Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twenty-One and Twenty-Two

In which Anne and Diana accidentally stumble upon an eccentric "old maid" in the woods who, to no one's surprise, turns out to be a kindred spirit, Anne and Marilla discuss said lady while chastising Davy, and the twins' final fate is settled, also to no one's surprise.



Greetings, quarantinos! Today we meet Miss Lavendar Lewis, who was mentioned by Rachel Lynde waaaaaaay back in Chapter One (which I read to you almost, uh, five years ago) when she told Anne about Paul Irving coming to the school, and how his father (now widowed) had been engaged to Miss Lavendar but they split up for reasons unknown. I'm sure none of this will be important at all!

Oh, and I fully realize that I am misspelling "lavender" here, but that's how it's spelled in the book, both for her name and when talking about the actual plant. It's like this in both my paperback and in the Project Gutenberg version, so it doesn't appear to just be an issue with the typesetting of my edition, nor can I find any evidence that this is some sort of "old-fashioned" spelling that Montgomery might have been using, so I guess maybe it's just a mistake that has somehow been carried through for over a century? And no one has wanted to fix it because, like me, they don't want to just change the spelling of a character's name? And they kept the spelling for the plant to, I don't know, make it less obvious? Anyway, I'll spell it correctly if I talk about the plant, but I'll retain the spelling for her name because. . . well, it's her name.

Our cover this time is from an Australian edition from 1955, published by Angus & Robertson (the same folks who did that fourth-wall-breaking cover from the '80s), and I am once again unable to find the artist's name. This one is interesting because it is, I think, the only one I've found that specifically features Paul Irving, despite the rather large part he plays in this particular volume. At least, I assume it's him. I can't think what other young boy might be walking alongside Anne, both carrying school items, while holding a small bouquet and staring up with a dreamy (one might almost say "vacant") expression.) Anyway, it's pretty enough, not wildly inaccurate, and applies to this specific book, so well done!

Just a couple of notes:

19:25 - "horns of elfland." This comes from Alfred, Lord Tennyson, who you may remember from when Anne and her friends reenacted his telling of the story of the Lady of Shalott back in Anne of Green Gables, with hilarious results. This particular one comes from his poem "The Splendor Falls," which describes a sunset he saw over a waterfall in the mountains of Ireland. Go and read it; it's lovely and quite short.

24:51 - "Kerrenhappuch." Keren-happuch was an exceedingly minor character in the Bible. Remember the delightful story of Job? Where Job was a pious and righteous man, and Satan bet God that he was only so righteous because he had a comfy life and enjoyed God's protection, so God let Satan ruin Job's life by killing off his wife and children, financially ruining him, and stealing his health? And Job refused to get angry at God for his misfortunes, just accepting that it was all God's will while despairing that he did not know why? And God rewards his faith by healing him, giving him even more wealth than he had before, a brand-new wife,  and seven new sons and three new daughters who were said to be the most beautiful women in the land? Yeah, Keren-happuch was the youngest of those daughters. Her name means "horn of kohl," so a container of eyeliner, I guess? It's unclear whether Diana was referencing her directly or just picked a weird name that happened to have a Biblical origin, as other people have indeed been called that, and it seems as though it would have been an egregiously old-fashioned name even then.



If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Nineteen and Twenty

In which Anne has a very nice day with three boys of varying levels of tediousness, then is surprised with hosting duties while at her least presentable; and in which your narrator is once again unable to restrain himself from complaining about Paul Irving.



Hi-ho, everyone! I hope you're all holding up well, staying home as much as possible and being careful if and when you must leave. Let's escape back into Avonlea for a bit, shall we?

Today's cover comes from the very edition I'm reading from, a Bantam Classics paperback from 1992 with cover art by Ben Stahl. It's a rather lovely painting, though it does fall a bit into that "generic" category I mentioned last time. We've got a pretty well-put-together Anne amidst a bunch of pretty flowers with what I assume is the schoolhouse in the background. Nothing really to tie it to this specific book so much.

