{"id":3036,"date":"2022-03-21T16:48:21","date_gmt":"2022-03-21T16:48:21","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/?p=3036"},"modified":"2023-02-06T17:26:40","modified_gmt":"2023-02-06T17:26:40","slug":"betsy-tacy-and-rilla-of-ingleside","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/betsy-tacy-and-rilla-of-ingleside\/","title":{"rendered":"Betsy-Tacy and Rilla of Ingleside"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

I read Betsy-Tacy<\/em> by Maud Hart Lovelace several years ago with my book group <\/a>and decided it was time to finish the series. Betsy-Tacy and Tib<\/em> is my favorite of the four children\u2019s books. Several of the antics made me laugh out loud\u2014especially the chapter \u201cBeing Good.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It begins with these words:<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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It was strange that Betsy and Tacy and Tib ever did things which grown-ups thought were naughty, for they tried so hard to be good. They were very religious. Betsy was a Baptist, and Tacy was a Catholic, and Tib was an Episcopalian. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

They loved to sit on Tacy\u2019s back fence and talk about God.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n

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Betsy-Tacy and Tib<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

In this particular conversation, they decide that they won\u2019t get to Heaven if all they do is think about fun. Tacy observes that \u201cthe saints didn\u2019t have much fun\u201d and that \u201cthey used to wear hair shirts\u201d to \u201cmake themselves gooder. And if they did anything bad they put pebbles in their shoes.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This gives Betsy a profound idea. The girls will establish \u201cThe Christian Kindness Club\u201d to help them be good so that they will get to Heaven. She explains, \u201cWe\u2019ll never get to be good if we don\u2019t punish ourselves for being bad. A child could see that.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n

So they empty the marbles from their little bags and pin them inside of their dresses. Every time a girl does something bad, she\u2019ll put a pebble into the bag. If she does something really bad, she\u2019ll put two or three pebbles into the bag.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It doesn\u2019t take long for all three girls to realize how fun it is to put pebbles into the bags, and they become naughtier and naughtier as they race around as if \u201cpossessed,\u201d doing things that will allow them to put pebbles into the bags. Their bags are almost full, when the girls and a couple of younger siblings end up in a tomato fight.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Betsy\u2019s mother comes out of the house at that moment, and suddenly The Christian Kindness Club isn\u2019t so much fun anymore. That evening, the girls meet at the fence again and decide to change their club a little. They agree that it didn\u2019t make them \u201cgood\u201d that day; it made them \u201cbad.\u201d But they agree that they really do need to keep being good, and then they \u201clooked at the sunset and thought about God.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Betsy and Joe<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

The girls are too innocent to understand at age eight that being good enough for Heaven won\u2019t require them to punish themselves. Struggles are coming that will refine them and mold them into the very good women they want to become. Eight more books follow in the series, all based on the young lives of Maud Hart Lovelace and her friends, where the reader gets to see firsthand that refining process, particularly in Betsy, who is the character based on Lovelace herself. <\/p>\n\n\n\n

All ten Betsy-Tacy books are so wonderfully innocent, and yet, one of the best things about them is that Betsy\u2019s far from being perfect. She makes goals and doesn\u2019t keep them, she doesn\u2019t always do as well in school as she knows she should, and she makes all kinds of other mistakes in life and love. Through it all, though, she learns and grows and is always likeable and relatable. In Chapter 2 of Betsy and the Great World<\/em>, her father consoles her with these words, \u201cWe all make mistakes. If you\u2019ve made a mistake in getting so little out of college, why, you have . . . that\u2019s all. And it would be a pretty poor world if we couldn\u2019t sweep up our mistakes, now and then, and go ahead.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n

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Betsy and the Great World<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

Instead of returning to college, Betsy\u2019s father suggests she continue her education by spending a year in Europe and offers to pay for it. Betsy sets out in January 1914. She isn\u2019t aware\u2014but many readers will be\u2014that before the summer is over, Europe will be at war. That fact made Betsy and the Great World<\/em> especially fascinating and poignant to me. Betsy spends many weeks in Munich, Germany. She makes friends there, learns the language well enough to get along, and ends up loving the German people and many things about their culture. She sells a story and makes enough money to take a little sight-seeing trip, and when her friend asks whether her parents will approve of her traveling alone, she replies, \u201cNot this tiny jaunt! Germany is as safe as my own back yard\u201d (Chapter 13).<\/p>\n\n\n\n

