How do you do,
In case most of y'all don't know, July 26th is the feast day of St. Anne, mother of Mary, and it's time of year for all the Novenas. The nine days leading up to Wednesday are when they take place, the first of them starting on July 17th. So, it's impeccable that this entry is done on the week of St. Anne's Day.
After a fifteen year hiatus, L. M. Montgomery churned out another novel in the Anne of Green Gables Series, which has Anne's name in the title for the first time since Anne's House of Dreams. This means that Anne is once more protagonist. Now, I must make note that what I am blogging on is the US title; in Canada it was originally published as Anne of Windy Willows, but was changed in the US editors who felt it was too much like Kenneth Graham's The Wind In the Willows. Of course, the song remains the same, either way.
1936 was quite a year for the new Anne book: The Great Depression is underway with some signs of recovery, only to see another crash; Nazi Germany hosts the Summer Olympics in Berlin (after the controversial rearming of Germany and militarizing the Rhineland); the Spanish Civil War breaks out; Mussolini has Italy invade Ethiopia; Japan sees the February Incident that ends with the arrests of 123 conspirators (19 of whom are executed); the United States reelects President Franklin Roosevelt; the Tupelo-Gainsville Tornado outbreak does extensive damage in the South; the Tasmanian tiger went extinct after the last one died in a zoo; Joseph Stalin orders the General Purge in the Soviet Union; King Edward VIII abdicates his throne for his brother, who becomes King George VI; the BBC makes a broadcast on television; Margaret Mitchell publishes Gone With the Wind while William Faulkner gave us Absolem! Absolem!.
If you read in chronological, as opposed to publication, order, you are indeed reading Book Four in the series. It's the interquel, technically, with Anne of the Island as its prequel and Anne's House of Dreams as its sequel. There is a three year gap in between. Now, that means there is very little tension in the story. We all know that Anne and Gilbert will tie the knot in the next book, and they are committed to each other, so how can you produce some tension. Firstly, L.M. Montgomery writes the book in a different style that in the previous six installments. Instead of titled chapters that tell one the events to come, she writes an epistolary novel where Anne writes letters to Gilbert, who is attending medical school, while she becomes principal in Summerside High School (though it breaks into the standard third person narrative later on) while Gilbert never shows up. With Diana married and with her children back in Avonlea and the rest there as well, for the first time since leaving Green Gables for college, Anne is on her own.
In Summerside, she meets the world totally different than before, which allows the book to be different that what was experienced in Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island. Anne has gotten a job as principal in the high school and she encounters the vice-principal named Katherine Brooke. Anne takes delight that she spells it with a K, thinking it better than Katherine with a C, but Katherine proves to be something of Fredo in The Godfather Part II, she is upset that she was stepped over despite being older and more experienced than Anne. One way to snub Anne is shown when she replaces the K with a C. Katherine eventually becomes like an onion; a multi-layered character. She was orphaned like Anne, but she was raised by an uncle who payed for her learning and she feels obligated to repay him. Some of this causes her to be resentful and focus on her job more than life. Thus, Montgomery has provided a foil to Anne, who is grateful to Marilla but is still willing to put aside her work for life. However, Katherine is the least of Anne's worries.
Enter the Pringles. No, they are not the people who created the potato chips that are stacked in cylinder cans. The potato chips you are thinking about weren't invented until 1968, so there's no chance that L.M. Montgomery named this family after it. The Pringles are a family of influence in Summerside. Some of us in towns know of such families that are like the Pringles. They are usually very rich (some nouveau riche and some "old money), had someone in the past who helped found the town, ran an successful business that basically pays for everything in the town, had someone who was a war hero, or a miser in the family who gave away his possessions to the town (like the Miser Madison gave his library to River City in The Music Man), and so on. Such families give so much to the town that the town makes them their important ones; a sort of New World gentry, or royalty. To be in the same fold opens doors in the town (or as Jumanji cynically adds, makes one a target for bullies) and even outside of town. To be friends with such families does both and their backing is often the make or break move for someone running for office. Though the last could mean the town leaders are basically puppets for such families, there is a plus side that they provide the wealth and employment in a town that otherwise would nothing but a shantytown of sharecroppers. They could do things for the poor that all of us are told to do in scripture but most can't as we are often impoverished as well (feeding the starving, clothing the naked, and so on). At the same time, having such families can be a double edged sword, as bad elements show up with them, like the recent case in the South where the heir of businessman raped a college girl and turned the tables her, permitting him to walk scant free of justice while the poor girl had to leave town and later commit suicide. The Pringles do have more respect for the system than the example used, but they could make it hard for Anne to keep her job.