Only a couple of mostly-simple notes this time around:

25:38 - "help Mr. Harrison haul dulse." I really expected this to be some sort of grain, but apparently it's a type of red seaweed that's been harvested for food for centuries in Ireland, Iceland, the northeastern US, and the Atlantic coast of Canada (which is, of course, where Prince Edward Island is.) Oh, and fun fact in case you didn't know: seaweed is not a plant, but is actually a type of algae.

35:22 - "forced to content herself with her black lawn." Lawn in this context is a type of plain weave linen, simple and fairly hard-wearing, but not as coarse and cheap as (say) wincey.

37:54 - "feast of reason and flow of soul." Anne here is quoting the great 18th-century English poet Alexander Pope, from his Imitations of Horace. Horace, in turn, was a 1st century CE Roman lyric poet whose works were very popular with Neoclassical writers like Pope. A popular thing for many of these writers to do was to translate classical works like Horaces Satires but update the cultural references, thus satirizing things in the present day in an imitation of the satires of 1800 years prior. Anyway, that's what Pope was doing here, and he used the phrase Anne quoted to describe congenial conversation.



If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Seventeen and Eighteen

In which hijinks predictably ensue when Anne tries to host a dinner for a famous author; more ensuing happens when she tries to fix one of the results of said dinner; and in which all it took was a global pandemic to get your narrator to start recording again.



Yes, yes, I know it's been a long, LONG time since my last recording, and even long since I started this book (coming up on five years!), but right now I feel we could all use a little something to keep ourselves occupied, and that's as good an excuse as any.

Anyway, cover! We've got this 1997 edition published by Penguin Classics. This is a nice one because it's one of the very few that depicts an actual scene from the novel, instead of some generic, baffling, or vaguely terrifying picture of a girl who could conceivably be Anne (or not). This artist (whose name was not listed in the copyright info inside the book, boo, credit your artists) clearly read the book, or was at least given very clear instruction from someone who did.

And now, your notes!

4:22 - "antimacassars." I could swear I'd covered this one at some point already, but search is coming up empty. Anyway, the cloths (often lacy, frilly, and/or embroidered) which are draped over the headrests and sometimes arms of chairs? Those are antimacassars. Macassar hair oil (so called because its ingredients were supposedly purchased at the port city of Makassar in the Dutch East Indies, now Indonesia) was extremely popular among Western Europeans throughout pretty much the entire 19th century, but it had a tendency to transfer to and stain fabric, so antimacassars were put on chairs to prevent that from happening. You still see them on chairs that get high usage, like on buses, trains, and planes.

4:46 - "a great blue bowlful of snowballs." This most likely refers to Hydrangea aborescens, alternatively known as the smooth hydrangea, wild hydrangea, sevenbark, or snowball bush.

4:55 - "Every shelf of the what-not. . ." You know those spindly little freestanding shelves? They're like end tables, but with multiple levels, and each shelf is maybe six inches across, and it's only really good for holding knick-knacky little crap? That's a what-not.

6:26 - "bread sauce." Maybe this is a common thing in some areas and I just haven't heard about it, but in case you're in the same boat: this is basically what you would think, a type of milk-based sauce/gravy that is thickened with bread crumbs, typically served with fowl.

8:42 - "her namesake in the Bluebeard story peered from the tower casement." This is, obviously, a reference to the story of Bluebeard, in which a young wife disobeys her new husband's orders not to look in a specific locked room, even though he gives her a key, and finds the remains of all his previous wives. In the Charles Perrault version of the story, the unnamed bride sends her sister, Anne, up to the top of the tower to keep a lookout for their brothers coming to save her.

9:22 - "twenty dollars." I can't find US-Canada exchange rates past 1913, but it seems to have held roughly steady at 1-1 for pretty much that whole time, so I'll go ahead and say that it was probably equal to about 20 US dollars at the time. Using various inflation calculators for roughly the time the story takes place (1880s?) and the time it was written (early 1900s), it looks like that's somewhere between $500 and $600 today, and the $25 that Anne eventually shells out for it is more like $700, which, WOW, sounds about right for rich old Aunt Josephine, but sounds a bit much for Anne to have been able to actually cover, so maybe my calculations are off somehow.

