April 2020 in Books: What I've Been Reading - An Anne of Green Gables Sequel

At the beginning of the coronavirus quarantine, I reread Anne of the Island, which is the third of the books in the Anne of Green Gables series. While Anne of Green Gables describes the advent to a farm on Prince Edward Island, in eastern Canada, of a young orphan girl with a vivid imagination and a precocious vocabulary, Anne of Avonlea follows amongst other things her training as a teacher after she graduates from school. Then, Anne of the Island describes her time at Redmond College, at a university town in Nova Scotia (if I remember correctly), publishing her writing, substitute-teaching at a village school, and navigating romance.

By Anne of the Island, Anne is mainstream and poised. She also seems rather mean from time to time, as she giggles over classmates whom she finds unsightly or ridiculous. But the author gives Ruby Gillis, a childhood classmate who falls ill in one of the many sicknesses that were rampant before the onset of proper health insurance in the mid-20th century, a rather soulful treatment. Pictured as a man-obsessed flirt earlier, she is handled with dignity in the end. But when I read this passage, which captures Anne's reflections about Ruby and about what constitutes a well-lived life, I do think the author might have been more consistent in her moral tone if she was going to set the threshold so high:

 It must not be with her as with poor butterfly Ruby. When she came to the end of one life it must not be to face the next with the shrinking terror of something wholly different -- something for which accustomed thought and ideal and aspiration had unfitted her. The little things of life, sweet and excellent in their place, must not be the things lived for; the highest must be sought and followed; the life of heaven must be begun here on earth.

Anyway, although the book is a 'pearl on a string' of the Anne of Green Gables series, rather than its own fleshed-out work with world-building, it has the spectrum of familiar Lucy Maud Montgomery touches.

The Green Gables farmhouse, c. 2006
A farm which Lucy Maud Montgomery's cousins owned.
via Wikimedia Commons, CC BY-SA 2.5 license

For one thing, she has a lot of local colour, secondly characters, and parochial pride. We read the exploits of adults whom Anne meets, as well as the exploits of the twins whom Anne's adoptive parent Marilla is taking care of. Regarding adults, there are in my view touches of disquieting condescension; Anne and her creator are both better-educated and those were class-conscious times.

For another thing, the vocabulary is expansive and Montgomery interweaves literary, but also biblical, references and phrases into her work. The biblical phrases help capture the way in which the Church towered over eastern Canadian society of her time, as most people attended church regularly, social functions and culture were also organized around it heavily, and the King James Bible and other versions were texts that people thought about and wrestled with on a daily basis. But Montgomery's turns of phrase are also generally memorable, and she has a poet's attunement to them.

Thirdly, the descriptions, e.g.:

"they rambled through the park on one of April's darling days of breeze and blue, when the harbour was creaming and shimmering beneath the pearl-hued mists floating over it."

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Quotations from:
Anne of the Island, by L.M. Montgomery (L.C. Page + Company, 1968)
Anne of the Island on the website of Carnegie Mellon University (Chapter IV: The Summons)