Oops, so sorry, Robert Armin. Not sure where my brain was but I was meaning the three "Emily of New Moon" books and directed you to the totally wrong thing. They are not "Anne" books. The stories are a little more complex and the little girl, Emily, wants to be a writer. Seriously though, you've delved into far more of the series than most would and breathers between the books are a good idea.
Continuing to read to Dafling major. For a children's book, I'm surprised how much of it so far is from the adult's point of view. There are children's books with good parent figures and with bad parent figures, but not so many with parent figures who are not quite sure what they're doing. Also while there is a lot of moralising going on the narrator is quietly irreverent about it.
As for the "tribe of Jacob"--did you mean "tribe of Joseph"? Because I think there was a reference to the Exodus 1:8 verse, "Then a new king arose who knew not Joseph" in one of the early books. (You'll remember that this is the Pharaoh who neither remembers nor cares about Joseph's historical help to Egypt, and starts the oppression of the Hebrews. Therefore a useful way of referring to any number of unsympathetic teachers, ministers, etc.)
The reference to Joseph goes on to be used to differentiate between those who are "kindred spirits" or "folks like us" as opposed to "them", and was IIRC later abbreviated to "of the tribe of Joseph".
I might well mean the tribe of Joseph. At my age I have trouble remembering my own name, but your explanation makes sense. Is it a phrase used widely in the USA?
Turning back to Anne of Green Gables, which is what I thought we were supposed to be discussing, I offer a few thoughts.
My memory of the only time I had read it earlier (decades ago with our then 8 year old daughter) was that although it was about a girl growing up in Canada it was not too soppy to be read by a mere male, so I was ready enough to re-read it for this discussion.
Page 1 convinced me that if nothing else the author could write with style. In particular, I loved the lines about Mrs Rachel: " ..not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it was probably conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed." What a beautiful one-sentence character summary!
I was also struck how many people seemed to take against Anne just because she had red hair. Although my own hair is now mostly white, it was once red (or at least brownish red, as distinct from fiery red). That served as a descriptor and source of one or two of my many nick-names as a boy, but I do not recall being ribbed about it. Perhaps such prejudice is a Canadian or an Edwardian era thing.
Yes, the book is to some extent a collection of anecdotes, but that doesn't stop a clear narrative line emerging, particularly about the growing love and understanding between Anne and M and M. For what it's worth my favourite anecdote is when Marilla fails to label the aloholic beverage correctly , and so gets Anne and her friend drunk. As a young laboratory technician I myself learnt a severe lesson about the importance of correct labelling, when a bottle labelled as "distilled water" turned out to be anything but, and nearly poisoned me.
For me, the most tedious parts of the writing were Anne's fantasies about woods full of fairies or devils or whatever - I just skipped over those, as I often do with descriptive passages generally, until "something happens".
I hadn't thought about this in relation to the book for years, but the prejudice against red hair (at least, the sense that it's considered a very unattractive quality that keeps her from being considered an attractive girl) seems really odd. I wonder were redheads really thought of that way at that period?
When I was in primary school, I remember the teacher telling us that red hair was the result of in-breeding. This to a class with 2 fiery red members. I am not as old as our book(!) - this was in the early ‘70s. I wonder if this idea was widely held?
It’s interesting to hear of people skipping Anne’s flights of fancy. I adored all her long monologues.
Growing up my sister and I similarly named various areas in the plantings around our yard.
It's a girly thing, like the stories about fairies and princesses that one of my grandaughters like to read. I refused to read them with her, and tried (not always successfully) to divert her to stories whose message was "girls can do anything", which she also liked.
Page 1 convinced me that if nothing else the author could write with style. In particular, I loved the lines about Mrs Rachel: " ..not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it was probably conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed." What a beautiful one-sentence character summary!
I think Mrs Rachel Lynde is an excellent example of what a good writer L M Montgomery is. In other hands she could have been either an annoying busybody or an pattern example of what a housewife should be. Instead she come across as a very real person. Although I can't agree with her about whipping children, somewhere in the story she says something about Marilla trying to bring Anne up by a set pattern, and that having had ten children she knows that can't be done. You have to adjust your parenting style to the child. I still think that is sensible advice.
My husband had red hair as a child and was nicknamed 'bonfire.' I asked him if he was teased about it and apparently he was, although he's never really talked to me about it. When I was pregnant I hoped our child would have red hair. It was not to be, no red hair gene in my family, but I have a niece with a glorious head of bright red curls.
It’s interesting to hear of people skipping Anne’s flights of fancy. I adored all her long monologues.