23:04 - "over the mountains of the moon / down the valley of the shadow." These lines come from the 1849 poem "Eldorado," by Edgar Allan Poe. It's about a knight looking for and failing to find the famous city of gold. It was one of Poe's last poems before he died, and written at least in part about the 1849 gold rush. And, if I am interpreting these specific lines right, Anne is basically telling young Davy that "sleep" is in the land of the dead. Dark.

26:36 - "jumping on the spare room bed. . . I must refer them to Anne's earlier history." This of course refers to the events of Chapter 19 of Anne of Green Gables, where Anne and Diana accidentally jump on old Miss Barry, thinking the bed she was in was empty.

36:12 - "Do send it to the Canadian Woman." This sounds like a magazine or periodical of some sort, but I can't find any that were ever called that, so perhaps it's made up?

38:25 - "cowcumbers." This is a very old name for cucumbers, apparently considered hopelessly old-fashioned even back in the 1830s. Its use here -- and the scare quotes around it when it's repeated in the narration -- is presumably to mark Miss Copp as a particularly rustic and uneducated person (as does her saying that "I didn't know men were so skurse."

And that's it! I'll see you next time, hopefully in increments of days rather than years.



If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Fifteen and Sixteen

In which summer vacation begins with a joyous trip to the graveyard, a question of theological geography is cleared up, and Anne prepares for a visit from a literary luminary; and in which our narrator asks if anything interesting happened while he was gone.



Hey, remember me? Been a long time! Almost exactly a year to be specific, after which an escape back to Avonlea — which, apropos of nothing, is in Canada — is sounding really good.

First up, our cover this time around comes from a 1987 edition published by the Australian firm of Angus and Robertson, where they published the whole series with covers that included something breaking out of the frame for some reason. I'd like to think that this symbolized Anne's out-of-the-box thinking or something, but they probably did this with lots of other books as well. And frankly, I don't know if I really feel comfortable with a post-modern, fourth-wall-breaking Anne.

Now for notes!

8:35 - "How fair the realm / Imagination opens to the view." All right, I am totally drawing a blank on where this quotation comes from. All the sources I can find list Ms. Montgomery as its author, though it's clearly formatted as a quotation in the text. Moreover, Montgomery has quoted this more than once: in a 1903 diary entry (six year before Anne of Avonlea was published and in a 1927 letter, for instance, each time clearly delineated with quotation marks. Looking for only part of the phrase (in case she's paraphrasing) gets the same results. Anyone else have any ideas?

8:55 - "east o' the sun, west o' the moon." Oh good, this one's easy. This is from a Norwegian folk tale of the same name, where the title refers to the impossible-to-find location of the troll castle the heroine's husband was spirited away to. Also her husband was a bear. I think I may actually read this as our next Short Story Interlude, if only to tell you the personal connection I have with it and explain one of my more esoteric tags.

11:31 - "Not failure but low aim is crime." Helpfully, Mrs. Allan partly sources this one herself, attributing it to "Lowell." This turns out to be the American Romantic poet James Russell Lowell (1819-1891), from his poem "For an Autograph." The whole line reads

Greatly begin! though thou have time
But for a line, be that sublime,—
Not failure, but low aim, is crime.

Which, FINE, I've already started recording again, sheesh. Quit bugging me, Lowell.

25:50 - "In the elder days of art / Builders wrought with greatest care / Each minute and unseen part / For the gods see everywhere" Ah, again helpfully sourced in the text! This is from "The Builders," by Henry Wadsworth Longfellow in his 1850 collection The Seaside and the Fireside (the "Fireside" portion, in case you're curious). Longfellow, incidentally, was part of the group of 19-century New England poets called the Fireside Poets, which also included James Russell Lowell. Montgomery had certain preferences.

Oh, and you may have noticed that I've switched over to hosting my books on SoundCloud! This means you can more easily stream them to your phone through their handy app, where they're already helpfully parceled out into their own playlists. You can find all of my stuff here, where you can also favorite, make comments, subscribe, etc. At some point I'll go back and update all the old posts with the new embedded player.



If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Avonlea, Chapter Fourteen

In which the twins will be staying with Anne and Marilla for a little longer, to no one's surprise, a theological discussion is had, and a potential disaster for the Improvement Society is averted by political corruption; and in which the narrator just sort of gives up on keeping all the very minor characters' voices straight.



