I decided to read this book as an eBook. The University of Adelaide has a great archive of books which are out of print or out of copyright.
This was the last in the Challenge for me to read, and I was disappointed with it. It is an account of a two week boating holiday from port of Kingston to Oxford and back to Kingston. It was published in 1889, and authored by Jerome K Jerome. This was the main book of Jerome which was greatly popular. The royalties from it kept Jerome comfortable financially indefinitely. The book has inspired film versions over decades. Notwithstanding this, for me the characterisations, including of Montmorency the dog were shallow and two-dimensional; for me, the humour was stilted, repetitious of theme, and mild. On the positive side, there were some travel descriptions of villages as they navigated the Thames.
I think that the version which I read had only a few of A. Frederics illustrations. I see there were 67 in the copy available on Amazon.
This book has really stood the test of time, and many reviewers have enjoyed it. Seems it just wasn’t for me; and joins the only other book this Challenge that I did not like, The Grand Sophy by Georgette Heyer.
This might be my favourite book read for this challenge. In the Australian idiom, a shiralee is a swag or a burden. Macauley was a swagman who walked around the backroads of western New South Wales, who suddenly found himself encumbered with his small four year old daughter on the road. She started out as his Shiralee, but became much more. The author of the book, D’Arcy Niland, grew up in Glen Innes, in NSW. His father was a cooper and wool classer. Following a brief stint as a reporter, the Great Depression saw D’Arcy travelling the countryside turning his hand to a variety of jobs: farm labourer, opal miner, circus hand, potato digger, and shearing shed rouseabout. Niland had an intimate knowledge of the lifestyle that Macauley, too, led.
Ruth Park and D’Arcy Niland working together.
Later, when Niland married renowned author Ruth Park, they travelled over many parts of western NSW, too. They had 5 children. Their youngest, twins, Deborah and Kilmeny Niland wrote and illustrated children’s book. I loved Mulga Bill’s Bicycle, and When the Wind Changed, with my own children.
D’Arcy Niland died tragically young at 49 from a heart conditions. His wife wrote two books which were autobiographical of her childhood in New Zealand their lives together respectively: A Fence around the Cookoo (1992); and Fishing in the Styx (1993).
Some of the towns and place names mentioned in the book are: Coonamble; the banks of the Castlereagh; Gilgandra; Dunedoo; Guyra; Dorrigo; Ulmarra; Collarenabri; ”walking across the Gallatherha Plains in the black soil country; Walgett; Potaroo, Moree; the Barwon (river); the Murrumbidgee (river).
A lot of the idiom and thinking used by Macauley is iconically Australian. For example:
No rain at the right time, too much at the wrong. Macauley forced the door shut. He ate a meal out of a tin with bread and butter. He drank the lukewarm tea. He made up his bed and lay on it. He wished the tick were filled with gumleaves. There was nothing better. Straw had a stink, and it broke up and the fluff irritated your nose.
There was a notice on the wall from last year; it was scribbled in pencil and headed up: Craphouse Duties. It gave a list of men’s names and their rostered days. It ended up with the injunction in snaggled capitals: Kangarooing it Not Allowed. And in smaller letters: Remember others have to sit where you shat. The notice was signed by the shearers’ rep. Chalked on a weatherboard slab at the far end of the room was an inscription: Fang Davis shore here in ’37. Underneath it was a postscript added by some other hand: Yes, the moaning bastard.
he was surprised that the old man, too, had seen Buster as a burden to him: a swag to be taken, and often carried, wherever he went.
all she had to do was keep an eye on the billycan and tell them when it was boiling.
This was the man Macauley wanted, this hit-run driver, the dingo of the highway.
From her I found this out: to live is not easy and often by the time a man has learnt how to live his life is over. She had a home with me. It wasn’t much, but she didn’t grumble. She put the hobbles on me. She had a rope round my neck and she wouldn’t let go. I didn’t have to be frightened of her getting away from me. She was frightened of me getting away from her.
Beautiful use of complex English:
He found the sulky among a sargasso of derelicts in the blacksmith’s yard. (Sargasso – banks of tropical seaweed) All that flightiness was gone, and the cultured guyver. (affected speech)
He told him of the stories the river had told him: of the drover’s horse that whickered in the moonlight, galloping along the river bed, under the surging waters that played music in its nostrils and teased out its tail like a golden bush.