Growing up my sister and I similarly named various areas in the plantings around our yard.
It's a girly thing, like the stories about fairies and princesses that one of my grandaughters like to read. I refused to read them with her, and tried (not always successfully) to divert her to stories whose message was "girls can do anything", which she also liked.
Not sure if it's a' girly' thing or not. Certainly I'm not that keen on Anne's flight's of fancy.
Not because I think having an imagination and making up stories is a bad thing, it's something I did as a child and still do now, it's just that I find her imaginings a bit too sweet for me.
Anne is just well-rounded. Not only is she strong and smart but she's able to use her imagination and creativity. The North Shore in those days, and still today during the winter months at least, is a pretty isolated spot. People had to make their own fun and do so within the confines of the morals and manners of those times. Her fantasies often seem to take her outside of herself.
Btw, while I think of it, the churches in most of that area were served by clergy who travelled on a circuit. Most learned their Bible through readings in the home after meals and through Sunday school which wasn't held in the worst of the winter months. Even today, churches share clergy in the areas where L. M. Montgomery lived.
Gingers still get teased. Look at clips on YouTube.
I remember past threads about bullying of redheads in the UK - or it might just have been England. AFAIK, it did/does not happen here like that. A red-headed boy might be called Bluey or Ginge, nothing more serious than that.
When I was a student in Germany in the 1950s I knew a man with a very nice personality who was shamefaced. He had light red hair, and in elementary school he was constantly told that his hair color proved that he was a child of the devil.
Red heads did get picked on for a short period in Australia by kids after the South Park, red heads have no soul episode. Kids took it literally and also started using the Aussie insult Ranga (Orangutan).
Thankfully it seems to have died down again now. I feel a bit bad about this incident, but a real life event did remind me of Anne. During this time when red head kids were being picked on quite a bit, I was teaching a class of nine and ten year olds. Most of the children in the school were white, and red hair was quite common, including one boy in the class I was teaching. One day I put the kids in groups for a group task. The red headed boy was in a group with the one ethnically Chinese boy in the class. He kicked up a fuss and said he would not work with an Asian and said some really racist stuff in front of the Asian student and the rest of the class. I kept him back at recess to discuss his behaviour - sadly probably learnt at home. I explained that it is not okay to exclude or be mean to people because of their ethnic background or appearance, and that some kids even make fun of kids with red hair like his, and that was awful and not okay either, and he wouldn't want to be in the same position in which he had put the Asian student. The next day the red headed boy came to school with died black hair! Unlike Anne his hair was really black, not green, but it still looked pretty unnatural with his pale skin and freckles. Thankfully no-one commented negatively and he never made racist comments again himself (at least that I witnessed). We later found out he was having family troubles at home and his behavior and kindness to others improved the next year with more support from school staff and friends. Also everyone else in class liked the ethnically Chinese student and were friends or friendly to him, so hopefully he was not too affected by the incident, though I'm sure he did not forget it.
I've been thinking about the job of village schoolteacher, which Anne and most of her more academic contemporaries aspire to. Anne and Gilbert (and others) become teachers of all-age schools after 1 year post-school education (if I read it correctly) - Anne is 16 1/2 when she takes over Avonlea school.
There she will have to teach everything from kindergarten to entrance exams for Queens. It's pretty mind boggling! Yet educational standards seem quite high - or at least the range of subjects is wide. Queens looks to be a cross between a high school and teacher training college, not uncommon at the time
My great-grandmother taught an all-age village school in Lanarkshire in the 1870s, after a training course at Moray House (Edinburgh). Her situation must have been similar to Anne's, though I think she was a bit older when she started, and possibly 2 year trained .
Certainly I'm not that keen on Anne's flight's of fancy.
Not because I think having an imagination and making up stories is a bad thing, it's something I did as a child and still do now, it's just that I find her imaginings a bit too sweet for me.
I think though that for any parent reading them they're shaggy dog stories, the punchline being Marilla's reaction as she tries to get the conversation sensible again.
Thanks Mili, I had not caught that. Dlet would have been at school then, and although there were a couple of red-haired boys in his class, I did not pick up any anti-redhaired comments. Certainly not in my days of the early 50s to early 60s at the same school.
I've been thinking about the job of village schoolteacher, which Anne and most of her more academic contemporaries aspire to. Anne and Gilbert (and others) become teachers of all-age schools after 1 year post-school education (if I read it correctly) - Anne is 16 1/2 when she takes over Avonlea school.