Welcome back! I hope everyone had a good holiday season. We're diving back into Avonlea with the drama of aesthetically displeasing advertisements. No notes this time around, so we'll just have this installment's cover, from Aladdin Classics in 2005:

This has what appears to be an actual vintage photograph, which works fine as it's at least roughly the right time period and age to be Anne. I am curious, though, as to what exactly is going on with her left hand there. Is it just me, or is that handbag rather blatantly photoshopped in? Why is her hand in such an awkward position? Is that photoshopped too? Why would they do either of those things? Why is the bag flying up like that? Is she supposed to have just moved her forearm up very quickly for some reason that the rest of her body is unaware of? Is it just about to whap her in the face? I DON'T UNDERSTAND WHAT'S HAPPENING.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Twelve and Thirteen

In which Anne has a very cranky day and finds her personal educational philosophy slipping, but then celebrates a pseudo-birthday by exploring the countryside and learning a terribly tragic story; and in which our narrator wonders whatever happened to Anne's toothache, because she should really get that checked out, seriously now.



Today's cover is from a 1995 Norstedts printing of the Swedish edition of Vår vän Anne. I like that this one shows Anne with (presumably) Davy and Dora, who I have never seen featured anywhere. Heck, they're hardly ever even mentioned when talking about these books, so it's rather nice to see them on a cover. In Sweden, anyway. I also appreciate that Davy looks like he's trying to claw his way out of those fancy clothes that are strangling him.

Unnecessarily complex notes to follow!


10:56 - "by what somebody has called 'a Herculaneum effort.'" Herculaneum was an ancient Roman city that was, like the more famous Pompeii, buried by the eruption of Mount Vesuvius in 79 CE. It was wealthier than Pompeii, and actually better preserved, containing organic remains like wood, food, beds, and even skeletons. The destruction of Pompeii, though, was famously witnessed and described by Pliny the Younger, so it's distinctly the better-known.

Of course, that doesn't have much to do with this quote, which is a malaprop for the idiom "a Herculean effort." I'm not sure who the "somebody" is that Montgomery is attributing this phrase to, though. My best guess comes from an 1894 travelogue called Our Journey Around the World, by Rev. Francis Clark and Harriet Clark, where the narrator says "with a Herculaneum effort, as Mrs. Partington would have said..." Mrs. Partington turns out to be a character created by American humorist B. P. Shillaber in the 1850s who is described as an American Mrs. Malaprop (who, in turn, was from the play The Rivals by Richard Brinsley Sheridan and who, of course, gave her name to the practice of humorously replacing one word for another, similar-sounding one). The texts the Mrs. Partington are from, though, don't appear to be readily available online, at least not in searchable form, and what I can find does not appear to use particular term. I found other people in the 1800s making this same malaprop, though, so maybe it was just a semi-common joke with no specific source.

12:58 - "plum puffs won't minister to a mind diseased" Ah, okay, this one's easy. Anne here is adapting a quote from Act V, Scene III of Shakespeare's Macbeth:

MACBETH: How does your patient, doctor?

DOCTOR: Not so sick, my lord,
As she is troubled with thick-coming fancies
That keep her from rest.

MACBETH: Cure her of that!
Canst thou not minister to a mind diseased,
Pluck from the memory a rooted sorrow,
Raze out the written troubles of the brain,
And with some sweet oblivious antidote
Cleanse the stuffed bosom of that perilous stuff
Which weighs upon her heart.

DOCTOR: Therein the patient
Must minister to himself.

One should note that by quoting this, Anne is casting herself in the part of Lady Macbeth, guilt-ridden over the murder of King Duncan.

13:37 - "Every morn is a fresh beginning / Every morn is the world made new." Anne here is caroling the start of the poem "New Every Morning," from the 1889 book A Few More Verses by Susan Coolidge (1835-1905, real name Sarah Chauncey Woolsey, and also author of, of course, Verses). As far as I know, it was never set to music. If it ever was, it most certainly was not whatever travesty I saddled it with.