It\u2019s no wonder Betsy is shocked when the rumors of war start whirling. She proclaims, \u201cA war in these civilized days is absolutely unthinkable!\u201d She\u2019s in England when war is declared. I love these last two sentences of Chapter 20: \u201cBetsy did the only thing she could do at such a moment. She got down on her knees.\u201d The Christian Kindness Club notwithstanding, Betsy has developed into a woman whose first instinct in a crisis is to turn to God.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Betsy-Tacy<\/em> series ends shortly after the United States enters the war. The Betsy-Tacy<\/em> series is so similar to L.M. Montgomery\u2019s Anne of Green Gables<\/em> series in some ways that I decided\u2014at long last\u2014to read the eighth book of that series, Rilla of Ingleside<\/em>, which also takes place on the home front during World War I. Fifteen-year-old Rilla, however, lives in Canada, which enters the war at the beginning. All of a sudden, Rilla\u2019s life is turned inside-out, and she\u2019s forced to abandon her frivolous concerns when the first of her brothers goes to war.<\/p>\n\n\n

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Rilla of Ingleside<\/figcaption><\/figure><\/div>\n\n\n

I wasn\u2019t sure what to expect when I began reading Rilla of Ingleside<\/em>. It\u2019s much darker than the earlier books in the series, and I didn\u2019t get to see much of the sparkling, upbeat Anne, who is forced to watch all three of her sons go to war. Montgomery did an excellent job creating the atmosphere of anxiety and suspense that must have existed in every family that sent its members to fight in World War I. She also did an excellent job dramatizing the changes that come to the various characters, especially Rilla.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When Rilla learns that the second of her three brothers enlisted, she \u201cdid not sleep that night. . . . The body grows slowly and steadily, but the soul grows by leaps and bounds. It may come to its full stature in an hour. From that night Rilla Blythe\u2019s soul was the soul of a woman in its capacity for suffering, for strength, for endurance\u201d (Chapter 14). Two years into the war, her friend and former school teacher asks Rilla if she would exchange those difficult years for ones of fun.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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\u201cNo,\u201d said Rilla slowly. \u201cI wouldn\u2019t. It\u2019s strange\u2014isn\u2019t it?\u2014They have been two terrible years\u2014and yet I have a queer feeling of thankfulness for them\u2014as if they had brought me something very precious, with all their pain. I wouldn\u2019t want to go back and be the girl I was two years ago, not even if I could. Not that I think I\u2019ve made any wonderful progress\u2014but I’m not quite the selfish, frivolous little doll I was then. I suppose I had a soul then, Miss Oliver\u2014but I didn\u2019t know it. I know it now\u2014and that is worth a great deal\u2014worth all the suffering of the past two years. And still\u201d\u2014Rilla gave a little apologetic laugh, \u201cI don\u2019t want to suffer any more\u2014not even for the sake of more soul growth. At the end of two more years I might look back and be thankful for the development they had brought me, too; but I don\u2019t want it now.\u201d<\/p>\nChapter 22<\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I\u2019m sure that most of us would rather not endure strange and difficult times, but once they are behind us, perhaps we, like Rilla, will be thankful for our own \u201csoul growth.\u201d<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The featured image Maud Hart Lovelace’s childhood home is attributed to Jonathunder<\/a> and licensed under the\u00a0Creative Commons\u00a0Attribution-Share Alike 3.0 Unported\u00a0license<\/a>.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

The Betsy-Tacy series and Rilla of Ingleside share a similar setting and “soul growth” theme.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":3038,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[16,126,171],"tags":[225,57,13,124,224,9,11],"class_list":["post-3036","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-great-books-group","category-juvenile-fiction","category-young-adult-fiction","tag-anne-of-green-gables","tag-christian","tag-fiction","tag-l-m-montgomery","tag-maud-hart-lovelace","tag-religious-themes","tag-wholesome","post-preview"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=3036"}],"version-history":[{"count":17,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":4852,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/3036\/revisions\/4852"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/3038"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=3036"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=3036"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/novels.zerosilver.com\/wordpress\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=3036"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}