The black earth was a lurry (a confused jumble) of cracks.
I get to give you the best that money can buy buckshee. (free).
I think this book will stay with me always, a deeply rewarding read. I would love to see the two film versions of the story: the 1957 movie starring Peter Finch as Macauley and the 1987 mini-series starring Bryan Brown as Macauley.
This was a quick enjoyable read. The story of the play is a working of Christopher Isherwood’s book The Berlin Stories. In his books and the play, Isherwood is an English writer struggling to survive in Berlin just as Hitler is rising, as Isherwood had. Sally Bowles was based on the real cabaret singer Jean Ross. Christopher and Sally lived in adjacent boarding house rooms. Sally Bowles character was only a character in one of the stories in The Berlin Stories, but became the focus of John Van Druten’s play, along with Christopher Isherwood (Her Issyvoo) himself. The play is published by the Dramatists Play Service Inc., and includes an introduction by John Van Druten which is very interesting. The play was first performed in 1951, with the film starring Julie Harris and Peter Harvey following in 1955.
Cabaret, the movie, a further iteration of the play starring Liza Minnelli and Joel Gray. Sally in the play was a failed singer, with a tragic motif through her life. Sally played by Liza Minnelli was consummately talented, and rises triumphant at the end.
Christopher Isherwood (1904-1986) was one of the most celebrated writers of his generation. He left Cambridge without graduating, briefly studied medicine and then turned to writing his first novels, All the Conspirators and The Memorial. Between 1929 and 1939 he lived mainly abroad, spending four years in Berlin and writing the novels Mr Norris Changes Trains and Goodbye to Berlin on which the musical Cabaret was based.
John Van Druten was an English playwright who had moved to the USA by the time he wrote I am a Camera in 1951.
I did enjoy reading this, including it’s format as a play. I look forward to re-watching Cabaret, the movie and also the 1955 film I am a Camera.
I am so late in life reading classics which others would have read earlier in life, no doubt due to focus on study in other areas and life focus in other areas. This delicious post-retirement space has opened up, where reading has come into focus again……so glad I did not miss out on this Classic.
Throughout life I have I have had a strong identification with the vulnerability and, too often, the tragedy of young men going to war. World War One epitomised the large scale waste of youth and the devastation of a generation. The small brushes of war in my own life have been…
seeing a cousin drafted into the Army, off to Vietnam at Central Station as a teenager
being aware that my father had had a “long” war in New Guinea in World War Two (Itape to Wewak Trail) making him an older father when he married
The impact of the loss of my mothers young brother-in-law during WW2
watching numerous WW2. Movies with my mother on Sunday afternoons, growing up
researching the death of My father’s older cousin who enlisted in WW1 early, went first to Gallipoli, then to France. He was injured severely three times, and sent back to the Front each time, to be killed a couple of months before the end of the war
always finding ANZAC day Commemoration deeply moving, to weeping
Remembering Rudyard Kipling’s loss of his son, who he foolishly signed consent to join up, his death on the front after rapid field promotions. His grave site not being found till after Kipling’s death. Kipling had looked for it the rest of his life
the poor aftercare that Veterans get too often
a need to augment my small bunch of poppy flowers which my mother (deceased) initiated, in a dish on her sideboard
the poppies at the Australian War Memorial…
Dulce et Decorum est by Wilfred Owen (The old Lie!)…the Old Lie being that old men in faraway rooms decide and manage wars, the young men are thrown as fodder into it….
wonderful movies made by the Australian and British film industries commemorating the 100 years since
The Crimson Field
37 Days
Birdsong
Anzac Girls
I have completed my two WW1 commemoration knitted rug throws…
Virginia Woolf’s book, Mrs Dalloway. Also movie, starring Vanessa Redgrave as the older Mrs Dalloway, and Natascha McElhone playing the younger. A close description of the annihilation of those killed as well as the survivors
All a little tangential to the topic…
I read All Quiet on the Western Front as an audiobook as well. It was stark in its portrayal of the reality for young German men in WW1 at the Front. Aside from a few references to the German forces or the Allied forces, the work could as well have been about British or Australian soldiers. They were all thrown mercilessly from trenches into no-man’s land. I was devastated by the ending, which was very naive of me.
