Despite Montgomery’s solemn oath in 1920 that she was finished with Anne, Rilla of Ingleside was not to be the last of the Anne books. In 1936, to satisfy ‘pleading publishers,’ Montgomery published Anne of Windy Poplars (called Anne of Windy Willows in Britain); and then in 1939 she filled in more gaps in Anne’s story with Anne of Ingleside, her last completed novel. Windy Poplars covers the three years, before Anne’s marriage, that she was principal of Summerside High School, and Ingleside deals with the early days of Anne’s children (before Rainbow Valley). Nor were these two the end of the Anne stories. Before her death Montgomery had prepared another manuscript she entitled The Blythes Are Quoted, dealing with the goings-on in Glen St Mary when Anne’s children were young, and grown. The original book was divided into two parts, each headed by a description of an evening in the Blythe house, and then filled with stories and poems about past and present events and people. This manuscript was never published as such, but eventually appeared in 1974 as a collection of short stories under the title The Road to Yesterday. Though the stories have been rearranged and the introductions removed, we can still read the book as an incomplete addition to the Anne series (Foreword). So, although Maud Montgomery thought herself to be finished with Anne in 1920, she revived her in the late 1930s when the 1934 talkie film of Anne of Green Gables opened up more markets for Anne books (Letters 177).
Montgomery confessed to MacMillan that she had had difficulty at first thinking she could get back into the Anne series to write Anne of Windy Poplars: ‘But after the plunge I began to find it possible – nay to enjoy it – as if I really had found my way back to those golden years before the world went mad’ (Letters 177). And in many ways she is successful in transporting the reader back, too, to Anne’s earlier, gingery days when she spoke up and got angry and meddled in other people’s lives. Still, Windy Poplars has serious drawbacks as a novel. In 1939 the RKO Company purchased the film rights for both Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne’s House of Dreams, and Montgomery commented to MacMillan with her usual honesty and shrewdness, pinpointing a central problem in the novel and, prophetically, describing what a 1980s film crew would later do with her work: ‘I can’t imagine how they’ll make a picture out of Windy Willows (“Poplars” in America) because it is just a series of disconnected stories strung together on the thread of Anne’s personality but no doubt they will inject a good deal of their own invention’ (Letters 195). How true! The novel is disjointed, eventually seeming more like a series of short stories or scenes than a coherent work. Perhaps even more interesting, however, is the second part of Montgomery’s observation. We may never know what the RKO Company did with the novel, but we have Anne of Green Gables, The Sequel, the smash-hit, made-for-television movie, by Kevin Sullivan Productions, which draws liberally from the novel and certainly ‘injects’ freely. Montgomery herself would probably have laughed to see the Summerside, P.E.I., setting of the novel switched to a Kingsport that evokes the stately homes of England translated to Ontario. ‘Grand’ is perhaps the right word for the setting of the movie version of the novel. But, irony and carping apart, it is interesting to speculate on the Sullivan Productions’ choice of material. Why, with the original Anne books available in their poetic and romantic narrative intensity, do we find the megabucks sequel to Anne of Green Gables drawing from one of the most disjointed of the Anne books – a work published sixteen years after the original series and clearly tailored to fill in the three-year gap in the original chronicles of Anne’s life?
One could argue that the Sullivan writers made a shrewd choice, recognizing, as Montgomery did, that the book was a series of stories that cried out for dramatization. And, interestingly, the Anne in this novel sounds more like a grown-up Anne Shirley of Green Gables days than the entertaining but obviously thoughtful and poised young woman of Anne of the Island. In going back to add to the series, Montgomery gave her recreated Anne some of the fire and ginger Anne had lost as she grew up in the imagination of a pre-war Montgomery. It is regrettable that an Anne who is most welcome in being like her old tempery self comes to us in a book that just never gets off the ground.
