Set almost a decade after Rainbow Valley, Europe is on the brink of the First World War, and Anne’s youngest daughter Rilla is an irrepressible 14-year-old, excited about her first adult party and heedless of the chaos that the Western world is entering. Her parents worry because Rilla seems not to have any serious plans for her life, and is more concerned with having fun.

Once the Continent descends into war, her brothers and friends promptly enlist. With her sisters at college, Rilla is left anxiously alone at home. As the war drags on, Rilla matures, organising the Junior Red Cross society in her village.

While collecting donations, she comes across a house where a woman has just died in childbirth and her husband is away at war. Rilla takes the sickly little boy back to Ingleside in a soup tureen, naming him “James Kitchener Anderson” after his father and Herbert Kitchener, British Secretary of State for War. Rilla’s father Gilbert Blythe challenges her to raise the war orphan, and although she doesn’t like babies at all, she rises to the occasion.