Year One at Windy Poplars
Welcome to Month 4 of the Kindred Spirits Book Club, dear friends!
Anne of Windy Poplars is written differently from the previous three. It begins written in the form of letters from Anne to Gilbert as they are apart for three years before their marriage. Anne is a principal at a school in Summerside in PEI, while Gilbert continues on at Redmond as a medical student.
Sunset on Lake Champlain
From the very start, I find myself missing the voices and experiences of other characters who have diminished from the previous books, and I anticipate they will diminish even more. I miss Rachel Lynde antics. I miss Gilbert (who while he is included since these letters are directed to him, we don’t hear much of anything about what he is doing). I miss Diana and want to know about how she feels in married life and motherhood. And I miss Marilla most of all. How she doing with the twins and with missing her Anne? All of these voices feel terribly absent in Year 1 of Windy Poplars. I do hope it will change.
But we do have a whole new cast of characters that we get to enjoy! We’ve met the Pringles who seem to make up most of the town and are initially quite bitter towards Anne getting the Principalship over a Pringle relative who had applied; but in her Anneish ways she ultimately wins them over. Rebecca Dew and the widows are Anne’s new roommates, and will be for her next two years in Summerside. And little Elizabeth (sometimes Beth or Betty or Elsie) lives next door and takes frequent adventures to Fairyland with Anne. Anne enters fairyland with Elizabeth, just as she had with Paul Irving and surely many others. Anne’s role as a mentor and kindred spirit is to keep the spirit of fairyland alive for children as long as she can. Anne also finds herself within the quirky dynamics of multiple families, as she is invited to many dinners and gatherings. Through these adventures we meet Cyrus Taylor and his family, Dr. Lennox, Pauline & Mrs. Gibson, the Nelsons, and so many others!
It’s so wonderful to see Anne in her element as a teacher, especially in her secret coaching of Sophy as understudy and in the ways she befriends Elizabeth. In both of these relationships, I see the unloved little girl before she found a home in Green Gables, who now has so much love and support to give to the children she encounters in her life and work.
I enjoy these many different characters and the stories that accompany them, but they feel to me in some ways more like disconnected essays or vignettes, rather than part of the Anne of Green Gables series. Do others feel similarly or are you liking the mix up of characters?
Suddenly in chapter 5, we leave the world of letters and resume 3rd person narration. We strangely go back and forth from here between the 3rd person and the 1st person letter narrative. Personally, I prefer the 3rd person narration over the letters. I see the cuteness in filling this book with Anne’s love letters to Gilbert, but it just doesn’t capture the essence and spirit of Anne that I so adore and feels a bit chaotic to me.
A few favorite quotes from this section:
“But the graveyard wasn’t a sad place after all. Really, the people in it seemed alive after Miss Valentine’s tales.”
I have always loved cemeteries for this reason. I walk around them and I think about the life lived by each of the people marked by a grave. I have a very similar feeling about working in Hospice, it is not about dying, it is about living.
“Whenever you come into a room, the people in it feel happier.” What a beautiful compliment given to Anne! And one that is well deserved. Not only does Anne make others happier with her presence, but she goes out of her way to make others' lives better and happier. She did everything in her power to ensure that Pauline had a free night, out of the house and at the wedding of a loved one. As she has done with others, Anne meddled in order to bring together old lovers, this time in the case of Nora Nelson and Jim Wilcox. She does these things because she truly wants for other people to have more joy in their lives, and it makes me love her even more for it!
Not only did I like this reading experience less than the previous 3 books, I am finding myself having a much harder time writing this week’s newsletter! I’d love to hear your thoughts and if you are feeling stuck as well. And if you are not, please send along your reflections from Year 1. Regardless of how you feel at the start of Windy Poplars, I truly hope you stick with me through the process. I know there are more gems to be uncovered!
Thank you for reading
Thank you for reading and joining me on this read-along of Anne of Green Gables!
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Your bosom friend,
Bri
I agree with you about everything. The switching between letters and 3rd person narration felt chaotic. I expected that we would also read Gilbert's replies and was disappointed. It also appears that all the juiciest parts from the letters are omitted (when Anne's Pen is right). I miss all the characters from previous books and I felt overhelmed by the number of new characters. There's little to no introduction to them and I was often searching for them in my e-book because I wasn't sure whether they had been introduced before. I enjoyed the different stories (but they did feel like dusconnected vignettes or short stories), but they felt a bit repetitive from previous books (insufferable old ladies, children who live in fairy lands, meddling and match making).
It's definitely episodic, but it feels more coherent than, for example Anne of Avonlea. I actually loved it - I started reading a few days ago and shot straight through to the end! Just didn't want to pause at the end of the first year.
I do think it becomes less "letters" and more actual narration after the first year, and there's some nice character development (as well as a visit to some beloved characters from previous books).