The trouble with Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside is that they are neither quite children’s books nor quite adult novels. Anne of Windy Poplars begins with a bold experiment: not only does Montgomery try to get back into the pre-war, pre-marriage days of Anne, but she uses first-person narration, something she had used only rarely before with Anne herself, though she had used it in Rilla of Ingleside with Rilla and extensively in the Emily series. The book opens with letters to Gilbert Blythe, a medical student at Redmond College, and for the first thirty pages or so we are reintroduced to Mrs Lynde (though she has very little to say) and introduced to the widows, Rebecca Dew, and the house Windy Poplars and its environs – all through Anne’s chatty letters to Gilbert. Most of the love passages are coyly deleted by an imaginary editor.
At first the tone seems just right; Anne sounds bubbly and intelligent and loving, and she gives us some comical sketches of Rebecca Dew and her new house that are worth reading. But the method palls. Part of the joy of the other Anne books is in a narrator who appreciates Anne but who puts her into context for us. With Anne doing all the talking – even though her voice sounds authentic – we miss Montgomery’s narrator’s irony, explanations, descriptions, and occasional incisive turns of phrase. Evidently Montgomery, too, found the epistolary method taxing; when she broke away from it, she used little of it in the remainder of the book. In the 116 pages of ‘Year One,’ 54 pages are letters and 62 are narrative; in ‘Year Two,’ 10 are letters and 62 narrative; in ‘Year Three,’ 8 are letters and 50 narrative. Unfortunately, the quality of the narrative parts does not necessarily improve as they take over. The novel seems more and more episodic as it progresses, until at the very end we are jerked unceremoniously from one story to another with very little of the transition and continuity the letters provided. Such episodes may be wonderful trove for a dramatist, but they make difficult reading for either an adult or a child who is expecting to find a novel with a story line.
Yet Montgomery is always a professional, and even with the crazy-quilt pattern of one short story hastily stitched onto another, we find narrative threads and colours that almost unify the whole. Each year has its theme, and each theme is worked out in the narrative passages of the story. In the first year we are introduced to the book’s three big concerns – the Pringles, Katherine Brooke, and Elizabeth Grayson – but we concentrate on only one, the Pringles. In the second year, Katherine is the focus, and in the third, Elizabeth. Montgomery fleshes out each of these main stories with anecdotes about the tower room where Anne lives or with Rebecca Dew’s sayings or with wisps of Green Gables doings. In each of the three sections, even in the first with its a fairly even split between letters and narrative, Montgomery gives us the really interesting interactions in third-person narration, not in Anne’s letters. And it is, even from this first year, the third-person portions of the story that the Sullivan Productions writers mined for their material.
The account of Anne’s triumph over the Pringles in the matter of the play about the life of Mary Queen of Scots, where the Pringles pulled out their Mary at the last minute and Anne surprised them all by having Sophie Sinclair trained in the part and ready to take over, is covered in a few quick paragraphs of the narrator’s summary of events (the Sullivan movie uses this as a key event). But the Pringle capitulation is given due space. The matriarch of the clan actually comes to Anne to surrender when she finds, in an old sea log Anne has discovered and loaned to them, that a Pringle patriarch and some of his crew survived shipwreck by eating one of their dead shipmates. The little scene is delightful drama in the style of the best of Montgomery’s writing, showing Anne in her innocent surprise and the clanswomen in their cynicism, pride, and forced humility – and in the wings comical Rebecca Dew is bursting with curiosity to know why Maplehurst has thus descended upon Windy Poplars.