There she will have to teach everything from kindergarten to entrance exams for Queens. It's pretty mind boggling! Yet educational standards seem quite high - or at least the range of subjects is wide. Queens looks to be a cross between a high school and teacher training college, not uncommon at the time
My great-grandmother taught an all-age village school in Lanarkshire in the 1870s, after a training course at Moray House (Edinburgh). Her situation must have been similar to Anne's, though I think she was a bit older when she started, and possibly 2 year trained .
Thanks for mentioning schools @Marama . I think when I first read the book as a child I couldn't quite understand the school system, living as I did in 1960s inner London, and regarded it as a bit of a fantasy on the part of the author. I assume that teenagers really did take over schools after one or two years training. I agree the curriculum at Avonlea is pretty academic, geometry, Latin and grammar, though I guess those children destined to become farmers and housewives would be spared those. Interesting that teaching is seen as the only career for an academic girl, and the choice for boys isn't much wider, teaching, or the ministry seem to be the main choices. I wonder how hard it would have been in real life for Gilbert to train as a doctor. When I was growing up, certainly for girls, teaching was the only career suggested for those of an academic bent. Even me saying I wanted to be a librarian, was seen as unusual.
The other thing about having red hair is Anne's sadness at not being able to wear pink, which used to be a real thing. One of my oldest friends has always had beautiful red hair; part of her teenage rebellion was to start wearing colours she wasn't meant to. That was back in the 70s; I don't know if such colour codes persist today.
The bright teenager becoming teacher to an all-grade class after as little as one year of teacher training (or "Normal School" as it was sometimes called here, and maybe in other places) was certainly common in Newfoundland at the time too.
I think ‘Normal School’ was used in the UK too. When my son was at university he lived on the ‘Normal site’ for the first year, where there had once been a teacher training college.
Though set a bit earlier, there is a similar pattern in the Laura Ingalls Wilder books where she is teaching school only a year after finishing herself, and there is reference to her mother having done the same.
This was facilitated, in my understanding, by the ‘reader’ system often referred to in both sets of books where the content of most of the curriculum was set out in textbooks which children worked through step by step (often with the answers to questions at the back). This meant these very young teachers didn’t have to plan curricula for such a range of ages but were supporting children to work through the books. (Not that it wasn’t still a huge ask for a 16 or 17 year old to be doing that with a room full of children from 5 to 16!)
It seems so crazy for modern readers to have such young, inexperienced teachers. The Mr Phillips story is pretty horrifying too, but with such young teachers it was probably considered 'normal' if not ideal for young male teachers to court their older female students! The story did show the pitfalls and why even adult teacher/student relationships are banned or highly discouraged today, in that Mr. Phillips gives Prissy more help and teaching than his other students. In the T.V. adaptions the relationship is seen as less acceptable and leads to Mr. Phillips leaving. I think in the newest adaption (which I didn't like due to making it too adult and changing the story far too much, so only watched a bit of) their relationship goes beyond appropriate courting and is depicted as grooming and abuse.
I haven't reread AoGG recently but have read it many times in the past. It's an old favourite and I am enjoying reading your reflections on it!
One thing that I remember thinking about when I reread the book as an adult was that a child who had had the kind of life experiences that Anne had before she came to Green Gables would be likely to have a lot more emotional baggage and other issues to work through. In the book it is presented that she is a nice person, for example her speech is not slangy or rude, because her parents were decent folk. That somehow the parents that she was orphaned from at a young age could have had more influence on her than the unloved life of drudgery she had experienced at the hands of the families she worked for. To my adult mind this struck me as unlikely! Anne seems to have little difficulty in accepting love and forming loving relationships eg with Diana and Matthew, whereas I suspect attachment issues would have been more likely in real life!
I still love the book though!
This is part of the myth of breeding. It comes up a lot in Dickens as well; look how well behaved Oliver Twist is, because he comes from decent stock. Bollocks.
It seems so crazy for modern readers to have such young, inexperienced teachers. The Mr Phillips story is pretty horrifying too, but with such young teachers it was probably considered 'normal' if not ideal for young male teachers to court their older female students! The story did show the pitfalls and why even adult teacher/student relationships are banned or highly discouraged today, in that Mr. Phillips gives Prissy more help and teaching than his other students. In the T.V. adaptions the relationship is seen as less acceptable and leads to Mr. Phillips leaving. I think in the newest adaption (which I didn't like due to making it too adult and changing the story far too much, so only watched a bit of) their relationship goes beyond appropriate courting and is depicted as grooming and abuse.
