100 years of Pollyanna

Littleton Public Library, New Hampshire

Do little girls still read Pollyanna (1913)? You can still buy the books on Amazon (and not just the free Kindle versions) so maybe they do, or maybe she only finds older, nostalgic readers such as myself? I loved the book as a child, but hadn't thought of it for years until the 1960 Disney film, starring Hayley Mills, was shown on television a few months ago. I was rather more impressed by it than I had been first time round - in fact, my first memory of the cinema is being carried out screaming when (spoiler alert) Pollyanna falls from a tree. In my defence, I would only have been three or four, so was much too young to understand it. However, I wasn't inspired to re-read the book until this summer, while on holiday in New England, I came across the statue above. Littleton, New Hampshire, is the birth-place of Pollyanna's author, Eleanor H Porter, and every year they hold a Glad Day to celebrate Pollyanna, this year marking her centenary.

Why a Glad Day? Pollyanna is an orphan who is sent to live with her maternal aunt when her father dies. Her mother's family had not approved of her marriage to a poor minister, so Aunt Polly is not very welcoming. However, Pollyanna's sunny nature can melt the stoniest of hearts, and soon she has transformed the whole town with her "glad game" which consists of finding something to be glad about in every situation. It started one Christmas when Pollyanna, who was hoping for a doll in the missionary barrel, found only a pair of crutches inside. Pollyanna's father invented the game to teach her always to look for good in bad situations and to find something to be glad about —in this case, that they didn't need to use the crutches! When Pollyanna has an accident, all the people she has helped rally round to help her recover and her aunt is reconciled to, and marries, her former beau, Dr Chilton, leading to a happy ending. Like another of my childhood favourites, Anne of Green Gables, Pollyanna can be irritatingly pious, but the message of the book is a sound one.

There are a dozen or so sequels, (see the list in Wikipedia) but only the first, Pollyanna grows up (1915), was written by Porter. Pollyanna's aunt wishes to accompany her husband to Europe. Rather casually, to the modern eye, she leaves Pollyanna to stay in Boston with the sister of an acquaintance. Mrs Carew's past has left her a bitter woman and Pollyanna, unknowingly, has been "prescribed" for her like a medicine. The glad game works its magic, Mrs Carew is transformed and Pollyanna makes many new friends. She is, however, horrified by the poverty she witnesses in Boston and returns home with views which sound dangerously socialist for the time! At this point, I got rather confused because six years pass and at first the second part of the book seems to bear little relation to what went before. Aunt Polly is now widowed and impoverished (by her standards), and Pollyanna casts around for money-making schemes and ways of preventing her aunt from sinking back into gloom. Her solution is to take in her friends from Boston as summer boarders - the connection is now clear! The rest of the plot features romantic misunderstandings and a rather hard-to-swallow coincidence which I don't think I could summarise without giving the game away. The attitude to a "crippled" character also sits uneasily in the twenty-first century, but is, I suppose, reflective of its times.

Despite these reservations, I've thoroughly enjoyed re-reading both books, but I don't think I'll go on to the sequels by other authors. I'll need to find another childhood heroine to revisit.

Update 26/08/13

Since posting the above I've learned of the existence of a list of children's literature statues in the US, Pollyanna included. Does anyone know of a similar UK list? Or of statues that could be included? Let me know in the comments if so.

Anne Shirley: my continuing obsession

Since I first read Anne of Green Gables I have wanted to visit Prince Edward Island, home of both L M Montgomery and her much-loved characters. Last summer, I wrote here about achieving that ambition. I said then that I wanted to re-read all the books in the series - and now I have! There are 8 books directly about Anne and her family, plus two Chronicles which are essentially short stories about other people in which Anne occasionally appears. In order, they are:

Anne of Green Gables
Anne of Avonlea
Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of the Island
Further Chronicles of Avonlea
Anne of Windy Willows (sometimes called Windy Poplars)
Anne's House of Dreams
Anne of Ingleside
Rainbow Valley
Rilla of Ingleside 

Some I borrowed from the library, most were available as free ebooks and a few I had to pay a small amount to download. So what did I think? I was a little disappointed. I love Anne of Green Gables. It's a strong story, the three main characters are believable and lovable and the relationships between them beautifully drawn. If you're reading this, you probably know the story already, so I won't go over it here, but I will say the other books can't match it. Anne grows up, goes to college, becomes a teacher, marries Gilbert Blythe, her sort-of-childhood-sweetheart, and has a large family. It's all a bit ordinary. After Anne's House of Dreams, the books are really about her children anyway, and Anne retreats into the background as an idealised mother figure.

