rillasdiary

[rillasdiary]

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. :(

[rillasdiary]

[rillasdiary]

Want to learn something new in 2022??

Absolute beginner adult ballet series (fabulous beginning teacher)

40 piano lessons for beginners (some of the best explanations for piano I’ve ever seen)

Excellent basic crochet video series

Basic knitting (probably the best how to knit video out there)

Pre-Free Figure Skate Levels A-D guides and practice activities (each video builds up with exercises to the actual moves!)

How to draw character faces video (very funny, surprisingly instructive?)

Another drawing character faces video

Literally my favorite art pose hack

Tutorial of how to make a whole ass Stardew Valley esque farming game in Gamemaker Studios 2??

Introduction to flying small aircrafts

French/Dutch/Fishtail braiding

Playing the guitar for beginners (well paced and excellent instructor)

Playing the violin for beginners (really good practical tips mixed in)

Color theory in digital art (not of the children’s hospital variety)

Retake classes you hated but now there’s zero stakes:

Calculus 1 (full semester class)

Learn basic statistics (free textbook)

Introduction to college physics (free textbook)

Introduction to accounting (free textbook)

Learn a language:

Ancient Greek

Latin

Spanish

German

Japanese (grammar guide) (for dummies)

French

Russian (pretty good cyrillic guide!)

[rillasdiary]

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."

[rillasdiary]

just reread jane of lantern hill... i really enjoyed it. for one, the main character was capable! love that. she also reminded me a bit (in terms of existance) of valancy in the blue castle and i like how both of them have their moment of becoming stronger. what's everyone else's opinion on the book?

[rillasdiary]

"And I love you because you aren't pompous like Dr Carter... and I love you because you haven't got sticky-out ears like Johnny. And... the very best reason of all... I love you for just being Gilbert!"

A letter from Anne to Gilbert, Anne of the Windy Poplars, LM Montgomery

[rillasdiary]

[rillasdiary]

on a random note, I would like to say that I consider the chapter in Magic for Marigold where Marigold talks to Old Grandmother the night she died one of LMM's best (not in part because I'm reading an incredible essay by Epperly which states that the chapter is biting commentary on LMM's stories being considered old fashioned)

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[rillasdiary]

[rillasdiary]

"Cheer up, dearest. Getting married can't be so very terrible when so many people survive the ceremony."

Anne to Diana, Anne of the Island, LM Montgomery

[rillasdiary]

Started rereading The Blue Castle by LM Montgomery thanks to posts by @batrachised, and a few things stood out.

First, I think this may be LM Montgomery’s angriest novel. It’s very funny, but it’s also very angry. In the Anne and Emily books small-town small-mindedness is satirized, but often with an affectionate or gently amused note. Not here! The satire is biting. Valancy’s family are small-minded, dried-up, without love or sincerity or purpose.

Secondly, the book is specifically angrily Christian. It sets itself furiously against an empty religion that consust of going to church, saying the right things, and never causing any scandal. Valancy’s path to liberation is bracketed with Biblical references. When she goes to keep house for Roaring Abel and Cecily, she feels, “Old things had passed away; everything had become new,” a reference to Revelation (“the old order of things has passed away”; “I am making everything new”). At the moment when there is a chance of Valancy turning back, when the minister comes to browbeat her into it, she is saved by a “still small voice” in the of her consciousness, a reference to God speaking to the prophet Elijah in the book of 1st Kings. Valancy’s first major change is going to care for a sick, socially outcast, and dying girl whom everyone is avoiding because she’s not ‘respectable’ (she got pregnant outside marriage and her father is regularly drunk) – and Valancy does so out of love and compassion, not a barren sense of duty, and she finds joy in it. The echoes of the Gospel fighting against the Pharisees are very strong. She is rejecting the lifeless religion of respectability and compliance and choosing a Christianity that is characterized by joy, love, and liberation.

