The Blythes Are Quoted recap

The last Anne book is not a novel but a collection: two parts of short stories set in and around Glen St. Mary and Four Winds, interleaved with poems attributed to Anne and Walter Blythe and with brief scenes of the Blythe family at Ingleside talking over those poems and their neighbours. The first part is set before the First World War and the second after it. The Blythes themselves stay mostly at the edges; the stories belong to the people of the district, who quote the doctor and his wife, measure themselves against Ingleside, and conduct their own courtships, feuds, deceptions, and reconciliations. The tone is markedly harder than in the earlier books, with more irony and more unhappiness allowed to stand. Walter's death in the war is the shadow across the second part, and his verses are read aloud in the family scenes. Montgomery sent the manuscript to her publisher at the very end of her life; a shortened version appeared decades later, and the complete text only in 2009.

Previously: Anne Shirley, brought up as an orphan at Green Gables in Avonlea, married Doctor Gilbert Blythe and raised their family at Ingleside in Glen St. Mary, with the housekeeper Susan Baker in charge of the kitchen. Their children are Jem, Walter, the twins Nan and Di, Shirley, and the youngest, Rilla, and the family's closest friends have long been the Meredith children of the Glen manse. The First World War took the young men of the district: Jem was taken prisoner and came home, and Walter, the poet of the family, was killed in France, leaving verses that were published and widely read. This book is not a continuation of that story but a collection of short pieces set in the same countryside, with the Blythes seen mostly from outside, as the neighbours see and talk about them.

The first part is set in the years before the First World War. It gathers short stories of Glen St. Mary and the Four Winds district, each complete in itself, about courtships long delayed, family quarrels, mistaken judgements, secrets kept for years, and the small tyrannies of respectable households. Between them come poems attributed to Anne Blythe and to her son Walter, and short scenes at Ingleside in which the family reads those poems aloud and comments on them and on the neighbours. The Blythes are not the subject of the stories; they are the fixed point the district measures itself against, quoted approvingly by some characters and resented by others, and the effect is to show the familiar world of the earlier books from the outside. The register is drier and more ironic than the novels, and unhappy situations are more often left unrepaired.

The second part is set after the war. The Blythe household is older and Walter is dead, and the linking scenes at Ingleside are quieter, with his verses read aloud among the family and his absence present in the talk. The stories continue as before, drawn from the private lives of the district: marriages made and broken, old grudges, deceptions discovered too late, and lives narrowed by pride or by respectability, with several endings that offer no consolation at all. The Blythes remain at the margins, quoted and discussed by people who mostly know them only by reputation. The collection ends there, without a plot to conclude, leaving Glen St. Mary as it stands after the war and closing the sequence that began with an orphan child arriving at Green Gables.

The book has no single plot to resolve. It closes at the end of its second part, after the war, with the Blythes older, the family circle reduced by Walter's death, and the last of the linking scenes at Ingleside given over to reading his verses and to the family's talk around them. The stories of the second part end as they began, in the private affairs of Glen St. Mary and Four Winds neighbours, several of them on a note of irony or plain bitterness rather than the reconciliations the earlier books preferred. The Blythes themselves are left as the district sees them: prosperous, respected, endlessly quoted, and privately carrying a loss the Glen mentions but does not feel. Taken as a whole the collection is Montgomery's closing word on the world of Avonlea and the Glen, published complete only long after her death, and it leaves that world intact but noticeably darker than she had drawn it before.