If you think back to "Dawson's Creek: Review of Commentary Part 3" where I mentioned of Principal Green running afoul of such families in one episode and was driven into resigning if he did not overturn his expulsion of a student. They painted him as an outsider with ideals of justice being not fit for Capeside (plus he was black in a town run by rich white men and women), and used the expulsion of a rich man's son as an excuse to run him out of town on a rail. Knowing that will make it easy to root for Anne as she is also from outside of Summerside and has to deal with the Pringles, who are also running the town and made up of rich people. Anne is also occupying a place of authority in the school, which is consisting of girls. Being principal of a school for girls was where Anne could get in her sex, but it would have been barrier busting if she were to be principal in an all boys school, or even co-ed. Either way, the Pringles make it clear that she is not wanted.
What helps in rooting for Anne more is that the Pringle Family is a largely faceless entity for much of the book, only represented by the students in Anne's class. One stands out among them, Jan, to whom Anne believes could be a good student if she tries. However, Jan proves more than a handful and it gives Anne a reputation as a bad teacher to the Pringles. Eventually, that changes through a relative. Elizabeth Grayson, who is of Pringle stock. Elizabeth is lonely in school, as her mother died, leaving her with her great-grandmother and "the woman" to look after her. Anne and Elizabeth form a friendship during the course of the book where it is discovered her father is out of the country and left her to her great-grandmother when she was a baby. There were a few other things to add such as how the old woman made her walk in the dark despite being afraid of it in order to go to bed. Basically, she was starved of love in a way that Leonard was in The Big Bang Theory. Where Leonard had his science and self-love to fall back on, Elizabeth had her imagination which is about as fantastic as Anne's. In short, Elizabeth is Anne 2.0. To help, Anne brings her to Green Gables on a two week vacation and she likes it there. Later, Anne writes to Elizabeth's father and he shows up in the end to take her home. However, her guardians, the great-grandmother, believes that she has a good home with her, regardless of how Elizabeth feels. In the end, Mr. Grayson takes Elizabeth with him to Boston.
Anne also brings Katherine to Green Gables in the book and it leads to a transformation of the character. Suddenly Katherine becomes a softer woman who has forgotten her jealousy of Anne. They then become good friends. Anne also befriends the owners of the namesake Windy Poplars, Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate, along with Rebecca Dew. Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate own the place which is used as resident spots for the faculty, though Rebecca Dew does most of the running. This wasn't something appointed to her but rather a case where the owners made her think she was running it in reverse psychology. The aunts living together and running the boarding house is hardly out of the ordinary for those seeing it in 19th Century lens. Some women who never married would move in with each other, and some got into Bostonian marriages, named for the book by Henry James. Rather or not they were actually Lesbians is never discussed and I can't find any reason to believe it here, either. They are likely just two widows living together for mutual advantages, just as Marilla and Rachael Lynde are living together for the same purpose. There are plenty of things that happen with this trio that Anne observes, but to cite them all here would require a much longer entry.
I will simply say that L. M. Montgomery has it all done in a period of three years with Anne fighting an uphill battle with the power of the Pringle Family, and she comes out smelling like a rose. After the three years have completed, Anne bids Summerside adieu once more and all those who are found of Anne must wave their tearful good byes. Not one of them is going to be able to make her wedding, sadly, and I don't believe they are mentioned in Anne's House of Dreams either. But the book does try to wrap everything up like a bow in order to keep in connection with Book Five.
To close, Anne of Windy Poplars is a good book. It is better than two of its predecessors and has a fresh new voice after Montgomery kept the Anne Books from the public for so long. The fact that Anne is dealing with the Pringles and the problem of Elizabeth and her great-grandmother, plus her dealing with Katherine Brooke, on her own and without the presence of Gilbert or any man restores the feminist side of the story, though one could argue that Mr. Grayson taking Elizabeth back into this house is a kind of cop out or deus ex machina with the man playing the rescuing cavalry. Where the last two books of the series (which were published first) seemed to reduce Anne as a character into a mother figure, this one can be refreshing to some in seeing Anne made into a strong female character. The image of Elizabeth and her house hold does involve a kind of feel that would make the book a Gothic novel, especially as the scenes of her and Anne take place at night in the start. Even the US title gives it a Gothic setting, even if Summerside doesn't invoke such. One of the best parts of the book is most of the cliches in the series are absent. We still have the lonely and imaginative girl in the midst, but the spinster lady who marries in the end is not there.
One last thing to add is that this book, along with Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, served as the source material for Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel, produced by Sullivan as a follow up the mini-series Anne of Green Gables. I do not know if I will make a review and commentary on that, yet, but I will say that this, the best entry of the trilogy, is an impressive adaptation of a trilogy of sequels to L.M. Montgomery's masterpiece.
