una is?

  2. red says:

    Yeah, poor Una. I love Una.

    SPOILER ALERT FOR ANYONE WHO GIVES A CRAP AND MIGHT READ THIS BOOK:

    I think Lucy Maud felt that Walter needed to be relatively sexless. Because of his sacrifice – it’s like he always knew what was going to happen to him. He was always kind of otherworldly, not attached to this plane of existence.

    Frustrating, yes.

    My favorite was Faith. She’s the earthiest of them all.

  3. Harriet says:

    Rilla’s a spoiled little girl, but I love her dearly. And I love watching her grow up throughout the next book. She really does mature remarkably. But Walter is and always will be my favorite.

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