Third, I had completely forgotten about the rosebush and it made me laugh! It finally getting roses after Valancy hacked it to pieces is probably accurate horticulturally (some things do need to be pruned!) and also a fantastic metaphor for Valancy’s life. It is only when she hacks off the carefully-tended green leaves of obedience and being ‘well-behaved’ that she gets the roses of life and love that had been eluding her.

Fourth, the similarities between Valancy and Jane Eyre stand out to me in that the difference between each of them being “small and insignificant” or “elfish and bewitching” largely lies in whether they are fulfilled or are being trodden on, whether they are free or being kept down, and whether they are seen through eyes of love. Although Valancy does specifically make Barney Snaith promise that he has no other living wives! 🤣

Fifth, the futility of Valancy’s attempts to avoid censure and trouble from her family by “behaving”, which just lead to the same handful of minor things (eating a jar of jam as a child, losing a spoon) being continually cast up to her, while as soon as she starts rebelling they’ve got too many things to handle!

Sixth, the intense limitations on her life, the way the least things are treated as dangerous (going out without a flannel petticoat in May!) leaves Valancy not safe, but rather with very limited ability to assess actual danger. Going alone to the Chidley Corners dance was actually a very bad situation for her to be in, and both Barney Snaith and Cecily knew it! But all the things she “wasn’t supposed to do” (which was practically everything) were all of a piece to Valancy, so she had no basis for understanding that!

And seventh, the twist about Barney Snaith’s identity is in retrospect telegraphed pretty heavily, especially when the passage below is later followed up with his forest-creature friends at the Blue Castle.

“I’ve been watching a woodpecker all day,” he said one evening on the shaky old back verandah. His account of the woodpecker’s doings was satisfying. He had often some gay or cunning little anecdote of the wood folk to tell them…Barney, when he liked, could sit down on the edge of the barrens and lure those rabbits right to him by some mysterious sorcery he possessed. Valancy had once seen a squirrel leap from a scrub pine to his shoulder and sit there chattering to him. It reminded her of John Foster.”

This line made me hope that LM Montgomery got to read Jack London:

“Those silences at the back of the north wind got me. I’ve never belonged to myself since.”

The Northland Wild!

A vast silence reigned over the land. The land itself was a desolation, lifeless, without movement, so lone and cold that the spirit of it was not even that of sadness. There was a hint in it of laughter, but of a laughter more terrible than any sadness – a laughter that was mirthless as the smile of the Sphinx, a laughter cold as the frost and partaking of the grimness of infallibility.

Finally, the book doesn’t revolve around Valancy and Barney on the island as much as I though. They get to the island on page 151 of a 250-page book! It seems roughly split into five parts: 1) An introductory section showing in grim detail the sheer depressingness of Valancy’s life; 2) Valancy’s initial rebellions; 3) Valancy at Roaring Abel’s; 4) Valancy’s marriage to Barney Snaith and her Blue Castle; and 5) Valancy after she realizes she is not going to die.

It feels so much more modern than LM Montgomery’s other novels, too! You don’t imagine a car in Avonlea. Or movie theatres! They don’t belong there! But this one takes place in the Muskokas of Ontario, so those things can exist without profaning the sacred soil of Prince Edward Island.

[rillasdiary]

[rillasdiary]

[rillasdiary]

MAYBE niche but did anyone else read this part of anne of ingleside, as a kid:

and then 100% mentally picture these👇🏻 dumb ass mugs, which were like… peak 2012 humour lmao

(i don’t know how old i was when i realised it actually meant those little tea cups with a moustache guarding ledge)

[rillasdiary]

"Let's be daring and adventurous and expectant. Let's dance to meet life and all it can bring to us, even if it brings scads of trouble and typhoid and twins!"

A letter from Anne to Gilbert, Anne of the Windy Poplars, LM Montgomery

[rillasdiary]

on my voyage through lm montgomery's works, i have just wrapped up the story girl and the golden road. just reblogged an interesting post below about how detached bev (the narrator) is to the plot and wanted to ask what people thought on lmm's only first person narrated story?