With the 100^th anniversary of the start of the first world war coming up I’ve been rereading one of my favorite books that takes place during that time, Rilla of Ingleside by Lucy Maud Montgomery. While this book is marketed to children it can be enjoyed equally well by adults and indeed I think I was too young to appreciate it when I read it the first time as a child. Rilla is the youngest child of Anne Shirley and Gilbert Blythe and is turning fifteen in the summer of 1914. She is a pretty and frivolous girl whose only goal is to have a good time. The book chronicles the changes that Rilla, her family, her community and the world go through because of the war. While reluctant at the beginning, Rilla does her part for the war effort by starting a chapter of the Junior Red Cross, organizes concerts to raise funds and sells war bonds. She even takes in  an abandoned baby and raises it, to her family’s great surprise.  She has to cope with tragedy too when her favorite brother Walter is killed in action. All this helps her mature, change and fulfill her potential in ways that she might not have done otherwise.

Rilla was based on the real diaries that Lucy Maud Montgomery kept during WWI and because of that it has a realism that I find is missing in other novels I’ve read that are set in the same time period. So if you want find out what it was like on the homefront during WWI as well as what happens to Anne’s family, pick up Rilla and enjoy.

Long before William and Kate there was another royal match that captured the hearts of the British public. This was Queen Victoria and her consort (who was also her cousin) Prince Albert of Saxe Coburg and Gotha in Germany. They were married in 1840 and it was a love match which was unusual in those days of arranged marriages. Victoria was so in love with Albert and believed that he was everything good, a wonderful husband and a perfect father to their nine children. But Victoria and Albert were only to have twenty one years of happiness before Albert died of a serious illness thought at the time to have been typhoid fever. Albert’s death had a great impact not only on Victoria but on the whole of Britain. Victoria spent much of the next few years in seclusion which might have been fine for an ordinary citizen but was not for a monarch. She spent huge amounts of the public’s money on numerous memorials to Albert and appeared so rarely in public that republican sentiments arose calling for the abolition of the monarchy. But Victoria weathered all those storms and kept the monarchy intact for her son who later became King Edward VII. Victoria was a widow for over half of her life and spent forty years in mourning for Albert. A sad end to a romantic love story.