‘Year Two’ has the very sentimental and in some ways touching story of the Tittle fellow,’ but its surprise ending of the long-lost, look-alike cousin, so popular in short stories of the turn of the century (we see a good sampling in Akin to Anne), is really out of place in this modern-sounding Anne. In the first part of the novel, despite the presence of Elizabeth and the triumph of Anne over the Pringles, the story is preoccupied with the comic perversities of the human spirit. This second year seems a parody of itself; its anecdotes deal with sentimental surprises and comic self-delusions, but its central story – the conversion of Katherine Brooke – is serious and seems undercut by the sentimental or comic excesses of the flanking pieces. The year, introduced with the ‘little fellow,’ is rounded off with Cousin Ernestine’s pointless grumbling and malapropisms and the long story of Hazel Marr’s crush on Anne and Anne’s well-meant but resented interference in immature Hazel’s love affair. Little Elizabeth’s magical visit to Green Gables actually ends the strangely assorted ‘Year Two.’
The middle of the second year is occupied by the story of Katherine Brooke, and with it Montgomery achieves one of those flashes of really impressive and powerful writing that makes us turn to this uneven novel with interest. Katherine has been presented in ‘Year One’ as a forbidding and somewhat repellent character. Students are afraid of her; adults despise her pride and cold manner. An excellent teacher, she has nothing else to recommend her, and she pushes Anne away, obviously hoping Anne will fail to beat the Pringles. In ‘Year Two’ Anne decides to trust her own instincts (one of the truly wonderful lessons Montgomery’s books continue to offer to girl readers), and she visits Katherine in her run-down boarding-house. Anne invites Katherine to Green Gables for Christmas, and the scene and its dialogue are realistic and moving. The bitter Katherine lashes out at Anne, and Anne’s temper flares – and the honesty of the two eventually leads them to mutual respect and liking later on. Here Katherine is everything Anne is not – a perverse, unattractive woman – and it is the intensity of Katherine’s bitterness and anger that makes her believable. It takes the Eden magic of Green Gables to effect Katherine’s transformation, and the story is impressive and persuasive because we see how Katherine – without Anne – would have continued her career of sourness and loneliness. Montgomery’s comic anecdotes may make us laugh at the foibles and perversities of the spirit, but Katherine’s story makes us see how easily and how often tragedy results from neglect.
It is interesting that while Leslie Moore is the romantic, dark counterpart for Anne in Montgomery’s visionary, romantic novel Anne’s House of Dreams, here in a reconstructed early world, a world informed in its recreation by Montgomery’s own sorrowful experiences of life, we find a counterpart for Anne of an entirely different kind from Leslie. Leslie’s tragedies are believable, but they also, like Leslie herself, have colour, passion, even romance. But Katherine’s life, devoid of romance, parallels Anne’s own in its early experiences of neglect, and Katherine has become a pinched, starved, morbid, spiteful woman with a life of discontent and narrowness facing her like a road without a bend. The obvious passion and romance of the 1917 character and story are missing from the 1936 book, and yet Green Gables is still a magical place, so imbued with home love and beauty that Katherine is transformed while visiting there. A romantic heroine such as Leslie may have no place in the recreated Anne world, but fairy-tale changes are still possible at Green Gables, even for unbeautiful princesses. In the early and the late books, Anne embodies the home spirit of Green Gables, the House of Dreams, and Ingleside, and her loving ‘eye’ helps thwarted passion and bitterness to heal themselves. In such different ways Montgomery continues to give the message that genuine romance involves the conscious self and a sense of belonging. (Perhaps, late in her career, Montgomery recognized it was now safe to say that marriage is not for everyone – though she hedges her bets by making Katherine seem at odds with the world.)
