Rilla of Ingleside

Rilla of Ingleside is the eighth of nine books in the Anne of Green Gables series by Lucy Maud Montgomery, but was the sixth &quot;Anne&quot; novel in publication order.<br /> <br /> This book draws the focus back onto a single character, Anne and Gilbert&#39;s youngest daughter Bertha Marilla &quot;Rilla&quot; Blythe. It has a more serious tone, as it takes place during World War I and the three Blythe boys&mdash;Jem, Walter, and Shirley&mdash;along with Rilla&#39;s sweetheart Ken Ford, and playmates Jerry Meredith and Carl Meredith&mdash;end up fighting in Europe with the Canadian Expeditionary Force. The book is dedicated: &quot;To the memory of FREDERICA CAMPBELL MACFARLANE who went away from me when the dawn broke on January 25, 1919&mdash;a true friend, a rare personality, a loyal and courageous soul.&quot; Frederica, Maud&#39;s cousin and best friend, grew up in Park Corner, PEI, but died in the worldwide flu epidemic of 1918/19.<br /> <br /> Frederica may have been the model for Diana Barry, Anne of Green Gables&#39; &quot;bosom friend&quot;: both had unusual, non-Christian first names, and the fictional Diana&#39;s husband was named, perhaps not coincidentally, Fred. Rilla of Ingleside is the only Canadian novel written from a woman&#39;s perspective about the First World War by a contemporary. The novel is also groundbreaking as it is one of the first non-Australian texts to mention the Gallipoli campaign and the sacrifice made by the ANZACs. At some point after Montgomery&#39;s death in 1942, publishers quietly trimmed Rilla of Ingleside of a few thousand words, removing among other things passages containing historically accurate but now offensive anti-German sentiment. The trimmed version was the only available &quot;in print&quot; version for decades, until a new, restored and annotated edition of Rilla of Ingleside, edited by Benjamin Lefebvre (editor of Montgomery&#39;s The Blythes Are Quoted) and Andrea McKenzie, was published by Viking Canada in October 2010.