Rilla of Ingleside is L.M. Montgomery’s twelfth book, published in fall 1921 by McClelland and Stewart (Toronto) and 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).
Rilla of Ingleside is one of the only contemporary fictional accounts of the experiences of women and young people at the Canadian home front during the First World War. Montgomery began writing the book within months of the war’s end in November 1918 and the death of her 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 she would later revisit.
Montgomery vowed after completing Rilla of Ingleside 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, she wrote three more books to fill in gaps in the overall chronology: Anne of Windy Poplars (1936), Anne of Ingleside (1939), and The Blythes Are Quoted (2009).
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. It contains the full text of Virna Sheard’s poem “The Young Knights,” which Montgomery excerpted as her epigraph.
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
I. Glen “Notes” and Other Matters
II. Dew of Morning
III. Moonlit Mirth
IV. The Piper Pipes
V. “The Sound of a Going”
VI. Susan, Rilla, and Dog Monday Make a Resolution
VII. A War Baby and a Soup Tureen
VIII. Rilla Decides
IX. Doc Has a Misadventure
X. The Troubles of Rilla
XI. Dark and Bright
XII. In the Days of Langemarck
XIII. A Slice of Humble Pie
XIV. The Valley of Decision
XV. Until the Day Break
XVI. Realism and Romance
XVII. The Weeks Wear By
XVIII. A War Wedding
XIX. “They Shall Not Pass”
XX. Norman Douglas Speaks Out in Meeting
XXI. “Love Affairs Are Horrible”
XXII. Little Dog Monday Knows
XXIII. “And So, Goodnight”
XXIV. Mary Is Just in Time
XXV. Shirley Goes
XXVI. Susan Has a Proposal of Marriage
XXVII. Waiting
XXVIII. Black Sunday
XXIX. “Wounded and Missing”
XXX. The Turning of the Tide
XXXI. Mrs. Matilda Pitman
XXXII. Word from Jem
XXXIII. Victory!!
XXXIV. Mr. Hyde Goes to His Own Place and Susan Takes a Honeymoon
XXXV. “Rilla-My-Rilla!”
Reviews of Rilla of Ingleside (30)
Trenton (NJ) Times-Advertiser, 4 September 1921, Part 1, 5 (“An Agreeable Romance”). The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 225.
New York Times Book Review and Magazine, 11 September 1921, 23. Scrapbook of Reviews, 179. Children’s Literature Review, edited by Gerard J. Senick (Detroit: Gale, 1985), 8: 138 (excerpted). The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 225–26 (as “[A Captivating, Sunny Story]”).
New York Tribune, 11 September 1921, Part 5, 9 (“An Island Heroine”). Scrapbook of Reviews, 182–83. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 226–27.
Post Express (Rochester), 14 September 1921, 10. Scrapbook of Reviews, 179. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 227–28 (as “[Perhaps Her Best Story]”).
Brooklyn Daily Eagle, 24 September 1921 (“Daughter of ‘Anne of Green Gables’”). Scrapbook of Reviews, 184.
Wisconsin Library Bulletin (Madison), October 1921, 157. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 229 (as “[No Unpleasant Details]”).
Globe (Toronto), 1 October 1921, 19. Scrapbook of Reviews, 183–84. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 229–30 (as “[A Faithful and Worthy Picture]”).
San Francisco Bulletin, 1 October 1921. Scrapbook of Reviews, 179. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 230 (as “[Not Too Much of the War]”).
The Family Herald and Weekly Star (Montreal), 5 October 1921, 17 (“By the Author of Anne of Green Gables”). Scrapbook of Reviews, 184. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 231.
Bookseller and Stationer (New York), 15 October 1921, 24. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 231 (as “[Wholesome Fiction for Young People]”).
Winnipeg Evening Tribune, 15 October 1921, 39.
Boston Evening Transcript, 21 October 1921. Scrapbook of Reviews, 186. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 231–32 (as “[Deserves to Be Successful]”).
Idaho Daily Statesman (Boise), 23 October 1921, 4 (F.W.T.).
Boston Herald, 5 November 1921, 8 (John Clair Minot, “The Charming Daughter of Anne of Green Gables”). The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 232–33.
The Publishers’ Weekly (New York), 5 November 1921, 70. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 233 (as “[Rilla and Her Destiny]”).
Saturday Night (Toronto), 5 November 1921, 8–9. Scrapbook of Reviews, 190. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 233–34 (as “[May Be Read by Others Than Girls]”).
Fort Worth Star-Telegram, 6 November 1921, 9. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 234 (as “[Clean and Wholesome Romance]”).
St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 12 November 1921. Scrapbook of Reviews, 188.
Bookseller and Stationer (New York), 15 November 1921, 56. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 235 (as “[An American Girl at Home in War Time]”).
Chicago Daily Tribune, 20 November 1921, G1 (Fanny Butcher, “Now Anne’s Daughter Rilla”). Scrapbook of Reviews, 187. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 235.
The Canadian Bookman (Gardenvale, QC), December 1921, 20 (“Our Woman Novelists Are Busy”). Scrapbook of Reviews, 192. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 235 (excerpted as “[A Canadian Girl in Love]”).
Farmers’ Magazine (Toronto), 1 December 1921, 28. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 235–36 (as “[Perhaps the Best Yet]”).
Manitoba Free Press (Winnipeg), 3 December 1921, Christmas Books Section, 2. Scrapbook of Reviews, 194. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 236 (as “[Useful to Historians]”).
The Scotsman (Edinburgh), 3 December 1921, 13. Scrapbook of Reviews, 197. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 236 (as “[Domestic Canada during the War]”).
Western Mail (Perth, Australia), 15 December 1921, 39. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 237 (as “[A Wondrous Amount of Sentiment]”).
Punch, or the London Charivari (London), 21 December 1921, 499. Scrapbook of Reviews, 196. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 237 (as “[Quite Convincingly Idyllic]”).
Idaho Daily Statesman (Boise), 27 December 1921, 6 (F.W.T.). The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 238 (as “[A Lesson for Every Family]”).
Sunday School Chronicle (London), 29 December 1921. Scrapbook of Reviews, 185. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 238–39 (as “[A Distinction of an Outstanding Kind]”).
Queenslander (Brisbane, Australia), 14 January 1922, 3. The L.M. Montgomery Reader, 3: 239 (as “[Rilla the Empire-Builder]”).
The Christian Endeavor World (Boston), 18 May 1922, 652.
Published on 2 August 2008; last updated on 29 March 2024. Please contact the site owner with additions, corrections, questions, and suggestions.