I assume that Mr Philips is just a year or two older than Prissy. I don't think it is grooming and abuse, but he certainly is neglecting his other students for her. I found it interesting that Miss Stacey is quite lightly sketched in compared to Mr Philips. We hear lots via Anne of what she is doing, and she visits Marilla to encourage her to allow Anne to go in for the Queens entrance exam, but I can't recall her actually saying anything for herself.
BTW I've just finished The Blue Castle and thoroughly enjoyed it.
Miss Stacey's character is more fleshed out in subsequent books.
I sometimes view the whole Anne series as a village of characters with whom we are getting acquainted. Some get quite completely developed, some remain as vignettes, appearing in only one book.
And the "race that knows Joseph" appears first in Anne's House of Dreams, where it's a favourite saying of Miss Cordelia's. Before she used "kindred spirits", in fact, she used "bosom friends" to describe her hopes for relationship with Diana.
I've carried on re-reading the series, and am coming to the conclusion that Montgomery's great strength was capturing characters in a few sentences, but that she wasn't really that hot on plot. I'm reading Anne of Windy Poplars (Willows) at the moment, and the description on Jen Pringle's father sums up a certain type of annoying know-it all man very well. As a complete aside does anyone know why the book as two different titles?
I always assumed there were two titles because willows are poplars somewhere else. Adding a late comment because my almost 15 year old nephew has died his hair a natural red! Not sure why, but I think it is because he naturally has brown hair that has unusual natural reddish gold highlights so people were always asking if it was dyed anyway. Though he and his parents thought the dye was a rinse that would wash out before school started and it turned out it was permanent! He plays drums and has longish hair. His parents are less concerned by the colour and just wish he would brush it more often.
Comments
The reference to Joseph goes on to be used to differentiate between those who are "kindred spirits" or "folks like us" as opposed to "them", and was IIRC later abbreviated to "of the tribe of Joseph".
Also The Blue Castle is probably my favorite book of hers, and A Tangled Web comes close second.
AFF
My memory of the only time I had read it earlier (decades ago with our then 8 year old daughter) was that although it was about a girl growing up in Canada it was not too soppy to be read by a mere male, so I was ready enough to re-read it for this discussion.
Page 1 convinced me that if nothing else the author could write with style. In particular, I loved the lines about Mrs Rachel: " ..not even a brook could run past Mrs Rachel Lynde's door without due regard for decency and decorum; it was probably conscious that Mrs Rachel was sitting at her window, keeping a sharp eye on everything that passed." What a beautiful one-sentence character summary!
I was also struck how many people seemed to take against Anne just because she had red hair. Although my own hair is now mostly white, it was once red (or at least brownish red, as distinct from fiery red). That served as a descriptor and source of one or two of my many nick-names as a boy, but I do not recall being ribbed about it. Perhaps such prejudice is a Canadian or an Edwardian era thing.
Yes, the book is to some extent a collection of anecdotes, but that doesn't stop a clear narrative line emerging, particularly about the growing love and understanding between Anne and M and M. For what it's worth my favourite anecdote is when Marilla fails to label the aloholic beverage correctly , and so gets Anne and her friend drunk. As a young laboratory technician I myself learnt a severe lesson about the importance of correct labelling, when a bottle labelled as "distilled water" turned out to be anything but, and nearly poisoned me.
For me, the most tedious parts of the writing were Anne's fantasies about woods full of fairies or devils or whatever - I just skipped over those, as I often do with descriptive passages generally, until "something happens".
Growing up my sister and I similarly named various areas in the plantings around our yard.
It's a girly thing, like the stories about fairies and princesses that one of my grandaughters like to read. I refused to read them with her, and tried (not always successfully) to divert her to stories whose message was "girls can do anything", which she also liked.
My husband had red hair as a child and was nicknamed 'bonfire.' I asked him if he was teased about it and apparently he was, although he's never really talked to me about it. When I was pregnant I hoped our child would have red hair. It was not to be, no red hair gene in my family, but I have a niece with a glorious head of bright red curls.
Not sure if it's a' girly' thing or not. Certainly I'm not that keen on Anne's flight's of fancy.
Not because I think having an imagination and making up stories is a bad thing, it's something I did as a child and still do now, it's just that I find her imaginings a bit too sweet for me.
Btw, while I think of it, the churches in most of that area were served by clergy who travelled on a circuit. Most learned their Bible through readings in the home after meals and through Sunday school which wasn't held in the worst of the winter months. Even today, churches share clergy in the areas where L. M. Montgomery lived.