It was first published in Germany in 1929; then 2.5 million copies sold in 22 languages in the first 18 months.
The author, Erich Maria Remarque, was himself traumatised, by his time at the Front as an 18 year old, thus able to portray the tragedy, bleakness and loneliness if being at war. He was injured, and lost companions.
This book was one of the books which were burned at Hitler’s Book banning and burning. It was stigmatised as subversive in Hitler’s Germany and was rendered poorly available. At the same time, it became and remains a classic in the rest of the world.
Remarque changed his name back from Remark (a Germanified form) to reflect the French origin of his father’s family. He replaced his middle name with Maria to honour his mother. Before WW2, he moved to Switzerland to live; later, he became a US citizen, but finished his life back in Switzerland. Later in life he married movie star Paulette Goddard. He wrote other books, but this is the world famous classic. The book w
A.W. Wheen translated the book into English very early in 1930 for British publishers. His age and war experience was very similar to Remarque’s. Wheen was an almost exact contemporary of Remarque. Born in New South Wales in 1897, Wheen enlisted in the Australian Imperial Forces (AIF) in October 1915. He was quite severely injured and was not well enough to be discharged till 1920. His is regarded as the best text, translated with the knowledge of the experience. There was another translation which is more word for word, but stilted (Murdoch). Then there were two American translations which deleted significant parts to sanitize it for the American reader, the first more than the second.
Such a worthwhile read, conveying the true pall of war.
The Jewel in the Crown is the first novel in a set of four books called the Raj Quartet written by Paul Scott. (Raj refers to the occupation of India by the British Crown from 1857 to 1947. Prior to that The British East India “ran” the country. Book 1: The Jewel in the Crown (1966). Book 2: The Day of the Scorpion (1968). Book 3: The Towers of Silence (1971). Book 4: A Division of the Spoils (1975).
A further book, with some of the same characters and settings was called Staying On, referring to the few British who decided to stay on after the independence of India from Britain in 1947. It won the Booker Prize for 1977.
Scott first went to India in the Armed Forces in 1943 during World War 2. He knew the soldiers life, both private and later commissioned, the social heirarchy amongst British and Indians, as well as the politics and cultural context. He returned to India several times after the war. There is an excellent Wikipedia entry about Scott. The author comments that his entries regarding Scott’s writing career were original research.
“Scott’s novels persistently draw on his experiences of India and service in the armed forces with strong subtexts of uneasy relationships between male friends or brothers; both the social privilege and the oppressive class and racial strata of the empire are represented, and novel by novel the canvas broadens.”
I first came to know this story as a British 1984 series of the same name, on the ABC TV. There were fourteen episodes, and I understand the story encompassed the four books of the Raj Quartet. I loved the series then, and have watched it several times. I chose to “read” this long book as an Audible book, starting early in the year, slowly plying though the 33 hours on morning walks.
Reading The Jewel in the Crown gave wonderful depth to the characters and a greater feel for the historical and social context of the book, over and above the television series.
Hari, an Indian young man, raised and educated in Britain was out of place in India. Daphne Manners was a young English woman, who felt at odds with the class system, and racism. The two were very drawn to each other. In the wake of their coming together, a tragedy unfolds, and we hear in depth about them and the many other players in the tragedy from many different speakers.
The book is beautifully constructed, giving us in depth understanding of all the characters and the political and class restraints on all. I am so pleased I have read this book. I also loved learning about Paul Scott’s life. I think he was an interesting man, but also flawed, giving his wife and daughters a hard time with his temper. I would like to read his biography by Hilary Spurling: Paul Scott, A Life of the Author of the Raj Quartet. A rewarding read.
These three books in order make up An African Trilogy.
Quite coincidentally in the choosing of this book, it became the second book read in this competition, that is set in Africa, this time in Nigeria, somewhere near the lower Niger. It is set in the late 1800s on the cusp of British colonisation, along with missionaries bringing Christianity to replace the age-old gods of the Igbo people.
