Anne of Windy Poplars

1936, 1992 Bantam edition
L. M. Montgomery
Anne of Windy Poplars
Original and/or purchase price unknown
Worn paperback with corners torn off
B-

Although written so much later than most of the rest of the series, this is #4 in the chronology, filling in Anne's three years of running a small school and waiting for Gilbert to finish his medical training.  As such, it feels a bit disconnected from the rest of the series, with a very different cast.  Even when Anne goes to visit Green Gables, we don't hear much about Marilla and the other locals.  Diana, once Anne's dearest chum, has "other interests," so we don't even hear from her, and not much of her.

Most of the book is Anne matchmaking and otherwise playing Mary Worth to the residents of Summerside.  Some of the problems are more interesting than others.  Anne herself has some problems as principal but, not surprisingly for Montgomery, we don't actually hear much about the school.

After reading so many Thompson books, I'd forgotten that while RPT is mistress of the unfortunate names and accidentally suggestive phrasing, Montgomery is the go-to early-20th-century children's writer for "Even in context, that's pretty weird," such as the "shameless orgies of love-making and ecstasies of adoration" in Anne's House of Dreams.  In this story, Anne babysits eight-year-old boy & girl twins, and has to punish them separately.  When they're reunited, they call each other darling and "embrace and kiss passionately."  There is one deliberately suggestive joke, about a man kissing his wife in an "improper place," meaning the church steps.

The book contains anachronisms, the most obvious being a reference to the 1906 earthquake, when this would have to be the late 1880s.