Anne of Ingleside

or

"I have never denied," said Rebecca Dew, taking her well-baked feet out of the oven, "that while we should not forget the Higher Things of Life good food is a pleasant thing in moderation."

Anne of Ingleside (#6/1939) seems rather obviously intended as a loving peek into the previously skipped material of Anne's young motherhood. Like Anne of Windy Poplars, it has a lot of those stand alone stories that I don't really care for as part of the larger whole. In this case, the stories are split pretty evenly between Anne and the Ingleside Children. Anne gives birth to Rilla near the beginning of the book (after a cloyingly nostalgic visit with Diana Wright nee Barry back in Avonlea). Rilla is the last of six children. Each child gets at least one chapter in which to have an adventure and/or learn a lesson. The structure bores me, but there are definitely great moments here and there, as well as hilariously dead-on character dialogue and description. The older I get the more I love the gossipy passages Montgomery sometimes includes, with women talking about people in the town. Miss Cornelia, the man-and-Methodist-bashing lady with the heart of gold from Anne's House of Dreams, has now been married for years and has mellowed a bit, but not too much for our amusement. Susan Baker, the never-married live-in help of Anne's family, is another classic character. When writing from the children's points of view, Montgomery has that Harper Lee knack of remembering how your brain works when you're little. And I don't deny that I plan to use what I've learned about parenting in these books someday. Anne's relationship to her children and her views on raising them still feels fresh and smart. I can't lie.