Note Igbo land on this map
It is written by Chinua Achebe, a Nigerian author and poet, and was his debut novel. Published in 1958, the book became regarded as the first African classic written in English, and has since been a set book in many schools all over the world.
In the first of three parts, in each chapter, we meet Okonkwo and his family and fellow villagers of Umuofia (his father’s clan’s village) and Mbanta (his mother’s clan’s village) and the culture of the Igbo tribe of peoples as it was before the arrival of the White Man, in this case British missionaries. The culture was patriarchal, in various ways brutal eg., the killing of twin babies, murder of other tribes-people, the beating of wives; however, the society is very stable and sustaining of countless generations. The protagonist is the strong, proud, but flawed warrior, Okonkwo. We come to know all his family and the culture that defines them all. He is a wealthy yam farmer, wealth being counted as numbers of seed yams possessed. Kola and palm-wine are items of welcome and social offering. He lives in his own hut within his compound with the huts of his three wives and their children in separate huts behind his.
In the second part, we go with Okonkwo and his family, to the neighbouring village of his mother’s family, for the seven years of his banishment for accidentally killing another tribe member. During those years, British missionaries arrived in his home village. They are treated with tolerance and derision at first, and given the worst land for their church; however they embed themselves in the village, and start to change the culture.
In the third part, Okonkwo and his family return to Umuofia. Okonkwo is angered by the missionaries and the changes, including the conversion of his son. The story continues to a clash between Okonkwo and others with the British authorities. He is released but the story moves to a shocking conclusion with things unbearable, as Things Fall Apart……
I loved reading this book. It is simply presented, (a narrative in the oral style as was the tradition of story-telling in the Igbo culture), and easy to read. I felt immersed in that culture, and loved all the African names of people and villages. For example, neighbours Okoye and Ogbuefi Ezeugo; family members Ekwefi and Ezinma; Agbala the Oracle.
In part 1, Chapter 5, the Festival of the New Yam is described. There is music, dancing, drumming and wresting. Music is provided by the Udu, the Ogene and drum sets.
The Udu
The Ogene
It is worth adding some quotes from this chapter:
“The drums were still beating, persistent and unchanging. Their sound was no longer a separate thing from the living village. It was like the pulsation of its heart.”
“There were seven drums and they were arranged according to their sizes in a long wooden basket. Three men beat them with sticks, working feverishly from one drum to another. They were possessed by the spirit of the drums.”
“At last the two teams danced into the circle and the crowd roared and clapped. The drums rose to a frenzy.”
“Their bodies shone with sweat, and they took up fans and began to fan themselves.”
“The drums went mad and the crowds also. They surged forward as the two young men danced into the circle. The palm fronds were helpless in keeping them back.”
“The crowd had surrounded and swallowed up the drummers, whose frantic rhythm was no longer a mere disembodied sound but the very heart-beat of the people.”
Perhaps with some deprivation in my education regarding literature, I had never heard of Chinua Achebe. He was a poet and novelist, a chieftain of the Igbo people of Nigeria. Things fall apart has been regarded as a masterpiece. I will read more of him. No infringement of copyright is intended.
Arkansas novelist, Charles Portis’ classic tale turned 50 last year.
My version of the book was a 50th Anniversary Edition published by Overlook Press New York, 208 pages long, with an additional Introduction, Afterward, and Essays.
I really loved this novel. Charles Portis published it in 1968. (The movie rights were snapped up before the book was published!) It is narrated by the iconic heroine Mattie Ross as she recalls, from the vantage point of old age, events which occurred she was 14 in about 1880. Mattie’s family lived on a farming property near the town of Dardanelle, Yell County, Arkansas. Her father had gone about 70 miles west to Fort Smith to buy ponies for hunting in rough country. While in Fort Smith, he was murdered needlessly by his wastrel farmhand Tom Chaney, a man to whom her father had previously shown great kindness.
Mattie’s home was near Dardanelle on the right-hand side of the map. Her father, then herself, rode 70 miles to Fort Smith. Both towns were in Arkansas.Tracking the outlaw Tom Chaney Lead into the Winding Stair Mountain in Choctaw Country, in Oklahoma. In 1880, however, there were yet no State lines.