When Anne comes to Katherine’s room, Katherine is insulting. Anne begins with her accustomed exuberance, ‘Oh, Miss Brooke, look at that sunset,’ and Katherine responds, without moving to the window, ‘I’ve seen a good many sunsets,’ while thinking, ‘Condescending to me with your sunsets!’ (136). When Anne tells Katherine that she wants her to come home with her to Green Gables for Christmas, Katherine replies characteristically, ‘Oh, I see. A seasonable outburst of charity. I’m hardly a candidate for that yet, Miss Shirley.’ Anne loses her temper and crosses the room to look Katherine in the eye and say, ‘“Katherine Brooke, whether you know it or not, what you want is a good spanking.” They gazed at each other for a moment. “It must have relieved you to say that,” said Katherine. But somehow the insulting tone had gone out of her voice’ (137). When they do get to Green Gables, where Montgomery lavishes half of the book’s dozen nature descriptions, Katherine actually opens up. The crucial dialogue (again, one borrowed for the Sullivan production), is excellent drama. Katherine does not know about Anne’s early orphan life and believes that Anne cannot understand how slights and neglect can twist the soul. Montgomery very shrewdly does not try to reproduce Anne’s quick sketch of her early childhood misery; instead Montgomery leaves us to imagine what Anne says (a luxury television does not have) and provides Katherine’s response. The two women together suggest what the spirit can do when encouraged by love. Anne is obviously the rarer spirit because she blossomed even in the desert of foster home and orphanage; but Katherine, perhaps more like the rest of humanity, needs only understanding and encouragement in order to blossom, even yet. The core of Katherine’s story and the test of Montgomery’s handling of tension and emotion is found as the two women, on a snow-shoe ramble one night, stop to rest. Katherine’s tears surprise Anne, and Katherine lashes back,
‘Oh … you can’t understand! […] Things have always been made easy for you. You … you seem to live in a little enchanted circle of beauty and romance. “I wonder what delightful discovery I’ll make today,” … that seems to be your attitude to life, Anne … […] You seemed to have everything I hadn’t … charm … friendship … youth. Youth! I never had anything but starved youth. You know nothing about it. You don’t know … you haven’t the least idea what it is like not to be wanted by anyone … anyone!’
‘Oh, haven’t I?’ cried Anne. In a few poignant sentences she sketched her childhood before coming to Green Gables.
‘I wish I’d known that,’ said Katherine. ‘It would have made a difference. To me you seemed one of the favorites of fortune. I’ve been eating my heart out with envy of you. You got the position I wanted … oh, I know you’re better qualified than I am, but there it was. You’re pretty … at least you make people believe you’re pretty. My earliest recollection is of someone saying, “What an ugly child!”’ (142–3: the ellipses in square brackets are mine; the rest are Montgomery’s)
The scene and Katherine’s whole story in the novel escape sentimentality or sticky sweetness. Even a regenerated Katherine is still somewhat aloof. Montgomery’s loving descriptions of Green Gables scenery and her nostalgic reminders of Green Gables lore make Katherine’s transformation seem as much a part of Green Gables loving magic as a result of Anne’s tact and understanding. Katherine’s conversion is a believable and welcome story in the context of Anne’s love of home and home spirit.
But once Katherine is converted, we see very little of her – as is this novel’s way. ‘Year Three’ lurches from one anecdote to another, and since its central story concerns the uninspiring little Elizabeth, this third portion of the book would be weak indeed if some of the filler anecdotes were not interesting. (I recommend the Tomgallon episode as a good spoof.) Since Montgomery recognized the whole book as a series of episodes, perhaps she realized, too, how soon the epistolary parts of her novel pall. At the end of the story, when Rebecca Dew is too moved to say farewell to Anne in person, she writes her a letter. The letter is obviously patterned on one Rebecca found in her copy of the Book of Deportment and Etiquette, and Anne laughs, though she is touched. Perhaps Montgomery’s joke about Rebecca’s letter contains a little self-mockery as well – Anne’s letters to Gilbert have proved to be little more than convenient excuses for the narrator to interject with explanation and story. At least, however, the Anne depicted through the letters and the stitched-together short stories is an Anne we can recognize from Green Gables childhood.
