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“Is this rilla-my-rilla?” He asked in a low tone.

“Yeth” said rilla and immediately wished she could throw herself headlong down the lighthouse Rock or otherwise vanish from a jeering world.

🤣 I love 15 year olds

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Someone adapt The Blue Castle!

I say this as an Austen fan, but enough Austen adaptations. She's one of the only classic authors I can think of who regularly gets feature film adaptations of her works.

I get it. Her stories are funny, accessible, romantic. Her stories aren't about highly-specific issues of her times, but have more universal themes that are easy for people to relate to even 200 years later. A lot of other classic books have lots of subplots that make them better miniseries material, but Austen's books, with one central romance thread and a few connected subplots, are much easier to adapt to feature film length without sacrificing major swathes of the book. But there are other books out there! If nothing else, adapt L.M. Montgomery or Alcott books that aren't Anne of Green Gables or Little Women. At the very least, give us Northanger Abbey! The world is full of books that have never been adapted, so there's no reason to keep adapting the same ones.

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Only book that has ever made me cry is this one:

Small potatoes, really, compared to Rilla. But tears are irrational things.

So, Rilla of Ingleside book clubbers, is everyone prepared for the book that prompted ten-year-old me to write this?

It's not true anymore - these days, I even get teary at some earlier Anne books. But man, That One Thing. :(

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On this particular afternoon Rilla had no quarrel on hand with existing conditions.

WHAT MUST THAT BE LIKE RILLA

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I had the other Bantam version. Which no one told me was abridged! I love the cover, though, and find it so pretty--this was always my image of Rilla.

Which book cover of Rilla of Ingleside did you grow up with? Mine was this one:

(Apologies for the terrible image quality--it was hard to find this particular cover online and I eventually just screenshot it.)

I never felt like the illustration portrayed Rilla as I imagined her, but there was something romantic about the moonlit setting that I found thrilling. Not to mention the presence of a soldier's uniform in the background.

I'm pretty sure I first encountered the book when I was a tween hanging out at my mom's place of work. She sold children's and YA books, among other things, and I probably acquired Rilla through her like I did most other entertainment during the pre-social-media era of my childhood. (I could've encountered it at the library too but I don't think they had all of the Anne books there--sacrilege!)

What are your memories of encountering the book for the first time? Did you have the whole series at once or was it piecemeal, in different editions (my experience)? What, if any, is your favorite book cover?

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The thing I really love about Rilla is how unique a heroine she is in the Maudverse. She’s not brainy, she’s explicitly pretty, she’s young for her age instead of precocious, she’s hashtag just a girl. Her tumblr blog would be angelcore and pictures of picnics and fashion inspo. I know Maud tells us Anne is “feminine to the core” in AOGG, but Rilla is the only one who really gets to lean into that cultural femininity—and be empowered by it, especially with Jims—in a way that’s rejected by Emily/Ilse, and played with more slyly with Valancy, and unwittingly pathologized in Pat. (Even Jane the Homemaker isn’t allowed that much freedom, considering her parents, as was well discussed in that book club!)

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I'm considering using my copy of Readying Rilla for the book club. I've been promising myself that I would read it for my next re-read of Rilla, but I'm worried it will make it too hard to keep up with the book club schedule.

On the plus side, however, I do have the first week of book club off on leave...

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Before I ever picked up a Jane Austen novel, I had the misguided impression that she was some boring, sedate and formal author whose works would be impossible to relate to because they were written so long ago.

What a treat to discover how absolutely wrong I was! To find out how utterly hilarious her works are and how real her characters still feel, even after so much time has passed and how little our world resembles the one that she lived in.

I just started reading Northanger Abbey again and the absolute subtlety and hilarity of the way she describes characters struck me again:

'Mrs Allen was one of that numerous class of females, whose society can raise no other emotion than surprise at there being any men in the world who could like them well enough, to marry them. She had neither beauty, genius, accomplishment, nor manner.'

Yeah, the language is a touch formal and you can tell it was written over two centuries ago but... I think we've all encountered a Mrs Allen or two in our time!

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I would like to note that not all of these are scams, necessarily. Yes, they are often poorer quality than official editions, but they can be good as well. I bought an excellent copy of Little Women from the independent publishing platform. Be wary, but not absolute.

If you are like me and you love to read classic literature but you also love holding books in your hands, watch out for Amazon public domain scams. That is, people dump the text of a public domain novel into Amazon's self-publishing platform and then sell it without any editing. Often these copies are horribly formatted and occasionally incomplete or inaccurate and they aren't even cheap! One Shakespeare play I bought accidentally was literally a PDF of a scanned script.

Let me show you how to identify them. On the left, a scam edition, on the right, a proper copy of Pride & Prejudice:

The biggest tip offs that this is a scam is "Independently published" in the product details and no preview of the actual text of the novel:

This isn't a huge problem with popular novels like Pride & Prejudice, there are a lot of real copies from real publishers, but it was a problem when I was trying to buy the works of Elizabeth Gaskell or even the lesser known Shakespeare plays. And don't think Barnes & Nobles or other online booksellers are safe! I found these scam Amazon copies on Indigo as well, they pull them right from Amazon. Also, they are often promoted so they'll be near the top of results.

This is me trying to find a copy of Ruth on Indigo's website. The three top results were all scam copies:

My advice is 1. Go for used if possible (as Gaskell is less popular, I had trouble doing this), 2. Check for publisher names that you know (Penguin, Harper Collins etc.) or 3. Go to a physical bookstore so you can look at the pages yourself

And yes, I know I can read these for free online, I have every Jane Austen novel open at all times on my desktop, but I like having my own paper copies.

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From chapter 7 of Charlotte Brontë's "Jane Eyre"

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Anne Brontë, Agnes Grey

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ANNE OF GREEN GABLES (1985) dir. Kevin Sullivan

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Gotta love English lit

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No she didn't. Oh well.

AUSTEN CHARACTER SHOWDOWN, Quarterfinal Round

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Wouldn't be surprised if Montgomery was thinking about it in the back of her head, but it's a no from me.

I saw that there were different comments in the fandom regarding this situation. What do you think about this situation? You can share your ideas if you want.

Thank you to everyone who will vote. I will wait for the result with curiosity.

@diario-de-gilbert-blythe I'm very curious about your thoughts on this subject. I would be very happy if you shared it with us.

I realized that the question of my poll was not very clear. If they going too far, I ask if they have had s*x or something close to it. I wanted to explain it to those who haven't voted yet.

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Do y'all remember the chapter in Anne of Windy Poplars when Anne tried to "fix" the situation for that girl who loved italics? (She'd told Anne that she'd accepted the proposal of a man she didn't love and was in agonies over it.)

And the man decided to hit on Anne when she tried to intervene?

And then, both of them turned on Anne later?

r/relationship_advice could only dream of drama like this.

I just know that girl would be making multi-part tiktok videos about women who are not "girls' girls."

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Anne of Green Gables by L.M. Montgomery

Anne’s House of Dreams by L.M. Montgomery

anne at 12 vs anne at 25, feat: repeated seagull fantasies lmao