The key to Rainbow Valley lies in its dedication: “To the memory of Goldwin Lapp, Robert Brookes, and Morley Shier, who made the supreme sacrifice that the happy valleys of their home land might be kept sacred from the ravage of the invader.”

Title: Rainbow Valley (Anne Novels #7)
Author: L.M. Montgomery (1874-1942)
Original Publication Date: 1919
Edition: Bantam Books (1998), 225 pages
Genre: Sentimental Fiction.
Ages: 12-15
First Line: It was a clear, apple-green evening in May, and Four Winds Harbour was mirroring back the clouds of the golden West between its softly dark shores.

In this spinoff to the regular Anne series, the four older Blythe children befriend the four children of the town’s new minister: Jerry, Faith, Una and Carl. The Meredith kids all mean well, but their father (a distracted scholar at the best of times) is a heartbroken widower with no time for them while the housekeeper is crotchety, half-blind Aunt Martha. The children are left to free-range most of the time and they do their best to bring themselves up, but as the minister’s sons and daughters, they are subjected to ferocious scrutiny – with tomboy Faith especially good at shocking the elders of the church. The Blythes may welcome them but it seems they will never be accepted by the rest of the community…

I began Rainbow Valley convinced that it was going to be one of the weakest installments in the series. The four Merediths and their abstracted father are pleasant enough, but total strangers who take away time from the established families of previous volumes. Adding runaway servant girl Mary Vance in chapter five doesn’t help matters – too many children, too few of them Blythes, and Mary incredibly obnoxious to boot. However, by the time I was done I realised that this is one of the most well-structured and meaningful of the Anne books.

Rainbow Valley is soaked in sunshine and cheer, returning the focus to youthful scrapes and hijinks for the first time since Anne of Green Gables, with Faith taking Anne’s long-vacated role as the wild innocent. Montgomery also addresses an early blind spot of her own – in Anne of Avonlea, trouble-making Davy was the center of attention, while quiet Dora was ignored both within text and without. Here again, Faith receives most of the attention from other characters, but Montgomery sets up shy Una as the only Meredith who understands how much the family suffers, who witnesses their father’s grief and had an uneasy consciousness that there was something askew in their way of living. She longed to put it right, but did not know how. Fittingly, it is she who ends up taking the necessary step to bring about a happy conclusion to the novel.

The treatment Montgomery affords the Merediths is rather peculiar and alienates many readers. The children are thoroughly neglected by their father and yet John Meredith is treated as a sympathetic character throughout. He dressed hurriedly and ate his supper less abstractedly than usual. It occurred to him that it was a poor meal. He looked at his children; they were rosy and healthy looking enough–except Una, and she had never been very strong even when her mother was alive. They were all laughing and talking–certainly they seemed happy. Carl was especially happy because he had two most beautiful spiders crawling around his supper plate. Their voices were pleasant, their manners did not seem bad, they were considerate of and gentle to one another. Yet Mrs. Davis had said their behaviour was the talk of the congregation. John Meredith is not proactive – he’s a broken man who has retreated entirely into his books and sermons while his children eat poor food, lose beloved pets and are looked down on by the neighbours, all with him rarely the wiser. Yet he’s depicted as a good father and given a sweet romance plot. So what is Montgomery’s purpose here?

The community of Glen St. Mary is driven by gossip. The elders of the Presbyterian church are not interested in trying to improve things or aid their new minister – they just want him to look good for their rivalry with the Methodists and make snide comments when he fails. No one offers sewing lessons to Una or sends over a meal (the Blythes excepted), even though they’re perfectly aware of how the family struggles. They simply judge and diminish. Since Montgomery married a minister and thus ended up in a very exposed community role, I wonder how much of the depiction in Rainbow Valley was actually based on personal experience. However, it’s not just one character who functions as a mean-spirited gossip – it’s practically the whole town. Indeed, that’s the point.

This is why there’s a sudden ensemble cast of children and why the emphasis is on these children raising themselves and holding to their own standards. This is Montgomery’s ode to the generation sacrificed. The four Meredith children are not intended for the reader to pity, they are not meant to be seen as neglected and in need of guidance, but rather as strong and self-sufficient. That’s why the plot reads so strangely at times. Anne barely features in this novel, and yet she’s given the pivotal scene where she defends the Merediths. Notably? She singles out the four children for their potential. The meaning could not be clearer.