Montgomery did not make the mistake of using first-person narration in Anne of Ingleside (1939). It, too, is episodic, but most of the episodes have to do with Anne’s children. Like Anne of Windy Poplars, Anne of Ingleside suffers from mixing two modes of writing – here the writing aimed at children sits uncomfortably beside the writing aimed at adults. Neither kind is so well done that it can appeal to both audiences at once. The reader of the novel may sometimes feel like Walter within the novel, who wants to hear other parts of the story, but does not. Walter listens to the racy gossip of the women quilters (Anne is not among them) and, when he later asks his mother to tell him about Peter Kirk’s funeral, which he has heard mentioned, she declines. Montgomery gives the story to us, however, and then has Anne say to herself at the end of what is meant to be Anne’s reminiscence – ‘But I think the story of what happened at Peter Kirk’s funeral is one which Walter must never know. It was certainly no story for children’ (195). If not, why is it here? To compliment her reader by saying that Walter may be too young to hear the story but the reader is not is not Montgomery’s usual way, nor does it really explain the inclusion of the anecdote. The novel sometimes seems at odds with itself.
Like Anne of Windy Poplars, this novel, too, insists sporadically on a very different quality of realism from the obviously idealized realism of the early Anne books. Jem has a bad temper and is even exasperatingly sulky. Walter’s persecution by the Parker children is convincing; Diana is deluded by two little girls, and Nan tricks herself into believing in a princess in the Gloomy House and then suffers disillusionment when a very prosaic woman appears. In part, the book is about the harshness of disillusionment. Yet, at the same time, this disillusionment seems always to be softened by the whole book’s attitude of ‘those were the good old days.’ Nostalgia marks the book’s opening and closing and suggests the rosy light Montgomery wanted to focus on the past as she entered again into a world as yet untouched by war. Realism and nostalgia compete throughout.
Montgomery’s reconstruction of Anne’s married pre-war days meant including ‘old’ characters from Avonlea and Four Winds. Writing about them may have made her long for many of the days themselves when she had originally created such people as Diana, Rachel Lynde, Marilla, and Leslie. Perhaps the writing of this late novel took Montgomery back to her own days on P.E.I., as well as to her sons’ childhood and the days when Frede Campbell was alive. The book seems to yearn backwards (it begins with Anne and Diana going on a picnic and reminiscing about the days of their girlhood). At the same time, this is the only book in which Gilbert plays a conspicuous, adult part, and it is certainly the only book in which Montgomery hints at the possibility of real problems between wife and husband.
On the whole, Anne of Ingleside keeps Anne in view. Even when the episodes are about the children, they almost always end with some (romanticized) reference to the wonder of ‘mother’ or mothering, and it is usually Anne who listens to them and smooths out the troubles or takes out the sting. We may get a little tired of this ‘mother dearwums’ writing, but we also have the occasional sardonic flash, ‘Mummy, is a widow really a woman whose dreams have come true?’ (133).
What makes this late novel more realistic or at least less idealized than much in the earlier series is the closing look at Anne’s brief unhappiness with her marriage. In the original series Anne and Gilbert, apart from the argument in Anne’s House of Dreams over Leslie’s being told about an operation for her ‘husband,’ never really quarrel or even talk at any length. By the time we read Rilla of Ingleside Anne is an echo or shadow and Gilbert is a disapproving grunt or a teasing question and little more. But in this book Anne and Gilbert do things together and are pictured as a couple. So much we could expect from a novel about family life. But at the end of the book Anne is distressed by Gilbert’s silence and absent mindedness, and she turns angry and resentful in a startlingly realistic way. She even comes to that most adult of realizations – that children are no replacement for adult love. This insight could not have belonged to the earlier books, where children and home are harmony itself (with occasional discordant notes to forestall monotony). It is as though a tinge of the despair of Montgomery’s own life and journals leaks into the otherwise nostalgic story. When Anne believes that Gilbert no longer loves her, she acknowledges privately that the children are not enough to live happily for: ‘ “There are the children, of course,” she thought dully. “I must go on living for them. And nobody must know … nobody. I will not be pitied”’ (242).
