August 23 1920 letter to G. B. MacMillan

I finished my new book yesterday and sent it off to the typewriter with a sigh of relief. Its title is yet undecided but it is more of a “girl’s story” than my previous two, dealing with the life of a Canadian girl during the years of the war. It is positively the last of the Anne series. I have gone completely “stale” on Anne and must get a new heroine. Six books are enough to write about any one girl. Yet they don’t seem to be. I had an amusing letter recently from a young girl asking if “Anne” hadn’t “kept a diary” and if so wouldn’t I publish it! And I had a pathetic letter from a lady, telling me that her father, a retired army officer of 85 loved the Anne books so and was worrying lest he would not live until the next one came out. This is touching.

Tuesday August 24, 1920

To-day I wrote the last chapter of “Rilla of Ingleside.” I don’t like the title. It is the choice of my publishers. I wanted to call it “Rilla-My-Rilla” or at least “Rilla Blythe.” The book is fairly good. It is the last of the Anne series. I am done with Anne forever – I swear it as a dark and deadly vow. I want to create a new heroine now – she is already in embryo in my mind – she has been christened for years. Her name is Emily. She had black hair and purplish gray eyes. I want to tell folks about her.

Saturday, Mar. 5, 1921

… a letter had come from Stokes complaining that “Ingleside” was “too gloomy”, and wanting me to omit and tone down some of the shadows. Also, subtly intimating that I had not “taffied up” the u. S. enough in regard to the war – this last being the real fault, though they did not like to say so bluntly.

Well, I didn’t and I won’t! I wrote of Canada at war – not of the U. S. but I have felt worried by the matter. I do not like to feel that my publishers are dissatisfied with my book. Mac liked it – said it was a good story and would sell well. This last is what Stokes doubts – and he has made me doubt it.

Thursday, Nov. 24, 1921

Today I got a letter from Mr. Douglas of the Carnegie library in Vancouver, which warmed and illumined the whole day. He says of Rilla: “You have written a very wonderful book - a book that will live, I think, when most of the ephemeral literature of the time will be forgotten. You have visualized the soul of the Canadian people in the war; you have given a true picture of what we went through during five long years of agony, and you have lighted up the canvas with gleams of humour which no other living writer could have excelled… The storm and stress of home life during those anxious days have never received audible expression, except in your wonderful book.”

I was especially pleased with this because that is exactly what I tried to do in my book and this is the first competent testimony that I had succeeded.

Sunday, January 1st 1922

There exists in New Glasgow, Nova Scotia, an editor named James Fraser … He edits the New Glasgow Chronicle, is a rampant Liberal, a virulent anti-Unionist, and easily first in the gentle art of making enemies. In journalism he is a hangover from the days of the Eatonsville Gazette and makes vitriolic abuse take the place of argument. Anyone who is opposed to him is on the side of the devil – nay, is the devil incarnate. Hitherto he has rather liked my books and has mentioned them favorably. But in the case of Rilla he sees red. From one brief sentence in the book, written by way of a joke on one of the characters, he infers that I am Unionist, likewise my husband. From another paragraph dealing with the Khaki election in 1917, he deduces that I am a Tory and he gets after me loaded fro bear. I just howled over the editorials. They do not belong to the kind tha can really “get under my skin”, so I must confess I found a sinful enjoyment in them.

Here are some choice tidbits from them –

“Possibly if there were more prayers and less stories in the Unionist minister’s homes there would be less desire to throw away the church of their fathers – less of the spirit of Babel and more of Christ.”

(wonder what kind of prayers Jimmy F. puts up!)

“The series of Anne stories which are referred to now and then in the cheaper reviews.” (The italics are mine)

“She is the wife of one of those transmogrified ministers who clutter up the once proud and exclusive Presbyterian church in Canada.”

What is a “transmogrified minister”? And could the bitterest enemy of the Presbyterian church say of it anything harsher than that it was “proud and exclusive?” Shade of he meek and lowly Founder!

“The writer alleges that Whiskers-on-the-Moon was the only Liberal in the valley where they lived.”

Where do I allege it?

“The story is machine made and reads as if the machine was getting out of repair and consequently slipping cogs. But as the author has removed to Tory Ontario it is probable that if she does not improve as a story writer she will at least enjoy her days in a bath of that Toryism in which she so delights to take readers and do lots of splashing. Well, let her splash in her own mud-puddle to her hearts’ content.”

The joke is that I have always been a fervent Liberal and as bitter an anti-Unionist as Jimmy F. himself. But I think I’ll have to turn now. I don’t want to be on the same side as he is.