Independent, strident, forthright, Mattie, who was also gifted with being able to drive a hard bargain, and having a strong sense of justice, travels to Fort Smith searching for a Federal Marshall to take her into Indian Territory (Choctaw Country, also a haven for renegades) to either arrest Chaney and return him to stand trial and hang for he father’s murder, or to shoot him herself with her father’s gun. She is looking for a man with True Grit to lead her into the Indian Territory and she chooses Rooster Cogburn.
LaBoef, a Texas Ranger, also in pursuit of Chaney, completed the trio…….
The horses need a special mention. Rooster’s “tall” horse was called Bo…he is felled in the classic shootout.
Matty’s choice of pony, which she bought back from the horse trader, was named by her, Little Blackie. Little Blackie was probably on the way to the soap factory if not for this. Later in the book, Little Blackie and LaBoef pull Mattie from the snakepit.
Mattie states, “Then I saw the horse. It was Little Blackie. The scrub pony had saved us! My thought was: The stone which the builders rejected, the same is become the head of the corner.”
Then, Rooster rides her lovely black pony to death to save the snake-bitten Mattie.
The written and spoken language of the story was contemporary to the time of the events, with many intriguing colloquialisms.
There is a very good review of the book in The Daily Beast by Allen Barra, which reflects on the language.
“The cadence and rhythms of Portis’s prose in True Grit were shaped by the speech of his older neighbors in rural Arkansas—people who grew up speaking English that owed much to the King James Bible with echoes of Shakespeare’s English and traces of the oral traditions of Scotland, Wales, and Ireland. It’s a speech light on contractions and Latinate words, largely unaffected by television or even radio. It’s the resonance of the Old Testament, lightly seasoned, on occasion, with classical allusion. Portis’s ear never lost it. Willie Morris once told me about the old folks where he grew up in Yazoo, Mississippi: “They didn’t read much poetry but knew how to speak it.”
While in college, he (Portis) had a part-time job at a small paper, editing the stringers in tiny communities, typing up their handwritten reports. All of the color of their idiosyncratic imagery found its way into his notebooks and, eventually, into Mattie and True Grit’s other characters.”
“The language of True Grit influenced scriptwriters of the best westerns of the last few decades, including Tombstone (1993) and the HBO series Deadwood (2004-2006).”
Viewing both the movies of True Grit is also well worthwhile. The 1969 version stars John Wayne as Rooster Cogburn, Glen Campbell as LaBoef, and introducing Kim Darby as Mattie. This version was regarded as a vehicle more for John Wayne. I love that John Wayne rode the horse he always rode in his Western movies. Wayne insisted on doing the final scene hurdle of the four-post fence himself on his characters replacement “tall” horse, ie., his own regular movie horse. It was exhilarating to watch.
Glen Campbell, John Wayne, Kim Darby
The 2010 version is regarded as more complex, and sticking more closely to the book. It starred Jeff Bridges as Rooster Cogburn, Matt Damon as LaBoef, and Hailee Steinfeld as Mattie.
Below is Allen Barra’s list of the rise of the Great American Western Novel.
“The first shot, so to speak, was Thomas Berger’s Little Big Man (1964), a tall tale told by the only white man to survive Custer’s Last Stand. Then came Michael Ondaatje’s Neruda-inspired book-length poem The Collected Works of Billy the Kid (1970), Ron Hansen’s novels about the Dalton Gang, Desperadoes (1979) and the James Gang, The Assassination of Jesse James by the Coward Robert Ford (1983), Larry McMurtry’s epic story of a cattle drive from Texas, Lonesome Dove (1985), Cormac McCarthy’s novel of Bruegelian carnage in the early Southwest, Blood Meridian (1985), Pete Dexter’s elegiac tale of the last days of Wild Bill Hickok, Deadwood (1986), and most recently, Daniel Woodrell’s Civil War-era novel of Quantrell’s Raiders, Woe To Live On (1987) and Mary Doria Russell’s fictional account of Wyatt Earp, Doc Holliday, and the O.K. Corral, Epitaph (2015). Next week, The Library of America is releasing Elmore Leonard: Westerns, which includes the original stories for classic western films Valdez Is Coming, Hombre, and 3:10 to Yuma.”