The dinner party with Anne and Gilbert and a widowed Christine Stuart is very good drama. Montgomery gives some of Anne’s and Christine’s thoughts in parentheses, and we recognize the scene as a duel for power between two privileged and successful women. (Power and success here mean attractiveness to males as well as status from enviable possessions.) Who takes precedence – a modestly dressed doctor’s wife with six children or a childless but wealthy widow? We know Christine doesn’t stand a chance, but Anne suffers keenly. Even if we are sorry to find in the book the unquestioning endorsement of sexual territorialism and competition inherent in the struggle between Anne and Christine, we will probably be intrigued to find the struggle so clearly and cleverly rendered. We sympathize with Anne and understand perfectly the culturally supported deception, the ‘sly politics of the ego’ as Bonnie Kreps calls it (80), that Anne later exercises when she and Gilbert have made up and he remarks on Christine’s malice: ‘“Christine was never very entertaining, but she’s a worse bore than ever. And malicious! She never used to be malicious.” “What did she say that was so malicious?” asked Anne innocently. “Didn’t you notice? Oh, I suppose you wouldn’t catch on … you’re so free from that sort of thing yourself”’ (244). Montgomery’s ‘innocently’ is wonderfully revealing of the politics and role playing within institutionalized romance (marriage). Anne’s pain and then her joy at finding out that Gilbert has been worried, not bored, are unlike anything we have been told before about their marriage. This later Montgomery acknowledges that a good marriage involves work and diplomacy and luck. This Anne has the gumption to resent mistreatment and the skill (alas, that she should need it) to hide her own self-preserving manoeuvrings. How far Anne has come since she smashed a slate over Gilbert’s head!
In the years between Rilla of Ingleside (1920) and Anne of Ingleside (1939) Montgomery had written about other heroines, had experimented with adult novels, and had changed with the times themselves to include more realistic and less idealized detail. Her strength was still with humour and irony, and she still created romantic descriptions of nature (though there are only a dozen in this novel). Her fondness for repetition and for images or symbols is not evident in this, her last completed book. Similarly, the use of literary allusions is far less obvious in both Anne of Windy Poplars and Anne of Ingleside than in any of the other Anne books except, perhaps, Anne of Green Gables itself. The allusions are there, but sometimes woven in with deliberate reticence, as though Montgomery is joking now only with those of her readers who can sort the references out for themselves. For example, when Anne has persuaded Katherine Brooke to let Anne fix her hair and choose her dress, the narrator invokes Genesis to comment laughingly on the creation of the world and the recreation of Katherine: ‘“Clothes are very important,” said Anne severely, as she braided and coiled. Then she looked at her work and saw that it was good’ (AWP 151). Similarly, the narrator makes an allusion to Tennyson’s Idylls of the King to characterize the girlish Nan’s starry-eyed rapture over the most unworthy Dovie: ‘Nan looked up to Dovie, who seemed to her to be almost grown up, with the adoration we needs must give the highest when we see it … or think we see it’ (AIn 157–8).1 Montgomery’s narrator always enjoys a good joke, but in the later books the reader may need to share background to catch the playfulness.
Nevertheless, even if the pace and tone in these later Anne books differ from those in the original series, we do find the familiar preoccupation with the individual’s search for and celebration of (a much romanticized) home. Anne looks for a home away from home in Summerside and finds the cheery tower room and Rebecca Dew; frequent reminders of Green Gables assure us that its hearth can furnish many others. And when Anne has left her little ‘house of dreams’ and has six children of her own at Ingleside, each of them discovers how wonderful it is to belong somewhere, to have understanding and loving adults as guardians, to explore for themselves how ‘good’ and ‘bad’ behaviour feel afterwards. Ironically, Anne herself is more alive and conspicuous in these late Anne novels than in several of the original Anne books. But whether we read of a fiery and vocal and manipulating Anne, or a dreamy and forgiving and virtually silent Anne, we experience Montgomery’s most enduring romance: love of place or beauty, together with the sense of a belonging and conscious self, can make heroines of us all.