After a fifteen year hiatus, L. M. Montgomery churned out another novel in the Anne of Green Gables Series, which has Anne's name in the title for the first time since Anne's House of Dreams. This means that Anne is once more protagonist. Now, I must make note that what I am blogging on is the US title; in Canada it was originally published as Anne of Windy Willows, but was changed in the US editors who felt it was too much like Kenneth Graham's The Wind In the Willows. Of course, the song remains the same, either way.
1936 was quite a year for the new Anne book: The Great Depression is underway with some signs of recovery, only to see another crash; Nazi Germany hosts the Summer Olympics in Berlin (after the controversial rearming of Germany and militarizing the Rhineland); the Spanish Civil War breaks out; Mussolini has Italy invade Ethiopia; Japan sees the February Incident that ends with the arrests of 123 conspirators (19 of whom are executed); the United States reelects President Franklin Roosevelt; the Tupelo-Gainsville Tornado outbreak does extensive damage in the South; the Tasmanian tiger went extinct after the last one died in a zoo; Joseph Stalin orders the General Purge in the Soviet Union; King Edward VIII abdicates his throne for his brother, who becomes King George VI; the BBC makes a broadcast on television; Margaret Mitchell publishes Gone With the Wind while William Faulkner gave us Absolem! Absolem!.
If you read in chronological, as opposed to publication, order, you are indeed reading Book Four in the series. It's the interquel, technically, with Anne of the Island as its prequel and Anne's House of Dreams as its sequel. There is a three year gap in between. Now, that means there is very little tension in the story. We all know that Anne and Gilbert will tie the knot in the next book, and they are committed to each other, so how can you produce some tension. Firstly, L.M. Montgomery writes the book in a different style that in the previous six installments. Instead of titled chapters that tell one the events to come, she writes an epistolary novel where Anne writes letters to Gilbert, who is attending medical school, while she becomes principal in Summerside High School (though it breaks into the standard third person narrative later on) while Gilbert never shows up. With Diana married and with her children back in Avonlea and the rest there as well, for the first time since leaving Green Gables for college, Anne is on her own.
In Summerside, she meets the world totally different than before, which allows the book to be different that what was experienced in Anne of Green Gables, Anne of Avonlea, and Anne of the Island. Anne has gotten a job as principal in the high school and she encounters the vice-principal named Katherine Brooke. Anne takes delight that she spells it with a K, thinking it better than Katherine with a C, but Katherine proves to be something of Fredo in The Godfather Part II, she is upset that she was stepped over despite being older and more experienced than Anne. One way to snub Anne is shown when she replaces the K with a C. Katherine eventually becomes like an onion; a multi-layered character. She was orphaned like Anne, but she was raised by an uncle who payed for her learning and she feels obligated to repay him. Some of this causes her to be resentful and focus on her job more than life. Thus, Montgomery has provided a foil to Anne, who is grateful to Marilla but is still willing to put aside her work for life. However, Katherine is the least of Anne's worries.
Enter the Pringles. No, they are not the people who created the potato chips that are stacked in cylinder cans. The potato chips you are thinking about weren't invented until 1968, so there's no chance that L.M. Montgomery named this family after it. The Pringles are a family of influence in Summerside. Some of us in towns know of such families that are like the Pringles. They are usually very rich (some nouveau riche and some "old money), had someone in the past who helped found the town, ran an successful business that basically pays for everything in the town, had someone who was a war hero, or a miser in the family who gave away his possessions to the town (like the Miser Madison gave his library to River City in The Music Man), and so on. Such families give so much to the town that the town makes them their important ones; a sort of New World gentry, or royalty. To be in the same fold opens doors in the town (or as Jumanji cynically adds, makes one a target for bullies) and even outside of town. To be friends with such families does both and their backing is often the make or break move for someone running for office. Though the last could mean the town leaders are basically puppets for such families, there is a plus side that they provide the wealth and employment in a town that otherwise would nothing but a shantytown of sharecroppers. They could do things for the poor that all of us are told to do in scripture but most can't as we are often impoverished as well (feeding the starving, clothing the naked, and so on). At the same time, having such families can be a double edged sword, as bad elements show up with them, like the recent case in the South where the heir of businessman raped a college girl and turned the tables her, permitting him to walk scant free of justice while the poor girl had to leave town and later commit suicide. The Pringles do have more respect for the system than the example used, but they could make it hard for Anne to keep her job.