I selected “A Separate Peace” by John Knowles to read as my choice for A Classic Tragic Novel. This was one of three books which I purchased from Barnes and Noble, 7th Avenue, New York, each written by American authors. It is a coming-of-age novel first published in 1959, regarded as an American Classic, and which has been a set book for study in American schools over the years since it was published. It is set in the Summer of 1942 at a wealthy boarding school in New Hampshire.
The story focuses of a small group of boys who have a further time at school before graduating; however, enlisting looms for all of them. Gene is an introverted academic, sharing a room with the outgoing, adventurous, athletic Finny. Gene becomes jealous of Finny, unbeknownst to Finny. During a dare-devil game participate in by a group of the boys, Gene manages to cause Finny to lose balance on a high tree branch causing him to fall to the ground, instead of into the river below. The book follows the reactions of Gene, the eventual realisation by Finny and the reaction of other boys. A second accident for Finny has the ultimate consequence, with disturbance into the future for many of them. Feelings are admixed with the pervasive sentiments regarding war and peace. Finny had a separate peace.
I was pleased I read this book. I thought it captured the effect and foreboding of the War on these very young men, juxtaposed with the further imprint on them all of a stupid act born of immaturity and jealousy with tragic consequences. It was curious to me that seemingly there were no mature adults having any presence or impact on the psyches of these young men; but perhaps this is the norm for essentially teenagers to be anxious about and aspiring to their own sense of agency without adults. I felt affected by the tragedy myself.
The author, John Knowles, had himself attended Phillips Exeter Academy, on which he based the school in the novel called Devon. Knowles then spent time in the US Army Air Forces at the end of WW11 – in the novel some of the boys considered leaving school at their 17th birthday to join the Air Force, rather that wait to be drafted into the Army on finishing school. Finny was based on friend he met at a summer session, as in the novel; that friend was a friend of Robert Kennedy. Gore Vidal claims that Knowles told him that the character of Brinker was based on him.
Knowles other significant book was Peace Breaks Out, set just after the war, at the same school. but written in 1981, so long after A Separate Peace. Knowles seems to have been processing his own response to youth, camaraderie, war, peace and loss.
I was able to buy the movie of the same name in Google Play. I enjoyed the movie as well, another interpretation of the novel.
I cannot remember reading Anne of Green Gables in my own childhood, but it came into consciousness when acquiring it, probably from the Beaudesert Library, for then 10 year old daughter, J. It has been a delight to now read it myself at the age of 66 years. Daughter, J, read several of the sequels, and the Emily books, as well.
Once again, I made an effort to get a lovely version of the book – this time, when unaccostomedly being in New York, trekking down 5th Avenue to the Barnes and Noble bookstore. There was a lovely pastel yellow leather-bound version with gold-embossed pages with ribbon bookmark, and beautifully laid out quality pages with some of the original illustrations. Having read this book, it is now dedicated to J’s little daughter, A – another generation of kindred spirits.
Lucy Maud Montgomery brings us orphaned Anne who arrives at Green Gables, the home of Marilla and Matthew Cuthbert, on Prince Edward Island, Canada. Anne is vibrant and optimistic and forthright, fully embracing her new life, inspite of her harsh earlier childhood years. We go on her adventures and misadventures, her growing up, her forging of friendships (and frenemies with Gilbert) and an invaluable family with Marilla and Matthew. She would be exciting and inspiring to the young reader.
Montgomery was able to draw on her own childhood which had many similarities, having lost her own mother very early in her life, and grown up happily with her grandparents, in a green gabled house in the village of Cavendish on Prince Edward Island. Montgomery was raised mostly by her Aunt Emily Macneill until Emily was married (when Maud was about 10 years old), and left the Macneill farm. Maud lived with her “grandmama”, Lucy Macneill, and grandfather, Alexander, except for ages 16 – 24: she lived with her father for a year in Prince Albert in 1890, took teacher training at Prince of Wales College and taught in Bideford, PEI, took classes at Dalhousie University in Halifax, Nova Scotia, and taught school in Belmont and Lower Bedeque, PEI. When her grandfather died in 1898, she returned to the Homestead to take care of her grandmother until her death in 1911. Her later marriage to a parson bore three children, Chester, Hugh (died in infancy), and Stuart; however the marriage itself was unhappy over a lifetime for both parties, both suffering from significant depression, and with the pall of the possibility of suicide over the ending of her life at age 67 years.
