The Blue Castle: a novel

A little about the story

Valancy Stirling has spent her life trying to avoid disapproval in a family that seems able to find fault with everything she does. At twenty-nine, she has little independence and no expectation that her circumstances will change. Her private consolation is an imagined blue castle and the books that let her picture a world beyond the narrow routines of her Ontario home. Unexpected news finally makes the risk of displeasing people seem less frightening than continuing to obey them.

As Valancy begins to act on wishes she has usually kept to herself, familiar neighbors become less easily classified as respectable or unsuitable. L. M. Montgomery combines romantic possibility with comic observation of family authority and small-town judgment. The natural world offers a contrasting measure of value, suggesting forms of beauty and companionship that do not depend on approval. The story follows a woman discovering that a life can be limited by fear as much as circumstance, and that kindness, curiosity, and courage may become practical choices rather than private daydreams.

Things You May Not Know About The Blue Castle

• An adult heroine. Valancy is twenty-nine when the novel opens, making her circumstances different from those of Montgomery’s better-known child protagonists.
• A departure from Prince Edward Island. The novel is set in Ontario’s Muskoka region, rather than the island landscapes most closely associated with Montgomery’s fiction.
• A castle of the imagination. The blue castle begins as Valancy’s private refuge, expressing desires she finds difficult to acknowledge in ordinary conversation.
• An invented writer within the book. The nature books attributed to John Foster give Valancy another language for imagining freedom beyond her household’s expectations.
• Published in 1926. The novel appeared well after Anne of Green Gables, showing another side of Montgomery’s interest in restricted lives and independent spirits.