17:45 - "harrowing." A harrow is an agricultural tool made up of many spikes, discs, or tines which are dragged across plowed soil to smooth it out and break up large clump of dirt, giving it a finer and more finished appearance  that is also better for seeding. This is also where the word "harrowing" comes from, as in "a harrowing experience." Because, well, imagine being dragged through this sucker.

18:17 - "Begone, dull care!" This comes from an old English folk song that dates back to at least the 1600s, and possibly earlier.

19:14 - "It would be too hot to hold some folks." ...yeah, no, I still have no idea what Jane is so "sagely quoting" here, if indeed anything.
 
20:21 - "elephant's ears." I'm not sure which of the various related plants referred to as "elephant ears" they are referring to, but as far as I can tell none of them would be described as "graceful" or "feathery," or appropriate for "picking a big bunch," as they're primarily known for their very large, leathery, heart-shaped leaves rather than their flowers.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!

Anne of Avonlea, Chapters Ten and Eleven

In which Davy makes a good deal of trouble due to not being brought up right, and Anne writes a letter to someone we don't care about relating numerous funny, strange, or creative things her students have said; and in which our narrator is pretty sure that if Anne were around today she'd totally have her own Tumblr.



Today's cover is from Sterling Publishing in 2008 and makes the unusual choice of showing Anne as a teacher, with her class. I hadn't really realized it before, but it really is a bit odd that so few covers seem to depict her in this way, considering how a big part of this book relates to her teaching and relationships with her students. Here's a fun game: try and figure out which of these students are the saintly Paul Irving, the terrible Anthony Pye, the put-upon St. Clair Donnel, the clumsy Barbara Shaw, and the coquettish Prillie Rogerson! And wonder if the illustrator actually tried to represent the specific children or not! (I really have no idea if they did or did not.)

Notes:

12:59 - "asseverated." Man, the Pyes animadvert, Davy asseverates... Ms. Montgomery, I love you and I love your work, but you need to put down your thesaurus for a while. You can just say that Davy declared, or asserted, or stated earnestly or something.

21:00 - "Thomas à Becket." AKA St. Thomas of Canterbury, Thomas Becket was the Archbishop of Canterbury during the reign of King Henry II in the twelfth century. Though the two had started out as friends, after his election to the archbishopship (... is that a word? That doesn't look right.) Becket had a bit of a change of heart and came into conflict with the king regarding the relative rights of the crown and the church. It got so bad between them that in 1170 Henry said... something. It's uncertain what, exactly, though tradition states it was "Who will rid me of this troublesome priest?" Whatever it was, it was interpreted (rightly or wrongly) by four of his knights as an order. They found Becket in Canterbury and demanded he come and account for himself. He refused, went in to say vespers, and they killed him. The Catholic and Anglican churches both venerate him as a martyr and a saint.

You might notice something missing from the above account, though: the "à." It's not actually part of his name, and no one's entirely sure why people sometime in the 1600s or so started putting it in there. Some say it was in imitation of Thomas à Kempis for some unknown reason. It doesn't even make sense in Becket's name, because it means "of" or "from" (so Kempis's name actually means "Thomas from Kempen," where Kempen was his hometown.) But Becket wasn't from anywhere named "Becket." One of those weird linguistic mysteries how it really got and stayed there for so long.

21:05 - "William Tyndale wrote the New Testament." Tyndale was a 16th-century English scholar, best known for his translation of the Bible into English at a time when unauthorized English Bibles were against the laws of both the Church of England and England itself. His was also the first English Bible to work directly from Greek and Hebrew texts (rather than working from later translations into Latin), and the first to be printed on the printing press. He later went on to vocally disapprove of King Henry VIII's divorces. For these varied crimes, he was eventually convicted of heresy and burned at the stake. Well, strangled to death while tied to the stake, and then burned.

21:09 - "Claude White says a 'glacier' is a man who puts in window frames!" Claude White is of course looking for the word "glazier."

22:32 - "carded rolls." Carding is a process of basically turning a raw, fibrous material like cotton or wool into a useful form by untangling the fibers, laying them out parallel to each other, and locking them together in a sort of web, using a sort of brush/comb called a card. This creates a sort of mat that can be pulled up off the card in rolls that can then be used to spin out yarn.


If you would like to read along, the text can be found at Project Gutenberg. No reading ahead, though!