2024 is L.M. Montgomery’s 150th birthday! The L.M. Montgomery Institute (LMMI) at the University of Prince Edward Island is celebrating with 150 tributes – celebratory statements or greetings – that reflect upon personal connections to Montgomery or on an aspect of her life, work, or legacy.
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For Remembrance Day, this week’s tribute from Andrea McKenzie celebrates Montgomery’s depiction of a community at war.
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On November 11th, Remembrance Day, many honour the men who served and the men who died during the World Wars of the 20th century to fight for our freedoms. In the L.M. Montgomery community, we also honour the women who served and the impact of those wars on their lives, as they, too, fought for those same freedoms. Who can forget Rilla Blythe, gallantly carrying on with a Red Cross fund-raising concert under the shocking blow of learning that her beloved brother Walter has enlisted? Or the sight of Susan Baker running up the flag after Canada’s victory at Vimy Ridge, embodying the spirit of Canadian women? Or of Anne Blythe’s suffering when one son is killed and a second deemed “wounded and missing”?
Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside vividly depicts a community at war, where the women at home work, daily, for the war effort, just as Montgomery herself did for four-and-a-half long, weary years. Rilla, Susan, and their female family and friends maintain closeness with their men overseas through the long separation. Their words and their packages and their daily work bring home – Ingleside and Rainbow Valley – to Jem and Walter, knee-deep in mud in the trenches of France, creating a deeper, richer meaning of “home,” what it stands for, and why it is worth fighting and dying for.
Yet there is laughter to lighten the seemingly endless suspense: Rilla’s “shabby boot and gallant shoe” when she visits Irene Howard to ask her to sing at the concert (my favourite moment!); Susan trying to “kick that darned cat with both feet” and landing on the kitchen floor with a resounding thud; and the famous green velvet hat that Rilla “joyously” kicks around the room to signal the war’s end and the coming peace.
Thanks to Montgomery, we become part of this complex community during the First World War. We understand Rilla’s bewilderment at the war’s beginning and her search for a role that a girl can play. We suffer her suspense when first Jem, then Walter, leave for the war, and she is left at home to carry on. With her, we hem sheets, roll bandages, knit, run the Junior Reds, raise funds, and bring up a war baby whose mother has died. We rejoice at her first kiss; and we grieve with her when her beloved brother Walter is killed in action at Courcelette. With Rilla, we read Walter’s last words and stand beside her as she pledges herself to carry on in his memory.
Alongside Rilla, we learn not only how Canadian families and communities coped with the First World War; we learn lessons about how to cope with our own crises, through daily work, the benison of laughter, and the determination to carry on.
Through Montgomery’s Rilla, new generations can learn how Canadian women, with courage and determination, “kept the home fires burning” throughout the First World War.
On November 11th, we will remember them.
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Andrea McKenzie is an associate professor at York University in Toronto, Canada. L.M. Montgomery’s works, which she first discovered in her tiny village library in the 1970s, led to a love of literature and of history. Rilla of Ingleside, one of the few Canadian war books then still in print to feature women’s experiences of the First World War, began a fascination with women’s war narratives. Andrea has since co-edited the restored text of Rilla of Ingleside with Benjamin Lefebvre, co-edited the essay collection L.M. Montgomery and War with Jane Ledwell, edited a collection of two Canadian nurses’ wartime letters (War-Torn Exchanges), published multiple articles and book chapters about Montgomery’s works, and run the L.M. Montgomery Readathon on Facebook.
Next week’s tribute will celebrate Montgomery in the context of World Children’s Day/National Child Day (November 20th).