This is not to say I didn't enjoy the books - I did, but there was an element of perseverance to reading them, each one striking me as dull to start with so that I had to struggle to get into them. I could always have told you the plot of Green Gables, but the sequels had left very little impression. Some examples: I had totally forgotten how pious the language was - perhaps, as a daughter of the manse myself, this hadn't struck me quite so forcibly as a child as it does now. However, as the manse I grew up in was Methodist, I'm amazed I didn't remember the strong anti-Methodist prejudice of Miss Cornelia who appears in the later books. I was fairly sure during Anne's first pregnancy that it ended badly, and the sadness of little Joyce's death confirmed this. In the same book, House of Dreams, there was a sub-plot which I vaguely remembered about a young woman whose husband had come home from sea brain-damaged, but I wasn't at all prepared for the dramatic denouement. The things I did remember vividly were often small ones such as the phrase "crossing the bar" for the death of an old sea-captain and Anne's preference for the word "dusk" rather than "twilight"', which I didn't agree with at the time but do now.

I though the best sequel was the last one. In Rilla of Ingleside, which concentrates on Anne's youngest daughter, we again have a single protagonist with real personality. Rilla is also more dramatic because it's set against the background of World War 1 with unbearable tension as all the young men volunteer to fight for the mother-country. I just knew they couldn't all come back, but didn't know which one/s would be lost. Another strong point of the book is that Susan - housekeeper for most of Anne's marriage - comes into her own. Always a faintly comic figure, she adds to this both fierce patriotism and an unsuspected talent as a military tactician. If only the generals could have listened to her!

I'm glad I undertook this project, but feel I've exhausted the obsession for the meantime and Anne can go back on her shelf until I need her again. However, it has started me thinking about other places I have visited because of a character in a book. My first trip to the US included a visit to Provincetown, original home of Dicey Tillerman, another spirited heroine from a series by Cynthia Voigt. I have the first book (Homecoming) on my shelves and might just start there!

Visiting Green Gables: Anne and Maud

Green Gables, Cavendish, PEI, Canada

I've just come back from three weeks in Canada, and one of the highlights was a visit to Prince Edward Island, home of L M Montgomery (Lucy Maud, known as Maud) and the place in which she set her books, including Anne of Green Gables.

I've always loved Anne, and if you want to read about what I learned from visiting Green Gables and see more pictures, please check out the entry in my travel blog. Read the comments too - two things emerge. One is that one of my friends reblogged it, and she later emailed to say that the link had appeared in the "LMM / Anne News from the World" section of the L M Montgomery Institute (it's not there now, but this is a site worth looking at for Anne fans). We were both thrilled!

The other comments relate to Maud's own life and how hard it was. I learned at Green Gables that her husband had suffered from depression (or religious melancholia as it was described at the time), but not that she did too, and so badly that there is some evidence that she killed herself - see this Guardian article. I suppose this is not the sort of thing that a museum aimed at families would want to dwell on, and I dare say the main impression left on me, that she was someone who loved the land of her birth and was driven to write about it, is still true. It made me think about the dangers of confusing author and character, of which I was guilty - when I wrote my travel post, I had to go through it carefully and remove all the places where I had referred to Maud as "Anne". Anne was happy and optimistic, but Maud's life was much harder. With how many other books have I assumed, wrongly, something about the authors because of what they wrote about?

It has certainly inspired me to re-read the Anne books, but also to read more about Maud. I bought a slim volume of memoirs while we were away, and I will be raiding both my local library and the University of Strathclyde's collections very soon.

New journal articles

The latest editions of Books for Keeps and Youth Library Review have arrived. They're both jam-packed with interesting articles - find them on the gallery upstairs. Here's an index:

DISABLED CHILDREN
PUTTING disabled children in the picture. (2010). Youth Library Review, 40, pp. 10-11.
Giving disabled children role models in literature.