January 27, 1922

Today I had a nice letter from Sir Ernest Hodder Williams (of Hodder and Stoughton) and some English reviews of Rilla. All were kind but one which sneered at my “sentiment.” The attitude of some English critics towards anything that savors of sentiment amuses me. It is to them as the proverbial red rag to a bull. They are very silly. Can’t they see that civilization is founded on and held together by sentiment. Passion is transient and quite as often destructive as not. Sentiment remains and binds. Perhaps what they really mean is sentimentality which is an abominable thing. But my books are not sentimental. I have always tried in them to register normal and ordinary emotions—not merely passionate or unique episodes.

I had also two curious letters, one from a male prig and one from a female prig. The most humiliating thing about these letters is that the writers like my books. I wish they loathed them. The male prig says that my books have convinced him that “a real Christian can still write books” but goes on to solemnly warn me that my nefarious habit of marrying off my characters “tends to lower the conception of the holy state of matrimony.” Whew! I wonder if he thinks it would be better if I let them mate up without marrying, or sent them into convents.

The female prig thinks “Mary Vance’s” talk is “vulgar” and that it should not be found in a book “written to influence young people.” But then I don’t write books for the purpose of influencing young people and I don’t make children of the antecedents and upbringing of “Mary Vance” talk like “Elsie.”

The said prig also rebukes me gravely for letting “Susan” call the cat she “tried to kick with both feet” a darned cat. But the real old lady of the anecdote said bluntly that the animal was damned. Yet this terrible example did no harm that I know of.

I shall not bother replying to the male prig. But I intend to write a polite, carefully ironic letter to the female of the species.

Friday Aug. 4 1922

… in a letter I received from a fifteen year old reader (who would of course be only seven when the war broke out) she told me how Rilla had made the years of the great war (which she only remembered dimly) “seem so real to her.”

Saturday December 30, 1928

The other letter was from a fanatic “pacifist” in New Zealand who calls Rilla of Ingleside a “beastly book” because it “glorifies war.” God rest her simple soul. Can’t the poor moron realize the difference between offensive and defensive war. I wrote Rilla not to “glorify war” but to glorify the courage and patriotism and self-sacrifice it evoked. War is a hellish thing and some day it may be done away with – though human nature being what it is that day is far distant. But universal peace may come and may be a good thing. But there will no longer be any great literature or great art. Either these things are given by the high gods as a compensation – or else they are growths that have to be fertilized with blood.

Monday, July 13, 1936

I have been reading all my own books over again and today I finished Rilla of Ingleside. I have decided it is the best book I ever wrote. I laughed and cried over it – especially over the scene where “Rilla” says good-bye to Walter. One school of psychologists says it is a kind of self-worship to find pleasure in reading your own books!!!

I think this is nonsense. I had so far forgotten those books that they come to me newly as if someone else had written them – and I enjoy them as books, with no feeling of authorship.

Yes, I did a good piece of work in Rilla.

“Montgomery Book Donated to U of G”
Lori Bona Hunt, January 19th, 2000.

Like many young girls, Emily Woods’s daughter, Vicki, read Lucy Maud Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside when she was in her early teens. But how many people can boast that the copy they read was written in Montgomery’s own scrawl, complete with corrections and notes in the margins?

“It’s quite something to go through the book that way - if you’ve seen her handwriting, you know what I mean,” says Woods. “Montgomery scratched things out and made changes to each page. It was not an easy chore to read it that way, but (my daughter) did it.”

The manuscript, believed to have been lost for decades, was in Emily Woods’s possession for some 30 years. It has become the latest major addition to the L.M. Montgomery Collection in U of G’s Archival and Special Collections at the McLaughlin Library.

On Jan. 19, U of G will officially recognize the donation of the Rilla of Ingleside manuscript from the Woods family. The manuscript will be kept in a rare book vault in the Archival and Special Collections area and is currently on display in the Wellington County Room.

“It gives us great pleasure to turn it over to the University of Guelph, where it will be safe and join the rest of the collection, and will provide opportunities for study and research,” says Woods.

Published in 1921, Rilla of Ingleside was planned as the last in the Anne of Green Gables series. It is a First World War story written from a young woman’s point of view and has been recognized by historians and women’s studies experts for its uniqueness in Canadian literature.

“It is the first English account from a woman’s perspective of how people ‘at home’ reacted to the war,” says Bernard Katz, head of special collections and library development. “It poignantly shows how women reacted to having their husbands, sons, brothers and sweethearts away in Europe fighting under terrible conditions.”

