Rainbow Valley recap

A new Presbyterian minister, the scholarly and unworldly John Meredith, comes to Glen St. Mary with four motherless children and an incompetent old housekeeper, and the manse family runs wild. Jerry, Faith, Una, and Carl make friends with the Blythe children of Ingleside and spend their days in Rainbow Valley, scandalizing the congregation with one thoughtless escapade after another while their father reads in his study and notices nothing. They rescue a starving runaway, Mary Vance, who is eventually taken in and brought up by Mrs. Marshall Elliott. Ashamed of disgracing their father, the manse children form a club to punish their own misdeeds, and one of the punishments makes Carl seriously ill, which finally wakes Mr. Meredith to his family's neglect. Meanwhile he falls in love with Rosemary West, who must refuse him because of a promise never to marry, extracted by her sister Ellen. When Ellen's own old suitor returns and marries her, Rosemary is freed and accepts the minister. The book ends with Walter Blythe's vision of the Pied Piper, a warning of the war to come.

Previously: Anne Shirley, brought up as an orphan at Green Gables in Avonlea, married Doctor Gilbert Blythe and lives at Ingleside in Glen St. Mary with their housekeeper Susan Baker and their children, Jem, Walter, the twins Nan and Di, Shirley, and the youngest, Rilla. Their neighbour and old friend from Four Winds days, once Miss Cornelia Bryant, is now Mrs. Marshall Elliott and lives at the Glen. The doctor's practice is long established and the family well settled. In this book Anne and Gilbert step back into the background: the story belongs to their children and to the family of the new minister at the Glen manse, and the setting is the wooded hollow below Ingleside that the children have named Rainbow Valley.

Anne comes home to Ingleside after three months in Europe, and the Glen catches her up on its news, chiefly the new Presbyterian minister. John Meredith is a widower with four children, a fine preacher, and hopelessly unpractical: the manse is dirty and disorderly, the meals are ruinous, and his old housekeeper, Aunt Martha, is half blind and will not be dismissed. Jerry, Faith, Una, and Carl Meredith are left to bring themselves up, and they do it cheerfully, running about the graveyard beside the church and making friends at once with the Blythe children in Rainbow Valley, the wooded hollow below Ingleside. Exploring an abandoned barn, the children find a half-starved girl of about twelve hiding there. Mary Vance has run away from a hard mistress and has nowhere to go; the manse children feed her and take her in, without troubling to consult their father.

Mary Vance is installed at the manse, where she is useful, sharp-tongued, and a good deal too well informed for the taste of the Glen. Her situation is settled when it emerges that the woman she ran from cannot claim her, and Mrs. Marshall Elliott takes her to bring up, giving Mary a home and the Glen a steady supply of comment. The manse children go on disgracing their father without meaning to: they play in the graveyard, keep house on the wrong day, and appear at church in whatever they happen to be wearing, and the congregation talks. Mr. Meredith, absorbed in his books, sees none of it. Walking home one evening he falls into conversation with Rosemary West, one of two sisters who keep house up the hill, and finds himself talking easily for the first time since his wife died. He begins to visit the hill house, and Ellen West watches the friendship with growing unease.

The manse children learn how badly the Glen speaks of them and are horrified, less for themselves than for their father, and they form a club to keep themselves in order, with the rule that any of them who does wrong shall choose and carry out their own punishment. The penalties are as ill-judged as the offences: they go without meals, walk to church in disgrace, and set themselves ordeals no adult would have permitted. Faith goes on acting first and thinking afterwards, in one case riding a neighbour's pig through the village for a wager, and afterwards, when the congregation blames her father for her behaviour, standing up in church to explain herself to the whole assembly, which scandalizes the Glen more than the original offence. Walter Blythe, who hates fighting, fights an older boy who has insulted Faith and his own mother, and is respected afterwards by boys who had thought him a coward.

John Meredith at last asks Rosemary West to marry him. She refuses, and cannot tell him why: years ago, when Ellen gave up her own chance of marriage to keep house for her sister, Rosemary promised never to leave her. The minister, humiliated and baffled, keeps away from the hill house, and Rosemary is left as unhappy as he is. When she tells Ellen what she has given up, the two sisters quarrel and settle into a cold silence. Faith and Una, learning something of the courtship, are torn between wanting their father happy and dreading a stepmother, and Una in particular is wretched about it. The manse runs on as badly as ever, and Mary Vance, from her comfortable place with Mrs. Marshall Elliott, keeps the children supplied with the Glen's opinion of them.

One of the club's self-imposed penalties goes badly wrong. Carl, punishing himself for a fault, spends a whole night alone in the graveyard in the cold, is brought home ill, and his illness turns dangerous. His father, sitting up with him, understands for the first time how far he has let his children go untended, and is bitterly ashamed of it. Carl recovers, and Mr. Meredith is a better father afterwards for the shock of it. Into this comes Norman Douglas, a loud, red-bearded farmer who has stayed away from church for years and who takes it into his head to come back, and to renew a courtship he abandoned in his youth.

Norman Douglas courts Ellen West as noisily as he does everything else, and Ellen, who refused him long ago, accepts him. Marrying herself, she can no longer hold Rosemary to the promise she exacted, and she releases her outright. Rosemary and John Meredith are reconciled and engaged, and the manse is to have a mistress at last. Una Meredith, still frightened of what a stepmother may mean, goes alone to Rosemary to beg her to be good to Carl, and Rosemary's answer settles the children's fears. Mary Vance is at home with Mrs. Marshall Elliott and as talkative as ever. On a still evening the children gather in Rainbow Valley, and Walter tells them that he has seen the Pied Piper coming down over the hills, playing, and that one day he will call and the boys will have to follow him. The others laugh and promise to go when the call comes, and the book ends there.

Norman Douglas returns to church and to his old courtship of Ellen West, and the two become engaged. Ellen, marrying herself, releases Rosemary from the promise that had kept her single, and Rosemary accepts John Meredith. Una Meredith, who has been dreading a stepmother more than she could say, goes alone to Rosemary to ask her to be kind to Carl, and comes away comforted; the manse children accept the marriage and gain the mothering they have gone without. Mr. Meredith, shaken by how far his family had been neglected, is at last awake to his household. Mary Vance is settled with Mrs. Marshall Elliott and thoroughly at home in the Glen. The Blythe and Meredith children are all a year or two older, and Rainbow Valley is still theirs. The book closes with them gathered in the valley at sunset, where Walter tells them he has seen the Pied Piper coming over the hills with his music, calling the boys of the world to follow him. The others take it for one of Walter's fancies and promise lightly to follow when the call comes, and the story ends on that promise with the shadow of the coming war lying over it.