Outstanding features in the book for me are the deft use of the spoken word in conversation, of which there is much, especially from Anne! and the lovely, frequently very sensory descriptions of the surroundings, e.g.:
“I’m so glad my window looks east into the sunrising,” said Anne, going over to Diana. “It’s so splendid to see the morning coming up over those long hills and glowing through those sharp fir tops. It’s new every morning, and I feel as if I washed my very soul in that bath of earliest sunshine. Oh, Diana, I love this little room so dearly.
~
Anne was bringing the cows home from the back pasture by way of Lover’s Lane. It was a September evening and all the gaps and clearings in the woods were brimmed up with ruby sunset light. Here and there the lane was splashed with it, but for the most part it was already quite shadowy beneath the maples, and the spaces under the firs were filled with a clear violet dusk like airy wine. The winds were out in their tops, and there is no sweeter music on earth than that which the wind makes in the fir trees at evening.
~
– a glorious October, all red and gold, with mellow mornings when the valleys were filled with delicate mists as if the spirit of autumn had poured them in for the sun to drain—amethyst, pearl, silver, rose, and smoke-blue. The dews were so heavy that the fields glistened like cloth of silver and there were such heaps of rustling leaves in the hollows of many-stemmed woods to run crisply through. The Birch Path was a canopy of yellow and the ferns were sear and brown all along it.
No wonder the island has become a tourist Mecca a hundred years later, as Montgomery evoked the beauty of the island through her books. Anne felt very communal with nature, as did Montgomery herself.
I have always loved Marilla in all her iterations – the book, and both the major film versions.
“Marilla was a tall, thin woman, with angles and without curves; her dark hair showed some grey streaks and was always twisted up in a hard little knot behind with two wire hairpins stuck aggressively through it. She looked like a woman of narrow experience and rigid conscience, which she was; but there was a saving something about her mouth which, if it had been ever so slightly developed, might have been considered indicative of a sense of humour.“
Marilla was born in 1824 in Avonlea, Prince Edward Island, to Mr. and Mrs. Cuthbert. She was raised there along with her older brother Matthew. A few years later after her birth the family moved to Green Gables, a farmhouse which was built by Marilla’s father.
In September 1830, Marilla attended Avonlea School. There she met John Blythe who was said to have been interested in Marilla once, and people called him Marilla’s beau. Unfortunately, they had a quarrel and Marilla never forgave him. She eventually came to regret it and likely would have forgiven John Blythe if she had another chance.
I have enjoyed the Scottish connection. On Prince Edward Island, the largest ethnic group consists of people of Scottish descent (39.2%), followed by English (31.1%), Irish (30.4%), French (21.1%), German (5.2%), and Dutch (3.1%) descent.
On Lucy Maud’s maternal side, following the maternal McNeill side, on WikiTree, her great-great grandfather came in Prince Edward Island in 1780. He had been born in Argyll, Scotland.
My own ethnic origins include widespread Scottish connections in Scotland, the Orkneys and the Western Hebrides, on my Ancestry DNA. There are also many of my connections on both Nova Scotia and Prince Edward Island, no doubt some arriving with the Scottish Highland clearances after Culloden………..no wonder I have always felt so Kindred Spirit with Pince Edward Island and the Anne stories……..
The website of the L. M. Montgomery Literary Society is very Interesting. It includes a paper regarding ‘A Hundred Year Mystery’ of who did the original illustration on the front cover. It is regarded as now proved that the depiction of Anne is by George Fort Gibbs, an American author and illustrator. The internal book illustrators are credited as W. A. J. Claus and M. A. Claus, husband and wife, for the seven illustrations in the book. This paper also draws attention to that fact that there are collectors of various editions of Anne of Green Gables, and that Canada celebrated the famous novel in 2008 with a 100 year Anniversary edition, a fac-similé of the original in 1908……..I might have to acquire one…….