If you think back to "Dawson's Creek: Review of Commentary Part 3" where I mentioned of Principal Green running afoul of such families in one episode and was driven into resigning if he did not overturn his expulsion of a student. They painted him as an outsider with ideals of justice being not fit for Capeside (plus he was black in a town run by rich white men and women), and used the expulsion of a rich man's son as an excuse to run him out of town on a rail. Knowing that will make it easy to root for Anne as she is also from outside of Summerside and has to deal with the Pringles, who are also running the town and made up of rich people. Anne is also occupying a place of authority in the school, which is consisting of girls. Being principal of a school for girls was where Anne could get in her sex, but it would have been barrier busting if she were to be principal in an all boys school, or even co-ed. Either way, the Pringles make it clear that she is not wanted.
What helps in rooting for Anne more is that the Pringle Family is a largely faceless entity for much of the book, only represented by the students in Anne's class. One stands out among them, Jan, to whom Anne believes could be a good student if she tries. However, Jan proves more than a handful and it gives Anne a reputation as a bad teacher to the Pringles. Eventually, that changes through a relative. Elizabeth Grayson, who is of Pringle stock. Elizabeth is lonely in school, as her mother died, leaving her with her great-grandmother and "the woman" to look after her. Anne and Elizabeth form a friendship during the course of the book where it is discovered her father is out of the country and left her to her great-grandmother when she was a baby. There were a few other things to add such as how the old woman made her walk in the dark despite being afraid of it in order to go to bed. Basically, she was starved of love in a way that Leonard was in The Big Bang Theory. Where Leonard had his science and self-love to fall back on, Elizabeth had her imagination which is about as fantastic as Anne's. In short, Elizabeth is Anne 2.0. To help, Anne brings her to Green Gables on a two week vacation and she likes it there. Later, Anne writes to Elizabeth's father and he shows up in the end to take her home. However, her guardians, the great-grandmother, believes that she has a good home with her, regardless of how Elizabeth feels. In the end, Mr. Grayson takes Elizabeth with him to Boston.
Anne also brings Katherine to Green Gables in the book and it leads to a transformation of the character. Suddenly Katherine becomes a softer woman who has forgotten her jealousy of Anne. They then become good friends. Anne also befriends the owners of the namesake Windy Poplars, Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate, along with Rebecca Dew. Aunt Chatty and Aunt Kate own the place which is used as resident spots for the faculty, though Rebecca Dew does most of the running. This wasn't something appointed to her but rather a case where the owners made her think she was running it in reverse psychology. The aunts living together and running the boarding house is hardly out of the ordinary for those seeing it in 19th Century lens. Some women who never married would move in with each other, and some got into Bostonian marriages, named for the book by Henry James. Rather or not they were actually Lesbians is never discussed and I can't find any reason to believe it here, either. They are likely just two widows living together for mutual advantages, just as Marilla and Rachael Lynde are living together for the same purpose. There are plenty of things that happen with this trio that Anne observes, but to cite them all here would require a much longer entry.
I will simply say that L. M. Montgomery has it all done in a period of three years with Anne fighting an uphill battle with the power of the Pringle Family, and she comes out smelling like a rose. After the three years have completed, Anne bids Summerside adieu once more and all those who are found of Anne must wave their tearful good byes. Not one of them is going to be able to make her wedding, sadly, and I don't believe they are mentioned in Anne's House of Dreams either. But the book does try to wrap everything up like a bow in order to keep in connection with Book Five.
To close, Anne of Windy Poplars is a good book. It is better than two of its predecessors and has a fresh new voice after Montgomery kept the Anne Books from the public for so long. The fact that Anne is dealing with the Pringles and the problem of Elizabeth and her great-grandmother, plus her dealing with Katherine Brooke, on her own and without the presence of Gilbert or any man restores the feminist side of the story, though one could argue that Mr. Grayson taking Elizabeth back into this house is a kind of cop out or deus ex machina with the man playing the rescuing cavalry. Where the last two books of the series (which were published first) seemed to reduce Anne as a character into a mother figure, this one can be refreshing to some in seeing Anne made into a strong female character. The image of Elizabeth and her house hold does involve a kind of feel that would make the book a Gothic novel, especially as the scenes of her and Anne take place at night in the start. Even the US title gives it a Gothic setting, even if Summerside doesn't invoke such. One of the best parts of the book is most of the cliches in the series are absent. We still have the lonely and imaginative girl in the midst, but the spinster lady who marries in the end is not there.
One last thing to add is that this book, along with Anne of Avonlea and Anne of the Island, served as the source material for Anne of Green Gables: The Sequel, produced by Sullivan as a follow up the mini-series Anne of Green Gables. I do not know if I will make a review and commentary on that, yet, but I will say that this, the best entry of the trilogy, is an impressive adaptation of a trilogy of sequels to L.M. Montgomery's masterpiece.
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