ELECTRONIC BOOKS
Whitney, N. (2010). Winds of change and the emergence to the m-generation: moving from books, via the web, to apps. Youth Library Review, 40, pp. 6-9.

HOOPER, Mary
Eccleshare, J. (2010). Authorgrapgh no 182: Mary Hooper. Books for Keeps, 182, pp. 12-13.

ILLUSTRATION
Wyatt, B. (2010). Illustrators and public lending right. Youth Library Review, 40, pp. 18-19.

INTERNET RESOURCES
Mynott, D. (2010). Stories from the web. Youth Library Review, 40, pp.16-17.
A reader development site for children and young people: http://www.storiesfromtheweb.org/

MEYER, Stephanie
Tucker, N. (2010). Once bitten: the fang bang fiction of Stephanie Meyer. Books for Keeps, 182, pp. 4-5.

POETRY
Styles, M. (2010). Ten of the best poetry books for children. Books for Keeps, 182, pp. 6-7.

PICTURE BOOKS
Browne, A. (2010). Children’s Laureate Anthony Browne on appreciating picture books. Books for Keeps, 182, p. 8.
Evans, J. (2010). Picturebooks are for everyone: children’s thoughts about reading picturebooks. Youth Library Review, 40, pp. 1-5.

TEENAGE NOVELS
Barnes, C. (2010). The catcher in the rye. Books for Keeps, 182, p. 11.
How did J D Salinger’s pioneering creation influence later teen fiction?

WHITE, T H
Alderson, B. (2010). Classics in short no 81: The sword in the stone. Books for Keeps, 182, p. 32.

Children's book miscellany

This post is an update for several links I haven't had time to blog about individually in the last couple of weeks. I'll start with ones about specific authors. Katherine Paterson is currently serving as the US's equivalent of our Children's Laureate, the National Ambassador for Young People's Literature. Read for your life in Public School Insights is an interview in both podcast and transcript while Fiction Focus's Tuesday Spotlight collects together a number of links, articles and interviews as well as the trailer for the film of Bridge to Terabithia. The latest Horn Book (yet to arrive in the Library) is also largely devoted to Paterson.

Who else? In alphabetical order - much loved picture book authors Janet and Allan Ahlberg feature in Trevor Cairney's blog, Literacy, families and learning; Michael Foreman is interviewed in Write Away and Mo Willems, loved for Don't let the pigeon drive the bus, talks to chron.com.

Films and classics next. Lucy Coats wonders if the Percy Jackson film The Lightning Thief, from Rick Riordan's book, in which the hero discovers that not only is he the son of Poseidon but Zeus is after him for a crime he hasn't committed, will reignite interest in Greek myths. Again, there's a movie trailer to enjoy. Tim Burton's film of Alice in Wonderland is also out, and in the Guardian, AS Byatt "takes another trip down the rabbit hole to celebrate classics she first enjoyed as a child".

Some more about reading itself: boys read as much as girls but prefer the simpler books (Independent); why kids re-read books (Literacy, families and learning); how to make reading cool (Guardian); and sharing picture books, a series of Book Trust videos.

Finally, Curious pages is a blog I've been dipping into for a while. It's billed as Inappropriate Books for Kids, which really seems to mean old-fashioned. The link I've included is to a 1971 Snoopy book. Recent posts include one on Shel Silverstein, complete with video, and another on Florence Parry Heide who wrote the Treehorn books. I love it, but then I'm of that sort of vintage.

Great resource for English teachers?

60 Second Recap: Every week, Jenny Sawyer, the host on this site, offers up the “inside insight” on a new book, a classic work of literature, and boils it all down to a handful of 60 second video recaps. It's a US site, but you'll recognise the books, for example, Lord of the Flies, Of Mice and Men, To Kill a Mockingbird. Here's an example of how it works: the thumbnail for Lord of the Flies offers "Famous for: The Beast, a talking pig’s head on a stake, a horrific descent into chaos and savagery." Clicking on the link reveals a brief text summary and ten 60-second videos of Jenny's ideas entitled:

1. A teaser trailer
2. The overview
3. The plot
4. Meet the cast
5. Simon
6. Motifs
7. Symbols
8. Themes
9. About the protagonist
10. In conclusion

She's very enthusiastic - will that enthuse your students in turn?