I remember past threads about bullying of redheads in the UK - or it might just have been England. AFAIK, it did/does not happen here like that. A red-headed boy might be called Bluey or Ginge, nothing more serious than that.
Thankfully it seems to have died down again now. I feel a bit bad about this incident, but a real life event did remind me of Anne. During this time when red head kids were being picked on quite a bit, I was teaching a class of nine and ten year olds. Most of the children in the school were white, and red hair was quite common, including one boy in the class I was teaching. One day I put the kids in groups for a group task. The red headed boy was in a group with the one ethnically Chinese boy in the class. He kicked up a fuss and said he would not work with an Asian and said some really racist stuff in front of the Asian student and the rest of the class. I kept him back at recess to discuss his behaviour - sadly probably learnt at home. I explained that it is not okay to exclude or be mean to people because of their ethnic background or appearance, and that some kids even make fun of kids with red hair like his, and that was awful and not okay either, and he wouldn't want to be in the same position in which he had put the Asian student. The next day the red headed boy came to school with died black hair! Unlike Anne his hair was really black, not green, but it still looked pretty unnatural with his pale skin and freckles. Thankfully no-one commented negatively and he never made racist comments again himself (at least that I witnessed). We later found out he was having family troubles at home and his behavior and kindness to others improved the next year with more support from school staff and friends. Also everyone else in class liked the ethnically Chinese student and were friends or friendly to him, so hopefully he was not too affected by the incident, though I'm sure he did not forget it.
There she will have to teach everything from kindergarten to entrance exams for Queens. It's pretty mind boggling! Yet educational standards seem quite high - or at least the range of subjects is wide. Queens looks to be a cross between a high school and teacher training college, not uncommon at the time
My great-grandmother taught an all-age village school in Lanarkshire in the 1870s, after a training course at Moray House (Edinburgh). Her situation must have been similar to Anne's, though I think she was a bit older when she started, and possibly 2 year trained .
Thanks for mentioning schools @Marama . I think when I first read the book as a child I couldn't quite understand the school system, living as I did in 1960s inner London, and regarded it as a bit of a fantasy on the part of the author. I assume that teenagers really did take over schools after one or two years training. I agree the curriculum at Avonlea is pretty academic, geometry, Latin and grammar, though I guess those children destined to become farmers and housewives would be spared those. Interesting that teaching is seen as the only career for an academic girl, and the choice for boys isn't much wider, teaching, or the ministry seem to be the main choices. I wonder how hard it would have been in real life for Gilbert to train as a doctor. When I was growing up, certainly for girls, teaching was the only career suggested for those of an academic bent. Even me saying I wanted to be a librarian, was seen as unusual.
This was facilitated, in my understanding, by the ‘reader’ system often referred to in both sets of books where the content of most of the curriculum was set out in textbooks which children worked through step by step (often with the answers to questions at the back). This meant these very young teachers didn’t have to plan curricula for such a range of ages but were supporting children to work through the books. (Not that it wasn’t still a huge ask for a 16 or 17 year old to be doing that with a room full of children from 5 to 16!)
One thing that I remember thinking about when I reread the book as an adult was that a child who had had the kind of life experiences that Anne had before she came to Green Gables would be likely to have a lot more emotional baggage and other issues to work through. In the book it is presented that she is a nice person, for example her speech is not slangy or rude, because her parents were decent folk. That somehow the parents that she was orphaned from at a young age could have had more influence on her than the unloved life of drudgery she had experienced at the hands of the families she worked for. To my adult mind this struck me as unlikely! Anne seems to have little difficulty in accepting love and forming loving relationships eg with Diana and Matthew, whereas I suspect attachment issues would have been more likely in real life!
I still love the book though!
I assume that Mr Philips is just a year or two older than Prissy. I don't think it is grooming and abuse, but he certainly is neglecting his other students for her. I found it interesting that Miss Stacey is quite lightly sketched in compared to Mr Philips. We hear lots via Anne of what she is doing, and she visits Marilla to encourage her to allow Anne to go in for the Queens entrance exam, but I can't recall her actually saying anything for herself.
BTW I've just finished The Blue Castle and thoroughly enjoyed it.
I sometimes view the whole Anne series as a village of characters with whom we are getting acquainted. Some get quite completely developed, some remain as vignettes, appearing in only one book.
And the "race that knows Joseph" appears first in Anne's House of Dreams, where it's a favourite saying of Miss Cordelia's. Before she used "kindred spirits", in fact, she used "bosom friends" to describe her hopes for relationship with Diana.