Rilla and Vera and the Great War

Have you ever thought about when your life as a reader started? Mine began with Anne of Green Gables. When I discovered Anne at age ten or eleven, I tossed aside fantasy and adventure books and gobbled up everything connected with her. For the first time, I experienced the delight of identifying with a character. I wasn’t as chatty as Anne, and did not have red hair, but I lived in my imagination as she did. But I never reached the eighth book in the series, Rilla of Ingleside, and was entranced to re-enter this world so many decades after my first encounter.

When I started my research for my next novel, which touches on World War 1, I could never have predicted that it would lead me to Rilla. Despite the best efforts of high school history teachers, I learned more about the Great War when I studied art history. Accounts of the Group of Seven’s first exhibitions always state that Canada’s war effort produced a new confidence and nationalistic spirit, which in turn favoured new art, but I never understood the full scope of the contribution. I’m filling in gaps now.

Life on the home front, or the war seen by non-combatants, is the theme of Rilla of Ingleside, written in 1921. The book opens in June 1914. Rilla, the youngest of Anne’s six children, is fourteen going on fifteen. She has no idea how the assassination of an obscure Austrian archduke can possibly affect her comfortable life in picturesque Glen St Mary on Prince Edward Island. She finds out in August when a local boy disrupts a dance to announce that Britain has declared war on Germany and her brother and his friends start talking about enlisting. We follow the four years of the war through Rilla’s eyes, as she confides in her diary, struggles to find a useful role, and recounts the anxious conversations of her family as they consume the daily news and wait for letters.

In contrast to this novel is a famous memoir, Testament of Youth, by Vera Brittain. She wrote it in 1933, looking back on the period 1914-1925. Vera left her hard-won place at Oxford after one year to volunteer as a V.A.D. (Voluntary Aid Detachment) nurse and serve in military hospitals in London, Malta, and Étaples, France. As the young men she knew were enduring so much in the trenches of the Western Front, she felt she had to sacrifice too. They were all motivated by patriotism in 1914, but became disillusioned by the horrors of the war. Vera suffered the tremendous loss of her fiancé, brother, and two close friends. She slowly recovered a feeling of purpose in life through her journalism and campaigning for peace after the war.

Two very different female voices. Rilla is a teenager, given to volatile emotions. More and more young men leave the Glen to enlist, so the war pervades her life, but Rilla still has mishaps with shoes and her childhood lisp, which appears to comic effect when she is overcome. These are reminiscent of her mother’s comical adventures in Anne of Green Gables. But Rilla also suffers the loss of a loved one. Montgomery strikes a perfect tone, alternately moving and amusing us as we follow Rilla’s growth in this tumultuous period.

Vera is much more high-minded and serious than Rilla, but she waits for letters from her sweetheart at the front as anxiously as her Canadian fictional counterpart. She looks back on an idyllic visit to her brother’s school in July 1914 with these words:

“Never again, for me and for my generation, was there to be any festival the joy of which no cloud would darken and no remembrance invalidate.”

Vera’s despondent periods last longer and are described in more detail, through her diary and letters, than those of the effervescent Rilla. Over and over again, she laments the loss of young contemporaries. The melancholy of the quote pervades her memoir.

I feel challenged by writing a novel with a historical component.  I’m immersing myself in the period, yet I know that ultimately I’ll use only the telling details that will resonate with the reader. I’ll have to emerge from my deep dive and imagine what my characters would experience. Other books will inform me of the tremendous price that Canada paid to emerge more confidently on the world stage in 1919, but the voices of these two young women, the real Vera and the fictional Rilla, will inspire me.  I’m glad to have discovered them and think they  will guide me in bringing my characters to life.