Interpreting war through monuments and stories: lifelong reading and L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside
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Abstract
More than a century after its conclusion, the impact of World War I remains consequential. This article addresses how this war has been commemorated, from the abstract expressions of national sorrow in war memorials and cenotaphs and Tombs of Unknown Soldiers to the individual particularities and grounded local reactions that are best evoked in a novel. Moving from the abstract to the specific, it investigates one articulation of living through the War years, in this case on the Canadian Home Front. L.M. Montgomery’s Rilla of Ingleside was written for young readers. It has never gone out of print since its initial publication in 1921 and continues to be read today. The article similarly narrows the readership of this novel to a single example through a tightly defined autoethnographic case study of the author’s ongoing relationship with this book, which began in 1961. What can we learn about lifelong reading from interrogating a single reader’s introspection concerning a single title? How can we apply the particularity of these insights to a broader understanding of how reading inflects our lives?
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