“Gerald Meredith is the cleverest pupil in the Glen school, and Mr. Hazard says that he is destined to a brilliant career. He is a manly, honourable, truthful little fellow. Faith Meredith is a beauty, and as inspiring and original as she is beautiful. There is nothing commonplace about her. … Una Meredith is sweetness personified. She will make a most lovable woman. Carl Meredith, with his love for ants and frogs and spiders, will some day be a naturalist whom all Canada–nay, all the world, will delight to honouor.”

This is a refreshing glimpse of proper Anne spirit after the treatment she got in Ingleside, but the speech, as satisfying as it is, is also sad. Anne of Ingleside was certainly steeped in nostalgia for the pre-war years, but Montgomery had no real heart left for the series by that point. Rainbow Valley is a far more intense tribute to the young taken overseas, and Montgomery chooses the horrifying metaphor of the Pied Piper to drive this point home.

However haunted the book might be, it still features the Montgomery staple of a romance to provide a happy ending, in this case between John Meredith and a parishioner, whose first encounter is played up as pure medieval enchantment involving a woodland spring, starlight and a shared cup of water. To a large extent, the excellence of Montgomery’s work and its ability to live on lies in her ability to weave such spells in the middle of realistic stories. Her Prince Edward Island almost exists – certainly nothing occurs in any of her Anne novels that couldn’t happen in reality, and that allows the reader’s day to day life to be seen in a better light.

When I first learned that Montgomery suffered from depression all of her adult life, I felt betrayed by the seeming insincerity of it all. But what’s clear in reading these books is that Montgomery didn’t want to package her own pain and ship it out to her emotionally vulnerable audience of children and teenagers. Instead, she wrote stories that encouraged them to find strength, beauty and hope in the world, to pay attention to natural wonders and actual ideals. Life is hard enough and she was well aware of it, and so she wrote to counteract that pain. It was a noble effort and more than makes up for the occasional flaws.

Parental Guide

Violence: Walter Blythe defends Faith’s honour in a schoolyard brawl! I think this is the first proper action scene in an Anne book: There were no particular rules in the fights of the Glen school boys. It was catch-as-catch-can, and get your blows in anyhow. Walter fought with a savage fury and a joy in the struggle against which Dan could not hold his ground. It was all over very speedily. Walter had no clear consciousness of what he was doing until suddenly the red mist cleared from his sight and he found himself kneeling on the body of the prostrate Dan whoese nose–oh, horror!–was spouting blood.

There’s also a ghastly episode in which Aunt Martha kills Faith’s pet rooster for a guest’s dinner. Since their father is away when this happens, it turns Aunt Martha into a truly vile and underhanded guardian. Montgomery misses the opportunity to utilize this incident, as it could have been central to finding a good stepmother, but instead it’s treated as more or less a freak tragedy and Aunt Martha never gets any comeuppance.

Values: The Merediths create the Good Conduct Club, in which they collectively pass sentence on any member of the club who brings shame to their father, recognising the need for rules and order and being willing to self-impose them. Being children of a minister, religion forms a large part of their worldview, including their play. The takeaway of the entire book is that single parent families are broken and need the healing hand of a well-chosen stepparent to function properly.

Anne’s speech is a declaration that communities should defend their own people – the Presbyterians willingness to find fault in the new minister projects weakness to the rival Methodists, not strength. Subliminally, this speech also declares that war wastes the potential of an entire generation.

Role Models: The same as usual for these books, with the exception of Mary Vance, who is the poster child for ingrate.

Educational Properties: Same as usual for these books.

End of Guide

One to go. But first, an announcement. Owing to WordPress’s late upgrade to the Gutenberg Block editor, it is now extremely difficult for me to use this website the way I am accustomed, and I’m ready to call it quits. The program is slower, click-based and there’s even lagtime when I’m typing. I have a handful of nearly complete/complete reviews which I will be posting up in the next couple of weeks for the sake of feeling finished with it all. This project has been helping me get through a very tough time, but it’s time for me to move on to other things. Thank you to my readers.