It is also the only original full-length holograph of a Montgomery novel in Ontario, where she wrote most of her books. The rest are housed in the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in P.E.I., where Montgomery was born and raised. The author of 20 novels and 500 short stories, she moved to Ontario after marrying Presbyterian minister Ewan Macdonald in 1911.

Woods acquired the manuscript from a member of the Macdonald family as a gift when she was a creative writing teacher. “It was a thrill to actually have it in my hands,” she says. “My students were also very excited. Most of them had read the Anne books and were thrilled to have a chance to see her actual handwriting.

“As a writer, I found it wonderful to see the changes she made as she went along, the things she had written in the margins. It makes you feel good as you’re going through the process of writing to see that someone who was a famous writer did the same thing.”

Woods says her family chose to donate the manuscript to U of G because of their connections to the University. Her husband, Murray, is a 1956 OAC graduate. Their son Douglas graduated in 1978, and their nephew Bill Woods graduated in 1973. Bill’s daughter and nephew are currently enrolled.

This month, the library is also housing a special exhibit called “The Visual Imagination of Lucy Maud Montgomery.” It includes 156 prints chosen from the library’s collection for an exhibition organized and circulated by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum, with support from Heritage Canada.

Source: http://www.uoguelph.ca/atguelph/00-01-19/articles/mont.html

A Lucy Maud Montgomery manuscript thought to have vanished decades ago has resurfaced and been donated to the University of Guelph.

Rilla of Ingleside, the eighth book in the Anne of Green Gables series, tells the story of Anne’s teenage daughter Rilla, who grows up on Prince Edward Island during the First World War. According to Bernard Katz, head of special collections and library development at the University of Guelph, the manuscript for the 1921 novel was mentioned in a codicil to Montgomery’s will, drawn up in 1939, which bequea thed a list of her possessions to her two sons.

“Of the things that were still in her hands at the end of her life — she died in 1942 [at the age of 67] — I think Rilla was the most important one that we didn’t know where it was,” Katz said.

Montgomery published 20 novels, a book of poetry and roughly 500 short stories. Most of the book manuscripts are accounted for, including 15 novel manuscripts that have been gradually acquired by the Confederation Centre Art Gallery and Museum in Charlottetown, P.E.I. But the location of the Rilla manuscript has long baffled scholars, who were not sure if it even still existed.

Now, the past three decades of the manuscript’s existence have been accounted for Emily Woods, a retired schoolteacher and church programming director in Guelph, says she obtained it while living in King Township, outside Aurora, Ont.

“I received the manuscript as a gift from a member of [Lucy Maud Montgomery's family],” said Woods. “I can’t remember exactly, but it was the end of the 1960s.”

In 1911, Montgomery married Ewan Macdonald, took his last name and relocated permanently to Ontario. Woods will not disclose which member of the Macdonald family gave her the manuscript, as “I haven’t discussed [the bequest to Guelph] with that person.”

She would only reveal that it came to her through a work association.

“I had been teaching creative writing, and so the member of the family gave it to me so I could show it to the students who were doing some writing projects,” Woods said.

After using the manuscript in her classes, Woods brought it home. “We would have guests once in a while and we would talk about this, and out it would come from a brown paper bag, where we kept it,” she said. “I shudder now to think of the casual way it was treated.”

In 1998, Woods and her husband showed the manuscript to a bookbinder and inquired about what could be done to protect it. That began the process of trying to place it in a protective environment, Woods said.

According to Mary Rubio, a professor of English at the University of Guelph, Rilla of Ingleside is important for historical reasons.

“I think it is one of her most interesting novels because it’s a women’s novel about the First World War and there are very few of them,” Rubio said. “I’m not aware of another Canadian one which has anything like the [same] impact.”

At 564 pages, the handwritten manuscript is longer than the published book, which tend to run at about 290 pages. Katz and Rubio say there are revisions on every page.

In a 1920 journal entry, Montgomery wrote of Rilla of Ingleside that “I don’t like the title. It is the choice of my publishers. I wanted to call it ‘Rilla-my-Rilla’ or at least ‘Rilla Blythe.’ [Anne's married name].” The cover page of the manuscript carries all three titles.

The manuscript, parts of which are on public display, will join Guelph’s existing collection of Montgomeriana, which includes her original diaries. A ceremony celebrating the donation of the manuscript is planned for Jan. 19.

Source: http://www.yukazine.com/lmm/e/RoIMS.html